PUTTING THE SYSTEM ON TRIAL. Chicago Tribune editorialists are not pleased with the pace of progress in former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic's trial.

Milosevic's trial before a three-judge panel of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague began in February 2002. Since then, one of the judges has died, Yugoslavia officially has dissolved, and Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic has been assassinated. Milosevic and a fellow alleged war criminal even were elected to seats in Serbia's parliament in December.

Milosevic was scheduled to launch his defense on Monday. But the tribunal, concerned about his health, has postponed it until later this summer. A court-appointed cardiologist said Milosevic has high blood pressure, a damaged left ventricle and is at risk of a heart attack or a stroke. "It is therefore necessary to navigate constantly between sufficient rest, optimum medication and the stress of the trial," the doctor counseled.

That may be legitimate reasoning for a delay. The question is, why has this matter already dragged on for so long? The Nuremberg war crimes tribunal took 11 months to try, convict, sentence and execute 10 of Hitler's top deputies. Israel's trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 took eight months, and he was executed in 1962.

The war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has been running the meter for a long time. And it is not a cheap ride--it has 1,238 staff members and a budget for this year of nearly $272 million.

On the other hand, Israeli intelligence kidnapped Mr Eichmann, no extradition hearing first; and the Nuremberg tribunal was a creation of the victorious powers, not an institution of long standing. Furthermore, the procedures allow for the defense to string out the proceedings -- there is probably no provision for a guilty plea and a mitigation hearing, the strategy the defense in at least one of the University of Wisconsin truck-bombing cases employed. Mr Milosevic -- and possibly the recently indicted Saddam Hussein -- have to "put the system on trial" as part of their defense, which is what Mr Milosevic's team apparently intends to do.

Milosevic has drawn up a list of 1,400 defense witnesses, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former President Bill Clinton. That should keep the trial going for a few more years and pile up tens of millions of additional euros in expenses.

So what is the world to make--what are the people of the former Yugoslavia to make--of a trial that seems designed to provide everlasting entertainment for the accused?

That's not justice. That's a charade.

Perhaps so. But absent any clarity on what distinguishes rules-as-sword from rules-as-shield, that's what happens.

MORE CAMPS COMING TO DEKALB. The sports camps run some 3,000 kids ragged.

Sports camp training is usually from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Coaches run the sports camps, McConachie said, and campers interact with them and have the chance to meet NIU players.

NIU receives some extra money from sports camps, McConachie said. The money is deposited to a special account and then is directed to different departments. Dining services and the buildings used by the camp are credited for expenses, she said.

NIU offers camps in history, journalism and media, speech, math, creative writing and science...

The article does not slight what I referred to as econ camp, which is officially a different kind of program.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

The sick logic of the speech code, when it is used as a means of punishment, is thus that of invasion of conscience: When faced with a choice between apologizing for speaking your mind and being expelled, a student is forced to decide whether his principles matter more to him than his record, whether he is willing to risk his future for the sake of his ideals. There is indeed a great deal of shame in that. But it should be felt by the people who enforce and endorse the codes, not by those the codes attack.

As long as there is "liberating tolerance," Critical Mass exposes its pretensions.

SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME SUING LIONEL?

Union Pacific, the nation's biggest railroad, was cited by The Times as an example of how railroads repeatedly denied their own responsibility at fatal grade-crossing crashes.

In one recent 18-month period, the newspaper found, seven federal and state courts imposed sanctions on Union Pacific for destroying or failing to preserve evidence in crossing accidents, and an eighth court ordered a case retried.

In 1997, Union Pacific secretly replaced a defective signal at a crossing where a truck driver was killed while hauling potatoes to a market in Washington, the newspaper found. And in 1998, a federal judge found that the railroad knowingly destroyed relevant evidence after a collision in Arkansas that left a man brain damaged and killed his wife.

The anecdotes are part of what might be a broader pattern, one perhaps abetted by the regulators themselves:

Enforcement of railroad rules is so lax that federal officials have said they were not even aware of the reporting problems, the [New York Times] reported on its Web site Saturday.

It's not just Union Pacific. The Times is doing a multi-parter on the hazards of level crossings, and apparently CSX is also more interested in shaking down model railroad manufacturers for royalties than in protecting level crossings.

In those first raw days after his 17-year-old daughter died, Norman Feaster couldn't stop thinking about how easily she might have been saved: If only Hilary hadn't agreed to run an errand that took her down an unfamiliar road. If only the overgrown bushes hadn't blocked her view of the railroad tracks. If only there had been crossing gates to stop her from driving in front of a CSX locomotive on that autumn day in 1997.

Soon Mr. Feaster began calling politicians, regulators, railroad officials, anyone who could help to get gates installed at the crossing so that no one else's child had to die there. But he made little progress, he says, until one day he received a strange telephone call. A state transportation official wanted to arrange a clandestine meeting. Intrigued, Mr. Feaster agreed to drive an hour and a half to Nashville, where he met the official in the lobby of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

The state official, Terry Cantrell, said he had just discovered some hidden history behind Hilary's case: Two teenage boys had been killed at the same crossing four years earlier. But because the railroad had never reported the accident to the federal authorities, the government had not identified the crossing as especially perilous and had not ordered the railroad to put up gates, Mr. Feaster said the official told him.

Disturbing anecdote? Apparently not.

CSX's failure to report that first fatal crash may be its most serious reporting failure, but it is hardly an isolated omission. Over the last eight years, CSX and other railroads have failed to properly notify federal officials about hundreds of crossing accidents, according to federal records and a computer analysis of crash data by The New York Times.

Hilary Feaster's death is a harsh lesson in the cost of those broken rules, and of the government's lack of enforcement. The federal regulators did not punish CSX for its silence in Decherd, just as they only rarely enforced the rules in other cases. In fact, records obtained by The Times show that in 2000, after finding a "critical problem" with CSX's reporting, regulators acknowledged that they had treated the railroad with "extreme leniency," pardoning most of its violations.

Doesn't do any good to have safety regulations if those are not enforced.

The Times is doing a series on level crossing safety. Visit the sidebars here and here for additional coverage.

TIME TO DEVELOP SOME RIGHT OF WAY RULES. Summer version of an old joke: I went to the boxing match and a NASCAR race broke out. What happened?

Stewart powered around the outside of Marlin and then dived down again. As Kahne shifted to fourth gear, he hesitated slightly to keep from spinning. Stewart ran into the back of Kahne's car, which turned left and then right and into the wall, setting off an eight-car tangle.

Doesn't he have to establish mast abeam before he can force the overtaken yacht to alter course? Not on the oval.

NASCAR considered the bump between Stewart and Kahne a racing incident, series spokesman Herb Branham said, meaning Stewart would not be punished.

"It was my fault I ran into him, but I don't know why he backed up, I don't know what caused him to check up," Stewart said. "It could have tore us up easier than it tore him up in all reality, so it's not something I was expecting by any means."

No provisions for hard luffs in the rules either, evidently.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY? Perhaps the backwards-baseball-cap set misinterpreted "Greek Fest." This comment by a public official is priceless.

Milwaukee Ald. Jim Bohl said he was concerned about the burden on the City of Milwaukee.

"We expend a huge sum of taxpayer money for a festival that is located in Wauwatosa," Bohl said.

STRONGER CAMP FARE. The econ campers (and the Mia Hamm wanna-bes?) have left town; the drum and bugle championship (wool uniforms in this humidity??) and an Olympic soccer camp have arrived.

NOT JUST A HIGH SCHOOL IN MILWAUKEE. Betsy's Page reports that today is the bicentennial of the duel between former Vice President Aaron Burr and first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who lent his name to a Milwaukee high school that figures in the Superintendent's intellectual development.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.

There is already photographic evidence of a massive dismantling of a facility of some sort before last year's invasion. These photos were published on the front page of the New York Times. Whether or not that particular building was producing weapons of mass destruction, it shows that Saddam Hussein saw the need to get rid of some things before they got captured.

Nations do not wait for iron-clad proof when there are lethal threats. The massive Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb was begun when the United States was at peace because of reports that Hitler's scientists were working on such a weapon.

We had no proof -- and, after Germany surrendered, it turned out that Hitler's atomic bomb project was nowhere near the stage that we feared. But we couldn't take that chance.

Thomas Sowell understands the importance of specifying a loss function. (Hat tip: Newmark's Door.)

SOME ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG:

Be virtuous, and find yourselves a dragonslayer. I am not saying be a prude.
Virtue retains it value better than either virginity or popularity.
Virtue is what cannot be savaged by the years, as beauty can.
Virtue is desired by those worth desiring.

Some context, from a guy who has been there, done that.

Now, in the college arena, the cheerleaders had started to switch their targets. The jocks of high school had failed to make the next evolutionary step to college for the most part. Now, the cheerleaders were starting to think about what would happen to their companions after the next evolutionary step, which was graduation. Now, the cheerleaders were interested in the guys who they had looked over during high school. The guys who were "boring". The ones who had studied hard, and didn't party much. Especially the upper classmen cheerleaders. Now, even the geek in the chess club, who was going on to med school could have his day. So, now, these girls started going after the guys they had ignored.

But it was usually too late. These guys remembered girls like this dating the baseball team. The girls had been used up, and had spread themselves around. Now, the cheerleaders were trying to get the guys they had spurned. And the guys were not playing that game. By this time, these guys had figured out which way was up, and they knew that they were going to be OK. They knew that they were going to have good jobs. They also knew that the cheerleaders were all used up. So, they would date them on occassion, but largerly they were interested in the other girls. They were interested in the girls who had never bought into the Ponzi scheme called popularity in high school. They were interested in the girls that had not fu*ked the basketball team. They were intersted in the girls who were strong enough and smart enough to make it on their own without worrying about how their standing at the prom would be affected.

(Hat tip: Accidental Verbosity.)

SECOND SECTION: Some of the younger people are figuring this out. Here's James K. Glassman.

Young people have become aggressively normal.

Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.

His column relies heavily on this Kay Hymowitz essay, where there's more reflection on the divide noted here:

Generational backlash counts for a lot: what we’re seeing now is a rewrite of the boomer years. The truth is, Gen Xers and Millennials have some real gripes about the world their boomer parents constructed. When a 1999 Peter D. Hart Research Associates poll asked Americans between the ages of 18 to 30 what experience had shaped their generation, the most common answer was "divorce and single-parent families." Growing up in the aftermath of America’s great marriage meltdown, no wonder that young people put so much stock in marriage and family, their bedrock in the mobile twenty-first century.

The article is too long to comment on at length here, although Mr Glassman (who gets paid to do this stuff, I suppose) has provided a good abstract.

Hymowitz offers four explanations: 1) A "rewrite of the boomer years," with young people reacting critically to the world of sexual experimentation and family breakup and "earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture"; 2) The trauma of 9/11, which has made kids more patriotic and turned them inward toward the comfort of family; 3) The information economy, which has given young people greater faith in their own chances to succeed, especially through self-reliance and entrepreneurship; and 4) Immigration, which has produced what she calls a "fervent work ethic, which can raise the bar for slacker American kids, as any higher schooler with more than three Asian students in his algebra class can attest."

INDUCED INNOVATION IN SMUGGLING?

Interesting post by Bob at Truck and Barter about the effect of stronger border enforcement on illegal-immigrant smuggling.

Unfortunately O’Reilly has failed to take into account the fact there will still be millions of people who want to cross the border. Think of immigration as a market. Safe border-crossings are the commodity, “coyotes” are the suppliers, and those who wish to come into America are the buyers. The National Guard may reduce the amount of safe crossings that are produced in the short-run. However, given the huge demand for safe crossing, “coyotes” are more likely to innovate new ways to sneak across undetected than they are to quit altogether. Furthermore, while I have extremely little knowledge of oceanic smuggling operations (about as much as O’Reilly, I’d guess), I know that if the price people are willing to pay is high enough, someone will figure out how to make it worth the costs. Remember, 70 years ago commercial air travel was thought to be unfeasible too.

Trying to reduce the incidence of a specific transaction, if both parties are voluntary participants, is pretty darn close to impossible. We can see that fact in the market for illicit drugs. America has focused on reducing the supply of drugs. Yet considering the quantity of the resources devoted to stopping the supply, most experts would agree that we don’t capture even half of the drugs that are sold in America (I believe 10%-15% is a more accurate estimate). Similarly, even if we reduce the supply of safe border-crossings we have done nothing to decrease the desire of people to enter the United States.

This is true, up to a point. The demand by illegal immigrants to enter the United States is a derived demand, in this case derived from the willingness of employers to pay for illegal immigrant services. To be sure, any interdiction of the supply of illegal immigrants will raise the wages that successful entrants receive. But those migrants might also be motivated by the possibility of a subsequent regularization, with the accompanying opportunity to participate in the legal economy. More stringent border controls have the effect of inducing migration by individuals who expect to do better in the legal market, holding the expectation of regularization constant. Details here, or just read the abstract.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM. Classic Victor Davis Hanson:

There is a great divide unfolding between the engine of history and the dumbfounded spectators who are apparently furious at what is going on before their eyes. Mr. Bush's flight suit, Abu Ghraib, claims of "no al Qaeda-Saddam ties," Joe Wilson, and still more come and go while millions a world away inch toward consensual government and civilization.

For over a year now, we have witnessed a level of invective not seen since the summer of 1864 — much of it the result of a dying 60's generation's last gasps of lost self-importance. Instead of the "innocent" Rosenbergs and "framed" Alger Hiss we now get the whisk-the-bin-Laden-family-out-of-the-country conspiracy. Michael Moore is a poor substitute for the upfront buffoonery of Abbie Hoffman.

The oil pipeline in Afghanistan that we allegedly went to war over doesn't exist. Brave Americans died to rout al Qaeda, end the fascist Taliban, and free Afghanistan for a good and legitimate man like a Hamid Karzai to oversee elections. It was politically unwise and idealistic — not smart and cynical — for Mr. Bush to gamble his presidency on getting rid of fascists in Iraq. There really was a tie between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — just as Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton once believed and Mr. Putin and Mr. Allawi now remind us. The United States really did plan to put Iraqi oil under Iraqi democratic supervision for the first time in the country's history. And it did.

Read it all.

SECOND SECTION: Jeff Zaslow's column focuses on the same cultural fault lines.

The oldest boomers came of age at a time of affordable housing, easier acceptance to colleges and better job markets. The youngest boomers struggled through deeper recessions, crowded workplaces, and now, outsourced jobs. Younger boomers also worry that in the next decade or so, their 401(k) values will fall as retired older boomers cash out of stocks.

He's also found a father and daughter who summarize the fault line in microcosm, as well as an observer from the end of the party.

Dennis Peterson and his daughter, Dee Ann Haibeck, are boomer bookends, born Jan. 1, 1946, and Oct. 28, 1964. Mr. Peterson of Bellevue, Wash., says people from his era "opened the door for a lot of discussions America hadn't been having" -- about such divisive matters as race, women's rights, the Vietnam War. He says those of his daughter's era "didn't have the testosterone to get involved in social issues. I don't think they had our sense of responsibility." For her part, Ms. Haibeck feels some of her dad's hippie contemporaries "changed our culture for the worse" by making society too liberal.

Larry Brennan of Burlingame, Calif., entered the world on Dec. 31, 1964, hours before the baby boom supposedly ended. He says he and his contemporaries feel like "we got to the party late and have to clean up everybody else's mess." For instance, older boomers helped create the drug culture. They deemed divorce more acceptable. They sparked the sexual revolution, though by the time late boomers came of age in the 1980s, herpes and AIDS were epidemics.

Heck, the party was pretty much over by about 1970, notwithstanding this:

Research by the late Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson showed that people tend to view as part of their generation those born about six years before and after them. By this measure, only boomers born between 1952 and 1958 have both feet in the baby boom.

The hippies, then, are a somewhat older cohort.

Virginia Postrel, who picked up the Zaslow column, notes,

My GenX youngest brother (born 1970) thinks of boomers as spoiled yuppies--the people he watched on Thirtysomething when I was only twentysomething--and doesn't associate them at all with the 1960s.

On the other hand, there was that brief shining moment in the early 1980s when "prep" became somewhat fashionable. If anything, that was a reaction to the 1960s.

ARC SIN 0.7071 = ARC COS 0.7071. But that only allows a rough estimate of ARC SIN 0.6 (has to exceed 30, which is ARC SIN 0.5, but cannot exceed 45, or pi/4 to be consistent) and ARC SIN 0.8 (which, per corollary, cannot exceed 60 and does exceed 45.) But to raise questions about Florida Governor Jeb Bush's intelligence over a question about the internal angles of the 3-4-5 triangle, useful for millennia in laying out square buildings is a bit much, although it generates much more discussion at Thursday's Best of the Web.
If I get really punchy, I will publish a post on the demonstration that the set of Pythagorean triples is countable.

SECOND SECTION. I'm not that punchy yet. There is much more on this story in today's Best of the Web, including a gentle correction of the correspondent from yesterday who conflated ARC TAN with ARC SIN, and an observation that "exceeds 30 but does not exceed 45" works out to "about 37" and "just above 53" (the slide rule in my office doesn't have the proper scales for me to check, but I can still chide the correspondent about excessive significant digits, I think 36.9 and 53.1 -- shouldn't that be 36 deg 54 min and 53 deg 6 min?? -- would pass any proper examination. 36.86989764584? Pah.)

SHOWING MY AGE. But look who I had to grow up with:

In 1954 (the year you were born)

Dwight Eisenhower is president of the US Nautilus, the first atomic powered submarine, launches Senator Joseph McCarthy begins leading televised hearings into alleged Communist influence in the Army Roger Bannister, a 25 year old from England, breaks the 4 minute mile with a time of 3:59 Supreme Court rules unanimously that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional Hurricane "Carol" hits the Long Island - New England area killing 60 and injuring 1000 Senate condemns Joseph McCarthy for contempt of a Senate elections subcommittee during his Army investigation hearings Playboy magazine issue features Margie Harrison, the first playmate Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, Christie Brinkley, John Travolta, and Jerry Seinfeld are born New York Mets win the World Series (Wouldn't this be the Yankees??) Cleveland Browns win the NFL championship Detroit Red Wings win the Stanley Cup Lord of the Flies by William G. Golding is published

What Happened the Year You Were Born?

More cool things for your blog at
Blogthings

(Hat tip: Accidental Verbosity.)

WHO SAID THIS?

John Edwards, who has more experience than George Bush and better judgment than he does when he became president of the United States. He was right that Dick Cheney was ready to take over on day one, and he did, and he has been ever since.

Answer at Shot in the Dark.

IF YOU LIKED PLAYING "GINGER OR MARY ANN", The American Mind suggests, "let's Play Two!"

EXPANDING THE TUBE NETWORK. Details at Going Underground. These projects are not making use of any Chicago capital as far as I know.

COSTS AND BENEFITS? Atlantic Blog:

Richard Posner once remarked (I cannot find the reference) that the mere fact that huge amounts of academic research was garbage does not imply inefficiency. After all, a sturgeon lays millions of eggs to produce very few progeny. So maybe intellectuals are like sturgeon. A few million lost to produce one good one.

Perhaps. Judge Posner is echoing a comment John D. Rockefeller made about the propagation of roses years ago.

A similar topic came up at dinner with some colleagues earlier this week. One remarked that economists as professors were probably overpaid in the aggregate, but acknowledged the remark of another colleague, not at dinner, to the effect that macroeconomic research had paid for itself many times in understanding and taming -- perhaps by forestalling foolish policies -- the amplitude of the business cycle. Something else might be true of industrial economics. Research was effective in identifying the deadweight losses of transport regulation, although nobody -- to my knowledge, correct me if I missed something -- anticipated the productivity-enhancing effects of deregulation coupled with better understanding of logistics. The deregulation permitted logistical innovation to be implemented without a wrangle over whether the proposed change in service was in the public interest or likely to have adverse effects on other carriers.

SUMMER READING GOING THE WAY OF TRAIN ORDERS? Lots of commentary on a National Endowment for the Arts study of reading habits. There's a spirited discussion going on at Critical Mass, and another one starting at Joanne Jacobs.

Petrified Truth (via Outside the Beltway) offers a simpler explanation.

Outside of specific genres, such as children's literature, science fiction, and mysteries, most "literary" works are now unreadable and therefore unread. The literary class -- elitist, self-referential, Leftist, and often focused only on the most degenerate aspects of human nature -- has clearly outsmarted itself.

Worse, much of that stuff is sleep-inducing. It is no accident that the term "yawn" frequently turns up here.

IF WE CAN PUT A MAN ON THE MOON.

Look for more posts on this theme in the near future. It's a question I recall wonks of years ago would ask, it would equate designing and budgeting a moon shot with obtaining some other outcome that simply involved a program and a budget. It's often a bad question, as it compares an exercise in applied mathematics on a system with predictable properties with some sort of attempt to influence a complex adaptive system. But that doesn't stop people from posing such false analogies. Movie maker Michael Moore is one of the latest.

Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?

We do? Strikes me that there might be enormous profits for somebody to apply those resources -- care to reinvest some of your movie's earnings?

James Lileks has already done the Fisking of the column. There are all sorts of possibilities for further explication of these questions, some of which Mr Lileks passed over.

Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?

Does the popular culture encourage those children to aspire to higher standards?

Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional illiterates?

Shall we have a conversation about the follies of the Colleges of Deaducation?

Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are low- and minimum-wage jobs?

They are? One has to adapt the work to the available workers, up to one-fourth of whom are functionally illiterate, nicht wahr?

Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an hour?

The participants in econ camp discovered that a substantial majority of minimum wage workers are younger than 25 and often dependents, functional illiteracy notwithstanding.

Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (and 11% cannot find the United States!)?

Haven't we already talked about the exclusion of academic content from the curriculum?

HE CAN HIDE IN THE BLIND, BUT YOU CAN'T. Robert at Liberty and Power offers some observations on Southern Mississippi's computer use policy, under which embattled President Shelby "Ten of Diamonds" Thames has read others' email.

No student or employee of the University of Southern Mississippi has any reason to expect email or computer privacy until Shelby Thames is removed from office, the information technology contract with Pileum Corporation is terminated, and a strict new email privacy policy is adopted.

Meanwhile, the adoption of such a policy could have wide-ranging impact. Employees in many organizations fear that their email is being read by managers. And it is common for professors and other university employees to avoid using both university email and university phone lines when discussing matters they do not want administrators to know about. It is worth noting that employees of many universities--not just USM--frequently believe that nothing they say over a university phone line is private, even though there are legal prohibitions against listening in on telephone conversations.

The USM Faculty Senate has a choice. If it moves swiftly to put forward a strict email privacy policy, it will do groundbreaking work and ensure loads of favorable publicity for its cause, while hastening the end of the Thames regime. If it falls back on reacting to administrative initiatives, or seeking to smooth things over with Thames and his administrators, it will have done its part to keep Shelby Thames in office for another two years, while insuring that one of his very worst policies remains in force after he is finally fired or his contract runs out.

(Hat tip: King at SCSU Scholars.)

TIME CRUNCHES. Arnold Kling looks at the national income and product accounts, notes historically rapid productivity growth.

As far as I know, President Bush has not claimed credit for the phenomenal productivity growth that has occurred during his Administration. Nor should he. As Dick Cheney said when asked during the Vice-Presidential debate whether he was better off in 2000 than he was four years ago, "Yes, but government had nothing to do with it." Productivity growth in any given Presidential term is affected much more by private sector trends and by policies of previous Administrations than it is by current policies. I think it will be years before we know how much, if any, the Bush Administration's economic policies affected productivity.

The most likely explanation for the faster productivity growth of recent years is the gradual diffusion and exploitation of computer technology. For example, as Virginia Postrel pointed out, "computers have finally gotten powerful enough to collect the data and deliver the problem-solving solutions that [Operations Research] has been promising since the heady days of the New Frontier. Beginning in the 1980s, when American Airlines demonstrated that airlines could save billions of dollars using O.R. techniques to design their schedules, O.R. has become an increasingly important, though largely invisible, contributor to rising productivity."

An Econ Log post offers some additional thoughts, and some comments worth a look.

Perhaps the productivity story has not attracted much attention because, as noted here, everybody is too tired -- in which case today's productivity has eaten future seed corn. Perhaps there is something to that Bolshevik complaint about speed-ups. There certainly are efficiency gains to seek elsewhere.

Consider the latest round of proposals to subsidize caregivers, which remind me of the 1972 Demogrant redux. Laura at Apartment 11-D asserts,

Parenthood is enormously expensive and is at the root of most social inequality today. If you are at all concerned with these issues, then finding a way to lessen the gap between M and P is essential. In this context, Alstott's $5,000 grant seems very small indeed.

Harry at Crooked Timber has been thinking about the same problem, and receiving many comments. One key observation:

I am more moved by a quite different, and much more openly perfectionist, kind of argument for subsidizing primary caregivers, which I can only sketch here. It is grounded in the idea that the structure of social institutions unnecessarily and contingently penalizes the primary caretaker and makes it the case that she/he faces ongoing disadvantages relative to her spouse (and relative to other non-primary caregivers). There is simply no reason to take the institutional status quo as authoritative. The idea is that we want to set things up so that primary caretaking does not have a set of costs attached to it such that one who takes it up is massively disadvantaged within the marriage and if the marriage ends. Why? First, we think that primary care-giving for children is a good thing to do. It is not just one choice among others, but something which has distinctive and intrinsic value, and should be socially validated and encouraged. Second, it will be more rewarding, other things being equal, for both the caregiver and the child if it is done in ‘favourable conditions’; circumstances in which the caregiver is not putting his or her future security excessively at risk. So it is wrong for social institutions unnecessarily to attach great disadvantages to this choice.

Presumably the set of social institutions that involved Dad working, Mom minding the kids, and parents staying together for the sake of the children, which takes advantage of the Say Aggregation Principle to ensure that one wage earner could support a family, and which makes unilateral dissolution of marriage less attractive, are not the set of social institutions envisioned in these discussions. There are, however, other institutional changes to consider, including reduced reliance on the treadmill career path, which might in fact be productivity enhancing as people might have less reason to look for ways out of productive but extremely time-consuming jobs. (Regular readers will correctly note that I have played this tune before: perhaps with sufficient notes on the horn the walls will come tumbling down.)

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. New Zealand has some really funky railroads. There are commuter services in Auckland and Wellington, some long-distance trains, although no sleeper services, and some mineral and container traffic.

New Zealand's government has become the latest to renationalize the tracks while looking for operators to contract out the train operation. Tyler at Marginal Revolution has some thoughts.

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

So it seems to me that people who are looking down their noses at the lower classes should look in their own mirror. A lot of what Cosby had to say about how low-income black people are living their lives could be said about the middle class.

After all, how can so many immigrants who arrive barely speaking the language outperform black American students, many of whom have been educated at expensive private schools?

Mary Mitchell first puts the question, then answers it:

When I visited Ghana a while ago, I met a 7- or 8-year-old boy who got up every morning and worked on the streets as a vendor before going to school. After eating dinner, he went back to work. The boy told me he studied several hours before going to sleep because he had to take tests to continue to stay in school.

It surprised me that the boy didn't complain about his all-work, no-play schedule. His only concern was whether he would have enough money to pay for his books, pens and paper.

While I certainly don't believe that black students in the United States can't compete, unfortunately many of them do not feel that education is the only way out.

He might have been in the same position that many of the kids who grew up in the Great Depression were. Everybody else was poor too. Toys and playtime were just not in anybody's conception of reality.

Michael at Chicago Report observes,

I believe there is also a larger cultural problem in the Middle Class period. We don't value education culturally speaking. The cool kids in High School are not the smart kids but rather the athletes and the trouble makers, just remember Ferris Bueller. This is not a race problem, its a popular culture problem.

Amen.

THE GOP CATERS TO THE RICH. Cheap shrimp? Available for boiling or frying in the most modest of homes? No longer restricted to expensive salads at formal restaurants? Must be dumping:

The Bush administration made a preliminary ruling on Tuesday that China and Vietnam were dumping shrimp in the United States at below market prices and proposed duties as high as 112 percent.

Cafe Hayek rephrases the statement more accurately.

TOLD YOU THE WEATHER WAS GOOD. In the days of ASA 10 Kodachrome, these conditions would be referred to as "Kodachrome skies." Those early days of color slide photography were also the glory days of Big Steam. It might have looked a little like this.

Mendota, Illinois, 25 June 2004.

To be fair, servicing crews did not have to wear high-visibility vests in those days, and the Milwaukee's tracks --now lifted -- through Mendota would not support something this big.

OUTSOURCING COMPENDIUM? Joe at Winds of Change recommends The Outsourcing Weblog.

ILLUSTRATED ECON CAMP. Last week, these pages reported on the conclusion of Econ Camp, more properly the Illinois Global Economics and Finance High Schools
summer academy.

More pictures, with some commentary on the content of the program, are available here.

RUNNING EXTRA: Econ camp sounds like a lot more fun than transcript-buffing, a new meme for high schoolers taking required classes in the summer so as to be able to schedule more Advanced Placement classes during the school year.

ARE YOU READING MILT'S FILE REGULARLY? If not, get over there. He plans a radio show on the rise of F. D. R. for tonight; presumably with the Milwaukee Brewers not longer tormenting the Cubs, the program will begin at 2100 Central. The stuff he's been linking to is quite eclectic, most of it somewhat more serious than this Onion piece on "Outrage Fatigue." The Onion originates in Madison, Wisconsin, where the staff is likely to have lots of exemplars to satirize.

"I can't even look at the back of my Volvo anymore," said one Syracuse, NY liberal who wished to remain anonymous. "My 'Lick Bush' and 'Four More Wars' bumper stickers just remind me of the angry feelings I can't sustain. I still have a MoveOn.org sign hanging up in my cubicle at work, but if someone starts to talk about Cheney, I can't take it. I'm like, 'Yes, we all hate Cheney. He's an evil puppet-master. Yes, Bush is dumb. This is obvious. How many times can we say it? Now, excuse me, will you let me through so I can microwave my burrito?'"

Priceless.

OPEN UP ANOTHER SPRECHER. Brewers 4, Cubs 0, with lots of disappointed flatlanders learning where Racine County's speed traps are. The Brewers have to learn how to beat the weaker teams too. Tonight: Irish style Stout. Ein prosit!

SECOND SECTION: I wasn't joking about those Racine County speed traps.

Illinois drivers can rest assured that they will always be welcome in Wisconsin, and not just because of this state's fondness for the doormats known as the Chicago Bears. There's the money that Illinoisians spend here, of course. But flatlanders mainly are welcome because they're just such darn friendly folks and good neighbors.

We raise these points because some Illinoisanders have come under the impression of late that Wisconsin - and specifically Racine County - doesn't particularly like folks from south of the border. What happened was that a Chicago Sun-Times columnist was ticketed for speeding not too long ago, and she has written several columns indicating that the Racine County Sheriff's Department is out to get Illinoisites.

The columnist is - as columnists always are - absolutely right to be upset. To give her a ticket for doing 83 in a 65 mph zone is an affront to all Americans' free speech rights. We wouldn't go so far as to say the department owes her an apology for actually daring to enforce the state's traffic laws, but perhaps deputies could send her a nice cherry kringle.

The aggrieved columnist's side of the story is here. I like this:

Back at home, the message light was blinking on my phone. It was a call from a close friend. She had driven her young daughter up I-94 through Wisconsin the same day as my court appearance. She was calling from her cell phone. They were sitting in her car. She had been stopped by a deputy sheriff and ticketed for allegedly speeding. I should mention that her car bears Illinois plates.

I wonder.

Maybe she can plead to distracted driving.

The background, from a flatlander perspective, is here. The view from north of the Cheddar Curtain is somewhat different.

IN CASE OF A TIE. Today's Best of the Web raises the possibility of a tie in the Electoral College and provides a map showing control of the state delegations.

This Democratic Party site has a map of the states it considers in play.

Just in case anyone is curious, I used the Opinion Journal electoral college calculator to set up this scenario. Come November, I will revisit this post to make amends as necessary.

TOWARD A FOURTH TURNING?

Is eroding civility in the comment section of weblogs that allow them a symptom of a broader fracture in society? Michele at A Small Victory suggests a connection:

How many times have I said in the past year that I feel a 1968 coming? Quite a few. Unfortunately, I think it's no longer just coming. It's here. The air has the same quality to it that I felt as a six year old. Like lightning about to strike. You can almost hear the thunder in the distance. I don't think the violence will reach the point it did that year, that's not what I mean. But the ugliness, the divide that keeps getting bigger, the hatred and vitriol; all present and accounted for.

In the world of blogs, the only thing we can do is close our comments when they need defusing. Even then, we end up doing the anger dance ourselves, lashing out at the left or the right. We reek of hatred right now. I admit to being part of that. Thing is, I don't know what to do about it. It's perhaps too late to reign in those feelings. Honestly, I don't know if I want to. It feels good to be able to sit down here, type away for an hour or so and release whatever pent up frustration I have. The fact that I allow people to respond to that rage probably fuels it.

Citizen Smash has a few thoughts, and a link to a sufficiently furious Cold Fury, who suggests,

The Left has been spoiling for a real fight for years now, and they’re most likely going to get it. It’s the awful truth, and I don’t see anything standing in the way of it but the Left’s own innate sneaky cowardice. When push comes to shove, perhaps the Left will be willing to put down their Bushitler signs and go home peacefully. But they’re not the majority, they never will be, and the only way they can win is through deceit, disinformation, intimidation, and, ultimately, violence. Scott’s fighting the good fight here, and we all ought to be out doing more of this sort of thing—speaking out before it’s too late to change the minds of the uninformed, and the dupes are standing shoulder to shoulder on the front lines with their manipulators. God help us if it should come to that at last.

The war protests, and counter-protests, are one crack along the fault line. Sometimes it can be as mundane as a song, in this case the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The Glittering Eye was sufficiently impressed by its use during President Reagan's funeral to comment on it.

This is not the hymn of pastoral America nor is it the ballad of an America rocked back on her heels. This is the anthem of revolutionary America. It is our La Marseillaise. Unabashedly Christian, unswerving in its commitments, it is the marching song for Winthrop's "City on a Hill".

I'm not entirely comfortable with The Battle Hymn but that means that I get it. You're not supposed to be comfortable with it. It's a challenge. It's a slap in the face to the complacent.

Those who do not believe in American exceptionalism and do believe in the moral equivalence of all cultures either find The Battle Hymn of the Republic incomprehensible, or quaint, or horrifying. They think or at least hope that its singers must be kidding. Those who do believe in American exceptionalism and in the superiority of America's aspirations hope the singers aren't kidding.

I think we'll be hearing The Battle Hymn of the Republic for some time to come.

Which will displease this commentator:

I too have been concerned with the appropriateness of using the Battle Hymn of the Republic in a religious service. Mind you I am "merely" a layman and a Roman Catholic to boot, but in spite of the mistake I made many years ago-- joining the military as a young man-- I have been over the more recent decades drawn to an appreciation for the importance of a concern for peace and justice. I greatly admire the tradition among the AFSC and other peace churches in pursuing a gospel of social justice which, to my chagrin, does not sufficiently include most American RC churches.

The BHOTR and other nationalistic and militaristic songs are played all too frequently this time of year and I am troubled. I usually get up and leave during the singing of these songs, unintendedly appearing to be disruptive to the congregation, but I have not yet been able to find a better way to deal with these occasions. I am in a process of trying to promote a more enlightened (and Christian) consciousness in my parish. But, as you might well imagine, it is a slow-going process.

The poster's use of the terms "peace" and "justice" illustrates yet another crack in the fault line. When a church-goer of a certain age uses those terms there is a strong possibility that that person uses "peace" to mean "appeasing Communists" -- or coexisting with them -- and "justice" to mean "especially in Latin America." Both of these notions are a bit overtaken by events, but still valid. Little Green Footballs provides a list of such organizations and links to a proposal that their protest of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns at the Republican convention be given conspicuous airing. Battle lines being drawn, indeed.

WELCOME GUESTS. It is unusual for a Karnival of the Kapitalists entry to rate an update two days on, but this week's proprietor was sufficiently impressed by this followup to this to provide such a special update. Many thanks.

On two related topics, it's not just the stressful life that can sap future productivity. Apparently the same is true of an insufficiently stressful life. James at Outside the Beltway has discovered the downside of those short European work weeks. His conclusion:

From a social idealist standpoint, the old European paradigm is clearly preferable to the American model. Shorter workweeks and longer vacations should lead to healthier lives and, to a point, happier, more productive workers. Reality and theory don’t match up very well in this case, however.

To a point. That's true of just about any argument in economics, you have to be aware of the point up to which it holds. Not only that, as the New York Times discovers, it's a limitation on individual freedom that free individuals can circumvent.

Flagging tax receipts and large budget deficits are the main cause of the state's newfound push for hours. In France, however, the government is making a broader case that the 35-hour week, which applies to public- and private-sector jobs, is throttling the country's growth.

"I've never been convinced of the positive effect of a 35-hour week," President Jacques Chirac declared recently. "I feel it's been a brake on economic development and therefore a brake on overall employment."

Mr. Chirac is feeling pressure from his fiery finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has called for French employees to have the right to work more than 35 hours, if it fattens their paychecks.

There's another dimension to this problem. A shorter work week does not mean higher rates of employment, if the jobs employers are seeking to fill have insufficient job seekers. (Consider in particular the difficulty employers continuously report in finding skilled workers -- a VOLUNTARY offer of shorter working conditions might be just the ticket for them. But that will not help the seekers who lack those skills, who might be proliferating.)

The second related point comes from some magazine reading. A letter to the editor of Trains made the observation that his objective, while in the employ of an eastern railroad, was to keep the younger workers from being fired AND from being promoted -- as into management. Are those higher management salaries a compensating differential for being brainwashed into accepting foolish fads?

A DEMOCRAT I COULD VOTE FOR?

"We are not a warlike people. We have never sought glory as a nation of warriors. We are not interested in aggression. We are not interested--as the dictators are--in looting. We do not covet one square inch of the territory of any other nation. Our vast effort, and the unity of purpose which inspires that effort are due solely to our recognition of the fact that our fundamental rights are threatened...These rights were established by our forefathers on the field of battle. They have been defended--at great cost but with great success--on the field of battle, here on our own soil, and in foreign lands, and on all the seas all over the world. There has never been a moment in our history when Americans were not ready to stand up as free men and fight for their rights."

Scrapple Face has a compendium of quotes from President Franklin Roosevelt's speeches that would give the contemporary Democratic Party -- the one that left me -- pause.

BEGGING TO BE SPANKED? Are the heirs to Xerxes begging for their own Thermopylae?

American and Iraqi joint patrols, along with U.S. Special Operations (search) teams, captured two men with explosives in Baghdad on Monday who identified themselves as Iranian (search) intelligence officers.

Roundup at Memeorandum.

BUG OR FEATURE? Looking for a doctoral dissertation involving the microfoundations of macroeconomics? Start with Tim Worstall's column on the effect of welfare reform on steady-state unemployment rates.

It might even be possible for Paul Krugman to go on and explain exactly why this recovery seems to be working a little differently from previous ones. For several decades it was a given that by the time we got down to 5.6 % unemployment we would expect to be seeing wage inflation. That's where we are now and as is rightly pointed out we don't have that inflation. So what happened, has there been some structural change in the economy since the last recession, something that would change the relationship between unemployment rates and income gains? Well, yes, there has been: welfare reform.

My old Professor, Richard Layard, spent the 1980's banging on (I would say to the point of tedium but then one should not be bored with the truth) about how getting the long term unemployed back into the labor pool, if not the workforce, would permanently bring down NAIRU (don't worry, just think of it as the rate of unemployment at which you start to see worker's incomes rising). What was the main point of Bill Clinton's welfare reforms? Why, to get people off long term dependence upon handouts and back into the labor force. What are we seeing now? Having reformed welfare so that it is indeed a hand up not a handout we see that a level of unemployment which would previously have led to wage increases now does not. We might assume then that NAIRU has indeed been permanently changed in exactly the way that theory predicted it would.

Wouldn't that be an interesting story for an eminent economist to tell in his NY Times column? That the currently skewed growth in profits as against wages is simply proof that the structural changes to the welfare system last decade actually worked.

One might quibble about the use of the word "proof" where there is at best preliminary evidence, but that's where the doctoral dissertation comes in.

I PROBABLY SPENT TOO MUCH TIME ON THIS The latest weblogger participation poll is Terry Teachout's Cultural Concurrence Index. At least one of the following two statements is true.

(1) I have to expand my circle of acquaintances.

(2) This selection of choices is weird.

Anyway, I was able to make a choice on 59 of the following items, and maybe ten of the items skipped were informed items. I concur with Mr Teachout on about half of the items I chose, for whatever that might be worth. Here are my choices.

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Astaire
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Drop back fifteen and punt.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington (last public appearance was at Northern Illinois University)
4. Cats or dogs? With a basement full of trains?
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso
6. Yeats or Eliot? T. S., not George, Eliot
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton reenacted the Great Locomotive Chase
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Punt
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Punt
11. The Who or the Stones? Got satisfaction. Stones
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Punt
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens, slightly
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Fitzgerald
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Insufficient information
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Huh?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Punt
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Dogs
19. Letterman or Leno? Yawn.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Huh?
21. Verdi or Wagner? Wagner
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Punt
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Cash
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Punt
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Mitchum. GI beats outsider hands down.
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Punt
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt, slightly
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Tchaikovsky
29. Red wine or white? What's for supper?
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Yawn
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Punt
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Shostakovich, slightly
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Yawn
34. Constable or Turner? Punt
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
36. Comedy or tragedy? What time is it (thanks, Bill)
37. Fall or spring? Fall. There is no spring in the State Line
38. Manet or Monet? Monet, slightly
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Simpsons
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Gershwins
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset, particularly with the lightning bugs out
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Porter
44. Mac or PC? IBM, path-dependence be damned
45. New York or Los Angeles? Chicago
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Yawn
47. Stax or Motown? Motown
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? The Cuervo gold ...
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Magazine
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Alec Guinness
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Punt
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Punt
54. Ghost World or Election? Punt
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism, provided it's not supported by government grants
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism, particularly on the rails
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Batman. Adam West rules.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Punt
60. Johnson or Boswell? Punt
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Yawn
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Before my time
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Arch Deluxe
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Punt
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Figaro has better tunes
66. Blue or green? Blue
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Dream
68. Ballet or opera? Yawn
69. Film or live theater? Movies. It's Arch Deluxe to refer to "film."
70. Acoustic or electric? Acoustic
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? North by Northwest, on the Twentieth Century
72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler, son of railroaders
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Yawn
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Music Man
75. Sushi, yes or no? No.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Yawn
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Punt
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Punt
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright. Roh More Boxes.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Punt
82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolor
83. Bus or subway? Subway, preferably elevated. Spell that L, please.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Stravinsky
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooth
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Cather
87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart. Schubert is a minor post-Mozartian.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Fifties
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Finn
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Yawn
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Punt
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Dickinson, slightly
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Churchill
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Punt
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Harpsichord
97. Anchovies, yes or no? No. Get out the salt shaker.
98. Short novels or long ones? Short
99. Swing or bebop? Swing, although the people who can get it right are passing.
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? Punt

SOME FAST TRAINS. Grand Central Terminal in New York has some old synchronization equipment and some even older clocks. Live from the Third Rail finds coverage of an upgrade to the clocks that includes a bit of history of "railroad time" and the evolution of standard time. The article also hints at some extremely fast running on the New York Central.

"A train could leave Syracuse at 12 o'clock and come into Utica, and it would still be 12 o'clock," said Pierce Haviland, a Metro-North employee who is also a railroad historian. "That wasn't working."

That would be some stunt. Utica is east of Syracuse, meaning local noon in Utica ought to precede local noon in Syracuse. Going west, the train would have to make the Utica-Syracuse run in four or five minutes. (To think that there is still controversy about No. 999 hitting 112 mph on a test train, sometime after the adoption of standard time ... apparently such speeds were routinely exceeded by an order of magnitude before the adoption of standard time.)

MORE ON PERFECT PRICE DISCRIMINATION. Rich Lowry has a footnote to last week's post:

Put aside the fact that George Bush doesn't himself set the tuition at any universities. The entire premise of this line of Kerry attack is still mistaken. Almost no one pays official tuition rates, and college tuition has become more affordable in recent years, not less. A report in USA Today found that the amount students pay public universities has fallen by a third since 1998. "In fact," according to the paper, "today's students have enjoyed the greatest improvement in college affordability since the GI Bill provided benefits for returning World War II veterans."

One would think that this constitutes what the Kerry campaign welcomes only through gritted teeth — good news. At public universities, students are paying roughly 27 percent of the official tuition price. Students pay more at private schools, but private tuition actually paid has gone up only 7 percent during the past five years, less than the 20 percent rise in the official price.

It is positively raining college aid, meaning students are in a tight competition with the elderly over who can be more pampered by government. Georgia began a program in 1993 to pay full tuition to state universities for students who had a B average in high school. Thirteen states have created similar programs. Eight new federal tuition tax breaks have been created since 1997. Total federal and state financial aid hit a record $49 billion in 2003, according to USA Today.

The game for universities is obvious — hike official tuition rates ever higher. Then everyone thinks students cannot afford college and plies them with more aid, which ends up lining the pockets of the schools. It's one of the great scams of our time, and Kerry has been happy to play along by hyping nominal tuition increases and promising yet more aid. He is the dream candidate of greedy college administrators.

The problem isn't that students hungry for knowledge are being frozen out from college, but the opposite. Marginal students take their generous aid and go to colleges that don't teach them. Eighty percent of universities aren't selective, e.g. more or less happy to accept anyone who shows up with a check. Only 37 percent of first-time freshmen graduate in four years, and only 60 percent graduate in six years. Universities are happy to take money from unprepared students and fail them right back out, or dumb down their standards to stay on the government-aid gravy train.

(Hat tip: Libertaria at Social Justice Friends.)

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES NO. 94 visits Democrats Give Conservatives Indigestion, where there is a brief history lesson about cabinets of curiosities, the precursors of modern museums. Sometimes the cabinet becomes an entire chamber, or a decent-sized palace, such as Peter the Great's Chamber of Curiosities, in Piter. The palace at one time provided lodging to Leonhard Euler. Henry Ford probably holds the record for largest cabinet of curiosities, namely the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Mr Ford purchased all sorts of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods to highlight improvements in the lives of ordinary people. His "history is bunk" quip is a comment on the emphasis of ordinary historians of his time on Important People and Important Events.

ON THE ONE HAND, ON THE OTHER HAND. Why I don't do macroeconomics:

There were strong 4.5 percent growth rates in 1997 and 1999, when Bill Clinton was president and the country was in the midst of a record 10-year expansion.

But if this year's growth ends up a bit faster than that, it will be the best since the economy roared ahead at a 7.2 percent rate in 1984, a year when another Republican president - Ronald Reagan - was running for re-election.

"We are moving into a sweet spot for the economy with interest rates not too high, jobs coming back and business investment providing strength," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One in Chicago, who is predicting GDP growth of 4.8 percent this year.

President Bush is highlighting the improving economy at every opportunity while Democratic challenger John Kerry has focused on what he calls a middle class squeeze of rising health and tuition costs and laid-off workers forced to take lower-paying jobs.

Who will win on the all-important pocketbook issues? Economists aren't sure.

"It is unclear whether voters will remember the past year and the better jobs created during that period or the past four years," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "It will be a close call and that is one of the reasons the election could be so close."

WHAT'S SHAKING? The June 28 earthquake got one Byron, Illinois weblogger's attention, but not another.

TO COMMENT OR NOT? Dan Drezner remains optimistic about comment sections on weblogs. Good for him. For my part, maintaining such a thing takes up more time than I'd like to devote to this hobby. The public interest would not be served by such an expensive investment here.

SECOND SECTION: Andrew Sullivan is thinking along similar lines.

OPEN UP ANOTHER SPRECHER. Brewers 4, Cubs 2. That calls for a Mai Bock. Eins! Zwei! Drei! G'suffe!

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at pc4media, with some contrarian observations by the host. This submission, on the possible adverse effect an intensified pace of work has on future creativity, is worth a look. (Are you listening, university administrators? Sooner or later the flow of Nobel Prizes will abate, as potential creative people burn out on the increased class sizes, additional courses, additional requests for reports, and additional unsound pedagogical fads that are crowding out thinking time.)

MEASURE OUTPUTS, NOT INPUTS.

America's public schools spend more than $400 billion each year — more than we spend on national defense (even with the War on Terror) and more than all federal domestic programs except Social Security and health-care programs.

For those who argue that the vast sums devoted to public education are insufficient in the face of even larger educational challenges, here's a challenge: Tell the American people how much you think it would cost to produce what you believe is an adequate education. Name the price. Then, once we reach that amount, adjusting for inflation, we can stop the endless calls for spending more.

But we suspect that advocates for increasing spending never will name the price of an adequate education. If they did, the American people would finally become aware of the true price tag — and refuse to pay.

Jay Greene and Marcus Winters discover The Public Schools' Dirty Little Secret

(Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.)

WE CAN'T TAX THE INDONESIANS, SO WE'D BEST NOT TRADE WITH THEM. That appears to be the thesis of this essay. King at SCSU Scholars has supplied the requisite Fisking.

RIGOR AND RELEVANCE.

Some time in the 1970s or 1980s, [operations research] was in a sense hijacked by mathematicians who insisted on imposing their view of rigorous mathematics onto the field. This placed much less emphasis on modeling and empirical work.

The story has a happy ending, with a potential Teachable Moment about the importance of making connections among ideas.

AND WHAT ARE THE KIDS LEARNING BEFORE THEY GET TO COLLEGE? Certainly not writing.

I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

That's from an essay that has been around for a while -- see also this -- but only recently attracted notice from Number 2 Pencil, who uses the essay to make some observations about what passes for "socialization" in the common schools.

It's laughable that the main charge hurled at homeschooling parents is that their kids will be "undersocialized," when, for a lot of kids, "socialization" at school involves either abuse for being unpopular or the ever-present drug scene. Homeschooled kids are more likely to be living in the real world than kids in schools, and less likely to suffer any abuse for not worshiping at the temple of "popularity."

This topic doesn't just make me think about homeschoolers, though. I think of the abuse that smart black kids, who are supposedly "acting white," receive in government schools, especially if they criticize the low standards all around them. I think about the harassment that Goth kids, who may not only be smart but too "different," get from others, especially every time a school shooting happens. It's not just about being a nerd anymore. At some schools, being unpopular and/or too smart can literally be hazardous to one's health. And that's a crying shame.

WHAT SHE SAID.

Those of us who teach college English classes are always overwhelmed by the astonishing deficits in our students' ability to get their facts straight, to think clearly and logically, and to express their ideas in language that actually makes sense and that follows the most basic rules of grammar.

Tina's guest commentary at Irascible Professor is today's Required Reading.

Hat tip: Newmark's Door.

It's not just the freshman comp faculty that are frustrated: go here or here for the frustrations of supervising senior capstone papers.

ROLL OUT THE BARREL

When it came time for 3,000 beer memorabilia collectors to pick a city for their group's national museum, there were a couple of obvious names on the list - St. Louis and Milwaukee - and one not so obvious, Potosi, Wis.

Potosi beat out the bigger rivals. The collectors' association picked the right state. Pretty setting, although it's a bit off the interstates.

SECOND BEST? Gary at Winds of Change makes a sobering discovery: drug companies are "addicted to government-granted patent monopolies." The basis for his post is an essay from the New York Review of Books that argues,

The hints of trouble and the public's growing resentment over high prices are producing the first cracks in the industry's formerly firm support in Washington. In 2000, Congress passed legislation that would have closed some of the loopholes in Hatch-Waxman and also permitted American pharmacies, as well as individuals, to import drugs from certain countries where prices are lower. In particular, they could buy back FDA-approved drugs from Canada that had been exported there. It sounds silly to "reimport" drugs that are marketed in the United States, but even with the added transaction costs, doing so is cheaper than buying them here. But the bill required the secretary of health and human services to certify that the practice would not pose any "added risk" to the public, and secretaries in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, under pressure from the industry, refused to do that.

The industry is also being hit with a tidal wave of government investigations and civil and criminal lawsuits. The litany of charges includes illegally overcharging Medicaid and Medicare, paying kickbacks to doctors, engag-ing in anticompetitive practices, colluding with generic companies to keep generic drugs off the market, illegally promoting drugs for unapproved uses, engaging in misleading direct-to-consumer advertising, and, of course, covering up evidence.

The essay prays for relief:

One could hope drug companies would decide to make some changes—trim their prices, or at least make them more equitable, and put more of their money into trying to discover genuinely innovative drugs, instead of just talking about it. But that is not what is happening. Instead, drug companies are doing more of what got them into this situation. They are marketing their me-too drugs even more relentlessly. They are pushing even harder to extend their monopolies on top-selling drugs. And they are pouring more money into lobbying and political campaigns.

Those prayers are not likely to be answered, as the money is well-spent:

The Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003, and scheduled to go into effect in 2006, promises a windfall for big pharma since it for-bids the government from negotiating prices. The immediate jump in pharmaceutical stock prices after the bill passed indicated that the industry and investors were well aware of the windfall. But at best, this legislation will be only a temporary boost for the industry. As costs rise, Congress will have to reconsider its industry-friendly decision to allow drug companies to set their own prices, no questions asked.

What appears to be missing from this essay is the recognition that those third-party payments -- as is true of any other insurance or subsidy program -- attenuate the incentive to find cheaper methods of production or quote Ramsey-efficient prices for products. U.S. taxpayers end up paying for the research and development either in the form of government grants or in the form of higher "benefit" payments.

OPEN UP A SPRECHER. One-nil, Brewers. (Sorry, too many yuppies in the seats, thought it was a soccer game.) Sheets makes Counsell's first-inning home run stand up. Brewers bounce back from losing all four at Pittsburgh, continue to mess up the pennant race.

MORE ON THE CORE. Chris at Signifying Nothing has one view:

Degrees in the liberal arts and sciences are intended as training in general competencies—how to think scientifically, how to come to your own conclusions based on information, how to think—rather than specific, rigorous training in the minutae of a particular field of knowledge, which is the goal of graduate and professional education (law school, medical school, et cetera).

And, in general, I think (in retrospect; as an undergraduate, I probably concurred with Ms. Malcolm’s assessment) that this is the correct approach—specialists are pretty useless outside their field of expertise without a general education to back it up.

Kate at Kitchen Cabinet has a different perspective.

I have a problem with this evaluation of higher education. It seems to me that this approach assumes that college is necessary to be a productive member of society -- "an educated citizen." It also seems to assume that the quality of education at these universities would not decline if they imposed a larger core of required classes. I can't say this for certain, but I believe that a larger core of required classes would likely result in bigger, less personable, less detailed classes. It might result in less motivated, less interested professors. It most certainly would sap resources from other courses. And it would also force specialized education more strongly into the graduate realm, depriving students who can't afford those extra years (for one reason or another) of that educational opportunity.

To an extent, these posters are talking past each other. The problem with what passes for general education today is the absence of anything resembling a core -- oh, there might be a writing course that properly ought to be the purview of tenth grade, and there likely is a "diversity" requirement of some kind, that can be satisfied by hearing somebody's grievance -- rather than the absence of any required courses that have to be added to the exclusion of something more field-specific. More here.

SECOND SECTION. Read this:

The trends against systematization, against context-keeping, against integration, are trends against reason, and it is only by undermining reason that the great mass of the citizenry can be turned into "passive sheep."

BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOR

It is crazy to think that in a time of famine, Ethiopian farmers had warehouses full of surplus grain. Ethiopian farmers, who are unable to get rid of their surplus, fear not having enough money for the next round of harvest and storage. Also, prices in Ethiopia will drop, farmers will be unable to pay loans and expenses. These factors will contribute to a smaller crop planted for next season, and famine will continue. Many groups “charge that Washington uses food aid to dump surplus commodities, in effect subsidizing U.S. growers”.

Thus does a beginning economics student discover the sweet land of subsidy.

FRAMING. Is a 57 point deficiency on an 800 point base meaningful? The context is the effect of calculator use on SAT scores, as interpreted by an aspiring expert. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

BELOW THE FOLD. King at SCSU Scholars is not happy with the radical chic on official display. The factoid also displayed is more telling.

Just so you know: During the last, 2,850 students earned more then $7million from on-campus part-time employment.

I suppose it's a bit much to carp about the "than" that's missing, as well as the unspecified direct object of "during." But if a university raises tuitions and fees in such a way as to collect $7 million, and then assigns 2,850 students to jobs to earn $7 million, is it engaging in perfect price discrimination?

HUH? Susan Lenfestey has a case of selective memory.

Bill Clinton's personal immorality distracted a nation and hurt him and his family terribly, but he presided over a bountiful eight years, eliminated the national debt and honed America's image abroad to a sparkling finish, at least in the eyes of all but the most rabid fundamentalists like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Back then, most people wanted to be like us.

I don't recall the national debt being eliminated, although some of the existing debt was retired. Perhaps graduates of econ camp can distinguish deficits from debts. Some of the money coming in to help pay down the debt (or did it -- how much of that was supposedly "contributed" to the social security trust fund?) was capital gains taxes on stocks bought at 100 times earnings and sold at 200 times earnings to buyers who hoped to sell them for 300 times earnings? Bountiful bubbles if you ask me. And that American image? Not if you rode Amtrak.

TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT. Nick at Tapped commends Winning Argument:

If you're a lefty, you'll find good took points on Judd's blog. And if you're a righty, well, don't you want to know what the other side is thinking?

And if you'd like something other than the usual talking points, you might want to stop, look, then look elsewhere. Consider The United States should not repeal the estate tax.

Opponents of the estate tax argue is unfair because it is double taxation. They believe the value of the estate has been taxed once as income and should not be taxed again. But people with modest incomes have most of their incomes subject to double taxation through sales and excise taxes. Their incomes are taxed once when they earn it and again when they spend it. Essentially, opponents of the death tax are arguing that the rich should be privileged to protect most of their income from double taxation.

Perhaps. But perhaps opponents of the estate tax oppose other manifestations of double taxation. Debaters expect something better than tu quoque. The suggestion that follows, although still subject to debate, does address several of the major talking points opponents of estate taxes raise.

Rather than eliminating the estate tax, simply raise the estate tax exemption level for family-owned farms and business to $4 million. A treasury department analysis found that would exempt almost all family-owned farms subject to the estate tax.

COMMON CARRIERS. The Pernambuco Tramway doesn't work any better just because the Pernambuco Transit Authority, rather than the Patagonian Public Service Commission, is enforcing the obligation to serve. Live from the Third Rail has picked up coverage of a court order mandating service improvements to an underserved and transit-dependent population in New Orleans. The post correctly observes,

Does local transit have an obligation to provide service to those who need it, or should they instead operate as a 'free market' enterprise that can serve only areas that are profitable? In the U.S., at least, transit went from free market to full-service in the 50s and 60s when state and local agencies purchased failing private transit providers. While it's harder to force private operators to service all areas (although in some cases, this has been done), its very easy to force the government to provide service coverage, because they're under an obligation to serve their constituents. This, then, creates an endless argument between governments that refuse to fund transit because it isn't profitable but will not allow service to be cut in unprofitable areas because of service obligations (hence, some WMATA funding issues and many of Amtrak's current problems).

The short form is that regulators used to force private operators to provide coverage. One of these days I may have to revisit the passenger train discontinuance cases of the late 1960s, and the weak carrier-strong carrier pairing of airlines by the Civil Aeronautics Board.

NOW THIS I LIKE. Will at Vodka Pundit recalls Question Time at a campus visit.

I believe I may be the only human being alive who's personally cracked up both Jimmy Buffett and William F. Buckley, Jr. The Buffett incident doesn't bear repeating, but in honor of WFB's retirement from National Review, here's what happened:

In 1991, Buckley gave a speech at my alma mater, Auburn University, and took questions after his remarks. I'm sorry to say that most of the questions were terrible; psuedo-intellectual claptrap from students who'd cribbed a few big words from their philosophy texts. Buckley was visibly bored, and after four or five pointless efforts, the moderator motioned for the last student questioner.

Which was me.

My question: "Mr. Buckley, I'm sure you're familiar with the famous observation of Sir Winston Churchill that a young man who is not a liberal has no heart, but an old man who is a liberal has no brain.

"Just before the last election [1988], a poll here found that 75 percent of Auburn's students were voting for President Bush [41], while over 80 percent of the faculty were voting for Michael Dukakis."

(Brief pause for breath, hopeful I wouldn't screw up the punchline.)

"Given all those facts, would you say that Auburn is a school of heartless students, being taught by a brainless faculty?"

Brought the house down. When WFB finished laughing, his answer went so far over my head, it smacked into a guy six rows behind me.

Priceless. But not that far off the mark. Somebody has to be validating those cliches that come up in the bull sessions of sophomores.

ECON CAMP. The Illinois Council on Economic Education has obtained state funding for a program called the Illinois Global Economics and Finance High Schools, intended to infuse knowledge about economics, finance, and the world economy throughout the high school's curriculum. Part of this program is a summer academy in which teachers and students from the participating school spend two weeks at college and they can obtain some college credit for their efforts. This year's summer academy was at Northern Illinois University, where the housing services have much practice with these programs, and their internal memoranda referred to "economics camp." (Also in town this week are a cheerleader camp, a wrestling camp, and the next generation of Mia Hamms have arrived for soccer camp. I'm not sure whether it was intentional or not that the economics students and teachers were housed in a different building.)

The teacher training included a program invented at the Idaho Council on Economic Education that culminates in an International Economic Summit. The teachers showed great creativity in developing their presentations, and we will have pictures. There will be some economic summits as class projects in participating schools, and there might be -- in the future -- a summit among schools, perhaps at one of the universities that host centers of economic education.