LIFE IMITATES THE ONION. Anthropology and Economics examines Britain's crackdown on quality-of-life crimes.

There is something threatening about public incivility. It is a modest, but distinct, form of terrorism. God fearing, good hearted citizens are made to fear for the security of person, family and home. Tolerating incivility gives power to thugs who are often marginal in their abilities, accomplishments, and social value. It is manifestly wrong that those who give so little to the common good should be allowed to extract so much from it.

Now scroll over to The Onion, and read about the dilemma a sheriff faces.

The string of unsolved crimes includes the defacement of public property, an incident of breaking-and-entering, and a string of harassing phone calls. The latest crime—the sudden disappearance of two yield signs from Hoxie Street—occurred Monday.

"We believe the yield signs were removed in order to disrupt traffic patterns, most likely to cause an accident," [Sheriff] Steinhorst said. "The party responsible for the crime could be anyone from suspected terrorist Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Mughassil, who is on the FBI's most-wanted list, to that Fairman kid and his buddies. It could be the work of one or the other. Possibly both, though I have to say I doubt that."

Anthropology and Economics, however, is interested in more serious fare: what is the balance between civility and creativity, or put another way, is there an optimal level of transgressiveness?

The perspective at Cold Spring Shops is that there is still room to err on the side of civility, and we offer some observations from Rebecca Hagelin, who is giving props to Kathleen Santorum's book, Everyday Graces.

How would children learn to avoid quarreling and whining? It is quite natural that they do so. Where would they learn to offer someone a seat if the bus is full? How would they learn that their chores are their jobs? How would they learn to speak when spoken to by adults, to say "please," "thank you" and "you're welcome"? God doesn't put us on Earth knowing these things.

Children learn them when parents take the time to teach them and to enforce the rules. Absentee parenting, part-time parenting, parenting that says, "Go to your room, watch television, get on the computer, amuse yourself becauseI have neither the time nor the inclination to make you do otherwise," produces part-time results.

We also offer for your consideration some Lileks commentary on the back-to-school adverts.

God forbid our children should ever be happy. Not when they can have ATTITUDE, which is what we all really want from our kids.

Methinks Anthropology and Economics frets too much.

How well do we control the “broken windows” dynamic. Is this, in the language of Cold War science, a controlled reaction or an uncontrolled reaction? Can we discourage small crimes against law without discouraging small crimes against social convention? I'm not saying we can't. I am saying we need to know more about the broken windows dynamic before we unleash it.

We have a lot of transgressiveness to marginalize before I will fear the tramp of brownshirts in the streets.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Moderate Voice has found more marketing of "attitude," and James Lileks has it about right:

Britney a stepmom? Let me answer that question for you: no. “How Hollywood’s blended families work” is not an issue that keeps me up at night; I expect that they stumble along thanks to money and docile Salvadoran nannies who do all the heavy lifting, and sometimes find themselves crying because they know they will be out of the child’s life eventually, and if they tried to show up for the wedding 18 years from now they’d be turned away by big men in black suits. Plus, look at that guy. These are our celebs. Not exactly a Hurrell portrait of Cary Grant, eh? He knocked up one women, produced the little girl you see here, and now he’s sauntering off to bed another doxy. Men like this make me ill.

In the comments to the Anthropology and Economics post is a link to some background information on the individuals inducing the British lifestyle policing. These individuals, in the best academic tradition, are being transgressive without realising it.

BATTLES OF THE SEXES. Professor Mike Adams at North Carolina-Wilmington (motto: Fort Fisher is Taken) offers a modest proposal to Womens' Centers at ten universities.

I would love the opportunity to visit your campus to talk about the following:

*The benefits and responsibilities of gun ownership in general.
*The desirability of concealed carry permits for women.
*The basic rules governing the use of deadly force.

Since I am traveling extensively in the coming year, I believe that I will be able to coordinate a visit to your university sometime in the coming months. Again, the lecture would be provided at no cost to the university.

Please contact me immediately, if you think that you would be interested.

The response was less than overwhelming.

Professor Adams's reaction:

I never intended to argue that women should actually carry their guns to class. But I did intend to show that the benefits of gun ownership outweigh the detriments. In others words, guns thwart crimes more often than they cause accidents.

Oh well, at least I tried. After all, most of these centers will be sponsoring the Vagina Monologues later this year. That should be enough to scare most of the men away. So maybe they don’t need guns after all. Maybe I just need to see things from a woman’s perspective.

The second battle is a post at Dean's World. Mr Esmay's complaint:

But when I became a teenager in the 1980s, to be honest, feminists were a bunch of jerks. They were. Boys could not do anything--AN-NEE-THING--right. If we were hot and horny, it was because we were "immature" and "viewed women as objects." If we were polite and respectful and called them ladies, it was because we were "demeaning" them and "putting them in their place." If we were sexually aggressive we were brutes and neanderthals. If we were respectful and decent, we were wimps.

Do you think I exaggerate? Just talk to men aged 30-45 today, and most of them--those who aren't self-flagellating wimps--will tell you that women were fucking EVIL back in the '80s. All men were potential rapists, and anything we did was taken as a sign of our "male chauvinism." If we were polite we were condescending. If we were rude we were oppressive. If we were aggressive we were domineering. If we were kind we were wimps. Honest to God, women who called themselves "feminists" twisted everyone with a Y chromosome into a pretzel, then either laughed at us or scorned us when we didn't measure up.

Worst of all, they demonized us for objecting to any of this.

Do you think I'm whining? I'm not. I'm telling you the way it was. Indeed, I don't really care what you think of me. A whole lot of us guys born between 1960 and 1980 finally got married, settled down, had kids---and didn't get happy until we decided to ignore what the kremlinists told us and started saying, "fuck you, this is me, this is who I am and what I like, and if you don't like it, you can stick it!"

The essay has illustrations, which are presented in a work-safe way. I like the term "kremlinists." Let us hope that the most militant among them are happy with their cats.

A TRIBUTE TO TWO GREATS. Word has reached Cold Spring Shops of the death of model railroader extraordinaire John Armstrong, creator of the Canandaigua Southern Rail Road. The Canandaigua Southern was open for visitors during the recent O Scale convention, and my pictures will be available for your viewing in the near future. Thanks to Mr Armstrong's sons and the Canandaigua Southern crews for opening the house although Mr Armstrong was in hospital at the time of the convention. The obituary includes this tribute.

An insatiably curious man, Mr. Armstrong also enjoyed classical music, art, science and history and the cultural resources of the Washington area.

Mr Armstrong included references to this art and history on the Canandaigua Southern, which leads to James Lileks's tribute to artist Edward Hopper. Envision Nighthawks, modeled in O Scale.

I hope to have sufficient photo-editing skills to bring you a picture of the model.

IT'S NOT THE QUALITY OF THE EVIDENCE, IT'S THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE CHARGE. Sorry, that dog doesn't always hunt. Some months ago, a faculty member at Claremont McKenna was so inspired by the consciousness-raising at a forum on racial intolerance that she vandalized HER OWN CAR in order to set off several days of rage and a one-day cancellation of classes to reflect on the evil in the Claremont community. The latter act earned Claremont Graduate president Stedman Upham a place on the deck of cards.

The good news is that the adults prevailed. Betsy's Page picks up a Los Angeles Times story bearing the good news that the faculty member has been convicted on two felony charges and one misdemeanor, and faces hard time. Sentencing set for 17 September.

Hey Stedman, it's not because you have two last names that we're laughing at you.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. This Day By Day has it about right:

It's a preview of some dissatisfied-customer venting I'm working on, perhaps to post on the weekend.

C-CARNIVAL CALL. (How else to introduce the 100th exhibition of the Carnival of the Vanities?) This time it's at Fringe Blog, with a Brazilian flavor (Carnival being the Latin equivalent of Fasching.) The Carnival of the Capitalists is up, at Frozen North. The North is not yet frozen, but the Lileks weather forecast runs

Everyone has just accepted that September will last eight weeks this year, just as we accepted that April lasted sixteen.

There are several other Carnivals touring, and Watcher of Weasels has a Weekly Roundup of Weekly Roundups and a link to Carnival of the Carnivals, should you wish to make a tour of the Internet.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. Both Instapundit and Tongue Tied have noted Amtrak's suspension of extra-board conductor Leslie Farr, a Republican candidate for a House seat -- the First Congressional District -- in Missouri. Mr. Farr was in charge of Amtrak's eastbound Ann Rutledge. The regular conductor was in charge of a westbound extra serving as Senator Kerry's campaign train. Mr. Farr got himself in a bit of trouble with Amtrak for exploiting the delay to his train to score some political points.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Farr said he used the train's public address system to inform passengers they would be delayed because of Kerry's train and quipped that they should vote accordingly in November.

The real problem here is not with Senator Kerry. Rather, the problem is a breakdown in supervision and dispatching on the Union Pacific Railroad, not that we haven't heard that song before.

According to Amtrak records, the eastbound Ann Rutledge train left Kansas City about 25 minutes late and was running more than an hour-and-a-half behind - due largely to freight train traffic - when it left Washington, Mo., headed toward St. Louis. The train, carrying 135 passengers, was delayed an additional 84 minutes just outside the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood to allow Kerry's special westbound train to pass.

It's not as if railroads haven't had occasion to keep first-class trains out of the way of POTUS(*) specials -- contemporary whistle-stop tours are nostalgia for President Truman (Senator Kerry ought to study the mistakes Governor Dewey made on his own whistle-stop that year, but I digress) after all. Likewise, railroads have had, what is it, 170 years of practice in moving lesser trains such as freight trains against first-class trains, using signal indications and instructions from the Superintendent. Furthermore, if memory serves, the Washington to St. Louis section is two main tracks. Although there are restrictions requiring the stopping of opposing trains on adjacent tracks past a moving POTUS train, laying out the Annie for 84 minutes on two main tracks constitutes a serious dispatching error. Union Pacific has yet to comment.

(*)President Of The United States. Senator Kerry's train enjoys the same status, although it might operate without the pilot train.

INSTEAD OF THE RED RIVER, THE WINNIPEGGER, AND THE RUMP OF THE OLYMPIAN. Commuter rail? In the Twin Cities area? Calling at towns of 1500 souls?

A Times analysis of the potential costs of driving versus taking the train suggests commuters traveling to work between St. Cloud and the Twin Cities daily could save between $7,750 and $9,600 a year by leaving their vehicles at home.

The article does not spell out the assumptions of the analysis. Is the premise that driving commuters drive from work to home and then leave home to run errands? Doubtful. One of the advantages of driving from office to home is the opportunity to pick up the milk and bread, or the kids getting out of drama club (this is Lake Wobegon we're talking about, nicht wahr), or to go straight to the boat dock.

I don't know that weekend driving conditions are so terrible around the Cities as to make the train attractive for recreational trips. It is an option around Chicago, and likely to be much used with the air show this weekend.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Belmont Club considers the wider ramifications of the likely storming of Najaf.

Civilization does not principally consist of bricks and mortar, but in a set of commonly accepted values and restraints. If the inhabitants of the sub-Saharan Africa and the United States could be exchanged instanteously; the one materializing in suburban homes and the other in wattle huts, the material imbalance would be reversed again within ten years, because the technology and civilization of Americans is carried in their heads and not in their possessions. There would be nothing Americans could not rebuild in Africa; and there would be nothing Africans could repair or replace in America.

So the most terrifying effect of the War so far has been in the slow destruction of taboos and imperatives which collectively allowed civilization to function. One writer observed that although Britain has possessed nuclear weapons for nearly 60 years no one worried about a UK attack on New York city. He might have added that no one in London lost any sleep over the prospect of an American nuclear strike on Picadilly Circus. The electronics, physics and rocketry check out fine; it was civilization that held them back. The concept of assymetric warfare was supposed to exploit the "fact" that transnational terrorist organizations operating in areas of chaos could strike at a civilization hamstrung by constraints. They could attack orphanages and then seek shelter in the Church of the Nativity; they could fly wide bodied aircraft into Manhattan, then seek shelter in "sovereign" Afghanistan; they could call for the death of millions from the pulpits of Qom; they could fire mortars from the Imam Ali Shrine and never expect the favor to be returned. But the logical flaw in this conception was that civilization could put aside these constraints in a moment. Hiroshima and Dresden are reminders that it could.

RUNNING EXTRA: This Cox and Forkum cartoon frames the point precisely.

They provide more commentary here.

MANAGED NOT TO CHOKE ON MY CHILI: One of the fringe benefits of travelling north of the Cheddar Curtain is the free copies of The Onion available at Real Chili.

I'll take mine without cheese, thank you.

Anyway, I was tucking into my fave, hot over beans, liberally splashed with the pepper vinegar, and then I read this. Ms. Setzer's comment is priceless. Kept my composure while eating, anyway.

SITTING IN MY CHAIR, BLUSHING. Shot in the Dark has been providing annotations for his link list (sorry, I'm just too old-school to refer to a "blogroll.") Herewith the C list, "C is for 'Crazy For These Blogs'."

Cold Spring Shops - One of my three favorite edublogs; combines laconic, genteel criticism with great railroad lore - which is really a wonderful combination.

Thanks for the props, Mitch!

SOME UNUSUAL MODEL RAILROAD READING. "Trains: the transportation for nymphomaniacs everywhere," notes Illini or Huskie?, who found these (scroll down)

WE WANT A PIECE OF THE ACTION. (Yet another discovery from my sojourn north of the Cheddar Curtain ...)

The University of Wisconsin System would request $211 million more from the state and students for its next two-year budget — about one-third of it in tuition increases — under a plan released Monday.

The proposed budget also includes a request for $227 million in additional state-funded borrowing for a slew of maintenance and building projects.

Rep. Dean Kaufert, co-chair of the Legislature’s budget committee, said the system would face a tough sell with lawmakers in asking for $227 million in additional borrowing for capital projects, especially with a budget that is expected to be tight.

“I think we’re just about tapped out as far as using the credit card and borrowing more money,” said Kaufert, R-Neenah.

Why not just request a piece of the action? What action? Oh, sorry, the supposedly objective wire services completely hide the action.

Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less.

The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.

(No media bias here, move along ...)

Sigh. Hasn't anybody connected the dots here? That real entry-level wages have grown only slightly suggests that what is entering the work force is still, well, in need of some seasoning. That real rewards to creativity have increased is, well, encouraging. That university officials do not say, publicly and proudly, "We are providing our graduates with talents that they will be able to cash in on in the future. We are going out of the business of providing subsidies to the future upper-middle and upper classes" is discouraging.

It might also have a salutary effect on the mind-set of the students. On this morning's radio news, a report from Florida on the cleanup after Hurricane Charley included one resident who saw less damage after the hurricane than happens during Spring Break. (Maybe the university officials do not ask for a piece of the action because it satisfies them to let ESPN and MTV set the tone.)

Not everybody is a Sitzpinkler. The editors at the Las Vegas Review-Journal get it:

So what's the problem? If we truly eliminated the opportunity for young people to find entry-level jobs, they might never find work at all. But most of those who do enter work "in the lowest quintile" work hard, save some money, and increase their skills and education as they go along, giving themselves a pretty good chance of living to be richer -- in real, constant dollars -- than their grandparents could ever have dreamed.

It's called America. No wonder people want to come here.

On the Irish Sea, Atlantic Blog has more.

These numbers suggest that students have a belief that wage growth is non-trivial, and that going into debt may be worth doing. They are not even remotely definitive, because they are not the numbers I really want. What I really want are numbers on the return to higher education. But a booming labor market is at least suggestive.

My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?

I suppose because it's easier to draw contrasts between this

"We're just trying to get ahead." said Debbie Reames, 49, of Raytown, Mo., whose bank job of 24 years was outsourced in February. "But it seems like we climb a few rungs and then we fall back again."

Reames has a new secretarial job, which pays $7,000 a year less than her bank job, and she works catering jobs for extra money. Her husband, Russ, can no longer work after an injury. One son is finishing college and another will start in the fall.

So the family budget tightened. That meant fewer cable channels, more meals at home, postponed doctor appointments, missed vacations, delayed credit card payments, all to "keep the wolf away from the door," she said.

and this ...

The income gap is showing up in booming sales of luxury items. Porsche Cars North America Inc. says sales are up 17 percent for the year. Strong sales at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes.

Real estate agent Lance Anderson, 38, of Overland Park, Kan., expects a record sales year, as homeowners upgrade to more expensive homes and commercial clients expand. He recently took his family to Disney World for a two-week Florida vacation.

SECOND SECTION: Should have checked Dan Drezner and Joanne Jacobs before hitting the publish button. Read and understand.

THIRD SECTION. King at SCSU Scholars (is it Welcome Home?) discovers that rarest life form, a university administrator that gets it:

I think there's a shift from higher education being a public good to it being a private good, that people who use it should pay for it.

That's St. Cloud State's Diana Burlison, associate vice president for student affairs, quoted in the local paper. (Are the archives screwy, King, or is Blogger's copying of links gone goofy?)

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

But the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes. Unless a person was willing, as [wreck divers John] Chatterton and [Richie] Kohler were, to ditch work and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct.

Cold Spring Shops readers who get paid to do research, whether as part of the job description, or on government grants, or for a dissertation, take heed. (That goes for recreational researchers whether working on family histories or investigating prototypes so as to build a model railroad as well.)

The quote comes from Robert Kurson's The Shadow Divers, which provides background on the identification of a mystery submarine wrecked somewhere off the New Jersey coast. The book reads a lot like Frederick Forsyth in the technical details and in the character development, but it has in common with all good sea stories that you could begin it, "No s***, this really happened." It also reinforces something my brother told me years ago, that it is easy to die on a big shipwreck. (Happens off Milwaukee all the time on Prins Willem, he has advised me.)

What U-boat was it? Read the d*** book.

TODAY'S DUMB IDEA. A school district requires that girls' handbags, just like the backpacks preferred by boys, must be left in lockers. Or rather, it did, until the students and their parents got wind of it, and exercised a little sovereignty.

SOME INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY IS BETTER LOST. "Retiring faculty strain UWGB" runs the lament. (That's the University of Wisconsin's Green Bay campus.)

The UW System reported that the retirement crunch could hit hardest in the state’s 11 four-year universities besides UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison. Those smaller universities typically do not have the depth in faculty to withstand frequent retirements.

“In the sciences area, many of those who are retiring now are some of those who came to the university when it was originally started in the late 1960s,” [science education professor Scott] Ashmann said. “They’ve given the university its stability. To lose that living history of the university is something that is difficult in making some decisions because you don’t always know the context and what has happened in the past.

“However, having new blood and new ideas is good, as well. But I don’t know if it’s always good to have a huge amount of turnover in a short amount of time.”

On the other hand, given the suspect origins of this university, some new context might be in order.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay is one of six schools profiled in a new book, The Innovative Campus (Oryx Press, 1999), which takes a look back at groundbreaking higher education institutions of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Author Joy Rosenzweig Kliewer devotes the chapter "Eco U in the 1990s" to what she sees as UW-Green Bay's success in honoring its roots as an innovative, experimental institution.

"UW-Green Bay is a bold survivor of the alternative higher education movement of the 1960s and early 1970s," she writes. "Over the past three decades, the campus has kept alive its distinctive interdisciplinary structure despite budgetary cutbacks, a merger, and a changing social and political climate."

Right. You could probably fill a deck of cards (I know, I know, it's time to update that deck) just with Sitzpinklern from the peer institutions Ms Kliewer mentions.

Along with UW-Green Bay, The Innovative Campus profiles Pitzer College in Claremont, Cal.; the New College of the University of South Florida in Sarasota; Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

The six schools experimented with a range of innovations, from individualized majors and independent study, to no-letter grading, student participation in curriculum development, and academic organization by broad, interdisciplinary areas rather than by narrow, specialized departments.

Kliewer says innovation - commonplace as college enrollments doubled nationwide during the 1960s - dwindled by the late 1970s with a recessionary U.S. economy, widespread enrollment declines and a shift in student values toward careerism and away from personal self-exploration. She contends, however, that the colleges that emerged can serve as models for present-day institutions as they prepare to meet new challenges.

Kliewer said she chose to spotlight UW-Green Bay because of its history as an interdisciplinary, environmentally oriented institution. Also of interest were the widespread attention it received in higher education circles and its position as a distinctive public university in a largely mainstream, Midwestern higher education system.

There might be a simpler explanation for the sagging popularity of these Sixties-fad-inspired "alternative" models for the university.

The. Models. Didn't. Work.

The current administration at the Green Bay campus, however, is not yet ready to admit that. Back to the news story:

“We have made wonderful hires in education, the sciences, social sciences, humanities,” said Sue Hammersmith, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UWGB. “We’ve hired an African-American Ph.D. in the education field. That’s going to be a significant plus for the university.”

For the color of his skin, or for the content of his curriculum vitae, Provost Hammersmith? I have some cards to fill in yet ...

The paragraph that precedes the provost's bragging is more telling.

Meanwhile, with the supply of new faculty instructors unable to keep up with the need created by the retirements — at UWGB and across the UW System — academic staff members have filled in the gaps and have become a larger percentage of those teaching on state campuses.

The reporter, however, has not taken a close enough look at reality.

Faculty members at UWGB and those at colleges and universities nationwide are reaching retirement age at the same time, and there aren’t enough people available to replace them, Hammersmith said.

“The one area where we were unsuccessful was in nursing, where there is a major shortage of faculty on the national market,” she said. “There are not nearly as many nursing Ph.D.s being produced as there are openings as people retire.

“The other reason is great competition for nurses — shortages in universities, technical colleges, and the medical field. Other tough areas are social work and business, although we did succeed in filing a business professorial position that had been open for three years.”

Also, the amount of federal funding available in the 1960s and 1970s used to train people for careers in higher education is no longer available because of severe budget cuts nationwide, Hammersmith said. Universities now compete with other industries for those with Ph.D.s.

It takes an average of six months to hire a professor, Hammersmith said. To address this issue, the university now advertises faculty openings in the fall and conduct interviews by January.

Academic staff members are paid less and are not eligible for tenure.

Data from the UW System show there were 5,416 full-time UW faculty members and 1,406 full-time academic staff members a decade ago. During the 2002-03 academic year, there were 6,718 full-time faculty members and 11,139 full-time academic staff.

Apparently, there is nobody available to correct the typographical errors and bring the faculty directory up to date at Green Bay's economics department, and a quick look at the English faculty and course offerings suggests that Green Bay is taking advantage of the industrial reserve army in that discipline. No doubt, however, there are plenty of dispersers of crying towels, assessors of the obvious and diversity boondogglers on campus.

Alas, the "there are plenty of retirements coming, get your Ph.D. now" bait-and-switch is getting a bit old. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you must be a Provost ...

TODAY'S NEW WORD. Sitzpinkler.

OSHKOSH, ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO. Burt Rutan proposes to make his space program portable.

Next year’s Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture fly-in could include a flight directly from Oshkosh’s Wittman Regional Airport into outer space.

Aviation pioneer Burt Rutan has indicated a desire to bring his pioneering SpaceShipOne aircraft to AirVenture for a possible space flight, EAA president Tom Poberezny said Monday.

The idea is a good one. The Rutan Vari-Eze has been a staple at the Oshkosh convention, and the chase planes that escorted Voyager in from its round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas flight were the single engine monoplanes that many homebuilders and recreational flyers started with.

HOIST ANOTHER SPRECHER. Although the Milwaukee Brewers have struggled some since the All-Star break, they are still messing up the playoff aspirations of other teams, most recently defeating the Chicago Cubs, 3-1.

THE LAZINESS PREMIUM. I took a birthday break and visited family north of the Cheddar Curtain. I had the opportunity to take an evening walk around Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Therein lies an economics lesson. The people who had houses on Lombardi Avenue, directly across from the stadium, were selling parking for $25. One block north of the stadium, along Oneida Street, the price was $15. Two blocks north, it could be had for $10. Further north, there were some optimists offering parking for $5, but there was street parking available on the side streets north of Liberty Street, about a ten minute walk from the stadium.

Admittedly, it was a preseason game, and the Bishop's Charities are no longer as sacred as once they were, and people were offering me game tickets very cheaply, but perhaps that talk about wide-bodied Cheeseheads is not completely off-base.

The game itself? Packers have some work to do.

MARKING OFF. It's still the summer session. Thanks for looking in. Back eventually.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. A model of the Boston and Albany Suburban Tank is currently on the workbench. Soldering on the superstructure is in progress.

Photo courtesy of Northeast Railfan Net.

If the cool weather persists, I am likely to have lots of progress to report on the railroad.

AN "UGLY TAX" IS NOT AN OPTION. Reason's Nick Gillespie is not impressed with suggestions that corrective taxation be applied to some food stuffs, all in the interest of public health. (That there might be a public interest in keeping the wide bodies hidden is out of bounds for now.)

If history is any guide, it’s safe to assume that a hot topic of political discussion will quickly transform into a hot topic of legislation, ranging from Twinkie taxes to mandatory high school exit exams administered by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness (which one assumes is now part of the Department of Homeland Security). Can the federal Leave No Chubby Child Behind Act be far away in a country in which 15 percent of kids are officially considered "overweight"? The corresponding figure for adults is about 65 percent, which simply pours more fat on this particular political fire.

If being overweight contributes "significantly to our health care costs," the best way to reduce our dangerous dependency on imported stretch fabrics is to make individuals internalize those costs the same way they scarf down the Big Macs and (formerly) supersized fries. That means reducing the publicly funded elements of health care. An added benefit of that would be to deny politicians -- and your taxpaying neighbors -- any right to shape your personal lifestyle.

There is a somewhat longer Jacob Sullum article, also in Reason, on the same topic, arguing

The more important question is why any of this is the government’s business. Granted that obesity is a health issue, why is it a public health issue? The answer from [Yale's Kelly] Brownell and like-minded activists is that the government must rescue consumers -- especially children -- from the environmental forces that make them fat, thereby rescuing taxpayers from the burden of obesity-related medical expenses. They propose to accomplish this mission through a combination of taxes, subsidies, censorship, and regulation. In his book Food Fight (co-authored by Katherine Battle Horgen), Brownell says "profound change is necessary." Among other things, the government must "change the basic economics of food," redesign cities so that "times, places, and incentives for people to be physically active [are] engineered into daily life," "prohibit marketing of products to children," "prohibit snack foods and soft drinks from schools," and "prohibit the operation of businesses selling food within a certain distance of schools." If legislatures fail to go along with this agenda, "litigation may be necessary."

The war on fat is the latest manifestation of a collectivist philosophy that says the government has a duty to protect "public health" by discouraging behavior that might lead to disease or injury. It also reflects an anti-capitalist perspective that views people as helpless automatons manipulated into consuming whatever big corporations choose to produce. The anti-fat crusaders want to manipulate us too, but for our own good. They seek to reshape us by reshaping the world.

There is more economics in weight gain than the simple externality argument. Mr Sullum has part of it.

As economist Tomas Philipson notes, Americans have been getting fatter for at least a century, primarily because of developments that have been tremendously positive on balance. Technological improvements in agriculture and processing have made food so cheap that even the poorest people in developed countries can afford to eat more than they need to survive. (Indeed, the poorest Americans are the fattest -- an astonishing reversal of the relationship between wealth and weight that prevailed for most of human history.) Work is much less arduous than it used to be, Philipson notes, so "the price of spending calories has gone up....Exercise has been pushed from labor to leisure." Rather than getting paid to expend calories, we now pay to do so, whether in leisure time or in money spent on health clubs, exercise equipment, and outdoor recreation. Labor-saving devices from the car and the washing machine to the remote control and the networked computer mean that we expend fewer calories away from work as well as on the job. We can choose from an amazing variety of entertainment options, many of them sedentary.

(Or, as Charlie Sykes put it, "One America does Pilates to keep fit. The other does yard work.") That is not to make light of the higher opportunity costs of exercising, or of eating right. Inas Rashad & Michael Grossman have an essay in The Public Interest (hat tip: Milt's File) titled "The Economics of Obesity" that notes,

Physical exercise has declined since 1980, and that decline is a proximate cause of the increase in body weight. Statisticians Reid Ewing, Tom Schmid, Richard Killingsworth, Amy Zlot, and Stephen Raudenbush have attributed part of the increase in obesity to the degree of urban sprawl, or how conducive a city is to exercise. Urban sprawl is defined as the process through which the spread of development across the landscape outpaces population growth. Those urban areas that offer more transportation choices, are more compact, and have a variety of stores and activity centers within reach have lower rates of obesity. Government spending on roadwork and infrastructure may thus have an influence on the obesity rate by subsidizing sprawl.

Furthermore,

According to our research, as much as two-thirds of the increase in adult obesity since 1980 can be explained by the rapid growth in the per capita number of fast-food restaurants and full-service restaurants, especially the former. It’s not hard to imagine how the explosive growth in these restaurants could fuel the obesity epidemic. Food served in these restaurants has extremely high caloric density, and almost certainly has contributed to obesity. We also found that the very modest growth in the per capita number of fast-food and full-service restaurants accounts in large part for the stability of adult weight in the period from 1960 to 1980, before the first major obesity upswing. During that period, the per capita number of full-service restaurants actually fell. Indications point to restaurant growth as the primary cause of increased obesity after 1980.

What caused this explosive restaurant growth? The principal driver seems to have been the increases in rates of labor force participation by women. As nonwork time for women became increasingly scarce and valuable over the last few decades, time devoted to at-home meal preparation decreased. Families began eating out more often. Indeed, the economists Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Phillip B. Levine find that the rise in average hours worked by mothers can account for as much as one-third of the growth in obesity among children in certain families. In part, the rise in obesity seems to have been an unintended consequence of encouraging women to become more active in the workforce.

We have also unmasked a second and perhaps more surprising culprit in the alarming rise in obesity: the crackdown on smoking via tax increases. Higher cigarette taxes and higher cigarette prices have caused more smokers to quit — but these smokers seem to have begun eating more as a result. According to our research, each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.

Clearly, those who curtail their habit or quit smoking altogether typically gain weight as the appetite-suppressing and metabolism-increasing effects of smoking come to an end. This is no small effect: The inflation-adjusted price of cigarettes has risen by approximately 164 percent since 1980. This large growth resulted in part from four federal excise tax hikes, a number of state tax hikes, and the settlement of the state lawsuits filed against cigarette manufacturers to recover Medicaid funds spent treating diseases related to smoking. The rise in the real price of cigarettes is the second-most important factor next to the growth in restaurants in the trend in the post-1980 obesity trend. We estimate that it accounts for almost 20 percent of the growth in obesity.

This summary is instructive: economists see tradeoffs where policy wonks attempt to find solutions.

Our findings underscore the idea that social action can have unintended consequences: Oftentimes, there is a tradeoff involved in achieving goals that society favors, such as increased food production, more workforce participation by women, and fewer smokers. Lower real food prices have significantly increased living standards. Expanded labor market opportunities for women have increased families’ command of real resources and increased equality of opportunity. Cigarette smoking is still the largest cause of premature death among Americans; pushing smokers to quit will have obvious health benefits. But our results and those of other economists also suggest that these efforts contribute to the rising prevalence of obesity. Whether public policies should be pursued that offset this ignored consequence of previous public policy to discourage smoking, increase market opportunities, and make cheaper food available depends on the costs and benefits of these policies.

Mr Sullum's article ends with another framing of the tradeoff.

All these developments have contributed to our expanding waistlines, but as Philipson puts it, "We are better off being fatter and richer. I would not want to go back." Given this reality, it’s rather disconcerting to see Brownell and Horgen proclaim, "Fundamental changes are necessary, because fundamental economic factors are central to the obesity epidemic."

Those who insist upon such "fundamental changes" cannot understand why others find the prospect alarming. Brownell thinks his critics are not being constructive if they fault his plan for remaking the world without offering a plan of their own. The same sort of incomprehension was apparent at the AEI conference on obesity, where University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein argued that fat people can impose costs on others only if the government forces taxpayers to pick up the tab for their health care or prevents insurers and employers from discriminating based on weight. Eliminate these distortions, he said, and weight control would be purely a private matter. In that case, a hostile audience member asked him, what are you doing to prevent obesity? Epstein’s answer: "I play basketball."

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The secret is out. Jeff at Conservative Book Club (this may be for members only) argues,

Make no mistake, the Left dominates academia as much as it does the media. But that wouldn't be possible without the herdlike submission of American parents, who more than ever seem willing to saddle themselves and their children with massive long-term debt in exchange for what is increasingly a worse than worthless miseducation.

Why do they do it? Let's be honest: it has little to do with the pursuit of wisdom. The main motive is money; or, if you prefer, "opportunity." Parents are convinced that an expensive degree from a "good" (read: prestigious) school is the price of admission to the upper middle class. It hardly matters what students actually learn -- or don't learn.

There's some validity to that view, of course: where you went to college does matter to most white-collar employers. But only at the outset: while it may be enough to get you an interview, or even a job offer, over someone else, after that the advantages cease. Which is why a long-term Princeton study of young men with equivalent SAT scores found that those who attended more selective schools out-earned those who didn't only in the first few years after college; the gap quickly narrowed and soon disappeared. (I only wish the study had included men with equivalent scores who didn't go to college at all: my guess is they'd have done just as well, long-term, as the others.) And the irony is, the ones with the initial economic advantage of a prestige degree probably spent it all, and then some, just paying off their larger student loans.

Personally, I think the days of even that initial advantage are numbered. With so many qualified students being priced out of the "better" schools, and so many unqualified students being recruited to promote "diversity," it can't be long before employers begin to notice that where -- or even whether -- one went to college is no longer a reliable indicator of intelligence, aptitude, or even minimal literacy. At which time the whole house of cards will collapse. God speed the day, I say.

Until then, what should parents do? Well, there's no one solution, but here's what I'm doing. With the first of five closely spaced children due to enter college in September, we applied only to schools we felt we could afford with little or no borrowing (state schools, mainly), plus a few that offered merit-based four-year scholarships.

CHARITY IS DUMPING. Seriously.

The argument that (new) textile and apparel manufacturers make is that their jobs must be protected for the good of the nation. But study after study has shown that the cost to consumers is an integer multiple (3 times, 4 times, maybe 10 times) the benefit to the textile worker. Still, there may be some point to this, since the reason that the second hand clothes are so cheap is the "goodwill" of industrialized nations. Huge shipments of second-hand clothing from charitable organizations have swamped the markets of third world nations, driving native clothing makers out of business.

Michael at Econ Log suggests it's time to dump the concept of dumping, although, as he notes, "foreigners are producing a better product at a lower cost and I want men with guns to stop them at the border," while more accurate, is less esthetically pleasing.

I suppose I should be grateful that a local proposal to limit the number of times a household has a garage sale (if it has more than three in a summer, it is reclassified as a "retail establishment" and subject to business tax) is not the work of resale shops engaging in rent-seeking by claiming unfair competition from "dumped" household goods.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. Eric Rasmusen has moved servers.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. A business employs 44,000 people, some of them at minimum wage, and some fraction of that workforce qualifies for public assistance of various kinds. Net result: an 86 million dollar cost to the state in the form of public assistance. Mungowitz End (via Newmark's Door) has some fun with the logic of the study.

THE EVOLUTION OF AN INFERIOR GOOD. The color purple is not just a reference to a trendy book for literature classes. It once used to be expensive to manufacture, but it has become cheap enough to reverse its class status, at least to the established residents of the Iron Range and the Upper Peninsula, who coined the term "Finlander purple" to refer to the house-painting tastes of the new strangers in the neighborhood. Marginal Revolution speculates,

If purple paint were say 25 or 50% more expensive then people would switch to substitutes but make it 500 or 1000 times as expensive and it becomes a fashion statement.

STEER A COURSE FOR FERENGI. PoliBlog hosts Carnival of the Capitalists. Logical.

MORE RAILROAD READING? Live from the Third Rail discovers a review of Central Indiana Interurban. The discovery perpetuates the automotive conspiracy myth.

The interurbans, which connected small cities and towns with metropolitan areas, were so commonplace that most large cities had were connected to one by the early 1920s. However, by the late 1930s virtually all of the interurban services were extinct. Many fell victim to GM and other auto-industrial companies, as did the street cars in Los Angeles. Others simply became redundant as the automobile proved more flexible and versatile modes of transportation across and around America's vast interior.

Umm, no, the National City Lines case does not identify a vast automotive conspiracy to destroy the interurbans. Interurbans might well have been the dot.com bubble of the early 1900s; the bubble popped well before the Great Depression. Newmark's Door has the roundup on that. A more likely villain might be President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Utility Holding Company Act, something inadvertently alluded to in the review.

The one interurban to survive, the South Shore Railroad, did so because Samuel Insull, the utility magnate whose holdings included Commonwealth Edison and the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, also owned the South Shore from 1925 until 1932, according to the Shore Line Interurban Historical Society.

In other words, he helped usher the South Shore into the era of public subsidies for passenger transport. That is considered to be the reason why the electric train, which still travels from Chicago to South Bend and back on a regular schedule, is the only interurban that successfully made the transition to a commuter railroad.

That's part of it. The Insull interests also owned the Chicago Aurora and Elgin, the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee, and the Indiana Railroad. The first two entered Chicago on respectively the Metropolitan and Northwestern Elevated tracks, which precluded much freight train service; the third served primarily rural areas. The South Shore, on the other hand, serves the steel mill country along the South Shore (obviously) and although it runs in city streets, the street trackage provided sufficient space for freight trains. For many years, the freight revenues sufficed to cover losses attributable to the passenger service.

YOU REALLY HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM. Deinonychus antirrhopus argues that Robert F. Kennedy the younger does not.

IT'S NOT EVERY UNIVERSITY.

Laura at 11-D might have moved to the suburbs, but she doesn't have to like it:

The lack of sensible suburban planning has long been an interest of mine. Good discuss in the comment section here about that. I have a theory that academic snobbery about suburbia is partly to blame. Why does every university have an urban planning department and an urban policy institute, but nothing about suburbia? This omission is especially glaring since most people, and most voters, live suburbs.

Um, it's not every university. One formerly rural university now in an outer suburb of Chicago comes to mind. Some people there have done some work on suburbanization.

[Northern Illinois University's Charles] CAPPELL FOUND,WAY BACK IN 1991, that one aspect of life that many suburbanites appear fed up with is how quickly their communities are growing and developing. In fact, “growth and congestion” finished in a three-way tie for second (with taxes and transportation) when Cappell’s students asked suburbanites to name the worst aspect of living in their community.

His colleague Dick Esseks has more.

From 1970 until 1990 the Chicagoland area grew by 4 percent in population and 47 percent in land use. In the process, thousands upon thousands of acres of the best agricultural land in the world were destroyed.

Others had protested that loudly, decrying the loss of farmland, but theirvoices went unheard. Esseks shared their concern, but approached the problem from a different angle. He trained his academic sights on the large-lot (one acre or more) rural developments that he saw cropping up all around the countryside between DeKalb and Chicago. “The inefficiency of such development seemed obvious, but it appeared that nobody had quantified the fiscal impacts of it for the Chicago suburban fringe, so that is what I did,” he says.

Painstaking research and analysis led Esseks to the conclusion that such developments were a burden and not a boon.Despite promises from developers that such large homes on such big lots would generate enough taxes to more than support themselves, his research indicated otherwise. Instead, he argued, those exclusive subdivisions were actually creating a tax burden on others who had to defray the cost of building and maintaining roads to serve them, providing police and fire services to protect them, and pay to bus children from those distant homes to school.

“It’s a case of the poor – at least the notwealthy – subsidizing a higher standard of living for the rich,” Esseks says. The findings provided some of the first hard evidence that farmland preservationists could use to defend cropland. “I think because of Dick’s work, people are paying more attention to the hidden costs of how we use land,” says Ann Sorensen, director of the Center for Agriculture in the Environment, the NIU-based research arm of American Farmland Trust. “He was the first to look at the numbers.

But wait, there's more:

For [geographer Richard] Greene, one of the most interesting aspects is how edge cities contribute to the phenomenon of urban sprawl.

“Just as people are willing to commute downtown, they are willing to commute to these new job centers, so the impact of the edge cities extends far beyond their actual borders. Consequently, people are traveling farther and farther out in search of affordable housing, causing more farmland to be converted to subdivisions," Green says. "That is why, from a farmland preservation point of view, edge cities are a terrible thing. But for municipalities in those corridors that are looking to attract industry to offset residential tax bills, it's a good thing. It all depends upon your perspective."

So why did the suburbs emerge? Anybody remember what the cities looked like before the Yuppie invasion? Does the name Jacob Riis ring any bells? (hint: The Battle with the Slum and How the Other Half Lives.) At one time, some wide open spaces were desirable, and the opportunity to stock up on a week's supply of groceries -- ever hear of a grocery list? -- a convenience.

But I want to stick to the academics. The research is out there, and you don't have to look very far. Myron Orfield's American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality is good reading. (Amazon helpfully notes that hard-to-find and specialty titles sometimes take longer to ship; Brookings will ship it immediately.) Paul Krugman has worked with Masahisa Fujita, who is a regional economist of some stature, and with Anthony J. Venables, also accomplished, on The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade, which is in my stack of stuff to read.

And in other developments, the economics department may be able to conduct a search -- note my continued skepticism about resources being matched with enrollments -- in urban and regional economics. I wonder if I should run the idea of research into the economics of suburbs by the search committee and the candidates they identify, as a screen for potential colleagues, rather than as a screen for snobs.

THE DISCIPLINE IS MISSING FROM THE PROTOTYPE TOO. Photon Courier suggests that the capacity crunch on the real railroads is going to get ugly, with the harvest and the Christmas importing season (with just-in-time deliveries, the toys get produced in October and November and the arrival of the containers at Pacific Coast ports and warehouses to the east is tightly timed) yet to come.

The railroads apparently are too busy suing Lionel to worry about keeping the lines fluid.

TODAY'S MODEL RAILROAD READING. In the Shadow of Mount Hollywood discovers the downside of operating your model railroad according to the prototype.

I came away from my discovery with a good deal of admiration and respect for Jacques, and increased frustration at my fellow hobbyists, who by and large don't share this admiration and respect -- I was, in fact, attending a meeting of fellow hobbyists, and one of the centerpiece presentations covered how a fellow was, in pedantic detail, duplicating the bureaucratic paperwork attendant to moving iron ore that was used by the real railroads in the pre-computer age on his model railroad layout. I much prefer the Lee Jacques approach. In fact, one of Jacques Barzun's most telling critiques of Western bourgeois culture is its glorification of pedantry (James Bond, after all, wanted his martinis shaken, not stirred).

The "pedantic detail" clearly refers to the modeller of an iron ore hauling railroad, who wants the switch crew working the ore dock to provide the proper mix of ores into the hold of the boat -- did you think smelting iron simply involved dumping some rocks into a furnace, applying some heat, and crossing your fingers? -- and perhaps going so far as to pull the tracks in the order the cars were emptied, so as to avoid breaking the boat's back.

But the hobby has many individuals for whom the height of excitement is shuffling hopper cars at a mine, or shuffling boxcars in Peoria. The discipline of clearing the main line for a first-class train while keeping the other trains active escapes them.

The Jacques he refers to is Francis Lee Jacques, wildlife illustrator and early kitbasher (a Depression era model railroad, improvised out of American Flyer mechanisms, in preservation in Chisholm, Minnesota) who apparently did a fine job of improvising with the materials he had.

Scratchbuilding and kit-bashing are becoming lost arts. There is so much good stuff available ready-to-run (gains from trade with China and Korea at work) that modellers have more time to think about the paperwork, and preprinted forms for the paperwork are available now from Micro Mark.

The scratch builders still have the circus to turn to: ready-built circus models are still not as easily available, but the standard of work the best craftsmen have set is pretty good.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Some people forget (because they backed/worshipped/served-as-useful-idiots-to the other side) that we have fought an ideology before, and – we won. The Cold War was, above all else, an ideological conflict. It was the Great Civil War of Western Civilization. On the one side, you had Western Capitalism, and on the other, International Communism. Obviously, things weren't that cut and dried. The US certainly doesn't (to my constant dismay) enjoy a laissez-faire economy, and the European NATO countries even less so. And despite a totalitarian regime, even the Soviet Union tolerated a little samizdat capitalism. Nevertheless, with the exception of France, countries took sides and stayed there.

Which socio-political system was left standing after 45 years of conflict? Oh yeah, baby – despite what you hear on American campuses, the West won. We won completely. We knocked their dicks in the dirt. The bad guys gave up, in the end, without even firing a shot – like Saddam Hussein in his hidey-hole.

How did we do it? How did we endure 45 years of conflict? How did we win? In the end, it came down to one simple thing:

We proved the enemy ideology to be ineffective.

We fought Communism for almost 50 years, and we would have fought it for another 50 – had that ideology not been too incompetent to keep up the fight. Islamism isn't
Communism, however, so the means of fighting it have to be different.

That's Vodka Pundit, who goes on to distinguish the Islamofascist ideology from the Communist ideology. He misses one important point, however. He notes that Communism pretended to be an intellectual idea, holding out the promise of paradise on earth, while Islamofascism holds out the promise of paradise beyond earth. It is therefore easier to criticize Communism on the basis of facts on the ground (he invokes the $300 -- in 1983 dollars -- Commodore 64) and to crack wise about a "Mickey Mouse" system -- as President Reagan did -- than it will be to make mock of the pretensions of the Islamofascists.

Read the whole thing.

JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE. In Favor of Thinking presents a job description for a literature professor. Give it a look. See also this.

MOVE ALONG, NO INDOCTRINATION GOING ON HERE. Winston's Diary discovers the downside of being ABD but not yet in a tenure-track line.

While I object strongly to the fact that I will be making about twenty cents on the dollar to an assistant professor, I object even more strongly to the fact that I am being required to teach this university's version of the infamous freshman indoctrination course, and that I have absolutely no freedom to choose what texts I will be teaching in my own class--it is all decided by committee.

The committee choice that most annoys him: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. (The Road to Wigan Pier it is not.) It puts him in the position where this university has assigned one arm-chair economist to teach a book by another arm-chair economist. This fact alone gives me ethical hives. Ehrenreich is an investigative reporter, and her book reveals her knowledge of economics to be both impoverish and ideologically conditioned. I took micro- and macro-economics as an undergrad, but that was at least fifteen years ago; since then, my exposure to economics has been a daily reading of The Wall Street Journal and that's about it. And even in the Journal, it's not like I'm reading it cover-to-cover. But when life deals you lemons, you make lemonade:

So I want to ask you all for help, and I'd appreciate if other bloggers would mention my plea on their own blogs, to try and attract as much advice as possible. If you've taught this book before (and you've taught it critically--lockstep leftists needn't reply), I'd like to hear about it. If you have suggestions as to how I might make myself more knowledgeable before teaching this book--including reading recommendations--please let me know. And if you just want to tell me how you think you'd handle this situation, I'd love to hear that as well.

One last thing--it had occured to me that I might use my own situation as a teaching tool. While I'm not getting paid hourly, my yearly "salary" is at the minimum wage level, and I'm obviously helping the university and the department to balance their budgets. And I have no benefits. Yet here I am teaching a book about how evil the business world is, and how underpaid its employees are, as if the ivory tower is somehow better and in a position to pass judgment. I find that a little ironic.

Hit Winston's comments section if you have any suggestions.

THE WORLD I WAS BORN INTO. Larry Smith, writing in Popular Science, attempts to live for a week with no technology developed after 1954. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution, in an aside to the positional arms race post.)

ROUND AND ROUND ON SUMPTUARY LAWS. Arnold Kling has taken issue with recent writings by Cornell's Robert Frank on measured happiness and positional arms races. The passage that sets off Mr Kling reads,

The evidence thus suggests that if income affects happiness, it is relative, not absolute, income that matters...In most cases, the person who stays at the office two hours longer each day to be able to afford a house in a better school district has no conscious intention to make it more difficult for others to achieve the same goal...Yet the ineluctable mathematical logic of musical chairs assures that only 10 percent of all children can occupy top-decile school seats, no matter how many hours their parents work.

Mr Kling suggests, instead,

Suppose that in order to try to illustrate his thesis, Professor Frank had used as an example a person who stays at the office two hours longer each day in order to pay for a tutor for a learning-disabled child. This example leaves us favorably disposed toward the parent, whereas Frank's example does not. Because Frank talks about educational opportunity as a relative concept, and above all because he talks about trying to get into the top decile, he is able to manipulate the reader into seeing the hypothetical parent's choice as a vain and futile quest. Thus, Frank is able to insinuate that working extra hours to try to pay for a better education for your child is pathological behavior.

To put it another way, if every parent were competing to give our children the best possible education, and that resulted in better education for everyone, that would seem rational and constructive. But in Robert Frank's morality play, the main characters are compulsively competing for the highest relative status, with no actual improvement in education. In an essay (based on a book) where he claims to be speaking from scientific authority, Frank stoops to proof by loaded example.

Reality is probably somewhat more complicated (although it's OK for economists to invent worlds that can't exist so as to better be able to grasp the essential elements of the world that does exist.) Consider the latest from suburban-dwelling 11-D, missing something from the party platforms.

I wanted more discussion about the vast debt that American families have encurred to achieve a good life for their kids. Housing costs, schools of uneven quality, growing demands of the workplace, the lack of support from extended family or community are a tightening tourniquet on average Americans.

The reality is that people do have to compete for the highest relative status, and one driver of that competition is the quest for the better school districts, which often come bundled with more expensive housing, reflecting both the positional arms race (more income shifts the demand curve) and the principle of complements (the demand for the houses derives from the demand for the schools.)

Brock at Signifying Nothing weighs in with some observations about the usefulness of happiness research as a way of improving economics, a point somewhat orthogonal to that part of Professor Frank's argument being questioned by Mr Kling. Marginal Revolution offers some additional perspectives on happiness research.

Tech Central offers elaboration on the original debate, with Radley Balko proposing to Stop the World.

I propose that Congress pass the Saving Our Public Health from Innovation, Success, Trade, Riches, and Yearning bill, or the SOPHISTRY Act. On the day it's signed by the president, SOPHISTRY would license the federal government to freeze all salaries, wages, and other sources of income among the poor and lower middle class, thereby preventing any dangerous upward mobility between tax brackets. Any income earned above a citizen's current tax bracket would be taxed at 100%. All revenue from the tax would be specifically earmarked for the study of the affluence threat. The freeze would stay in effect until scientists can determine the cause of the link between prosperity and mortality.

Because wealth begets an increased chance of death, the SOPHISTRY Act will undoubtedly save thousands of lives. Perhaps millions. We owe it to America's poor to keep them poor until we can figure out why getting richer makes them die. And while critics might contend that Americans ought to be free to decide for themselves whether a bit of extra income is worth the deleterious health effects that come with affluence, it's obvious that at least so far, they simply aren't deciding correctly. Despite the obvious implications of the data above, Americans still insist on bettering their respective standards of living.

And when people make poor decisions about their own lives, it's government's job to make the correct decisions for them.

There is an open thread on the subject of happiness research and positional arms races at Econ Log.

MISSING HIS CALLING? To bolster a flagging campaign, a candidate for elective office in San Francisco (why does that not surprise?) fakes his abduction and beheading by jihadis. Classical Values has an extended roundup of coverage, with potential fallout from the story. Betsy's Page is somewhat more succinct, suggesting that the candidate had potential to work for Michael Moore. Heck, why aim so low? Had this guy submitted some "films" to juries so as to establish a track record as a "serious artist" he'd now be a lock for a MacArthur "genius grant."

TRAIN DOES NOT CARRY CHECKED BAGGAGE OR DOGS. Transport Blog has a comment thread going on the utility of space for bicycles on commuter trains.

In Greater DeKalb, you may not bring a bicycle on a Metra train; if you break it down and put it in a carrier that will fit the luggage rack, the South Shore Line will allow it as a carry-on, but the Chicago Transit Authority, with its smaller cars set up primarily for standees, will let you bring your bicycle, subject to some rules. There is some evidence that the commuter train operators do not find it cost effective to provide combination cars with baggage space for bicycles. The old common carrier railroads, including the interurbans, had such capability.

Once upon a time you could take your bicycle to South Bend.
Combination baggage and interurban coach preserved awaiting restoration at the East Troy Electric Railroad.

South Shore Line picture from this site.

WHY THERE IS NO CATBLOGGING AT COLD SPRING SHOPS. Electric Nose is not so particular.

(Hat tip: Where Worlds Collide.)

A STANDARD TO MEASURE UP TO. The Superintendent has been disrespectful of what passes for high-speed rail initiatives in the midwest, see, e.g. this. For your consideration, please review this schedule (sorry if the print is a bit small) of the Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis service in the summer of 1947.

FINDING THAT MEDIAN VOTER. Consider Ward 15 in West Allis, Wisconsin, not far from where you can get real cream puffs for the balance of this week. In the 2000 presidential election, its count was Bush 444, Gore 444. There were 74 other wards in Wisconsin in which the major candidates tied. The voters confront the fundamental problem of political solutions: with two parties, and with "bipartisanship," which I view as the fleecing of the public by the political class, voters must choose a bundle of policies, rather than being able to pick and choose.

[State Representative Tony] Staskunas says it's a neighborhood that you would expect to vote Democratic when it comes to economic issues and Republican when it comes to issues such as abortion or gay marriage.

State Sen. Tom Reynolds, a Republican who lives in the ward, says a survey once showed his Senate district has the strongest level of opposition to abortion rights of any district in the state.

WHAT HAPPENS TO AN INFERIOR GOOD? The intercity bus is a canonical example of what economists call an "inferior good," meaning one that consumers make less use of as they get richer. Because on average, goods are normal (that's the Engel aggregation principle, should readers be studying for their economics prelims) resources get reallocated away from inferior goods over time. That reallocation is not without consequences, as Greyhound riders in northern Wisconsin are discovering.

On a slow summer evening, the 52-year-old driver is taking a handful of passengers over what is soon to become a ghost route.

As of Aug. 18, Greyhound will no longer visit any of the stops on tonight's itinerary: Bonduel, Shawano, Wittenberg, Birnamwood, Aniwa, Antigo, Summit Lake, Elcho, Pelican Lake, Monico, Rhinelander, Lake Tomahawk and Minocqua. Empty seats are the reason.

The more things change ... at one time these were stops on the Chicago and North Western's Flambeau 400, which did a neat job of consist-swapping in Green Bay so that the dining car, lounge, and extra coaches that came north from Chicago could return the same day, with only a few coaches going beyond Green Bay to the south shore of Lake Superior at Ashland. This bus service sounds a lot like the bus service that replaced the Flambeau during the winter, making the train a casualty of Amtrak that did not have a last run on April 30, 1971.

The story notes that Greyhound has not been a profitable company for some time. Repeat after me: losses are signals that resources are more valuable to society in their competing uses. Opportunity costs exist.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT. Campaign finance "reform," with new rules for private financing of explicitly political organizations, backfires on its inventors. Hog on Ice has a moment of schadenfreude.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

It's amazing that a man in his line of work would live to die in his bed at age
89.

That's Betsy's Page, noting the passing of oil-well fire fighter extraordinaire, Red Adair. Captain's Quarters has more.

NOW THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR. Cream puffs, made in Japan??

SO MUCH FOR THAT JOBLESS RECOVERY. A motorman on Washington D.C.'s Metro leaves her train before her relief arrives. The train sits for a while, until the motorman of the follower takes over the delayed train. Live from the Third Rail, who picks up the story, expresses some wonder at the relatively light reprimand the motorman received. It's not as if -- as once happened -- a motorman on a late-running Milwaukee streetcar gave his passengers transfers to the following car and attempted to short-turn his car in downtown Milwaukee. Big mistake. He managed to get himself completely lost and wound up on the Rapid Transit line, with an interurban car delayed behind him. He wasn't working for the Milwaukee Electric for much longer after that.

THERE'S NO WAY I CAN SAIL YOU TO THE MOUNT OF ARARAT. You can, however, view it from the Armenian side. King at SCSU Scholars, who is visiting Armenia, has pictures.

IF A BAD AFTERNOON OF SAILING beats a good afternoon of committee work, what does a good afternoon of sailing beat? (It certainly beats sitting at a computer, and it is likely to be some time until somebody figures out how to do Laser blogging.) Winds today out of the southwest at 8 to 12; sunny and warm, Shabbona Lake State Park not far away. The class rules now permit the use of PULLEYS on the running rigging (if you don't want to spend the money, learn how to tie lots of knots) and the controls are much more responsive. It is much easier to crank on some boom vang or to tweak the cunningham compared to the old cats-cradle rigging. The gut and the hamstrings are not yet ready for international competition, all the same it was nice to get out on the water in favorable winds with the fastest sailboat on the lake, if not the prettiest. (That honor would have to go to the Marshall Islands one-man proa somebody brought out to play with. Pretty boat.)

THE CASE FOR 75 MINUTE TRAINS.

As mounting delays at O'Hare slow air travelers nationwide, more passengers are finding that their 21-minute flight from Mitchell International Airport has turned into a 1 1/2-hour odyssey, often with a missed connection on the other end.

On the other hand, if one lives in the northern or northwestern suburbs of Chicago, Milwaukee's Mitchell Field appears to be a good substitute, at least to some domestic destinations.

EVERYTHING WE LIKE GOES AWAY. That's my sister's lament for the closing of yet another decent eatery in her neck of the woods. It's not just eateries. In Milwaukee, yet another bowling lane is closing (making way for a Walgreen's??) and a train bar is going to be relocated to Kansas City. The train bar sits on historic trackage: your Superintendent had his first ever diesel cab ride at the age of four in the switching yard that used to be there. And it's not just the Midwest: in the list of recently finished books is a tribute to the Automats -- with recipes! This web site has similar tributes to Lost New York.

BEND OVER, HERE IT COMES AGAIN. The Illinois Legislature and the Governor have reached agreement on a new state budget. Northern Illinois University gets the same dollar amount as it received last year, but cannot commit $4 million from that sum, which the state might request back if other tax revenues (note, it's the tax revenues that matter, not the tax rates) fail to materialize.

Conditions are also dire at UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) where Professor Bainbridge notes that the University of California system must cope with a 6 percent cut in its appropriation (is that more honest than continued funding at the same level albeit with a reserve for a recision?)

The funding crunches at the state universities make the discussion at Econ Log on the marginal private and spillover benefits of a university education timely. California's budget difficulties have lead to renewed calls for "community service" as a precondition of a college degree. Joanne Jacobs is unimpressed, noting that much of the growth in enrollment is returning adults (mugged by reality?) who might find the idea of unpaid labor as a precondition of enrollment a bit burdensome.

THE GENESIS OF TIME-SHARING. On my recent swing through some eastern states I had the opportunity to visit the site of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club ( it is not too far from Horseshoe Curve on the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad.) Some of the private cottages and part of the large clubhouse still remain (after the flood of 1889, some cottages housed squatters; a few have been fixed up as private houses.) The curator of the clubhouse building told me that most of the facilities were used by well-to-do Pittsburghers for two weeks during the summer. Is the club the first example of the time-share condominium.

The concept has expanded some over the years: neither I nor the family I visited at the Marriott Manor in Williamsburg would be confused with Mellons or Fricks.

REVERSE INCIDENCE. Suppose a state temporarily waives an eight cent per gallon tax on gasoline. Will the price of gasoline at the pump fall by eight cents, or by more or by less than eight cents? Newmark's Door notes that gasoline stations that fail to pass along the tax break in full are subject to felony charges. But what, precisely, is "in full?"

DULL AND EARNEST. Atlantic Blog has an apt description of Bruce Springsteen's latest foray into political commentary, with a good couplet from another review.

TO CATCH A THIEF, THINK LIKE A THIEF. A recent speech by President Bush includes the lines, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Betsy's Page and Peoria Pundit put the quote, which has come in for some snarking, in context.

ENOUGH ALREADY. On my recent trip, I introduced the term "metrofexual" to some colleagues who have been rather busy with their own work, exploring the wilds of West Virginia, and enjoying Seinfeld reruns to have stumbled across the term. I was unable to explain the meaning of the term to them, but perhaps can summarize it in microcosm. On my return I had to replenish my supply of shampoo. My supplier used to produce only a basic balsam-and-protein product that works tolerably well on what little hair I have. No more. Their offerings at the local grocery have now proliferated to fifteen or twenty different colors, formulas, and scents. I suppose that's just plentitude at work. But mining the stacks for what I want has just become a lot more work.

The good news: others have also had enough. Via Michelle Malkin, I find a Retrosexual Manifesto that has much to commend it. More here, with interesting trackbacks.

On a related note, Budding Economist and Crowe Bar are contemplating the hotness of economics professors. Move on, nothing to see here, but no "little professor hat" either -- I think that refers to the "Irish walking hat" that makes its wearer look like a mushroom.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATIONS. The Budding Economist has recombined all her weblogs at Jacqueline Mackey Passey Paisley, and new homeowner Apartment 11-D has moved off of Blogspot to new digs titled 11D.

MISSING THE SAUERKRAUT AND MUSTARD. Ann Althouse has discovered the delights of the University of Wisconsin's Union Terrace, including the bratwursts. Instapundit creates a new theme: bratblogging. Kindly be advised that at Cold Spring Shops, the grilling of bratwursts is a holy ritual, sometimes involving consumption of a Sprecher or simply kicking back outside. The computer is for indoor work. Summer at these latitudes is too short to spend cookout time at the computer. Alas, sunset is coming perceptibly earlier now than it was a few weeks ago.