REAL ANALYSIS.

Charles Murray's Real Education promises, in its subtitle, Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. Book Review N^o. 38 will demonstrate simple inconsistencies in the book that mislead readers. I'll use Mr Murray's plan. His first "simple truth" is "Ability Varies." He goes on to note seven dimensions of ability (there may be more, but those suffice for me to get rolling): bodily-kinesthetic, musical, spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. He intends to lay out a framework of analysis that everybody can accept. He destroys that framework at page 21 (which, if the book were properly paginated, would be page 5).

Educational measures such as test scores and grades tend to make differences among schoolchildren look as though they are ones of degree when in reality some of them are on differences in kind. For example, a timed math test limited to problems of addition and subtraction, administered to a random cross-section of fourth-graders, yields scores that place children along a continuum distributed in a shape resembling a bell curve.

That "resembling" is a critical hedge. With a small sample a statistician will not be able to reject the hypothesis that the frequency count is a collection of random draws from a normal distribution. That failure to reject is the basis for grading on a curve (top 10% A and bottom 10% F and fill in the rest as you wish, a 20-40-20 pattern is easy to implement).

Those scores appropriately reflect differences in degree: Some fourth graders can add and subtract faster and more accurately than others, but they are all doing the same thing and almost all children can be taught to add and subtract to some degree.

The purpose of No Child Left Behind and its attendant testing is to evaluate schools' effectiveness at teaching addition and subtraction, and teaching methods that enable students to make use of their differing capabilities to do the operations helps. To a great extent, one gets good at simple calculations the same way one gets good at shooting free throws, by repetition.

The same is not true of calculus. If all children were put on a mathematics track that took them through calculus, and then were given a test of calculus problems, the resulting scores would not look like a bell curve. For a large proportion of children, the scores would not be merely low. They would be zero. Grasping calculus requires a certain level of logical-mathematical ability. Children below that level will never learn calculus, no matter how hard they study. It is a difference in kind. Not only that: The child withouth the logical-mathematical ability to learn calculus cannot do a wide variety of other things in mathematics that are open to the child with the requisite level of logical-mathematical ability.

We're in agreement on one thing. Calculus is different from algebra. The middle-school student will not encounter "The solution can be guessed at and then verified." That suggestion comes at about page two of any presentation of differential equations. There's also the "there is a delta such that f(x) - L is less than epsilon whenever ...", which says nothing about motion, accompanying language such as "x approaches ...". These things can be taught. Good teaching matters. To what audience? Mr Murray suggests a smaller audience. Pay particular attention, dear reader, to that "would not look like a bell curve." Perhaps we can transform the score frequency count to a bell curve by taking the logarithms of the scores, creating a log-normal distribution. (Perhaps some professors use this dodge to establish grading scales with 80 or better out of 100 as an A.) Alternatively, perhaps we're looking at a Pareto distribution, or power law. Almost all students learn to add and subtract. A relatively few of them get through calculus. The phenomenon appears elsewhere: here's a Newmark's Door opening to a Mark Perry analysis of scoring in professional basketball. One fifth of the players score four fifths of the total points. (Whether that generalizes to scoring with Basketball Annies is outside the scope of this post.)

HABIT PERSISTENCE.

Laura at 11-D posed a deceptively simple question. The ensuing discussion did become a flame war, but one observer offered a sensible comment about the continuing drama of Palin Place.

The upper middle class narrative of staying in school, getting a degree, going to grad school, working to get ahead, marrying at 30, and having children even later, is admirably productive, but it isn't the life trajectory most Americans choose.

High school cheerleader Bristol Palin's pregnancy by high school hockey player Levi Johnston is out of another narrative. Much of the conversation I've heard describe the pregnancy as an "accident". Reality is more complicated. First, one has to consider the neighborhood. Although Alaska is a northern state, its outlook is Appalachian. That's evident from this story, which suggests the two had intended to marry for some time.

Wasilla mom Jennie Johnston, whose son Jade played hockey with Levi, saw the young couple in January at a game.

"She was in a cute little outfit like young girls wear," said Jennie Johnston, who is not related to Levi. "She was with Levi."

She said her son told her the two were already engaged.

"They've been together quite a while, more than a year," she said. "I hope everything comes out well. These are local kids."

Here's a confirmation of that explanation, from a reporter who did reach Mr Johnson's mother.

The young parents-to-be haven't faced any pressure to wed, says the boy's mother, Sherry Johnston, reporting that the two teens planned to marry before it was known she was pregnant.

"This is just a bonus," Johnston said.

Evaluated with the perspective of that upper-middle-class narrative, that decision looks wrong, and the reference to a "bonus" misguided. Seventeen. Dating for less than a year. Engaged. That, however, was a narrative years ago. Consider the Beach Boys' "Be True to Your School," where the singer is a two-letter athlete and his girlfriend is on the cheer squad. We don't know if they married just after graduation. I suspect (my preferences running to Stephen Meader whose The Long Trains Roll, which commands a steep price these days, embellishes things that really happened, rather than to syrupy plots) that was the plot of some of the adolescent novels in the high school library, although there were probably other novels in which the second-stringer connects with the cheerleader or the outcast girl wins the athlete's affection. (That's one possible outcome of I Am Charlotte Simmons.) Those adolescent novels left the seamier side of winning those affections to the reader as an exercise (and at one time Grace Metalious took stick for helping the reader complete the exercise).

PROMOTING ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM?

The Charles Murray column about excessive college attendance induces Professor Soltan to suggest that bad ideas can have bad consequences.

A lot of Americans don’t seem to like highly educated people, and they don’t want them running the country. They prefer people with poor academic backgrounds, like John McCain, whose class rank in college was 894 out of 899, and like Sarah Palin, who got a degree in communications at the University of Idaho, a Tier 3 school in the US News and World Report rankings. Mike Huckabee, who had a very parochial college education, did extremely well in the primaries. If John McCain drops Palin from his ticket, he might well pick up Huckabee, who seems to share her genial indifference to large parts of the world outside of the United States.

I'm not sure another "Democrats=smart, Republicans=dumb" squabble is the best counter-argument. I recently reacted to the column, and subsequently finished Real Education, the basis for the column. With the hurricane moving in, I will have time to post a proper review. (I'm embellishing. The rainy low-pressure system moving in came ashore as Gustav. Kerry is dealing with Hanna. Anybody remember the Walt Disney documentary in which a previous Hannah had its name retired for five years?) Mr Murray's thesis relies on faulty statistical inference, in ways that go beyond technical quibbles at the third decimal place. That calls for a proper review. My focus tonight is on Professor Soltan's summation.

Given this preference for intellectually average and below-average folk in positions of power, I think we need — with Country First the watchword — to take a position as far away as possible from Charles Murray’s. We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents’ religion. If they don’t get this in college, they’re not going to get it anywhere else.

That's part of Mr Murray's larger complaint, actually: the common schools have failed to do that work, which leaves it to the colleges. High schools that do a better job could mean less access-assessment-remediation-retention for college faculty (and many of us who work at the mid-majors, or "fourth-tier" institutions in Professor Soltan's ordering, would like to do less of that work and do more for our eager students who might be optimizing under constraints that place George Washington University outside their feasible sets).

TUNDRA POPULISM. The governor's speech simultaneously reinforced the Republican themes of counter-establishment and real-world experience. I suspect she was a pretty good trash-talker on the basketball court. The usual suspects probably live-blogged the speech. You know where to look.

DRILL, BABY, DRILL. I'm posting and listening to Mayor Giuliani's keynote speech. The red meat on offer is of Bull Moose proportions. Now comes Governor Palin. More posting after she finishes.

SALARY COMPRESSION IS EFFICIENT? Smith College's James D. Miller applies the logic of compensating differentials.

Assistant professors in many ways have harder jobs than tenured professors do. They have more pressure to publish. They usually spend more time on class preparation because they have taught their classes relatively few times. And, keeping in mind their looming tenure bids, they often feel compelled to be more deferential to their senior colleagues than they would prefer. Those who care about economic fairness consequently should support the idea of assistant professors making more than tenured professors. And those who care about markets should understand that the less pleasant the job, the higher salary you must pay to attract top talent.

Job security is a large part of tenured professors’ compensation. So even if a tenured professor has a somewhat lower monetary salary than an assistant professor does, he probably, over all, receives more total compensation than his non-tenured colleagues. After all, I suspect few tenured professors who are not superstars or close to retirement would agree to exchange, say, $3,000 in extra salary in return for abandoning tenure.

I'm not persuaded by a passage that follows.

For reasons economists don’t fully understand, employers almost never decrease their workers’ nominal salaries. So if a college gives a raise to a tenured professor, it is stuck paying this raise until the professor retires. In contrast, if an assistant professor becomes too expensive the college can simply not reappoint him.

All tenure means is that the faculty member will be paid. The college can authorize a nominal salary increase that is a real salary decrease, or to avoid having to lay people off, not authorize a salary increase at all.

Such a salary policy will induce people who have more discipline-specific human capital (current grants, and recent publications) to look elsewhere. I don't deny the possibility of an assistant professor becoming "too expensive," but that suggests professional jealousies or other dysfunction in the department or in the college.

Perhaps Professor Miller is hinting at such dysfunction with this passage.

I’m actually surprised that the academic market doesn’t induce more colleges to pay greater salaries to assistant professors than to non-superstar tenured professors. Tenured professors, however, have on average vastly greater bureaucratic power than their untenured co-workers and perhaps such power discrepancies explain why at most colleges tenured professors earn more than assistant professors.

The essay does not address other influences on pay, such as unionization, seniority, or egalitarian tendencies. I'm not sure whether the ensuing bull session has turned into a bar-room brawl. It's instructive reading.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Compare and contrast.

WHY THIS SIGN IS DIFFERENT. Most Wisconsin state highway markers provide a highway number and no other decoration.


The 32nd Division is now a National Guard Unit, and it receives kudos from unit veterans of earlier wars.

The red arrow was worn on their shoulder in battle, and now it's worn on the hats and lapels of the veterans of the famed 32nd Infantry "Red Arrow" Division.

It signifies loss, sacrifice and pride — the loss of soldiers on battlefields in Europe and the South Pacific, the sacrifice of Wisconsin and Michigan National Guardsmen who left their homes, jobs and schools to fight, and the pride that comes with serving in a unit the French nicknamed for piercing German battle lines during World War I.

The entire unit will be shipping out to Iraq. We wish them well, and a safe return.

PLAY LIKE IT'S A PENNANT RACE. Perhaps Milwaukee Brewer fans ought advocate for the return of light rail to the Beer City. Although the Crew still hold the wild card, it's difficult to get enthusiastic about their chances after today's Mets sweep coming in the wake of that late July Cub sweep, also at Miller Park, and that early-season Red Sox sweep in Boston.

SECOND SECTION. Cubs, Cardinals, and Phillies also lose. Talk about wasted opportunities.

IT TAKES MORE THAN MONEY. The first day of school in Chicago included some civic theater as state senator James Meeks brought several busloads of Chicago residents to New Trier Township to register them in a well-to-do school district.

New Trier Township spent nearly $17,000 per student in 2005-06 and Sunset Ridge spent about $16,000, while Chicago Public Schools spent an estimated $10,400 per pupil.

People in the New Trier district supported the effort, although state rules require that the students who applied for admission will probably be denied because they're not district residents.

Although differences in resources matter, living conditions also matter. There are many weekends when the Chicago school system has the equivalent of a Northern Illinois shooting to deal with on the Monday. That was the case over Labor Day, with one ten year old girl who took her blind sister for a walk being killed in a gang shootout and a thirteen year old girl visiting relatives also apparently being killed in another gang shootout. That girl's parents had moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the hopes of providing a safer environment, including safer schools for her.

GETTING INTO TRAINING. The Labor Day weekend means the trains are strained.

With delays, airport congestion, and sky-high jet fuel prices draining the romance and convenience out of air travel, Americans have increasingly turned to Amtrak for summer travel, the story continued.

The railroad was expecting 322,000 riders over Labor Day weekend, a 10 percent increase from last year, while the airline industry projected a decline of 6.5 percent in domestic travel over the holiday period.

Another Destination:Freedom post notes an Amtrak proposal to provide more cars for the Acela Express. A careful reading of the article reveals the shortcomings of a special-design quasi-fixed formation train. Although additional trailing cars are relatively easy to build, the locomotives (call me old fashioned, but a "power car" at each end that is dedicated to a control stand and the electrical equipment is a single-ended locomotive) will be taxed by longer formations. And the Acelas are not the only trains that could use more capacity. (Elsewhere in the country, the practice of setting up additional locomotives in multiple and cutting in additional coaches, if the coaches could be had, provides the additional capacity.)

It's also standing room only on the Chicago commuter services.

The [Rapid Transit] is removing all the seats from some of its rail cars and reducing seats on some buses as part of an experiment beginning this fall to pack in more riders.

To boost its seating, Metra ended bar-car beverage service Friday and plans to remove some on-board toilets. The commuter railroad is also rehabbing five 1950s-era bilevel coaches that it had sold to a Virginia commuter line and bought back earlier this year.

Even the Pace suburban bus system, the unfortunate symbol for years of how the car is king in the suburbs, is packing them in these days on routes that feed Metra and CTA rail stations and business parks. Pace reduced special express service to Cubs and Bears games to free up buses for regular evening service, officials said.

Managers expect further increases in traffic, and expect further strain on the stock as the state capital spending plan is still delayed in Springfield.

There's frustration on the lines.

Most Metra riders aren't as lucky, traveling up to 50 miles each way, in some cases while standing in the aisles and vestibules or sitting on the steps of packed trains.

When the trains are too crowded, the conductors don't always collect cash fares, so revenue is lost, Deborah Moore pointed out after her morning Union Pacific North Line train arrived last week in downtown Chicago more than an hour late.

"Metra, the way to really fly," said Moore, mocking the commuter railroad's slogan. "Oh, yeah, how could I forget? Flying doesn't seem like a good idea these days, either."

Thus far, neither the Transit Authority nor Metra have asked to borrow some of their retired rolling stock from local museums. There's the makings of a pretty good retro Evanston Express, with plenty of standing room, running at East Troy and at Union.

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. A Scotsman discovers college football.

I discovered, quite by accident, that my former home of Washington, D.C. was actually an ideal location for falling in love with college football, precisely because there’s no football power in the city. Each fall I’d become aware of a deep divide between my friends who attended Ivy League universities and those who studied at public universities in the South or across the Midwest. At parties, the former group would be immersed in the usual Washington small talk: the prospects for social security or immigration reform and the usual political and media gossip; the latter, by contrast, were liberated by the return of something much more important—the opening kickoff.

The author began his discovery at Michigan, where the team on the field is often good, and the band is always boring. His observation, however, might say much about the positional arms race in which the most selective universities (as measured by their "selectivity" or perhaps their yield management) are not necessarily the football powers, let alone the public flagships with pretty good football programs. On one hand, he might have discovered the secret of the Eastern Establishment: they lack a life. On the other hand, he might have discovered that the graduates of the less selective universities are more easily distracted.

(Via Phi Beta Cons.)

IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER.

The editorial board at the DeKalb Chronicle would prefer that less be drunk here.

We know, last week was Corn Fest weekend, and it was the first time returning NIU students had seen their friends since last spring.

It’s nice to get together and relax with few drinks; we get it. But DeKalb Police issued so many alcohol-related citations, most in neighborhoods with heavy student populations, it took the Daily Chronicle extra pages and several days to run them in the daily police blotter.

Most of the citations were related to underage drinking and having open containers on the public way. Some were written at the same address hours apart. We’re all for students socializing and celebrating the start of the new school year, but there have to be better ways to celebrate.

On one hand, perhaps a school year that starts without major flooding on move-in day will continue with December final exams as scheduled, and a February when we will pause to reflect but look forward to spring break is something to drink to.

JUST ACTIVATE THE CARDS. Once upon a time, telephone activation of a credit card was easy: ring the 1-800 number, enter the account number, enter a few digits of a social security number (probably a misuse of a number that's NOT supposed to be used for identification, see the old cards for details), be advised to sign the card and remove the paper tape.

No more. Ring Discover and get quizzed about what changes would induce you to use the card more (bigger cash-back bonuses and interest-free cash advances). Or ring Amoco, which under BP auspices has sold the credit card operation to Chase, and wait for someone to ask you the name of the bank you use to make payments on the account, as a prelude to offering Chase services.

If there's anybody at Amoco or Discover that's reading this site, hear this. I can get along without your cards. I am giving preference to those card issuers that don't play twenty questions with me. And enough unsolicited credit card offers arrive in my mailbox each month that I can fire credit card companies at will.

IT'S A PENNANT RACE. I had some time this afternoon to listen to sports call-in radio from Milwaukee and from Chicago. The Cubs, Brewers, and Cardinals all lost and there are plenty of people with ample time to get worked up about absolutely nothing.

As of this afternoon, the Cubs are 4 1/2 games ahead of the Brewers and about ten games ahead of the Cardinals. That Cub margin over the Brewers is exactly the outcome of a Cub sweep in Milwaukee in late July, and the Brewer margion over the Cardinals the outcome of two series with St. Louis, one in July and another in August.

Why the radio yakkers have to take calls from people who want to vent about the Cubs' having played more home games (that will be remedied shortly) or against weaker opponents (if the National League standings were an income distribution a politician would want to redistribute the wealth) and go along with the call escapes me. (I'm not referring only to Milwaukee radio here. Cub fans have that er, tradition of September collapse, to worry about.)

Look at the schedule.

Image courtesy The Wisconsin Sports Bar.

Note the six remaining games between the Brewers and the Evil Empire, er, Yuppie Bears. The schedule reminds me of the end of the 1982 pennant race, where the Brewers held a small lead over Baltimore at Labor Day yet had to win the final game of the season, in Baltimore, to qualify for the playoffs (in those days, there were two divisions). Either Milwaukee or Chicago can win the division. The team that takes care of business in those six games is likely to do so.

THE ADVANTAGES OF BLOCK AND TACKLE. The Laser class originally prohibited pulleys in much of the running rigging, requiring sailors to put together cats-cradles of loops and bows to create some mechanical advantage. It's much easier under the new rules, that allow some block and tackle.


Although the tropical storms are disrupting life in the southeast, the weather in the State Line has favored sailing practice, although I would have liked just one or two slightly stronger puffs to set up just one screaming reach for the season.

OUCH. The Minnesota football team, despite being material for scandal, managed to come from behind and steal a win at their rollerdome. The Goophs have matched last year's win total.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. The Overhead Wire endorses a transfer from Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space.

Congress passes the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Heralded as a consumer protection milestone, it also gives utilities a quick method to drop their traction systems. This becomes one of the nails in the coffin of streetcar and interurban railroads in the U.S.

I've commented frequently on the Public Utility Holding Company Act (keep scrolling) and welcome recognition of its side consequences, particularly when it comes from sources that would ordinarily object to iconoclasm where Saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose obsession with Samuel Insull led to the passage of the Act, is concerned.

A NEW REPUBLICAN AMTRAK POLICY? Alaska's governor Sarah Palin has her very own passenger railroad. The Alaska Railroad belongs to the state and it runs intercity passenger trains that are neither commuter trains nor part of the Amtrak network, using coaches (keep scrolling) that ought to be running in the Lower 48.

NO RUNS, NO HITS, ONE ERROR. The error goes to Pittsburgh's official scorer, who denies it. Milwaukee is asking Major League Baseball to review the ruling, which, no doubt, will lead to enhanced instant replay (currently in use for home runs, why not just put sensors on the foul poles?) and even sloppier officiating.

REGROUPING. With the start of the new academic year come some retrospectives on our troubles of last year. For new arrivals on campus and in town, there's a look at the first responders.

[De Kalb Fire Acting Chief Bruce] Harrison said Feb. 14 started as a routine day. There were training exercises, emergency calls and equipment maintenance, and people were talking about their Valentine’s Day plans, he said.

But it turned out to be a day to put into practice what fire, EMS and law enforcement officials in and near DeKalb County had practiced just a few months prior to the shootings. In October 2007, they took part in a mass-casualty exercise that included a helicopter evacuation. And an emergency plan went into effect Dec. 18 at NIU, when graffiti threatening an attack was found scrawled on the wall of a campus bathroom.

“It takes a lot of work to be a prepared community, and what we did prior to Feb. 14 prepared us well,” Harrison said. “But it doesn’t stop, and our goal is to stay ready.”

Northern Illinois University has also added reinforcements to its Public Safety Department.

Our friends from Blacksburg are helping residents cope with the long-term effects.

"We found advertising grief gatherings didn’t work,” [New River Valley Community Services executive director Harvey] Barker said about coordinating treatment efforts after students returned to Virginia Tech. “But going to where a group normally meets worked much better.”

Barker described the Virginia Tech shooting as a “pure mental health disaster.” University students, faculty, staff and their relatives were greatly affected, he said, but so were alumni, people who live in the town and anyone else with a connection to the school or the area.

“No one is untouched when something like this happens,” Barker said.

And a body of evidence — including a journal from the American Medical Association — shows that a community that doesn’t respond effectively to such a crisis could see an increase in suicides, depression, school drop-out rates and family dysfunction, Barker said.

The Northern Star has obtained an interview with investigative journalist David Vann, who is writing a book that will elaborate on the thesis of his Esquire article.

The article was written about by the Associated Press, and that story was picked up by hundreds of news outlets. I’ve received positive feedback, also, from many of Steve’s professors and friends, many of the people who are mentioned in the article. I do believe everyone wants to know the truth and the full story, as painful as that may be in various ways, and that’s why I’m also writing the book.

I have read through the article, and without access to the primary sources, and with reservations about the work appearing in Esquire, I cannot vouch for its accuracy. I can confirm, however, that the article's basis for Kazmierczak enrolling in the Illinois graduate program is accurate.

He’s just started grad classes, and now it looks like he isn’t going to be able to stay at NIU. The university has cut half the faculty from its sociology department through attrition, stripped the advanced courses, especially in criminology.

To a great extent, current course offerings, university-wide, are path-dependent. If a subject specialist, or all the subject specialists, retire or are recruited away (the former is common enough as the large cohort of professors hired as the normal school became a doctoral university retires, the latter is encouraged by headquarters' if-you-can-find-a-better-offer-we'll-consider-a-match approach to merit raises) that area becomes unavailable to students. Headquarters has twigged to the problem, although no permanent increases in faculty or reductions in entering class size have been proposed.

All is not gloomy, however. The first Huskies on Parade have been whelped. The weather has been pleasant for move-in and for the first few days of classes, with cool nights, low humidity, and enough daytime sunshine for the young ladies to leave just the right amount to the imagination. (I won't fish off the company pier, but I don't mind looking at the lake!)

This weekend, the football team travels to Minnesota. I don't object to Saturday night college football, but in a dome?

PRESERVED, AS IF IN AMBER. The professional protesters could not re-create 1968 outside the convention hall, and The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner misses 1968 inside the convention hall.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born 100 years ago today. Besides Franklin Roosevelt, his record as a progressive Democrat is unsurpassed. Thanks to his leadership and passion, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, Head Start, the Job Corps, legal services for the poor, and countless other pocketbook measures that helped millions out of poverty and reinforced a secure middle class. And Johnson took immense risks to pass the three landmark civil-rights laws. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Johnson's leadership, Barack Obama would not be accepting the Democratic nomination for president this week.

But here in Denver, where podium time has been found for a mind-numbing array of obscure speakers, the day will pass without ceremony or acknowledgment. Why? In part because for many Democrats, Johnson's greatness on domestic achievements has an asterisk -- the Vietnam War, a divisive debacle too reminiscent of the Iraq War.

At one time, academic historians were in general agreement that President Lyndon Johnson would be recognized as the greatest of all presidents. A few funerals later, he's probably fallen to the stature of a minor post-Rooseveltian. Perhaps one reason is that the Great Society's record is not what the true believers would have others believe. I am on record as attributing much of the now-missed-by-self-styled-"progressives" unionized, monopolized, and cartelized 1950s to the unusual position the U.S. economy enjoyed after World War II.

Beyond that, the advocate of the Great Society has to address the more rapid decrease in poverty before the Great Society than after. This commentary suggests the criterion for the poverty rate is flawed, but it presents the diagram. Scroll down to "Poverty rates by race, 1959-2004." This essay, by Brookings's Isabel Sawhill, addresses the controversies.

The failure of the aggregate poverty rate to decline in the seventies, and its subsequent rise in the eighties, suggest to some that the War on Poverty launched by the federal government in the midsixties failed. Indeed, the incidence of poverty was as high in the late eighties as it was in the late sixties, and the average poverty rate for the eighties was 2 percentage points higher than the average for the seventies. Researchers have suggested a number of plausible explanations for these trends, including changes in the composition of households, slower economic growth, the failure of government training programs to increase the skills of the poor, and the rise of a permanently poor urban underclass. Some also argue that the income transfer policies designed to alleviate poverty have themselves helped perpetuate it. Although all of these factors have likely contributed to the problem, the relative importance of each remains somewhat unclear.

There are no easy explanations. It is, however, misleading to suggest that the Great Society "helped millions out of poverty and reinforced a secure middle class."

For further reading, the Institute for Research on Poverty has provided a compendium of recent research under an "Understanding Poverty" rubric.

ILLINOISTAN? I recently referred to the khanate on Lake Michigan. Now come the editorial writers for the DeKalb Chronicle with Nepotism: a mockery of democracy.

Lipinski, Stroger, Jones. Now, more than ever, Illinois politics is a family business. And by taking such good care of their children, politicians are treating the rest of us like second-class citizens.

Despite those family ties, we're still waiting for a state capital budget. (A spat between the governor and his father-in-law contributes to its delay.) Its absence manifests itself in more frequent Metra delays account deferred maintenance, and in the continuing uncertainty about the classroom building to take the place of Cole Hall.

Despite the failure of these primarily Democratic families to do the state's business, the state's electorate is probably ready to award the state's electoral votes to a scion of Cook Khanate.

GET SOMEBODY ELSE. It's anonymous, but supposedly a first-person reaction by an adjunct who, upon discovering he is insufficiently respectful of access-assessment-remediation-retention, tells headquarters to take this job and shove it.

A FRIVOLOUS VERSION OF VEBLEN? The Wall Street Journal's Robert Frank (not to be confused with Cornell's economist, who on occasion researches similar topics) has a weblog called The Wealth Report. He has also written a book, Richistan, whose subtitle, A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, promises more than it delivers. (So often it is with writers who think the plural of "anecdote" is "data" and that two observations a "trend" makes. Sorry, Book Review N^o. 37 is going to be cliched, but I'm really not in the mood for profound criticism tonight. Apparently the modest life styles of millionaires, as documented in The Millionaire Next Door, are modest because a million doesn't buy what it used to. Or so a quick visit to the gated communities and private resorts and yacht showrooms suggests. It takes a billion to get into Richistan, and that billion often comes from a business startup that the owner sells to a corporation for a large sum of money. That dynamic has been recognized in business journalism at least since "Adam Smith's" Supermoney, albeit the acquiring corporation is no longer a conglomerate, the source of the supermoney in those days, at least as long as the accountants could perpetuate the rising pattern of earnings right up to bankruptcy day. (I'm borrowing shamelessly from Supermoney for that passage.) That, however, is not the focus of Richistan. It's where the money goes: to gaudy yachts and trophy houses to house trophy wives who have to be appeased. Not a pretty picture, but in all likelihood, a small sample.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

GOVERNMENT FAILURE? Hurricane recovery confronts low literacy rate.

Three years after Katrina, residents of New Orleans are still buried in a blizzard of government paperwork. But for thousands of storm victims seeking federal aid, the challenge is made more difficult by a little-known obstacle: More than 40 percent of the city's adults lack the literacy skills to comprehend basic government forms. And recovery programs have done little to ease the burden.

That 40 percent is a substantial number of people.

Rachel B. Nicolosi, program director for the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans, estimates that as many as 100,000 people from New Orleans may have had assistance delayed, or they never applied for help at all, because they could not read the documents.

"It's a paramount issue. The rules are almost indecipherable for everyone," said Davida Finger, a staff attorney for Loyola University's New Orleans College of Law, which has helped 1,000 people seek rebuilding aid, nearly all of whom had trouble understanding the forms.

Simplicity is not necessarily a virtue.

But some government officials say too much plain language can leave out vital information.

"I concede the point that those who are functionally illiterate, they would have challenges with any form," said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said the agency has trained all of its 37 staff members in New Orleans to help "those with literacy disabilities."

The National Adult Literacy Survey indicates that 25 percent of U.S. adults read at the lowest functional level, meaning, for example, that they can locate an expiration date on a driver's license but cannot fill out most motor-vehicle forms.

The failure of the government schools to produce literacy is in some cases deliberate.

The papers were so confusing that Thomas Wright drove three hours from Mississippi to talk to Road Home outreach workers.

Wright, a retired auto mechanic, graduated from high school in the 1950s and later took shop classes to get his mechanics' license. But when it came to the Road Home forms, he had to enlist friends.

"I needed help from educated people," said Wright, who is black and remembers the segregation of the city school system.

"We got your second-hand books, with half the pages torn out," he said.

The government schools of that era deliberately slighted Mr Wright. What excuse the deaducation establishment will offer for younger people also slighted remains to be seen.

Wright's generation is not the only one that's struggling. According to the Louisiana Department of Education, 42 percent of students who graduated from high school in New Orleans in 2004 had "unsatisfactory" English scores. And more than one in 10 students dropped out of high school.

I award Quote of the Day to the reaction of one man so slighted.

[Henry Lee] Burton, who earns $24,000 a year as a Wal-Mart tire shop worker, said the only assistance he received was a $3,500 payout from his renter's insurance. Two years passed before he could gather up the courage to go to the office and tell his agent he did not fully understand letters from the insurance company.

Now he has a different plan: to learn to read well enough so he does not need help.

"It's something I've always wanted to do and something I need to do," he said. "You really can't depend on the government anyway. You have to do it yourself."

I have the Democratic Convention going as background noise. So far, despite this being Hillary's night, nothing about The Village equipping its young people with the Habits of Effective People, something the New Orleans and Louisiana governments clearly failed to do.

AMERIKA ERWACHE. Oops, a different little megalomaniac.

INCENTIVES TO EXPLORE? An American Thinker article presents a chart that suggests a summertime bubble in crude oil and natural gas prices, the popping of which would discomfit would-be tsars and caudillos.

A major fall of oil prices to pre-run-up levels would severely cut the income of Russia, not to mention the oil states of the Gulf and Hugo Chavez.

To accompany the data, consider two differing perspectives on the incentives to develop new oil sources. First consider Jon Basil Utley in Reason:

In fact, the world oil shortage is political, not geological. In the U.S., the government makes it virtually impossible to drill in new areas offshore. In Nigeria, civil strife has shut down major production. In Libya and Iran, Washington effectively blockaded and isolated the nations for years to inhibit new production. In Iraq, of course, the U.S. destroyed much of the infrastructure since the first Gulf war in 1991 and then blockaded reconstruction. In nations such as Russia and Mexico nationalism and corruption curtail increased production.

Outside of developed Western countries, the single largest reason for oil "shortages" is government incompetence and ownership of the subsoil rights so that landowners don't benefit from oil discoveries. In Patagonia, Argentina (a nation with abundant oil), I was told how it was common for landowners to try to hide any evidence of oil seepages from underground, lest the government oil company come in and ruin their lands with no benefit to themselves. Private mineral rights ownership is the reason some 90 percent of all oil wells drilled have been in the U.S. Scientific advances and innovative engineers keep coming up with ways to both discover new fields and keep old ones in production almost indefinitely.

Note that discovering new fields and extending the production of old ones presuppose permanently higher crude prices, as these reserves are uneconomic to recover at lower prices.

That point escapes former Texas Railroad Commissioner Jim Hightower, who should know better.

Sure, global demand is on the increase, but under free market “law,” supply is supposed to rise to meet that need, thus holding consumer prices stable. However, here comes Oligopoly #1: oil producers. OPEC is the chief monkey wrench controlling the world’s flow of crude, and its members have refused to get off their ample rumps to ratchet up production enough to make a difference. Saudi Arabia alone could expand its output by two million barrels a day, but even presidential groveling has not moved the oil kingdom to take dramatic action. Twice this year, George W. flew there to hold hands with King Abdullah (literally—there are pictures!) and beg him to open the spigots, only to be rejected. Hold hands, yes; play footsie, no.

Cute, but wrong at the beginning and incomplete at the end. The conflation of a movement along a supply curve (increased demand implies excess demand at the old equilibrium price; a higher price is an incentive to buyers to conserve and to sellers to produce more) with a shift of the supply curve, the most charitable interpretation of "rise to meet that need, thus holding consumer prices stable" that I can come up with, is a common error among beginners that is all too often committed by pundits and policymakers. Moreover, the threat of entry can be a powerful inducement for participants in an existing collusion to defect. I think it takes a Texas Railroad Commission to prevent that defection. Mr Hightower appears to have forgotten.

Enter Oligopoly #2: oil refiners. These would be the same gentlemen who sang that free market ode to Congress. Interestingly, the refiners don’t really want crude prices to come down, because they also happen to be oil producers—ExxonMobil, for example, produces more oil than any OPEC member except Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Yes, a seller will be displeased to see the price of its product fall, but so what? Markets are environments in which resources flow to more profitable uses. It's not Exxon-Mobil that's blocking a vote on offshore oil drilling in Congress or maintaining those Iberian land-ownership rules in Patagonia.

While more expensive crude does raise Big Oil’s cost of making gasoline, so what? Thanks to a rash of mergers waved through by Washington in the past dozen years, gasoline refining and marketing are in the oligopolistic grasp of ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and ConocoPhillips. Even as oil executives were lecturing Congress about how the free market works, they were slashing output at their refineries in order to hold supply down and jack up prices.

Last time I checked, domestic oil refining was a medium-concentrated market, one in which no further mergers would pass muster with the antitrust authorities. It's also a market that's vulnerable to price competition from newly developed sources.

SIGN OF THE TIMES? With the start of the new academic year comes survival training for lecture halls.

Hundreds of colleges across the nation have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students not to take campus threats lying down but to fight back with any "improvised weapon," from a backpack to a laptop computer.

A Metropolitan Community College (Kansas City, Mo.) professor suggests an equivalence between this training and tornado and fire preparedness.

SENATOR BIDEN'S ACELA. Infinite Regress reacts favorably to a frequent train rider on the Democratic ticket. Illinois Review (via Reverse Spin) is less impressed.

Indeed, had it not been for my shortsightedness in getting a regular ticket, Senator Biden would have traveled in what was essentially a private rail car. No wonder he is the number one supporter of taxpayer support of the nation’s bankrupt passenger train industry.

First class as hideaway for the influential may be the reason for Acela. Consider this Washington Monthly article that criticizes Acela for being an expensive way to run a train not a lot faster than the steam-powered Yankee Clipper that yet attracts the Powers That Be.

The bartender says that travelers are choosing Acela Express for other reasons.

Acela draws a different sort of trade, he said, gesturing around, implying that his train was expensive enough for the busy business traveler to escape crying kids, fat guys chomping on smelly sandwiches, or grandmas brandishing an endless ream of photos. Indeed, Acela just doesn't have room for those guys. It has only 304 seats, compared to 700 on the European TGV trains---another reason the tickets cost so much. By granulating its audience through fares that grow to nearly match the airlines,' Amtrak has made Acela a kind of rolling gated community, a clean, comfortable place where business can be conducted.

There's a somewhat longer passage at p. 123 of John Stilgoe's Train Time that makes the same point.

Acela offers an intellectual feast to any sociology-minded passenger, especially in first class. The train is relatively expensive to ride and its food service exorbitant, for all that the food tends to be good. When the train is not full, business-class passengers drawn to each other by visual cues -- similar books, Blackberries or other wireless devices, even upscale shopping bags or European newspapers -- often strike up conversations; they may change seats or walk to the snack car together for muffins or sandwiches or wine. The alert eavesdropper discovers that seat changes often lead to the exchange of telephone numbers or business cards. Certain recurrent phrases float through conversations, usually relating to the decided superiority of Acela trains over ordinary Amtrak ones or the freedoms offered by unassigned seats. Strangers remark to one another how discerning Acela passengers are, something that matters more and more as the sun goes down and windows become mirrors that reveal much about what money buys. Perhaps making connections among like-minded others matters a great deal to passengers in their twenties, not only in terms of career or business but socially. Acela rolls like a private club, its tickets the price of entry, and hosts a definable cohort of well-dressed, upwardly mobile men and women in their late twenties.

I could carp that tax dollars are going to underwrite first-class services contrary to the intent of the original Amtrak legislation, but that's not the point of what is becoming Book Review N^o. 36. Train Time's subtitle is Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape. I'm tempted to suggest that if you want the full review, all you have to do is be a regular reader of Cold Spring Shops, because the ideas in Train Time often turn up in my posts. Sometimes that's been a direct use of the material. John is an O Scaler and we have on occasion compared notes on things that run on 12" = 1' rails as well as things that run on 1/4" = 1' (or on occasion 7 mm = 1') rails. Much of the information in Train Time is in plain sight for the ferroequinologist. But a ferroequinologist with a Harvard professorship is privy to conversations among movers and shakers contemplating, for example, abandoned railway grades that have commercial potential, either for commuter lines or for new freight corridors in a way that a faculty member at a mid-major is not. Thus, one line of analysis in the book. In like manner, access to the Eastern Establishment permits confirmation of hypotheses about the ability of the well-off to buy privacy that can be formulated but not easily tested using public material such as old train timetables. I'll cut John some slack for mis-stating some of the details of the Maine service. (It is no accident that an all-sleeping car Bar Harbor Express ran until 1960, and conspiracy buffs will have to reconsider their belief in a ruling class in that Patrick McGinnis was able to gut that service, first on the New Haven and then on the Boston and Maine, without disappearing.) That quest for privacy also offered the entrepreneurial a chance to identify future sites for residential or industrial development, the observation platform of a private car offering a much better view than that available from a jet.

The first-class train is not the only instrument of reshaping, particularly in an era of rising fuel prices that will pinch regional and local air carriers. There is also the potential for bulk freight and for express, two types of traffic that are incompatible with each other and to some extent with the passenger trains. Train Time suggests (and it's easy enough for a researcher to follow up) that much of the intermodal freight network continues the old railway express business in a new guise. That Penn Central used to have van trains with MAIL symbols and that Chicago and North Western timetabled their Falcon trains as First Class was not for show: these were inheritors of the Overland Mail tradition if without express messengers and armed postal clerks. (These, too, we might see again, if regional airports close and keeping reserve planes up all night just in case a little too much "absolutely, positively" cargo hits the counter in Chico or Chicago gets too expensive. A train with a crew that can sort and set off parcels at intermediate stops, often without stopping, can get it to a lot of places overnight.) Professor Stilgoe concludes by suggesting that many of the dot.com profits are being invested, or being held to be invested, in new railroads.

Now, if we could get rid of those cartel-era speed restrictions (and the book has some insights on who made those happen. Hint: the public roads are not safe for 100 mph driving, and faster trains increase the shortest-possible-profitable-hop for airplanes.)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

TEACH THE CONTROVERSIES.

A Chicago Tribune editorial refers to the one-off tax rebates as False stimulus.

How do we know? Because we just tried it. In February, faced with a mortgage crisis and a housing bust, our leaders in Washington agreed on a $168 billion package, consisting mostly of $1,200-per-family rebate checks that went out in the spring. Today, it's clear that expensive palliative solved nothing.

Harvard's Martin Feldstein, the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, was one of the many economists who urged this sort of program last winter. But in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, he announced that he was wrong.

The idea was to put money into the pockets of consumers, who would spend it, providing a needed infusion to companies that make and sell goods and services. But Feldstein says it didn't work. "Recent government statistics show that only between 10 percent and 20 percent of the rebate dollars were spent," he wrote. "The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending."

The editors then offer analysis, purportedly their own.

That's not really surprising. When workers get a wage or salary increase, they spend more than before because they know they can afford it. But when people get a modest one-time windfall, they usually put most of it in the bank or use it to pay off debts.

That analysis, however, is not original. It's the permanent income hypothesis (more technical exposition here) that figures prominently in Milton Friedman's Nobel credentials.

THE TORCH HAS BEEN PASSED. Chicago's promoters continue to make the case for the 2016 Summer Olympics. A Milwaukee radio station suggests setting the events to the north. The United States representatives earned high marks for sportsmanship, with basketball's "redeem team" being praised for their support for other teams.

On the lighter side, a Chicago Tribune article proposes scaling the medals, based on the ease of the sport. The 100m sprint rates the smallest medal?? On the other hand, "Sure it takes great vision and steady nerves, but so does needlepoint" perfectly characterized the 10-meter air pistol competition. Olympic gold?? The stakes are ordinarily a teddy bear at the midway. I think, though, that decathlon ought to rank ahead of balance beam. I'd have to look up the name of this year's champion, from the U.S. Once upon a time (Bob Mathias, Bruce Jenner) that winner got a Wheaties box or (Rafer Johnson) to advise Bobby Kennedy. To be sure, balance beam is challenging, but the description, "The field measures a stingy 10-centimeters wide and is obscured by your feet. Every movement counts—and is scrutinized under a spotlight with thousands of spectators staring down at you. One slip of the pinky toe and …" misses one thing. I recall a commentator during the all-around competition noting that eventual beam champion Shawn Johnson got marked down for not looking enough like a gymnast. Over the weekend, I observed a barrow competition that used similar criteria ("this pig is a bit narrow in the middle.") In the former case, the configuration of the competitor ought not affect the evaluation of the competitor's maneuvers. In the latter case the configuration of the competitor affects how much bacon the competitor brings home.

There's a difference. But then, I've developed skepticism about a number of those judged displays that have become Olympic events. I think it goes back to "8.9, 9.1, and an 8.2 from the Soviet judge." Didn't matter if that was figure skating or gymnastics.

HELPING THE SCHOOL HEAL. Zach Seward and his brothers continue their studies at Northern Illinois. Tim Mayerbock has left the football team although as far as I know he is continuing his studies. Classes resume Monday.

THE SOUNDS OF FREEDOM. The Arizona Commemorative Air Force's Sentimental Journey returned to DeKalb for this year's Cornfest, which relocated to the airport.


A short ride was on offer for a consideration of $425.

I understand all the arguments for a radar-invisible plane that you can't hear coming. All the same, I imagine a German, hearing a few hundred of these coming his way, and knowing there was little he could do (and nothing Fatso Hermann could do) about it had to concentrate the mind.

NOT RAILROAD AWARE? When Senator Obama introduced Senator Biden as his vice-presidential pick, he praised Senator Biden for his regular "lonely train ride" from Washington, D.C. to Wilmington, Delaware. That's as lonely as an Acela Express can be. (I'm surmising that the senator uses the Acela Express, probably in First at the urging of his protection detail.) Acela Express timings Washington - Wilmington are 72 minutes to 77 minutes, depending on whether that train stops at New Carrollton (Capital Beltway) and on the presence of commuter trains. That's not a bad commute: your Boston techie with a place in Grafton or your Chicago option trader from Geneva has more minutes on the train, as does your New York Master of the Universe riding the by-subscription parlor car to the Hamptons.

That, however, is not the supposedly rail-friendly nominee-to-be's most egregious mischaracterization of the railroads. Credit there goes to an observation about China that Riehl World View has pounced on.

Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option."

Yes, China is installing high-speed rail from Pekin to the coast, but for business logistics, that might not be determinative. This is the China that, to save money, equipped its new Jingpeng Pass route with steam locomotives (keep scrolling) cascaded from other lines. A few of those steam locomotives have since found new homes to raise railroad awareness in the U.S. And yes, China has recently built a mountain-climbing railroad into Tibet (keep scrolling). That railroad uses General Electric diesels, built in Erie, Pennsylvania, where the manufacturer has lots of expertise providing power to lift far more tonnage over Horseshoe Curve or Sherman Hill or Cajon Pass or Marias Pass.

COOK KHANATE. State Senate Majority Leader Emil Jones is the latest Cook County public official to anoint a son or daughter as successor (the succession having been ratified by allied khans and pakhans.) John Kass of the Chicago Tribune provides the history.

THEY DIDN'T TAG TRAINS IN SINGAPORE. Get caught, get caned. Europe is another matter.

While other tourists were sightseeing in Europe this summer, Jim Clay Harper and Danielle Bremner spray-painted their way across the continent, police say.

Investigators suspect the couple put their respective graffiti tags — "Ether" and "Dani" — on train cars in London; Madrid, Spain; Paris; Frankfurt and Hamburg, Germany, and elsewhere starting in May. When they flew home this week, police officers greeted them with handcuffs.

Bremner was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on a warrant alleging a graffiti spree that caused tens of thousands of dollars in property damage to New York's transit system. She was being held there Thursday while awaiting extradition to New York.

Harper pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to related charges of felony criminal mischief and burglary after being arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was released without bail.

Not guilty. I'm surprised the culture-studies weenies haven't already protested the censorship of an authentic art form.

In this case, the charges are felonies because of the degree of damage they are accused of causing.

Bremner, 26, a native New Yorker who attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and also goes by the tag "Utah," has been under investigation for nearly two years, Cooper said. After putting her under surveillance, investigators learned that she was dating Harper, another member of a graffiti underground known for hyping its exploits by posting photos on the Internet, he said.

Harper, 23, of Chicago, was a member of Made U Look, a graffiti crew notorious for plastering a parked subway train top to bottom with a Monopoly board game motif during an overnight raid in late 2006, Cooper said.

"No piece of that train was left uncovered," he said.

Perhaps if the transit authorities would stop selling whole-train advertising space they'd have a better case against what is vandalism, no matter what some latte-sipping aesthetes would have you believe. And perhaps if the latte-sipping aesthetes would stop defining "art" by "context" and "celebrating transgressivity" there'd be less temptation to treat car sides as rolling MFA exhibitions.

I WANT THOSE AMERICAN FLYER CARS. Senator Durbin has become an advocate for expanding Amtrak.

The Democrat's proposal includes seeking authorization for Amtrak to issue up to $2.8 billion in bonds annually to pay for such projects. He also says he'd like to see Illinois as one of the centers of a rejuvenated industry.

Durbin spoke today in Chicago between meetings with Amtrak president Alex Kummant.

Kummant says ridership is expected to boom further from around 25 million riders a year now to 50 million in ten years.

He says that means Amtrak's current fleet of 1,500 passengers cars and 400 locomotives would have to double.

Here are my candidate cars (keep scrolling). I'd like to see more sleepers, club cars, and consideration of dome cars.

The Chicago - Rockford - Dubuque train is part of this expansion.

SAIL TO THE SHIFT. Laser sailor Anna Tunnicliffe did, to win Olympic Gold.

The quality of the sailing competition is as good as ever, despite the lack of wind and the polluted water. On the other hand, a collection of competitions that includes an event for what I knew as spider bikes is a degraded competition. What's Chinese for Everything Turns to S***?

SELLING THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISENGAGE?

In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Murray claims For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time.

The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The Pope Center's George Leef concurs.

Throughout our whole educational system, we are “asking too much from those at the bottom, asking the wrong things from those in the middle, and asking too little from those at the top,” he maintains. From kindergarten to college and from the smartest students to the dullest, our education system underperforms.

What is the matter with higher education in America? The main problem is that most students go to college because they think it’s the best or only path to a good job. Unfortunately, Murray argues, it hardly ever makes sense to go to a traditional four-year college simply to acquire vocational skills: “For the student who wants to become a good hotel manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator, farmer, high school teacher, social worker, journalist, optometrist, interior designer, or football coach, four years of class work is ridiculous."

I dissent in part from this line of thinking. I will not go so far as to concur with two dissenters Inside Higher Ed retained to rebut Mr Murray. First up, Kevin Carey, very much of the deaducationist establishment, as evidenced by his internally inconsistent piece. Here's what might be the peroration.

It’s wrong to say that too many students are going to college. Too few are going, particularly those from disadvantaged communities. The history of American education is one long series of decisions to open up the halls of academia to students who, at the time, were looked down upon as undeserving. The naysayers have been disproven, over and over again. More broadly, our nation has long had an usually open economy and education system, one that puts a premium on second and third chances and shies away from giving the government power to shut citizens out of educational opportunities based on some imperfect estimate of “ability.” Again, the wisdom of this philosophy in hindsight seems clear.

That language about disproving the naysayers fails to convince in the face of the high proportion of matriculants in remedial classes, the high attrition rate, administrative handwringing about retention, and the replacement of the B.A. with the M.A. as the credential for more responsible jobs. (Is there any other business that gets away with selling a defective product and then selling an upgrade in the same way that education has allowed the high school diploma to become a ticket for time served, the baccalaureate to become all too often the new high school diploma, and the master's degree possibly producing what the baccalaureate once represented?)

BUYING THE RIGHT TO DISENGAGE. Slacker logic from Canada.

Second year Concordia University commerce student Matthew Pitts bought his first laptop three years ago — already ancient in computer years — and it is his steady companion. Pitts said it’s not always classroom business being conducted behind the laptop.

“Sure, there’s some Facebooking going on and checking e-mail, but if you want to do that in class, fine. After all you’re paying for the course so if you fail because you goofed off in class with your laptop instead of paying attention, whose fault is it?”

Margaret Soltan calls that a stupid argument.

This is a popular line among US college students too. Let’s recall what’s wrong with it.

Chances are your parents, not you, are paying for your college education. Chances are we, the taxpayers, are helping them out. The image of the rugged individualist assuming the blame for his or her class fuckupery is attractive but false. Lots of other people end up paying for the waste of a good college that you represent.

On moving-in day we offer the following advice to new and returning students.

Your professor’s awareness that you and others in the room are ignoring everything she attempts to offer is galling, upsetting, distracting. When she calls on you, your eyes have a soft heavy something that tells her you’ve been sucking an online nipple. She finds the pathos of this depressing, and it’s beginning to affect her teaching.

When we call our students out for paying more attention to their electronic shackles than to the course, it's business, not personal.

BRIDGE OUT. The Keslinger Road bridge over the Kishwaukee River failed Wednesday afternoon. Although the bridge is close to a pipeline construction zone, it is speculation at this time whether earth movement or extra wear from construction traffic contribute to the failure.

The Coltonville and Old State Road bridges are next to be replaced.

AUGMENTING RAILROAD AWARENESS. With higher fuel prices and air carrier retrenchments, where there's a passenger train, there will be people. When the passenger train has a steam locomotive, there will also be spectators. June's rains forced a postponement of the Milwaukee 261 reprise of the Wisconsin Dells excursion from late June until last weekend. There was a bit of rain on Sunday morning, but most of the ride was under sunny conditions. This engine was never streamlined, although the solid pilot does add a hint of speed, and it contrasts well with the stays on the Sixth Street viaduct.


We made a good start from Milwaukee and a good assault of the ridge west of Wauwatosa. The dispatcher sent us on the more steeply-graded line which caught many Brookfield-area trainspotters by surprise. (Your best bet to railfan a rare move is to wait at Elm Grove or at Brookfield rather than attempt to outguess the dispatcher on the split-grade.) Then we started to roll, as this video of Oconomowoc attests.

This trip, unlike the one offered two years ago, did not make servicing stops in Columbus, or at Portage westbound. We did stop in the Wyocena siding to adjust sticking brakes. Despite that stop, the train reached Wisconsin Dells five minutes before the planned 11.30 arrival. Here's the traditional view of a Hiawatha leaving Wisconsin Dells. I was at lunch when the eastbound Empire Builder went through. It reached Chicago five minutes late that Sunday.

The 261 organization has now supplied information about those Boston and Maine-looking coaches. They are Pennsylvania Railroad Congressional series coaches that Amtrak rebuilt as 76 seat "Clocker" cars for the service that officially wasn't commuter trains between New York and Philadelphia.

There's enough time in the Dells for one of the short boat cruises, or a leisurely lunch, but not both. The way the train and the railroad performed, a faster timing or a timing with a later Dells departure are possible. One of the passengers, a gentleman with railroad experience, told me Canadian Pacific was extending sidings and replacing the second track on the line west of Brookfield.

The New Lisbon trip appeared to be well-patronized, and it returned with time to spare to board and get underway for Portage, where a servicing stop had been planned.

A passenger pointed out this crime scene facing the tracks across Oneida Street. There's no such thing as getting away from it all.


Once the servicing is finished, the train leaves Portage. It is fitting that the servicing stop is at Portage, which was the east end of the fastest scheduled steam timing in the world, Sparta to Portage with the Morning Hiawatha.

We took siding west of Watertown for a freight train. At Nashotah, the westbound Empire Builder was waiting for us. We probably put on quite the show for its passengers. The show continued past Pewaukee Lake. Look closely, you'll see the pirate on a pier, and some new rip-rap suggesting the severity of the rain in June.

Despite some extremely slow running from Hawley Road east to Milwaukee, our arrival was at 5.25 against the expected 6 pm. Chicago passengers, if any, would have been able to catch the 5.45 Hiawatha.

Thus ended a pleasant late-summer train ride, and some of the train crew were talking about seeing us all next year.

FIFTY-FOUR-FORTY, NO FIGHT; THIRTY-SIX-THIRTY, BIG FIGHT.

I suspect Peter the Great, who fought Livonians, Poles, and Swedes to secure his window to the West, would have appreciated How the States Got Their Shapes, which earns an enthusiastic Book Review N^o. 35 despite some of author Mark Stein's quirky asides about public policy. Although many of the European powers had established colonies by 1650, the areas of North America that were actively supplying resources to their mother countries were small compared to the areas that the European powers had explored. The explorations suggested that those areas ought be claimed, and the claims backed up by force if necessary. Thus, this Encarta map shows the situation as of the mid-eighteenth century, by which time the British had tossed the Dutch out of North America and held temporary possession of Spanish Florida.

European Land in the Americas, courtesy Encarta.

The outlines of the Mississippi Valley states are present along the river, which makes sense, and a natural frontier between continental powers provides a logical boundary between sovereign yet United States. (I suppose we should be grateful there's no Prussian colony in the Mississippi Valley, the thought of a country-and-western version of Wacht am Rhein boggles the mind!) But look west. The Russian territory looks something like Oregon and Washington. There's logic to that. The Russians and the Spanish implicity agreed to send their respective shipments westward through the Puget Sound and the San Francisco Bay watersheds, and when the British moved into Russian claims, their diplomats concluded agreements with Spain to divide at 42^o N. Lat., today's California-Oregon border, and with Russia to divide at 54^o 40' N. Lat., the southern tip of Alaska.

The British had designs for all of North America, which were evident in this British map from 1755.

   

John Mitchell, Map of British and French Dominions in North America, courtesy Library of Congress.

King Charles II set the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina at 36^o 30' N. Lat., to give Virginia all of Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina all of Albemarle Sound, thereby permitting each colony to tax its own seaborne commerce. That boundary thus becomes the Kentucky-Tennessee state line, and it much later separates Missouri from Arkansas and figures in defining the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. (For the Republic of Texas to annex itself to the United States as a slave state, it had to be south of 36^o 30' N. Lat. under the still-in-force Missouri Compromise.) The map is somewhat less precise to the north, where Connecticut also claimed a Western Reserve all the way to the Mississippi, and where there were no islands east of Isle Royale (the British negotiator of the 1783 treaty didn't know that, but Benjamin Franklin did). Those colonial boundaries, however, existed to hem in the Puritans (a king named Charles would have good reason to do that) and to keep New Hampshirites from coveting Canada, particularly the recently conquered French Canada. Then came the War of Independence, which gave Vermont the opportunity to declare its independence from New York.