A RAPID CONCATENATION OF TROUBLES. U. S. investors stop supplying capital to a country and a region goes into recession. Stock prices revert to their more traditional multiple of earnings. Financial intermediaries have suspect balance sheets. Governments borrow heavily. These events occur within the span of a year or two, rather than over a decade. The events in question are what we now know as The Great Depression and Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World analyzes them and places them in historical context. Book Review N^o. 11 concludes that the book gives reason for cautious optimism. Unlike today's central bankers, the lords (England's Montagu Norman, France's Emile Moreau, Germany's Hjalmar Schacht, and Federal Reserve chairman Benjamin Strong) were constrained by a gold standard worked out when the British Empire was the leading financial power but imbalanced by the gold reserves accumulated by the United States during the Great War, and managing capital markets burdened by large public borrowing to pay for that war. The European powers borrowed integer multiples of their annual national income to finance that war, from each other and from the United States, and demanded large reparation payments from Germany. That the countries didn't turn on the printing presses earlier becomes one of the stories of the book. That the rigidities of the gold standard led monetary authorities to consider new standards for changing exchange rates is another. That policy makers learned by their mistakes, particularly in the 1928-1933 era, offers grounds for cautious optimism.

The central bankers themselves are an interesting lot, often people not born to the ruling circles, sometimes middle-class strivers who make tremendous personal sacrifices to achieve their positions (central banking being neither glamorous nor for the weak of mind). Their private foibles and troubles add richness to the story.

If there is a star of the story, it is John Maynard Keynes, who accurately understood the errors of the Versailles treaty and of the gold standard, particularly one based on the pre-war conversion terms. An article he wrote for a British paper resonates today See pages 229-230.

We should run the risk of having to curtail ... credit to our industries merely because an investment boom in Wall Street had gone too far, or because of a sudden change in fashion amongst Americans towards foreign bond issues, or because banks in the Middle West had got tied up with their farmers or because of the horrid fact that every American had ten motor-cars and a wireless set in every room of every house had become known to manufacturers of these articles.

Mr Ahamed suggests that the depression that began, long before there were ten cars in every garage and wireless in every room, was exacerbated by the ineptitude of the successors to Mr Norman and in particular Mr Strong.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THEM THAT HAS GETS. The womens' basketball tournament selection show Monday turned into the usual hype about the usual suspects. I hold no brief for Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma, although his stock went up when he expressed some exasperation with the show giving the rest of the field ample material to get worked up to play his team. Credit for the most tone-deaf observation goes to Tennessee's Pat Summitt, who came off as a bit jaded, observing on national television and for the viewing pleasure of her team that today's youngsters don't play with the same sense of urgency (that's close to an exact quote, I don't tape these things) as previous iterations of Tennessee recruits did. I emphasize recruits. Somebody who has the opportunity to select players and offer them with opportunities has nobody to blame but herself when they don't perform as expected. Coach Summitt wouldn't last a week teaching gen eds at a mid-major.

As usually happens in the Them That Has Gets world of the womens' tournament (and as predicted here) the mid-majors got hosed.

Even in a year begging for an olive branch with a dearth of major-conference at-large candidates, only Virginia Commonwealth out of the Colonial got so much as a twig.

No offense to Georgia or Michigan State, but did schedules largely devoid of quality wins outside of conferences widely viewed to be, at best, treading water really merit at-large bids at the expense of Bowling Green and Illinois State? Ball State, a team that wasn't as good as Bowling Green over the course of the regular season, scores an upset against the Falcons in the conference title game and gets a No. 12 seed in the big show.

But Bowling Green, with its 15-1 conference record and regular-season title, didn't deserve a No. 11 seed?

Could Georgia go 15-1 in the MAC or could Michigan State go 15-3 in the Missouri Valley? Probably, but so what? Georgia also gets to recruit, travel and train with all the advantages inherent to an SEC athletic department. It had its chance to distinguish itself in both the conference regular season and tournament and didn't do it.

It's not the selection committee's fault that these conferences insist on conference tournaments that serve only to dilute their own product, but every once in a while, it wouldn't hurt to throw the little guys a bone when they earn it over four months.

It's amateur sports and it has nothing to do with money, so the revenue enhancement the tournaments offer, if any, shouldn't matter. (The two Mid-American tournaments are in Cleveland. Early in March. With the northwest winds blowing snow squalls in off Lake Erie.)

THE ECONOMISTS WILL BE RECEIVING RETENTION BONUSES. The management of the Kentucky state community and technical college system have decided to make all future faculty appointments on a short-term basis.

New hires to the system will be offered a series of three one-year contracts before having the opportunity to sign a two-year contract. Any exceptions to these short-term contracts must be approved by the system president.

The managers expect to be able to make more full-time appointments.[System president Michael] McCall also suggested that, as a result of eliminating tenure, the system may see a rise in the number of full-time faculty. Currently, he said, the economy has forced the institution to hire more adjunct and part-time faculty than he would prefer.The assertion is spin. Fluctuations in enrollment might give the management reason to not commit to long-term hires. With a more steady-state enrollment, the management is in a position to maintain a steady-state cohort of full time faculty, whether these are tenured or on renewable contracts. The article suggests that tenured appointments produce rigidities.

Richard A. Bean, chair of the KCTCS board, said the system would have greater hiring flexibility without the tenure system. As demand for instructors in various disciplines fluctuates, he said the system would be better able to make appropriate hiring decisions with faculty members on short-term contracts. Hypothetically illustrating his point, he used the example of having the ability to hire more Spanish instructors if demand for the language were great, and to retain a limited number of Latin instructors if there were little demand.

“Our objective is not to find ways to let people go, but to educate the people of this great commonwealth with flexibility,” said Bean, emphasizing that the regents had been discussing this matter well before Kentucky’s budget crisis, and the national economy, took a turn for the worse.

Again, readers are being spun. Retaining a limited number of Latin instructors is not inconsistent with a small number of tenured Latin specialists. Or perhaps a local Catholic college would be willing to be a subcontractor. Flexibility is almost always a code word for reducing commitments, whether to capital or to labor.

The dean at Anonymous Community gives the proposal a revise-and-resubmit with no presumption of acceptance.

In various forms – the adjunct trend, increased tenure requirements, ratcheted-up employee contributions to health insurance and retirement accounts – this has been the MO of higher ed in America for the last thirty years. Everybody at the table agrees to screw over the folks who aren't yet at the table. This satisfies everybody at the table, but it does so at the cost of long-term sustainability and intergenerational fairness. Rather than solving the problem, it postpones it with interest.

The Kentucky system is looking down the barrel of several decades in which some faculty have tenure, and some full-timers never will. There is simply no way for that not to result in high drama. The impact on shared governance alone is likely to be devastating.

The full post and the ensuing bull session merit your attention.

It's almost certainly true that doing away with tenure won't result in immediate short-term savings. If anything, it might actually cost a little in the short run, if prospective hires demand higher salaries to compensate for increased risk. (In the evergreen disciplines, I suspect that most prospective hires won't have the market power to make those threats stick, but it might happen in some niche programs.)

Part of running higher education like a business is making businesslike offers to prospective hires. That includes retention bonuses.

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE. Professor McCracken is in a good position to observe the end of the investment bankers' dominance in New York City.

There is evidence of hostility these days...against the hedge fund managers, banking executives, those who ran the likes of AIG, and guys like Bernie Madoff. This ad suggests that the wealthy are vain, self centered, irresponsible. Conspicuous consumption is now doubly conspicuous.

But is that the traditional snobbery of old money, or the reverse-snobbery of the class of knowledge workers that includes your Superintendent, particularly on curmudgeonly days? The ad in question features a Hollywood dad, possibly divorced. That's not determinative of a leveling influence at work.

The anthropological questions: could this hostility scale up into a more substantial class hostility? Will it be used by individuals to mandate their own departures from existing consumption patterns? Can something like shame be used by some people to comment on and constrain the behavior of others? Will this work?

I'm not sure a graffito on an advertisement is an indicator of a mood shift. The McDonald's digs at coffee snobs are also a small sample, but they could be indicative, although McDonald's is a good metaphor for the Third Worldization of the United States. I'd be more encouraged if I saw a restoration of the more modest expectations and attitudes of The America That Worked^(TM).

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. Hee.

Republicans captured the new mood of populism in the nation. Candidates like Mitt Romney, who now spoke with a southern twang and carried a pitchfork, asked why savers should bail out lenders and borrowers, why taxpayers should prop up bank directors and why houses should be expensive instead of affordable. Border control, which Obama had never properly addressed, also began to resonate with ordinary Americans amid the job shortage. The 2012 race looked close, but Mike Huckabee, running on the slogan "God help us", eventually pulled out a persuasive win.

During the next presidency, the economy finally recovered. The recession, deep as it was, had run its course. The new leaders, unfairly, claimed vindication for their policies of tax cuts and deregulation. The public, unfairly, believed them. Obama retired to Chicago, where he returned to teaching constitutional law, and liberalism's brief renewal, the dream of FDR reborn, slipped quietly away.

BEFORE SNORKELS AND PERISCOPES. The Confederacy floated the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. The H. L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy tells its story. Book Review N^o. 10 will be relatively short. Hunley was the second submarine built by a consortium including its namesake. The first, named Pioneer, was built in New Orleans in an attempt to lift the blockade there, and subsequently scuttled. The Navy raised it, made extensive surveys and records of it, and scrapped it. Hunley, which had the nickname Fish Boat, as it looked like a metal fish, was built in Mobile and subsequently transported overland to Charleston. The book suggests the crew passed out and subsequently suffocated for lack of oxygen after Hunley sank Housatonic.

The Confederacy might have had a third submarine operating in Hampton Roads, until a crew from the James River Blockading Squadron noticed the float supporting its snorkel and made fast a rope to the air supply line. That submarine has not yet been recovered. The Navy might also have had a submarine, although its first operable submersible was not ready until 1866.

The book relates an instructive story about changing strategic interests. In the 1850s, the European powers adopted a convention banning privateering. The United States, with a relatively small navy, opted out. Come the Rebellion, the United States sought membership in the convention, which would have obligated the European powers to capture or sink the numerous Confederate commerce raiders operating as privateers. (The submersibles were also privateers, but presumably not intended for an early Battle of the Atlantic.)

It's less good with its references to Jules Verne. Verne has sympathies for various underdogs, including Rebel blockade runners, and he might have learned of some of the Rebel efforts to build an electrically powered submersible. (I am not making this up, there are several references to electromagnetic engines in the book.) It would not be too far a stretch for Captain Nemo to have put his great fortune to adaptation of Ruhmkorff's apparatus shortly after the Rebellion. But only somebody not familiar with Verne's work could pen this.

Verne, after all, presents his novel's protagonist, Captain Nemo, as a bona fide misanthrope. Cynically and cowardly, inside his submarine boat the Nautilus, he revels in sneaking up on his prey, conventional surface ships -- and for no good reason, sending them to Davy Jones's locker.

The quote is from page 48 of Hunley. The ships Nautilus rams in Twenty Thousand Leagues are, apart from the U.S. Navy ship that fires on it, British. Verne is French. Captain Nemo's ancestry is revealed in Mysterious Island. Nautilus is an allegory for Hunley, including the resentment of the gentry against an unsympathetic occupier.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS. Ball State's womens' basketball team defeated Bowling Green in the Mid-American tournament in beautiful Cleveland. Monday night, we shall see whether Bowling Green's regular season record is still good enough to qualify for the national tournament, at the expense of one of the so-called bubble teams from one of the so-called power conferences (it's amateur sport and it has nothing to do with money) or if the emerging parity in the Mid-American means only the tournament winner gets the phone call.

There's a back story about Ball State's former coach Tracy Roller, who resigned after the 2008 season but returned to watch the team on Senior Night.

SEEKING AMBROSE BIERCE. If he were alive, he might define accountability as taking time away from doing the things you're supposed to be doing to explain to people who might not understand what you're doing that you're doing the things you're supposed to be doing.

I'm pleased to report that the external reviewers of the economics and physics programs at Northern Illinois told headquarters both departments were doing a great deal of work, effectively, with the few resources they had.

I'm less pleased to discover, via Newmark's Door, that some managers see the accountability fetish as a feature.

Communicate more, in order to meet less. Be proactive in your communication. Don't wait for them to call a meeting. Tell them what's going on. Produce regular reports. Don't "promise" to produce regular reports -- just produce them. Let them listen in on some of your day to day chatter. If you have daily standups, bring the manager in. Stop baffling them with technical mumbo jumbo. Feed them edible slices of information. Walk them through it in bite-sized chunks. Give them documentation tasks to keep them feeling important. Give them communication tasks. Draw pictures for them to stick on the wall of their office.

I believe the barnyard epithet about the steer not getting fatter any faster if it's weighed more frequently applies here. The one management fad that hasn't made its way from the private sector, where middle managers who existed to be given documentation to feel important went in the late 1980s downsizings, into higher education, has been the proliferation of middle managers.

HOLD MAIN LINE AT LINCOLN JUNCTION. Despite springlike conditions, the Chicago, Peoria, and Southern had coal and manufactured goods to haul.


The Peoria station looks like something from the Dual Monarchy, although you won't see coal trains like this east of Halifax or west of the Bug River.


Today's crew included lots of people from the Fox Valley club, who know how to move trains. They'd pulled all the interchange tracks on a previous run, leaving this two-horse hitch to return from Springfield to Peoria.


The CP&S is a Soo Line property, hence the unusual diesels within bribing distance of the State House.

THEY BOUGHT IT. They can name it.

As news of the name change was posted Thursday at suntimes.com, a number of readers wrote in to grouse: "It's all about money!"

Which it is. As it should be.

Naming the 36-year-old skyscraper Sears Tower to begin with, essentially creating the world's tallest store sign, was all about money, too.

It's not like anybody's talking about renaming the Chicago River the Citibank River.

Which for the record, Mayor Daley, we would oppose.

We've come down in the world, if a notorious recipient of bailout money is the high briber for naming rights to the Chicago River.

Which we would still call the Chicago River.

Just take a look at the dozens of suburban places popularly known by names that don't technically exist anymore - the Rosemont Horizon, Palwaukee Airport or the East-West tollway. And there's still an active, angry group protesting the name change from Marshall Field's to Macy's.

And we have more to look forward to.

Companies spend millions of dollars on naming rights for certain buildings in hopes that repeated name use will help its marketing efforts. But the plan can backfire, especially when landmarks are involved, [senior advertising executive Bob] Killian said.

"This will be a blip compared to when Wrigley Field gets renamed," he added.

There isn't enough lipstick at Avon to cover that pig.

ENABLING BAD BEHAVIOR.

A Chicago Tribune editorial calls out the city fathers of Schaumburg, otherwise known as Scumburg, or as yuppie hell.

Schaumburg recently deactivated a red-light camera near the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg because ... it was doing too good of a job.
From November to January, the camera caught about 10,000 violators and the village slapped them with $100 tickets, mostly for turning right on red without making a full stop. But that brought a blizzard of complaints from drivers, and some threatened to stop shopping at the mall if the camera remained in place.
Village Manager Ken Fritz said that enforcing the right-turn-on-red law wasn't improving public safety and the village wanted to be "as friendly to customers as we are to villagers."
So the camera goes, and the scofflaws get a free pass.

It's always amusing to read Illinoisans taking other Illinoisans to task for being bad drivers. Here goes.

This is the wrong idea. The camera proved its worth. Clearly, a lot people are making illegal turns there, and that's a dangerous thing to do. The village is caving because it fears the economic consequences of enforcing the law. And what are the consequences if a driver whipping around a turn smacks a pedestrian or another car?

As if there's anybody walking around there anyway. Like other yuppie hells, the area is thin on sidewalks. Illinois pedestrians quickly learn to practice defensive walking, as a walk light is no protection against a cell-phone-jawing, to-the-left looking driver who treats the red light as reason to make a cursory check for oncoming cars and roll into the crosswalk, possibly to stop there.

The self-absorbed pedestrians one encounters in California who attempt to walk and text-message at the same time are still rare in Illinois. There's probably a tasteless pool somewhere on the frequency of fatalities involving pedestrian texters and right-on-red crosswalk infringers.

It's doubtful that many shoppers would stop going to the mall because of the camera. Motorists have a way of figuring out where the speed traps and traffic cameras are—and they act accordingly. They slow down. They stop at the light.

Maybe. Or perhaps they become a danger around Oak Brook or Old Orchard instead.

To make the story more amusing, consider Chicago, where there are lots of red light cameras (not that the streets are any safer for pedestrians) but relatively few police cruiser cameras, and the police don't mind.

Contrast that with Mayor Richard Daley's enthusiasm for other types of video. Chicago now has some 2,250 surveillance cameras to detect criminal conduct in public places. By 2016, Daley promised last month, Chicago will have one on every corner.
The city has also installed red-light cameras at some 132 intersections, with another 330 planned. So what exactly is different about those cameras? Well, they are trained on the citizenry, not on the police. What's sauce for the goose seems to be regarded as a dubious liquid substance when proposed for the gander. The city is less eager to capture video evidence if it may expose wrongdoing by its own law enforcement agents.
But the rest of us might want to keep unsleeping electronic eyes on the people with guns and badges. A city with a good police department can gain a lot from squad-car video cameras. A city with a bad one can gain even more.

Chicago? Bad cops? The purpose of the police is the preservation of disorder?

MORE FUN WITH TRAINS. Going Underground alerted readers to an upcoming open day at the London Transport Museum's Acton property.

The Underground cars aren't quite as exotic as a trolley diner in a converted brewery, but they have character. I hope the weather cooperated.

A subsequent post reported on the open day itself. This modular layout is evidently a retrospective look at New York.


The high-railers have a number of North American transit cars to choose from, including recently issued Spam Cans in Mercury Green and Croydon Cream with Swamp Holly Orange lining. The next stop will be Belmont, change for Ravenswood.

The post noted a long queue of visitors. Perhaps that's a manifestation of the recession, or possibly a mood shift. I went to the February swap meet at the DuPage County Fairgrounds. Around noon, when I left, there was a line out the door and halfway back to the parking lot. Traders told me that traffic was up but buying down.

THE NEXT GENERATION OF ECONOMISTS. We've completed judging of the entries in the Economics Concepts Regional Poster Contest.


View all the winning and honorable mention entries.

NO MORE BUBBLES TO POP? Michael Barone recommends some reading, and contemplates recent history.

If you want to read a very short book on how we got into the financial crisis, I don't think you could do better than John B. Taylor's Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Taylor argues persuasively that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long in 2002-05 and that "government programs designed to promote home ownership, a worthwhile goal but overdone in retrospect," together with the credit that was plentiful because of unduly low interest rates created the housing bubble.

"The rapidly rising housing prices and the resulting low delinquency rates likely threw the underwriting programs off track and misled many people." The ratings agencies also bear some responsibility for creating the toxic assets that clog the banks and other financial institutions. "The ratings agencies underestimated the risk of these [mortgage-backed] securities because of a lack of competition, poor accountability, or, most likely, an inherent difficulty in assessing risk due to complexity." He also mentions, rather fleetingly, the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in flooding the marketplace with mortgage-backed securities; his account can usefully be augmented by the works of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison.

I'm going to add that book to my list of things to acquire and read. There should be no problem meeting the fifty this year. For Book Review N^o. 9 I offer Michael Lewis's Panic, which suggests it's 20 years in the making. Mr Lewis collects a number of columns, some humorous, some instructive. One column helped me understand the tranching of mortgages in mortgage-backed securities (although I'm still not completely clear on whether specific mortgages provide collateral for specific securities, or whether the principal and interest are commingled in backing the entire convex combination of securities). The book ends with a series of columns on the recently-ended real estate bubble. But before that came the dot.com bubble (but for the campaign against terrorism might the real estate bubble have come sooner), preceded immediately by the Asian Tiger bubble, and a decade before that came the portfolio insurance bubble and the Crash of 1987.

Thus the story of my life: to come of age during the experiment against reality that was the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to spend young adulthood and middle age detached from the experiment against reality called upscale indulgence, where the glamour careers were hustling real estate or internet startups or derivative securities. Perhaps I can grow old watching the restoration of The America That Worked^(TM).

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

AGAIN. This time in Germany.

Albertville, Germany.
Getty photo courtesy The Daily Mail.

RISK MANAGEMENT. The bad mortgage outbreak is concentrated in a few states.

More than half of the nation's foreclosures last year took place in 35 counties, a sign that the financial crisis devastating the national economy may have begun with collapsing home loans in only a few corners of the country.

Those corners are notorious subsidy recipients.

A few of the 35 counties leading the foreclosure boom are in already-distressed areas around Detroit and Cleveland. But most are clustered in places such as Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, South Florida and Washington, where home values shot up dramatically in the first half of the decade, then began to crumble.

Let us count the ways: subsidized water projects protecting southwesterners from any reason to conserve water, or not develop a desert in the first place; generous public pensions that make retirement to sunny places feasible; years of protectionism for heavy industries.

The knock-on effects will be widespread.

The Obama administration on Wednesday detailed a $75 billion plan to keep more homeowners from slipping into foreclosure by helping them refinance loans or reduce their monthly payments. But that effort could face political challenges because most of the foreclosure problem has been so concentrated in a few areas, says Brookings Institution researcher Alan Mallach.

Perhaps public awareness that a few are attempting to use the state as an attempt to live at the expense of many informs those tea party protests.

HABIT PERSISTENCE. I still catch trains at North Western Station, and the White Sox still play at Comiskey Park, and ownership change notwithstanding, it's still the Sears Tower.

CAUSE TO BE CHEERFUL. The Mid-American Conference recognizes Northern Illinois.

Northern Illinois' 380 student-athletes in 17 sports posted the highest grade point average in the league for the 2007-08 academic year with a mark of 3.04.

The Huskies' 2007-08 GPA was well in front of the 3.024 posted by Ball State's 420 student-athletes in 18 sports of 3.024. Central Michigan ranked third at 3.019 while Western Michigan came in fourth, percentage points back at 3.016.

The Institutional Academic Achievement Award is presented to the Mid-American Conference member whose student-athletes post the highest overall GPA in a given academic year. From 1994 to 2007, the award was based on cumulative grade point average. Beginning in 2008, the award is based on an annual GPA comparison to better reflect the academic performance of an institution's athletics program in a given academic year.

[Senior Associate Athletic Director Francine] St. Clair, who leads Northern Illinois' Student-Athlete Academic Support Services (SAASS) unit, noted that in addition to the change from a cumulative total to a single academic year, this is the first time that the league office requested raw data from the schools and managed the calculations, as opposed to each school submitting its own GPA totals.

You don't suppose some of the athletic departments engaged in creative accounting?

The basketball teams will be returning to class with the rest of the university on Monday.

THE FORTY YEAR BRAIN DRAIN. Trains for America invites readers to giggle at some high-speed-rail-skepticism from The Detroit News (motto: all the news that's fit to deliver on Wednesday and Saturday).

No matter where the high-speed rail is eventually located, the concern is that taxpayers will never see the end of their transit investment. Mass transit systems never pay for themselves.

Well, fine. I was surprised to find so many gravel or unimproved roads not too far from Detroit. It must be that the Infrastructure Fairy never got around to paving them, or perhaps she, like just about everybody else in Michigan who had any ambition, went someplace else.

The serious point: some infrastructure projects, including transportation systems, pay for themselves indirectly, by making possible sufficient economic activity that people bear the taxes.

Perhaps there's no point in building a high-speed line to Detroit, as there are going to be fewer people wanting to travel there. And perhaps a high-speed line to Grand Rapids is a regressive transfer, catering to parvenu Chicagoans with lakefront property in Harbor Country. (The old money is in Door County, on the windward shore of Lake Michigan.)

If the Hotelling Principle of exhaustible resources has any effect though, some alternatives to driving make sense.

The rapid increase in oil prices last year directly contributed to the economic downturn by gutting the disposable income of households around America. This might not have been hugely problematic, had households been able to continue borrowing to pay for consumption, but in combination with the credit crunch the effect was deadly. It was deadly, note, because Americans were not able to rapidly and easily substitute away from driving, thanks to the country’s settlement patterns and inattention to transit.

Meanwhile, the decline in gasoline prices that has taken place since July has been a major source of economic stimulus. Had prices not fallen so dramatically, consumption would have fallen by considerably more. Still worse, authorities might have been more reluctant to use fiscal and monetary stimulus, given the threat of ongoing inflation.

But this is a temporary respite. It’s worth pointing out that the most significant collapse in global economic activity since World War II barely managed to push oil into the $30 per barrel range. Even now, as economic outlooks remain dim, prices have edged back up into the neighborhood of $50 per barrel. Given the collapse in new exploration and investment that has accompanied the drop in oil prices, one doesn’t have to be a genius to predict the path of oil prices once recovery begins. And the rise in oil prices will be a drag on growth.

That drag will affect railroads, including electrified ones. The Principle of Substitutes is one of those economic laws of conservation that contribute to our reputation as the dismal science.

TROLLEY SPARKS. The Milwaukee School of Engineering has a model railroad club with an HO walk-in layout in the student center. As part of Model Railroad Month, the club hosts an exhibition of other model railroads. The college has converted some of the old Blatz brewery into public space, including enough room for The Milwaukee Light Engineering Society to offer train rides.


That's the second of the two trolley dining cars to come out of Cold Spring Shops. I'm informed that the association has a second duplex unit.

Across the street is another Turnverein (not to be confused with the still functioning Turnverein on Fourth Street that's better known for its fish fry than for its still-in-existence sport program). I must confess to some unfamiliarity with this part of Milwaukee despite having once lived there. The student center at Milwaukee School of Engineering includes a gallery of oil paintings of steel mills. A return trip is in order.


Sunday's weather was not conducive to driving, and it was making a mess of the airline schedules. I wonder if any of the people booked on that 8 am plane to Chicago got on the first train of the morning and took a cab from Glenview. (And what's up with the "closed" 7.12 to Montego Bay? I'm waiting for the 11.10 train.) The trains were warm, full, and close to time or on time. No logs, nap time.


The Hiawatha service might not be as frequent or as fast as the Acela Express or the Neubaustrecke. It's one that observers on the coast, as well as European visitors, ought be aware of.

With very few exceptions, city-to-city travel in the US by rail is, if available at all, generally slow and inconvenient outside of the Northeast. Visitors from other countries are shocked, given the large number of trips that are within a 100-400-mile distance but for which travelers are generally forced to go by air or personal car.

We're making some changes in the Chicago area. The Milwaukee service, although lavish by Amtrak standards, is dramatically reduced compared to, say, 1949, with competing 75 or 80 minute expresses on The Milwaukee Road and Chicago and North Western, and hourly limiteds on The North Shore Line.

MARKING OFF. The last day of class before Spring Break offered spring-like conditions.


It's a much more cheerful beginning to a week of recuperation than was the case a year ago.

RESTORING THE VALLEY 400.

It's on the Passenger Rail wish list.

1. All-rail passenger service from Chicago to Green Bay.
2. More than one train each day out of Chicago to each and every route end, including the long ones.

I will weigh in on the multiple long distance trains another day.

Green Bay Press-Gazette file photo.

Today, I wish to report that Green Bay has passenger rail advocates.

Passenger rail service fell into decline in the United States not because it wasn't economically feasible but because the federal government forced it into decline, said Ray Ash of Green Bay, an 83-year-old railroad buff who worked most of his life for the Railway Express Agency.

"The government was all gung-ho on building an interstate highway system during the Eisenhower administration," Ash said. "And politicians today would rather fund the airlines."

Often that airline funding included payment for delivering the mail and express. It's a lot easier for a train to make drop shipments.

And somebody else understands what the trains could do.

Although the United States has fallen behind Europe in the development of state-of-the-art rail technology, even 50-year-old technology could get the job done, according to Ash, who still has old passenger train timetables.

Train service in the 1950s allowed travelers to get from Green Bay to Milwaukee in a little over 2½ hours and from Green Bay to Chicago in about four hours, Ash said. That's not much slower than the same trip by car, but without the headaches of driving and finding a place to park.

With most of the freight trains now running by way of Duplainville, much of the onetime Air Line between North Milwaukee and Fond du Lac, which would require serious upgrading for passenger rail, could be operated as a 110 mph railroad. The Valley 400 used to take 1:15 to Fond du Lac and 2:20 to Milwaukee (yes, you can drive it a little faster than that, if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket) and 3:50 to Chicago (if you're driving, and you leave Milwaukee less than two hours before your appointment, the chances of you being late are nearly 100 percent).

THE NAME OF THIS MONSTROUS ABSURDITY IS ORIGINAL SIN. Perhaps some of the new readers of Atlas Shrugged will take the time to read and understand The Speech and whether life is imitating art.

It's the ubiquity of the nature of Original Sin in cultural traditions that intrigues me. In Genesis, it is the acquisition of the knowledge of right and wrong. The Greeks unbundled the myth, with Prometheus punished for bringing fire and Pandora's box containing all the difficulties.

The Native Americans may or may not have legends about dangerous gifts in the earth. Last week it was uranium in the Southwest. This week it is coal in the Northern Plains.

Some members of the tribe warn that developing coal would betray the tribe's duty to protect the earth. Sweet Medicine, a mythic Cheyenne prophet, predicted centuries ago that digging up the "black rock" would rob the tribe of its identity, they say.

Some people have a better appreciation for tradeoffs.

Tribal values are rooted in protecting the land, yet their resources often seem like the only path out of poverty, says Garrit Voggesser, senior manager of the National Wildlife Federation's tribal lands conservation program. "Tribes have tough choices to make ... between their cultural and historical legacy and extraction," he says.

The article offers a lot of material for the ethnographer. The dilemma is not a new one: imagine the English lords of the early 19th Century who insisted that the new railways put their trains in cuttings and then cover the cuttings in the line of sight of the manor so that those tradition-destroying machines would not intrude on their traditions. They came around only much later. It wasn't until the 1930s that the Great Western Railway got around to putting the addresses of the lords on their locomotives.

THEY'RE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON. Democratic Revolt May Slow Obama Agenda.

Although only a handful of moderate and conservative Democrats abandoned their leaders during party-line votes on the economic stimulus law (PL 111-5), the group of vulnerable Democrats branded the omnibus spending bill as a budget buster and questioned whether the mortgage bill would raise interest rates on average home-owners and cause some struggling homeowners to rush to bankruptcy.

The defections could cause heartburn for Democratic leaders charged with ushering through Obama's three biggest priorities: a health care overhaul, a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions and his fiscal 2010 budget blueprint. The president might also have trouble winning their votes for an anticipated second financial bailout package.

Better that the mainstream press discover what I've been suggesting for themselves than that they be taken by surprise.

ECONOMICS ISN'T MATHEMATICAL POLITICS. Two economists with different world views offer similar comments on the new president's efforts to implement all sorts of new policies and investors' reactions.

Michael Boskin advised the elder President Bush.

It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.

He notes some proposals that would produce efficiency gains.

To be fair, specific parts of the president's budget are admirable and deserve support: increased means-testing in agriculture and medical payments; permanent indexing of the alternative minimum tax and other tax reductions; recognizing the need for further financial rescue and likely losses thereon; and bringing spending into the budget that was previously in supplemental appropriations, such as funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The specific problems, however, far outweigh the positives.

Most of those problems involve increases in marginal tax rates.

Paul Krugman, an unofficial advisor to Democrats who some on Team Obama would have preferred to make him an official advisor, offers a similar evaluation.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

Thus, in a recent interview Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, tried to make a distinction between the “basic inherent economic value” of troubled assets and the “artificially depressed value” that those assets command right now. In recent transactions, even AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities have sold for less than 40 cents on the dollar, but Mr. Geithner seems to think they’re worth much, much more.

I've been doing some work on those AAA mortgage-backed securities. A number of them are variations on the floater and inverse floater I found so puzzling. Instead of making a convex combination of two bonds that uses the principal and income of one bond as a collateral, make a convex combination of m bonds that use the principal and interest of n mortgages, where n is several orders of magnitude larger than m, as the collateral. The convex combination of interest rates on the m bonds must equal the average interest rate over n mortgages. Go to the head of the class if you deduce that there must be some part of that convex combination that offers a very high yield with an almost certain risk of default. On the other hand, some fraction of those mortgages will be current. Those payments enable the AAA-rated part of the convex combination to stay current. Let the fraction that is current decrease, and the AAA-rated part becomes just so much junk.

(As an aside, it's pathetic for the Treasury Secretary to assert that the assets have an inherent value that is somehow different from the market price. Let the starving artists make those claims for their paintings. If he's so sure of that value, why are we even having this conversation? He and a few close friends could buy them at the current prices and hold them until they recover. That takes the rest of us off the hook.)

TWO MADE FREE THROWS. DeKalb High School is home to The (Missed) Shot Heard 'Round the World. The state basketball tournament is another matter. First, Darius McNeal made two free throws. Then North Aurora's Jeffrey Lewis made two more. The local paper offers commentary.

The story once again centered around Darius McNeal and the free-throw line.

Only this time, there wasn’t the same heart-warming conclusion.

There certainly were tears again, but this time they were all about the end of one of the most memorable seasons in DeKalb basketball history.

Because it wasn’t about the wins and losses this season, although the Barbs only lost two games all year at home. It was about something a little more important.

When McNeal headed to the free-throw line with his team down one point and 26 seconds left in a Class 4A DeKalb Regional semifinal Wednesday night, coach Dave Rohlman had a smile on his face.

Because the last time McNeal had taken such important free throws, he purposely missed them at Milwaukee Madison.

If the outcomes were preordained, we wouldn't have to play the games.

If the DeKalb - Milwaukee Madison series continues, with alternating home games, the 2009-2010 game will be in DeKalb. Maybe an opportunity to fill the Convocation Center?

AN INCOMPLETE UNDERSTANDING. We have works such as Ideas Have Consequences and The Burden of Bad Ideas to make the argument that bad things are not completely accidental. Now comes Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi, whose The Great Derangement is a visit to the halls of Congress, the churches of Revelations, and the imaginations of the September 11 was an inside job conspiracy buffs. This Book Review N^o. 8 suggests that Mr Taibbi has insufficient grounding in the ideas he claims to be exploring to be able to properly criticize them. (Put another way, his Rolling Stone colleague P. J. O'Rourke, who would have different reason to criticize each of these collectivities, would be both funnier and more philosophically consistent.)

Mr Taibbi grew up in Russia, something he reveals toward the end of the book. Russia is the kind of place where a person can intuit the tragic vision (cornices fall off of buildings, drunken doctors pass out and patients die on the operating table). He therefore had a useful dodge when his church trainers beseeched him to speak in tongues: your Texas ten-step fundamentalist preacher isn't likely to recognize Russian poetry. There are other funny moments in the book.

It's the logic, the basis for a sustained intellectual argument, that's missing. When he gets into Christian logic-chopping (these behaviors invite demons, these behaviors are contrary to the commandments) he misses the parallel to the same sort of "anxious procedural discussions" (see page 122) that make up Congressional hearings or 9/11 Truth manifestos or faculty meetings. In all such cases, the reason the logic-chopping is frequently content-free is the absence of any meaningful standard of argumentation. The fundamentalists are too sure of salvation, the truthers too muddled by relativism, the members of Congress too corrupt to bother.

It's also a sense of history that's missing. The author has worked with members of Congress, including the recently-reviewed David Sirota on Bernie Sanders's staff. He may be right about Our President (just another establishment pretty face), and he's not fond of Rahm Emanuel, who, I learned, is brother to a Hollywood figure he's also not fond of. But I digress. The derangement of the antiwar left he contemplates is one he characterizes as a struggle for a "liberalism" whose roots are in the Vietnam-era war protests. Talk about playing into Rush Limbaugh's hands: the culture-war themes he has such fun with (feminazis, long-haired-maggot-infested-dope-smoking-FM types, environmentalist wackos) are precisely the same extreme left forces that are at odds with standard-issue liberalism, which is really technocracy styled as "progressive" by other means. That technocracy includes confidence in countercyclical fiscal policy, targeted tax cuts and credits, selective service, and rents for the court intellectuals. P. J. O'Rourke would not be fooled. But his writings show evidence of having taken time to understand the ideas first.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

QUESTIONING THE GERMAN MODEL. George Leef of the Pope Center suggests that academic research is a smoke-screen to conceal pleasant make-work.

Behind the policy of giving professors light teaching loads so they’ll have time for research is the assumption that they’re all brimming with original thinking that will expand society’s knowledge base. They just need the time to do the research and writing. That assumption, however, is mistaken, on two counts. First, many professors don’t have any important contributions to make. As Dean Edward Morris writes in The Lindenwood Model (which I reviewed here), we have “too much research chasing too few good ideas.” Most academic research is remarkably trivial and is done not to expand knowledge but merely because it’s necessary for tenure and promotion.

The second count is that it is possible for a professor to teach a full load of classes and still find time to do research. Under those conditions, the research is sure to be work that he or she really thinks is important. A good example is Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom, who has written several books, most recently a startling re-examination of FDR’s policies, New Deal or Raw Deal, despite the fact that he teaches three courses per semester.

While the price tag for a college education has been going up rapidly, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reasons why costs keep skyrocketing. Instead, most policymakers have been wringing their hands over ways to tap into more public money to help offset those rising costs. O’Donnell’s paper suggests that they ought to be looking at the research model’s impact on costs. Education is labor-intensive and most schools are employing far more professors than necessary to teach the undergraduates. Let’s not prop up that inefficient model with increased public subsidization.

His article summarizes a Texas Public Policy Foundation position paper that questions the value of using tax money for research universities. It raises all the usual objections: the research professors teach only small seminars, most of the research is pointless, the graduate students are doing all the teaching and the laboratory scutwork, not developing their own research skills (I suppose it's churlish to point out that it's hard to question both a research emphasis and a neglect of research skills and keep a straight face), the senior professors aren't doing enough research (I suppose it's churlish to point out that the committee work that displaces research time is often work preparing reports requested by the public officials who think quantification is equivalent to accountability), and the cost of providing a degree is higher as a consequence of all that time going to efforts other than teaching.

But toward the beginning of the report comes this.

The most prestigious universities selectively admit smart students, so they produce smart graduates, but too often add little value in between.

And your solution is? Require the smart students to attend universities that don't have research prestige? They already have that option. Regular readers know why they don't exercise it.

That noted, I want to alert readers to a passage in the initial issue of the American Economic Association's new American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

First, the editorial process has become too slow. It typically takes several months to get a fiirst decision on a manuscript, but since most papers are being rejected, it means that it can take years for a paper to be published. Second, the revision process is often protracted, with multiple rounds of revisions: it adds to the time until publication, and while it sometimes improves a paper's exposition, the improvements are not always necessarily worth the time it takes to both authors and referees. Third, in part because of the first two reasons, those who do not need official stamps of approval publish much less in journals, particularly outside the "top five". This reduces the value of the journals as stamps of approval.

Perhaps there's reason to reconsider the nature of scholarship. It's not pure waste: the world continues to offer new challenges that old models don't necessarily understand. It's not pure gain: that the process frustrates participants who could benefit from having their work available to others suggests possible efficiency improvements.

SHORTER COLD SPRING SHOPS. From the American Mathematical Society.

Complete control of [Complex Adaptive Systems] is impossible.

(Via William Polley.)

WHAT MOTIVATES TRAITORS? This spring's day of 24 establishes new lows for implausibility. Dave Barry's summary of the five o'clock hour only scratches the surface.

Last week, Jack, aided by highly competent FBI agent Renee, hatched a plan to use the innocent and trusting Marika as bait to capture her evil boyfriend African Subplot Dubaku. This plan was thwarted by the FBI mole, who turned out to be -- get ready for a shock -- Sean. No, we didn't really know who Sean was, either. He's just another in a long random line of 24 moles, hired under the federal government's Hire-a-Mole program. Sean had the police apprehend Jack and Renee, which means Marika, like pretty much everybody who trusts Jack when he has a plan, is now in danger.

Meanwhile President Woman President -- under the protection of Bill, who has replaced the Secret Service, which consists almost entirely of rogue agents -- is at the hospital, where her husband, Henry, is about to undergo dangerous but necessary surgery to remove his Screen Actors Guild membership. A new subplot was introduced in the form of the first couple's estranged annoying daughter, Olivia, who was fetched, blast-from-the-past style, by Aaron, who as you may recall was last seen shacking up with former First Ladies Martha Logan.

The plot this year involves an African Big Man whose economically irrelevant, as far as I can tell, country has committed enough human rights violations to warrant more aggressive handling than Serbia. The Big Man, however, brings his praetorian guard to Washington, D.C., to storm the White House, and take Madame President hostage. Before that, he's managed to buy off substantial numbers of influential government officials (does his country really have more boodle than Illinois?) and he's conniving with some businessman who is awaiting delivery of some useful item, possibly from that otherwise economically irrelevant country.

The ability of a different crop of bad guys to so thoroughly penetrate the U.S. government in each of these episodes bothers me. It's not the extent of the corruptibility, mind you. I'd think bad guys from countries with nuclear weapons or substantial oil reserves would be able to outbid the corruptible.

The role of these shadowy rogue-ruling-class types never makes sense either. Jack Bauer's brother is part of a small body of individuals who were pulling President Logan's strings, for reasons never spelled out. The Bauer brothers' father is either part of this body or a rival to this body, also for reasons never spelled out. The African Big Man also has allies in what appears to be part of the private sector, again, for no obvious reason.

I suppose I keep watching for the character development. Renee, the tough but moralistic FBI agent, has developed a better understanding of what's necessary in the last two hours.

I WARNED YOU. Me, late last year.

Emil Jones, Mike Madigan, Rod Blagojevich :: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama.

Newsweek, today.

Some White House aides have begun to grumble privately that the president has a Pelosi problem. In some ways, says a senior Obama official, "dealing with Democrats has been tougher than dealing with Republicans." (The official, like other White House and congressional sources quoted in this article, asked not to be named so he could speak candidly.)

All this, against a background of 3,000 points of dashed hopes and lost change. We have much to look forward to.

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Atlantic Blog is too gentle with school administrators who object to charter schools recruiting the better students from their systems.

When did schools get an entitlement to "the best students", stuck in dangerous, life choking environments with time servers passing as teachers? When did children become the property of the government?

We have school choice. It comes bundled with home ownership. Public policies that provide additional liquidity in the market for schools, including charter schools and vouchers, are potential Pareto improvements.

QUADRATIC FORMS. Today is the third Square Root Day of the decade. I wasn't aware people watched out for such things.

On Saturday of next week, Pi Day will be transcended at about 1600 hours.

AN EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY TO DEFUND BIG OIL. There was a global-warming-inspired protest of the Capitol's coal-fired power plant today, which prompted the usual snarking from the usual quarters about Old Man Winter having a sense of humor.

I'd prefer to address the substance. Crude oil is currently cheap, mostly because of the worldwide recession. Periods of low prices are not the best time to talk about developing substitutes. On the other hand, getting the oil ministers of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia used to permanently low prices for their primary exports appeals.

As a short-term measure, import substitutions from our undeveloped reserves make sense. Without any stimulus money, an infrastructure improvement has kept DeKalb County construction workers busy and a refinery near the Illinois River will soon be receiving oil from Canadian tar sands.

That's insufficient benefit in some calculations.

Alberta's oil production ensures that Canada is trashing its own environment, and is further from meeting its Kyoto commitments than any other country that has ratified the treaty. Its government has no intention of closing the Alberta tar patch. Let's hope Obama jumps the right way when he meets Canadian PM Stephen Harper today, and ensures that this industry becomes impossible to sustain.

And the resources employed in tar-sand oil have opportunity costs.

Both the United States and Canada have a tremendous supply of clean, renewable energy sources - sources that won't contribute to global warming, harm public health or destroy the environment. An investment in clean energy would boost our economies and create much-needed lasting, sustainable jobs in both of our countries.

Perhaps so. There's a lot of capital looking for something to do. What do the financial markets know that the government doesn't?

But as bad as these folks think oil from tar sands is, coal is worse.

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. When I testified against the proposed Kingsnorth power plant, I estimated that in its lifetime it would be responsible for the extermination of about 400 species - its proportionate contribution to the number that would be committed to extinction if carbon dioxide rose another 100 ppm.

That article refers to Britain's relatively small merry-go-round trains. Heck, the Union Pacific probably kills that many species in a week of hauling low-sulfur Powder River coal. (Never mind that you really wouldn't want to farm the Powder River Basin, or the tar sands region, particularly if water is priced at its opportunity cost).

And Our President is part of the problem.

Sadly, President Obama may be part of the faith brigade. During the election campaign last year, he was quoted telling the people of Michigan that "you can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the USA and make it work."

We could get that electricity by splitting atoms.

You're right. Don't go there.

In a Dine Creation Story, the people were given a choice of two yellow powders. They chose the yellow dust of corn pollen, and were instructed to leave the other yellow powder-uranium-in the soil and never to dig it up. If it were taken from the ground, they were told, a great evil would come.

Let's return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when that corn came up if the rain gods weren't displeased, and when a forty year old was a rare and venerable elder.

We deserve better than romanticism.

Ojibwe legends speak of a time when our people will have a choice between two paths: one path is well worn and scorched, but the second path is not well traveled and it is green.

And Gitchee Gumee never gives up her dead.

And while the greenies cavil, the oil ministers sit on their reserves, and wait to strike when the economic recovery comes, as it will.

IT USED TO BE BY GEOGRAPHY. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association now seeds its basketball tournaments. In some of the sectionals, the usual suspects emerge, e.g. Eau Claire Memorial, where the Bennett brothers got their coaching start, is still among the strong teams in the Marshfield sectional (north of the Milwaukee Road all the way to Canada), and Oshkosh North and onetime tournament regular Neenah still show up in the Oshkosh sectional. The north side of Milwaukee still provides a tough field (historically, Rufus King, banned this year, North Division, Milwaukee Lincoln, and Milwaukee Washington had to joust for one Madison slot out of this sectional). It's now the Al McGuire Sectional, and with the merger of the independent schools, Milwaukee Marquette High is among the favorites. Milwaukee Hamilton rates a 2-seed, which means the traditional game against Pulaski followed by the winner of the Bay View - South Division game is so much history.

INSTEAD OF CONCEALED CARRY. The Northern Star website is broken today, which prevents me linking to today's headline, about undercover police officers enrolled in classes. These officers have had specific training, and they pay tuition and take exams with everyone else. There are sufficiently many veterans and twenty- and thirty-something students here that the signature of an undercover officer will be difficult to pick up. Illinois Carry has some coverage, and the DeKalb Daily Chronicle article has provoked extensive discussion, which, as often happens on its public forums, has degenerated into name-calling.

HOME COURT HEROES. DeKalb and Milwaukee Madison are guests of the Milwaukee Bucks.

With the nation embroiled in a economic recession and professional sports figures seemingly being roasted daily – turning the sports pages into a police blotter – this story pulled at everyone’s heart. It hit all the right chords for DeKalb principal Lindsey Hall and reminded her what is good about sports and her student-athletes.

“Two things stand out about the story,” Hall said. “The team realizes everything came about because another young man lost his mother. We’ve continued to show compassion for him. The other thing is that when the team came back from the game they didn’t tell anyone what happened. I received a fax from [Milwaukee Madison] coach Womack about it. No players or coaches came back and said what happened.

“It was simply a part of what they do, how they act and how they behave. I’ve been an educator for 20 years and have a number of highlights. But this has to be right at the top. I couldn’t be prouder.”

PERSISTENCE. Prescription for keeping sanity despite cancelled searches and stacks of blue books.

Set aside 45 minutes to an hour to go down cellar. Apply waterproofing paint to walls. Rinse brush.


Repeat until job is done.

NONCOOPERATIVE EQUILIBRIUM.

I've been busy grading exams while others have been fretting about it.

It started two weeks ago in the New York Times. Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes. To the paper's credit, it draws examples and observations from the land grants and mid-majors, it's not another angsty piece about the boutique colleges. The fundamental error many students make is equating a lot of input to a substantial output. Real Professors Don't Grade Inputs.

EFFICIENT SEPARATION. Amtrak's East Coast fare structure is supposed to keep the unwashed off the Acela. It's been working, to the disgust of one of the unwashed.

The Boston Globe reports today that Amtrak is cutting Acela fares in the Northeast by up to 25 percent. What they neglect to mention though is that the federally subsidized transcontinental crawler remains the most overpriced and organizationally offensive way to hop up and down the coastline.

No doubt I’m a broke complainer who has for years made it a priority to bitch about the cost of Amtrak; I only use it occasionally to make traveling uncomfortable for businesspeople who think riders should be on library behavior regardless of whether they’re in designated quiet cars.

But for a company that relies on federal funding, I find their practices to be indefensibly prejudicial. Considering how commuter trains between Boston and New York take less than one hour longer than Acela trips, the only real difference is the price tag. It’s simple segregation; those who have enough means don’t have to shoulder up with middle class barbarians.

The news in this morning’s Globe article is infuriating; only now that companies are cutting back has Amtrak lowered rates. Furthermore, they’re only dropping prices on Acela trains, which normal folks don’t use anyway (and which, as Senator John Kerry argues, are a huge rip-off since infrastructure is in such poor repair that trains only reach maximum speeds for a few miles.)

The Acela is a notable example of a rolling gated community on Amtrak. It's not the only one. On my Western trips, I have encountered numerous people going Pullman, including some families of modest means with small children, who are doing so to avoid the barbarians in coach.

Whether that's yet another reason for the lower education to inculcate the Habits of Effective People is left to the reader.

BEGUN THE CLONE WARS HAVE. I've often wondered why, with battle-droids and Imperial Walkers, the Star Wars movies included live Jedi and Imperial Stormtroopers and free agents shootin' it out with blasters. The battle droids struck me as ways to keep the humans safer.

The military is thinking along similar lines, although that's provoking objections.

According to their proponents—generally the robot’s designers or defense officials—robots will not have any of the pesky weaknesses of flesh-and-blood soldiers.

“They don’t get hungry,” Gordon Johnson, who headed a program on unmanned systems at the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon told the New York Times in 2005. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Ronald Arkin, a leading roboticist at Georgia Tech, whose research the Defense Department funds, argues without a sense of irony that autonomous robots will be more humane than humans. Atrocities like the massacre by U.S. troops in Haditha, Iraq, would be less likely with robots, he told The Atlanta in November 2007, because they won’t have emotions that “cloud their judgment and cause them to get angry.”

Robots are also promoted as being cost-effective. On top of the annual salary and extra pay for combat duty, the government invests a great deal in recruiting, training, housing and feeding each soldier. Not to mention the costs of healthcare and death benefits, should a soldier be injured or killed.

By comparison, the current $245,000 price tag on SWORDS—which could drop to $115,000 per unit if they are mass-produced—is a steal.

The objection, however, is in the spirit of Gen^l Lee's observation that the terribleness of war keeps its practitioners from growing too fond of it.

A different perspective is gained when the price of the robot is compared with the low-tech, low-cost weaponry that U.S. forces face on a daily basis in Iraq.

“You don’t want your defenses to be so expensive that they’ll bankrupt you,” says Sharon Weinberger, a reporter for Wired’s Danger Room blog. “If it costs us $100,000 to defeat a $500 roadside bomb, that doesn’t sound like such a good strategy—as pretty as it may look on YouTube and in press releases.”

The claim that robots would be more ethical than humans similarly runs contrary to both evidence and basic common sense.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing that despite the portrayal in our popular culture of violence being easy, “There is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”

One of the most effective solutions to this quandary, the military has discovered, is to introduce distance into the equation. Studies show that the farther the would-be killer is from the victim, the easier it is to pull the trigger. Death and suffering become more sanitized—the humanity of the enemy can be more easily denied. By giving the Army and Marines the capability to kill from greater distances, armed robots will make it easier for soldiers to take life without troubling their consciences.

That is the logic, after all , of the Evil Empire's Death Star. It was also the complaint of the German about the British and U.S. air arms.

GETTING THE JOB DESCRIPTION RIGHT. After the loss comes the puzzlement.

“How in heaven’s name we could leave Kylie York open is still beyond me,” Central Michigan coach Sue Guevara said. “It’s still beyond me.”

God Helps Thofe Who Help Themfelves. Perhaps the tightness of the players' defense, not the tightness of their jeans, might be the first place to look.

MORE BLUE COLLAR ARISTOCRATS. The Milwaukee tradition continues.

The Milwaukee area has one of the highest concentrations of metal fabricators in the nation. And as veteran press brake operators retire from the work force, industry experts predict a shortage of people ready to take their place.

It's similar to the need for more welders and machinists.

"But it's a job that goes under the radar. Press brake operators are an invisible group within many companies," said Bruce Bohr, principal manufacturing engineer at Greenheck Corp., which makes ventilation equipment in Schofield and employs about 200 press brake operators.

The trade's wages range from about $12 to $26 per hour, depending on experience, skill and where someone works. Press brake work doesn't pay as well as welding, and its image lacks the sizzle associated with showers of sparks and hot metal.

We're not talking about stamping out multiple copies of the same part. Patternmakers and tool and die makers do the preparations for that. Any southern exile in Detroit can run a stamping press, or bolt the resulting pieces on.

A skilled press brake operator visualizes metal parts in multiple shapes and angles, making bends with tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch.

The job often requires blueprint-reading skills, mathematics and knowledge of metallurgy, machine tools and computers. It also requires a steady hand and intuition for placing metal in a bending machine just the right way.

Some people pick up the skills fast, while others can't figure it out no matter how hard they try.

It's still beyond the ken of robots.

And the job is still physical. Even with automated machines and material handling equipment, operators sometimes have to lift, turn and carry sheets of metal taller than themselves.

It's difficult to automate the process. Robots can do some of the work, but when making complex parts there's no substitute for a skilled operator, said John Wettstein with Northland Lasers, a Milwaukee distributor of Toyokoki press brakes.

"Bending metal, although it looks simple, is still a labor-intensive craft," Wettstein said.

Waukesha County Technical College offers press brake classes in its metal fabrication program.

Most companies train their own operators, but a lack of job security has scared people from manufacturing careers.

The flip side of companies training their own operators is that as the economy picks up, the companies that don't train their own might be poaching press-brake operators from the companies that do.

STIRRINGS. Market Watch identifies what some economic commentators have been referring to as mustard seeds.

Perhaps, as with the Battle of Britain, it is not the end of the recession. The author cautions we are not at the beginning of the end. Perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

Prosperity may not be just around the corner, but statistical evidence is mounting to suggest that the worst of this recession may soon be past.

I'm still keeping track of transportation. A correspondent noted low international shipping rates for containers and quipped that the railroads were going from double stacks to single stacks to zero stacks to empty stacks. There's still a lot of traffic on the Union Pacific, although fewer trains are parked on the grade separated bits east and west of DeKalb waiting for their turn to be yarded.