SCARCITY AND OPPORTUNITY COST.

Former High Washington Official Anne-Marie Slaughter gives up her High Washington Job to return to Princeton so as to get off the default high-power job treadmill.

For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”

"Control over your schedule" might be an emergent phenomenon, as people of ability walk away from supposedly high-prestige positions over the unreasonable expectations employers have.  Former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin suggests that a little legislation might be helpful, particularly where individual employers might not perceive the same pressure to offer less onerous terms of work.

Women and men in top management positions often can negotiate flexibility, either in the number of hours worked, where they work, or how many days they work. Mid-level and low-level earners rarely have that opportunity because they have little power, and fear that by asking for flexibility they might be fired.

England and Australia have come up with a compromise that works for most employers and employees. It’s called the Right to Request Flexibility. An employee may ask her or his boss for flexibility without risking dismissal. The employer does not have to grant the request, but they are required to negotiate a compromise. If it is not achieved, the case goes to a tribunal. Employers have grown to like the law because it enables them to attract and retain talent, which saves them much more money in the long term than the cost of flexibility. James Wall, former vice president at Deloitte, calculates that it costs two to five times an annual salary to retrain a new employee, women and men alike.

To some extent, though, a request for flexibility resembles a signal of low ambition, the tragic and nasty reality Ross Douthat identifies in his reaction to Ms Slaughter's essay.

Did the male breadwinners of yore, with their wives and kids waiting at home after a long day at the factory or the office, “have it all” in anything like the sense that today’s wistful working mothers seem to mean by the phrase? No, they did not: Most of them worked longer hours and spent less time with their families than today’s ideals of fatherhood would permit; many of them no doubt retired and died wishing that it could have been otherwise.

Perhaps so, although those Organization Men might have been neglecting their children or their golf games so as to provide better for those children.

A more family-friendly workplace is a plausible and worthwhile goal, but the employee or public servant who is willing to sacrifice time at home in order “to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you” will always, always have a professional advantage over a peer who wants to leave at 5 PM to see their family or telecommute two days a week.

In the absence of ways to identify high performers without performance tests, that may always be the case.

SEE THAT BIG HOUSE, SEE THAT SMALL HOUSE?

Among the books in the departmental housecleaning stack (anyone with any experience around a university knows about departmental housecleaning stacks) was the seventh edition of Paula S. Rothenberg's Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, and once Book Review N^o. 24 is done, it goes back to the housecleaning stacks.  It's an anthology, and the only apparent organizing theme is that some people lead pretty miserable lives, and that misery is due in some part to circumstances beyond those people's control, which the compiler would like readers to believe can be summarized as the multiple oppressions of race, class and gender.  But if you'd like to find an antidote to the poverty of cultural studies, such as, oh, a coherent logical framework, keep looking.  You get the usual language about intersecting modes of oppression, but you also get essays in Comparative Victimization in which the tussles between gang-bangers of Latin American extraction and gang-bangers of African or Asian extraction suggest there is no one model of marginalization.  That is, once one rules out "deficient life-management skills", something that an extract from William Ryan's Blaming the Victim rules out.  Never mind that the toddler enters pre-school or kindergarten deficient in reading and calculating skills, and the pre-school corrects that.  Never mind that according to Allan Bloom, the freshman enters college uncivilized, and the opening of the American Mind corrects that.  And you get Holly Sklar's extended meditation on see that big house, see that small house, but no basis for doing anything other than commiserating.  (I found this post that suggests where to go from that information.)

The book is now available in an eighth edition, priced around $60.  Can you say third-party payments?  The customer reviews there say more about the book than I have.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

A DIFFICULT DAY FOR THE CREW DISPATCHERS.

The Cold Spring Shops "Free Rein to 110" campaign is bearing some fruit, with test runs taking place in Illinois, and scheduled service now in place in Michigan.  With the coming of summer, and the four-day energy-conserving schedule in place at the office, there's no guilt in checking the Amtrak website for business class space on a Michigan train.  Sure enough, space available to and from Royal Oak, the destination on a pre-speedup trip four years ago.  Because of changes Norfolk Southern has made to its freight service, the current service is faster west of Kalamazoo, but slower east to Detroit and Pontiac.  The new Dearborn station will be adjacent to the Henry Ford Museum, if that is ever built, and the faster services Michigan is promising might make day-trips from Chicago to that museum possible.  Perhaps in another four years?

Amtrak Wolverine 350, Chicago to Pontiac, 6 July 2012: P32 diesel 27, Amcafe 48178, Horizon coaches 54559, 54541, 54519, P32 diesel 26.  I don't know whether the diesels are top-and-tailed, or if the trailing one in each direction is along for the ride.  Temperature is hot and sticky.  Business Class allowed to board around 7 am; attendant passes out Chicago Tribune.  Leave 7.30.19 (watch set to the National Bureau of Standards online time service a few days earlier, not synchronized with the public clocks in Union Station); hold for inward Rock Island scoot at Englewood 7.44; Hammond-Whiting 8.00.42 - 8.03.13, meet 29 at station; 110 mph running begins in earnest east of Michigan City, New Buffalo 9.46.55 - 9.48.00; Niles 10.06.49 - 10.10.11; Dowagiac 10.19.49 - 10.21.05; head in Decatur, meet 351 10.30, stop at east siding switch 10.30.40, go 10.31.43, head in Lawton, meet 363 10.43, no stop; arrive Kalamazoo 10.58.10.   Thus endeth the fast running.  But there is fast running, something that's missing from the Hiawatha service, as is food service, something this mural in the cafe emphasizes.

Leave Kalamazoo 11.02.31; Battle Creek 11.31.52 - 11.37.18; Jackson 12.27.31 - 12.28.31; meet 353 east of Chelsea 12.52, no stop; Ann Arbor 1.08.58 - 1.45.11, large crowd waiting; Dearborn 1.43.02 - 1.45.41; Detroit 2.05 - 2.08, arrive Royal Oak 2.28.  The old Grand Trunk line northwest from Milwaukee Junction is in somewhat better shape north of the Ferndale intermodal terminal, although it is still jointed rail.  I think that's a downgrade from the state it was in in the late 1980s.

The Detroit area also dealt with some extreme weather, and power was out at businesses on the west side of Washington Street, but on, perhaps in limited quantities, on the east side.  The air conditioning was out at a Caribou coffee shop that was nevertheless full of people studying.  Royal Oak is home to the first BD's Mongolian Grill, an establishment where you put together a mix of proteins and vegetables that the staff will grill while you wait.  Good lunch, cold pop, the Barnes and Noble was open, and the Caribou could whip up iced Mint Conditions.  Lots more time to explore when the trains are on time.  Now to get that Henry Ford Museum stop open.

A few people boarded at Royal Oak, and the crew made a request that passengers not put luggage on seats or nap on two seats.  Three coaches constitute a skimpy rake for a weekend Michigan train, even with the colleges on summer schedule.  Leave Royal Oak 5.55.30, conductor advises a delay with an intermodal train going into the Ferndale yard 5.59.36; stop, start, stop, start, stop, good to go 6.07.12; Detroit 6.28.28 - 6.31.06; Dearborn 6.49.25 - 6.52.13, meet 352 near Wayne Junction 6.54; Ann Arbor 7.23.25 - 7.26.30.

This diesel and coach, damaged sometime this spring, await shipment to Beech Grove or Wilmington from Jackson.  There's still a Conrail Shared Assets area in Michigan.  Jackson 8.01.09 - 8.03.00; conductor advises there is a brush fire ahead near the Jackson airport and we will be held.  Stop 8.12, moving 9.41 at restricted speed; conductor advises we have not been cleared past the fire, which is still not struck, stop 10.20, go 10.29, pass fire site 10.39, pass Albion 10.54.  Train will swap crews with 354: stop 11.03 to trade engineers, move 11.08, stop 11.09 to swap train crews, go 11.15; arrive Battle Creek 11.44.01, conductor advises passengers to hit the bricks to smoke, as there will be another crew exchange, this crew delayed a few hours on 364 account engine troubles in Chicago.  Go 11.56.25; Kalamazoo 12.26.20 - 12.31.06, train loading on track away from station platform; Dowagiac 12.55.46 - 12.56.31; Niles 1.05.49 - 1.07.16; all eastbound trains have arrived and left and temperatures are low enough to allow uninterrupted cruising at 110; New Buffalo 1.25.40 - 1.26.26; Michigan City 12.39.20 - 12.40.30 Central time, no chance of catching the last dinky to Aurora; Hammond 1.22.15 - 1.23.25; arrive Chicago 1.50.  The equipment for 8-28, with the Super Dome and Skytop Lounge Cedar Rapids, is leaving for the coach yard as we arrive.  Union Station now closes at 1 am or when the last Amtrak arrives, station staff advises there are all-night eateries in Greektown.  Yes, and some interesting people-watching -- the city that never sleeps is a different city after dark than by day.  First dinky of Saturday morning gets away at 6.30.  Hot shower and change of clothes welcome at 8.30.

DOUBLY LUCKY?

If one comes into the world on a Friday the Thirteenth, by the light of the full moon, one ought make the most of it. "For pagans, 13 is a lucky number. It corresponds with the number of full moons in a year."

PUSHED OUT?

Within Illinois, a combination of uncertainty over the future of the state pension plans, and a faculty getting older, thanks in part to years of downsizing, faculty are calling it a career.

The number of retirements at Northern Illinois University almost have doubled in the past four years. In calendar year 2009, 110 employees retired. In 2012, 204 employees are expected to retire, according to information received by SURS through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“It’s an unprecedented turnover,” said Steven Cunningham, vice president of Administration and Human Resources at NIU. “It’s about three times what it normally would be. It’s mostly caused by uncertainty caused by pension reform.”

That’s one factor that has led to a growing number of retirees, said Deborah Haliczer, director of employment relations with NIU’s Human Resources Department, which encompasses staff demographics.

A large percentage of NIU’s employees were hired in the 1970s and 1980s during a large period of growth, which means many of them are reaching retirement age.

That's the local news. At the state flagship, where they had a clout list but no rowing team, there's something similar in progress.

"Folks are very concerned with what's happening in Springfield with pensions," said Jack Dempsey, executive director of UI Facilities and Services. "Whether it's true or not, people believe if they retire they secure their benefits. Folks who are on the fence, they're making the choice to go now."

Figures provided by the State Universities Retirement System as of June 12 show the number of people planning to retire before July 2 at the UI's Urbana campus doubled this calendar year over the same period in 2011, from 223 to 491. The university's overall numbers showed a similar trend, with 1,008 employees planning to retire before July 2 this year compared with 507 during the first six months of 2011.

"The numbers are definitely up across our employee categories," said Barbara Wilson, UI vice provost for academic affairs at the Urbana campus.

Whether the same dynamic is at work elsewhere remains to be seen.  A professor at Georgia Southern sent a letter to his colleagues that Inside Higher Ed suggests might be a lament against the rise of the all-administrative university.

As people have forwarded it to colleagues elsewhere, frequently using the phrase "speaking truth to power," many are saying that [Georgia Southern literature and philosophy professor David] Dudley has captured many of the things that are wrong in higher education today, especially at the non-flagship, non-elite public institutions that most students attend.

The incentives may vary among universities.

Tenure is a property right and Stanford is trying to buy back that right from the age 70+ faculty.

Now there is a hidden information issue here. Each tenured faculty member has private information about what is the lowest payment he/she would need in order to induce him to retire early. Somebody who is sick or sick of his colleagues would need a smaller incentive then a guy who thinks that he is on the verge of coming up with his "General Theory of Economics" or doesn't like to hang out with his spouse.

Note, in the exalted climate of the fifty institutions that claim to be the international top ten, we're not talking about more downsizing from headquarters, intrusions by the Assessment Weenies, and parking permits advertising football.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

In the aftermath of the late June dual derechos, the commentariat begins to weigh in on the effects of bad weather.  To Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, the power failure is cause for reflection on the ubiquity of cheap electricity and air conditioning.

So many Americans—spoon-fed by a "go green" education system and media—live under the delusion that things were better in the past than they are now. Sure the economy is bad, but all we had to do is live for 72 hours without AC, TV, a dishwasher, a hair dryer and Google to appreciate how much progress has been made in the past 20, 30, and 50 years. Today a larger percentage of poor people have access to air conditioning than the average middle-class family did in 1960.

To Daphne Wysham of the Institute for Policy Studies, it's cause to contemplate the connection between the power for those conveniences and the immoderate weather.

Solar and wind power may seem like pricey alternatives to you, versus energy derived from coal, nuclear reactors, oil, and gas. But they also don't enjoy the same hefty subsidies. People, governments, and companies are spending countless dollars adjusting to the costs of a crisis of our own making. It’s a big gamble. In the best-case scenario, we may just throw out a refrigerator’s worth of spoiled food or spend a night or two in a hotel. In the worst-case scenario, the Earth will become uninhabitable.

Is it really more expensive to switch to greener power sources and drive less? When you add up all the costs of doing otherwise — no way. By investing in cleaner energy sources now, we can save the lives of countless innocent victims — perhaps even those we love the most — from storms that should only appear in our nightmares.

One quibble. Years ago, I did some work with the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency's Common Sense Initiative, and in those days, which coincided with the 1988 midwestern drought, we understood that nuclear-steam generating stations had a lot of potential for reducing greenhouse gases at the power plant.  By all means, continue the research on wind and solar and bio-coal, but don't rule out some of the legacy power sources.

WON THE WAR, LOST THE PEACE.

A recent issue of World War II included a list of recommended books from investment screamer Jim Cramer.  One title, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945 got Mr Cramer's endorsement as "The best-researched book yet to come out about where the war was truly won."  It is well, and thoroughly, researched.  It is also well organised and relatively short, two features contributing to a favourable Book Review No. 23.  The Great Patriotic War, to use the Soviet term, or the Ostfront, as the Germans had it, involved millions of men and numerous skirmishes as part of or in preparation for or incidental to the major set-piece battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk that get much of the attention.  It's thus easy to produce excessively complicated histories with lots of maps and units and minutiae.  Author Evan Mawdsley resists that temptation: for example, the description of the opening phases of Operation Babarossa occupy 32 pages and it might be possible to read them in less time than the opening movement of the Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony requires.  The author also suggests that Stalingrad and Kursk are not necessarily the pivotal events of the 1942 and 1943 campaigns: the outcome might have actually been determined or avoided by command decisions earlier in the campaign seasons.  By the end of 1944, however, the Soviets had organized their forces in such a way that campaign season lasted all year.  What intrigues, though, is the possibility Professor Mawdsley suggests of the successful Soviet war effort confirming the Stalinist model of political organization as something to be continued after the war ended.  (The Germans, Italians, and Japanese had to develop new models.)  Stalinist rigidities, combined with Russian nationalism, ultimately undid the Soviet Union.  Whether the end of the Great Depression coming with the end of World War II for the United States similarly ossified the New Industrial State and the Vital Progressive Center remains as a topic for future research.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WISCONSIN WHERE THEY ROW.

The Official Preppy Handbook suggests that rowing is a proper Preppy sport, even though it is done well at Wisconsin.  So well, indeed, that Ohio State recognizes it, and the University sells a book so titled.

For years, coaches of the rowing teams recruited by hanging out at orientation or registration (when all payments were received at the Red Gym, that's where the men's coach would be).  That's still the case, as a rundown of Wisconsin Olympians reveals.

Grant James, 24, rowing: The native of DeKalb, Ill., had never rowed until he was recruited by UW coach Chris Clark during freshman orientation in 2005. Seven years later he's going to the Olympics as a member of the U.S. men's eight.

Ross James, 24, rowing: Grant's twin brother, Ross was the last rower to earn his spot in the boat for the U.S. men's eight. Ross rows on the port side of the boat, Grant the starboard side.

Several other Wisconsin rowers will participate.  The James brothers didn't play sports in high school.

DeKalb natives Grant and Ross James each have the 6-foot-6 body of a basketball player, the lungs and legs of an elite cross country runner, and the poise of a marksman, and the pair is set to compete in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London starting this month.


But you won’t remember reading about the twins’ athletic feats in high school, and most readers probably never knew about their athletic gifts when the pair walked the halls of what is now Huntley Middle School. [The high school recently moved to a new campus on the north side of town, with a larger athletic plant, but no planetarium.]


The duo never played football or basketball, although coaches pined for their services over the years, and only have a few years of baseball to their credit at DeKalb.

Sometimes, the choice of a university matters.

The pair were part of the eight-man boat that won the 2008 national championship for Wisconsin, and the 24-year-olds will start their Olympic quest July 28 in the preliminary round of the eight-man competition.


"There are rowers out there walking around that are as good as them that will never know how good they could have been,” Clark said.

Sure. Instead of going to Wisconsin, where they row, they matriculated at Illinois.

WHERE WERE PENN STATE'S PROFESSORS?

University Diaries chastises the faculty at Penn State for not reining in the football program.

When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever?

Specifically,

Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!

I suppose.  On the other hand, how much muscle have professors exercised against the intrusions of the assessment weenies or the cultural studies grievance-mongers on the curriculum, and on faculty hiring?

SAIL ON THE LIFTED TACK.

Apparently the Olympics aren't enough sports for the summer.  Thus comes the ESPN Body Issue.  Among this year's models (not surprisingly, much of the U.S. volleyball team will participate) is Laser sailor Anna Tunnicliffe.

Steven Lippman photo for ESPN courtesy Daily Mail.

Ms Tunnicliffe sails for the U.S.  She's a native of Doncaster, but doesn't race Flying Scots.

The Daily Mail has its own preview of the issue.

THE NURTURANT PARENT IS THE NANNY.

Berkeley linguist George Lakoff has, for a long time, attempted to help Democrats get elected by suggesting the Democrats change their message.  He recently used his status as a well-regarded linguist to assist a Democrat operative with the latest guidelines for talking points.  Zombie at Pajamas Media has time to read the guidelines, and comment.

Lakoff does something throughout the book which he must think is very clever, but which is completely transparent to the reader, making for a truly cringe-worthy experience. Lakoff has two public personas: First, he is a scientist; and second, he is a partisan political advocate. He understands that when he speaks as a partisan, we the readers necessarily take what he says with a grain of salt; but when he speaks as a scientist, we are expected to accept his statements as objective truth. Throughout the book, he constantly switches back and forth between the two personas: He’ll speak for a paragraph or two as a liberal activist advising Democratic candidates and pundits, then he’ll take off that hat and put on the linguist hat to say something “official”; then switch back to his liberal hat, and so on. I guess the temptation was too great to resist abusing this dual role, because he makes a habit — a career, actually — of putting on his scientist hat and then making partisan statements, which he passes off as impartial facts. I can only imagine that he thinks he’s getting away with it, but the gambit is so glaringly obvious that it makes you almost embarrassed for the guy.

Quite so. More to the point, Zombie suggests, conservative and Republican court intellectuals are quite willing to take the latest frame and mock it.  Or take it seriously.

There’s a new frame in town: The nanny state. In a masterful maneuver of political aikido, conservatives have taken Lakoff’s antediluvian “strict father conservatism” frame and completely reversed it. Conservatism now stands for freedom from authority, while is it progressivism that seeks to implement the new scolding parent metaphor, now known as the “nanny state.” It’s liberals who want to tell you what to do and what is allowed, not conservatives.

And this frame is widely accepted by the general public not simply because of superior conservative messaging, but because there is evidence backing it up. It is mostly liberal politicians, not conservative politicians, who pass laws and regulations telling citizens what they can and cannot do, what they must and must not buy, what they are and are not allowed to say.

Who seeks to impose the “strict parent” paradigm now? Liberals. And everyone knows it. Yet still there’s George Lakoff off by his lonesome still pounding his fists about “strict father conservatives.” All the rhetoric in the world can’t hide the fact that conservatism now stands for unintrusive small government, and that progressivism stands for intrusive big government. The “nanny state” frame is so powerful and self-evidently true that it can’t be ignored away, and can’t be euphemized away.

Nurturant Parents don't let their children buy Big Gulps, q.e.d.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM.

The Hoover Institute's Amy Wax (via Newmark's Door) questions the effectiveness of mixing poor and rich children in common schools.

Urban minorities and, increasingly, less-educated whites suffer from chaotic families and dislocations occasioned by low achievement, high unemployment, and poor socialization. As Brad Wilcox and Don Peck have recently noted, even the white middle class has fractured into segments defined by education. An alarming fault line has emerged between white college graduates and those without a degree, with the latter increasingly resembling high school dropouts in their rising rates of financial distress, family disintegration, single parenting, partner conflict, and behaviorally troubled children. Well-off, better-educated suburbanites, despite embracing the ethos of tolerance and diversity, mostly stick to the 1950s script. Their lives are characterized by family stability, low rates of criminality, and a devotion to work and schooling. Despite the depredations of popular culture, their standards of decorum remain relatively strict and they do a good job of socializing their children.

Advocates of pooling recognize the phenomenon, yet are reluctant to grasp the likely consequences.

In the end, [Virginia law professor James] Ryan cannot avoid confronting the fact that, as developmental psychologist Richard Nisbett states in Intelligence and How to Get It, “lower  ses [socioeconomic status] children are more likely to have behavior problems, which are disruptive to one degree or another for all who have to deal with such children.” And indeed Ryan does concede, albeit skittishly, that disadvantaged students are more likely to hold dysfunctional attitudes or display disruptive behaviors. He refers, for example, to black adolescents’ “opposition to conventional middle class white values,” and to the problems of dealing with “loud, obnoxious, poorly behaved, low income African American students.” But Ryan knows that frank talk of such behavioral deficits indulges stereotypes and fits uneasily with the liberal zeitgeist. Not surprisingly, his approach to the topic is riddled with mea culpas, disclaimers, contradictions, and evasions. He simultaneously deplores the “prejudice” against urban schools as expressed in “stereotypical assumptions about urban minorities” and relies on those very stereotypes — and the functional superiority of the bourgeois folkways that characterize predominantly white suburban schools — to justify his income integration project.

The article notes that well-off parents who want good academic outcomes for their children will self-segregate, either by moving house or paying private school tuitions. Thus the private response to a public policy.

Left unsaid, though, is the root cause of social separation.  As long as there are Thinking People who view convention as a social construction, rather than an evolutionarily stable strategy, and Trendy People who celebrate transgressiveness for its own sake, and in spite of possible cost, there will be no policy to achieve integration of the common schools on the basis of wealth or income.  On the other hand, there might be some potential for common schools, even in tough neighborhoods, to inculcate bourgeois values, that is, once administrators and social theorists get over their identity-politics tics.

CHOO, CHOO, CHOO GOES THE TROLLEY?

A Chicago Tribune feature on Duneland describes the South Shore Line as the dunes country choo-choo.

While most motorists are accustomed to sharing the road with bicycles, few have ever had the odd experience of sharing the street with a train. In only a smattering of American towns do the train tracks run right down the main drag. In even fewer do suitcase-toting folks board a passenger train as automobile drivers wait patiently alongside.

Yet in Michigan City, the strange sight of trains stopping for traffic signals beside motorists is an everyday occurrence as the rail cars of the historic South Shore Line travel between Chicago and its eastern terminus at the airport in South Bend.

That's the Interurban Tradition.

The article suggests that readers disembark at Beverly Shores for Dune Park.

Chicago Tribune photo by Keri Wiginton.

In addition to Dune Park, there are five prototype houses built for the 1933 Century of Progress whose owners allow an architectural tour, once a year in October.

I suppose that if journalists stop using steam-era descriptions of trains by, oh, 2061, that, too, will be a century of progress.

SUMMER IS FOR CATCHING UP ON MY READING.

The Fifty Book Challenge is still going strong, and a number of the new members are well past their annual targets already.  There's still a possibility of making the half century by year's end.  The links at the dates point to the reviews posted at the Challenge.  Some books are particularly good (+) and others, particularly bad (-).

10. The Renaissance of American Steel, 23 April 2012 (+).
11. Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year, 29 April 2012 (+).
12. Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940, 30 April 2012.
13. Generations: The History of America's Future, 7 May 2012.
14. The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Methods and Mysteries of the World's Greatest Detective, 20 May 2012.
15. To Make Men Free, 27 May 2012.
16. The Faculty Lounges, 6 June 2012 (-).
17. A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh, 10 June 2012.
18. A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, 18 June 2012.
19. End This Depression Now!, 24 June 2012.
20. The Hoarder in You: How to Lead a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life, 28 June 2012.
21. Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, 29 June 2012.
22. I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next To a Republican, 30 June 2012.

The first quarter report is available at Cold Spring Shops or the European Tribune or the Fifty Book Challenge.

The bookworm continues to grow.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooo

Cross-posted to European Tribune and Fifty Book Challenge.

SPEAKING OF CORRECTIVE TAXES.

In Houston, the Pigou Club is a strip club that collects a pole tax.

The City Council passed an ordinance Wednesday that requires strip clubs to pay a $5-per-visitor fee to help pay for the analysis of biological evidence collected from rape victims in hopes of identifying their attackers.

Police in Houston, and in many other parts of the U.S., lack the money to promptly analyze evidence such as hair particles and blood specimens, gathered by investigators in packets known as rape kits. Houston estimates it has 6,000 rape kits that have yet to be scrutinized by crime laboratories.

Supporters of the ordinance, which was supported by Mayor Annise Parker and approved on a 14-1 vote, contend that strip clubs should shoulder some of the costs of rape investigations because the establishments can cultivate unhealthy attitudes toward women that can lead to sexual assaults.

"There are negative secondary effects associated with adult-entertainment establishments," said Ellen Cohen, the council member who championed the ordinance, which could generate up to $3 million in annual revenue.

The fee would also apply to clubs that stage occasional adult entertainment, such as "a wet T-shirt contest or naked sushi contest," according to the ordinance, which states all the revenue is to go toward processing rape kits.

There are an estimated 30 clubs subject to the tax, according to Ms. Cohen's chief of staff.

Critics strongly question attempts to tie strip clubs to violence against women, calling the fee unfair. "There is no known correlation between people going to nice, high-end gentlemen's clubs and rape," said Albert Van Huff, a Houston lawyer who represents local strip clubs.

A 2009 report by the University of Texas at Austin concluded that no study has "authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented businesses, and the perpetration of violence."

In Texas, a state law passed in 2007 already imposes a $5-per-customer charge, dubbed the "pole tax," on strip clubs around the state. A portion of the fee, which has so far generated about $15.7 million in revenue, can be used to pay for testing rape kits.

Is the tax based on a benefit principle, or on ability to pay, and what sorts of research papers might be forthcoming after a few years of experience with these taxes?

OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

Chicago Union Station must not yet be prime Loop real estate.

Amtrak has moved its Chicago office employees back into the building, partially occupying the second and third floors, which saves more than $2 million in annual rent.

Amtrak might not be writing checks to some other landowner any more, but it is foregoing the opportunity to rent out space in the office tower at Union Station to somebody else.  There are a lot of somebodies still to identify themselves.

Amtrak is working with Jones Lang LaSalle, the building’s property manager, to market the rest of the available office space and 60,000 square feet of upgraded retail space surrounding the Great Hall.

To think that the Concourse Building went for a trading floor that has subsequently been converted to a gym.  The idea in the late 1960s was that the railroads could profitably disinvest in passenger facilities and scale back the station facilities to something more suitable to commuters passing between work and train with all deliberate speed.  Live and learn.

A CUSHY BILLET, BEHIND ENEMY LINES.

Some years ago, literary type Harry Stein was mugged by reality sufficiently many times to pen How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, which made it into the Cold Spring Shops library before the Fifty Book Challenge began.  More recently, he wrote I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next To a Republican, in which he relates some of his experiences as the sole, or perhaps most vocal, dissenting voice from the Blue State Smug.  There's enough substance in it to evade the proscription of polemical material and offer a very brief Book Review N^o. 22.  The simplest way to understand the book is to consider the possibility that a Pauline Kael could be surprised with a Richard Nixon victory because either Pauline Kael's social world is as circumscribed as Mr Stein suggests it is, or because Pauline Kael's friends have marginalized by their scorn those people who might agree with the intellectual Right, or have persuaded those people who suggest those righties have a point to keep still.  That point, expressed most succinctly, might have been made by Madison radio talker Vicki McKenna, who gets props from Mr Stein for expressing dissenting views from within one of the citadels of Political Correctness.  Turn to page 126.

We start a brand new class in the public schools, running from kindergarten all the way through high school.  It's called "Middle Class Values."  And Mom's got to take the class, too -- because she fails to understand what deferred gratification is.

Once upon a time, the common schools implicitly did that -- that is, until the cultural studies types decided that "privileging" the mode of behavior of successful people had more negative than positive effects.  By their fruits shall ye know them.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

FIRST AND SECOND 98.

Sounds like a pair of redball freight trains, but it's a reference to the kind of wind velocities Friday's pair of derechos achieved while making the kind of time across country an express train could make if it didn't have to stop for crew changes or 500 mile inspections.

The first one got organized in eastern Iowa and it produced some interesting looking clouds in northern Illinois.

That colorful clutter in the lower middle of the picture is a bounce-house.  Look closely and you'll see somebody hustling to mow the grass before the rain hits.  The bounce-house was well enough secured to serve at a birthday party this afternoon.  Lots of tots running around enjoying themselves.

The second one came through just after sunset.  A train's schedule is valid for twelve hours, and this second one was about ten hours behind the first.

National Weather Service image (thanks Phil!)

Cold Spring Shops headquarters are somewhere under that little blue blob just west of Chicago.  Lots of lightning announcing itself, but most of that went north or south.  There was enough rain to fill the rain barrel.  The second section never got to be as big or as destructive as the first section, which, in this picture, is causing havoc at the University Diaries main base.

AROUND THE ROCKIES, NOT THROUGH THEM.

Amtrak's California Zephyr reverts to its historic California Service routing.

The [Pine Ridge] fire is burning in six-mile long Debeque Canyon, 60 miles west of Glenwood Springs, Colo. on the Zephyr’s former Denver & Rio Grande Western route. The trains will be routed over the Union Pacific’s Overland Route through Green River, Wyo., and Ogden, Utah.

Note: that fire is on the other side of the Continental Divide from the more widely-covered Estes Park and Colorado Springs fires.

THE POVERTY OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

Cornell historian Jefferson Cowie attempts, in Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, to come to terms with the end of the World War II New Industrial State and the propensity of blue collars to cause red necks.  I exaggerate, but only slightly.  The book is a different perspective on blue-collar politics from those proposed by Thomas Frank or by Richard Longworth.  Although Professor Cowie takes pains to assure readers that working-class is not equivalent to organized labor, the book we read switches among Presidential politics, Big Union politics, and perusal of songs and movies by Big Entertainment, particularly those directed by Big Entertainers who might have been red-diaper babies.  Book Review N^o. 21 will consider, at length, the ways in which Stayin' Alive tells readers more about the intellectual failures of the last forty years of post-everything in cultural studies, and perhaps in the academy generally, than it does about the difficulties confronting blue-collar workers.

A RAIL CITY, WITHOUT RAILROADS.

Midwestern ferroequinologists know the significance of Butler Yard to the Chicago and North Western.  Butler Yard, however, is not in the corporate limits of Butler.  That doesn't stop Union Pacific from recognizing Butler as Wisconsin's first Train Town, USA, part of the carrier's sesquicentennial festivities.

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF.

Very similar inferences, all the same.  Michael Moore:

John Roberts, not only joined with the liberal justices to completely uphold almost every single part of the Obama health care law, he wrote the majority opinion himself! In fact, he went even further. When he realized that the government had poorly made its constitutional case to the court, he went searching for a clause in their argument and the constitution that would give him the justification he needed to back the administration and to insure that his decision would hold up legally. In other words, even though he is on the opposite side of the political fence, he wrote the Dems' paper for them. Stunning.

Rush Limbaugh:

Other than the four liberals, they all knew the whole thing was unconstitutional and Justice Roberts decided to rewrite it. He rewrote the legislation in a way that Congress never intended it. It would be like a judge making up for an incompetent lawyer in court and finding somebody who's guilty totally innocent just because the judge wanted to appear magnanimous. Or vice versa. It makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income.

Read further into the columns, however, and you'll see very different proposals for what has to be done now that the Chief Justice has done the legislature's homework for them.

MARGINAL OR INFRAMARGINAL, PECUNIARY OR NONPECUNIARY?

George Leef questions the spillover benefits of higher education subsidies. Knowledge and skills are not public goods even though some people in society benefit from them.  The focus of his discussion is on how much of the spillover can be captured as a private benefit to the investor in human capital.

What especially raised [the Century Foundation's Richard] Kahlenberg’s hackles was that [Chicago finance professor Luigi] Zingales “conceptualizes higher education as an almost purely private good.” Bad idea, Kahlenberg says, because “we are all ‘beneficiaries’ to some extent when other members of society are better educated.”

Kahlenberg’s idea is one of those progressive shibboleths that sound so nice that they usually go unchallenged. We need to challenge it. Is it true that we all benefit when people become “better educated” and if so, does it follow that government ought to fund higher education in whole or in part?

Let’s start by drawing a distinction between training and education.  People spend time and money to develop competencies in producing goods and services, in return for which they expect to be paid. People learn how to do surgery, how to install drywall, how to fix computers, how to sell insurance, how to write novels, how to teach English, and countless other kinds of work. Some of their training may be done in formal education settings, but much of it occurs on the job.

Because they intend to use their skills to make a living, individuals have a very strong incentive to find the optimal degree of training. The government does not need to intervene to tell a lawyer, for example, that she ought to become better trained. She will figure out the point at which the cost of additional study and training exceeds the benefit from it.

The same is true for all other professions and occupations. People will invest in the “human capital” needed to succeed in a field, weighing costs and benefits to find the optimal point. There is no need to subsidize their investments.

The gravamen of Mr Leef's argument is that a classroom and an on-the job environment are equivalent in developing human capital.  In the case of lawyering, that may not be the case, depending on the propensity of the apprentice's mentor to instill an understanding of professional ethics as limits to be pushed, or as constraints, the respect of which makes the services of the lawyer more valuable.  To grant that possibility, however, does not imply a public benefit to be captured through public subsidies to the law colleges.

In short, there is no need for government subsidies for training. Think back to the time before any such subsidies. In colonial America, the people had access to highly skilled workers, craftsmen, and professionals. The government’s role: none at all.

So, what about education?  Let’s say that education comprises all the non-training aspects of college: learning to write a good essay, learning about history, about our culture, about science and scientific method, about mathematics, about literature, and so on. Isn’t society better off if more people absorb more of all that?

Again, the individuals who absorb that learning may be better off. A student, Pete, who takes a good college course on, say, British literature, may very well benefit. Perhaps he uses his knowledge to impress a girlfriend; perhaps to get a question right on Jeopardy; perhaps to enlighten others and recommend fine books.  Pete benefits from his education and some others probably do, too. It’s a prodigious stretch, however, to say that society benefits. Good for Pete that he chose to spend his time and money learning about literature, but there is no reason why the citizens at large should be taxed to help him pay for it.

Yes and no. On the one hand, in the colonial era the craftsmen began their career as apprentices, in an institutional arrangement inherited from the guilds -- themselves state-sanctioned monopolies -- and perhaps the financial aid for the apprentice was in the form of an indenture -- an outcome Mr Kahlenberg fears, although one that his essay draws unsupported analogies to.  On the other hand, perhaps the spillover benefits are a product of elementary school, and sociopathic aspiring lawyers and hedge fund managers received inadequate development of their consciences from an early age.

SUPPLANTING THE NIELSEN RATINGS?

The local newspaper is looking for ways to enhance sponsorships.

When readers first visit HuskieWire.com, they will see our home page as usual. But when clicking on the first headline, readers will be asked a question such as, “Do you drink pop?” Readers also may be asked to “Like” the story on Facebook.

By performing either of these quick actions, the full story will appear. The survey is part of our continued exploration into how we can work with internet companies such as Google.

The survey question will be displayed only on the first story the reader views. Readers will be asked to answer only one simple survey every 24 hours. All surveys will be completely anonymous, and Google will not use any data collected for their own ad targeting.

Not yet.

I suppose it's less intrusive than having to register or buy a subscription for online content.

THE VALUE OF DE-ACCESSIONING ITEMS.

One of the occupational hazards of reading things for a living is that books and papers accumulate.  One of the realities of doing the work of several people in an era of downsizing is that time to clear out the excess is hard come by or put to other uses, such as maintaining a web journal.  Thus comes Robin Zasio, the staff psychologist for A&E's Hoarders, and her The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life.  Book Review N^o. 20: sneak up on the task, clear it out a little at a time.  If you're considering the book as a nudge to a friend or family member whose housekeeping skills you find deficient, read it first.  Will it earn a place on the shelf and contribute to the hoard library?  Probably not.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

NOT PHOTOSHOPPED

The Germans are working on a new kind of trackless trolley.

Siemens AG photo courtesy Destination: Freedom.

The article notes there's nothing new in an electrically-powered road vehicle, although those current collectors are a bit much.

So-called “trackless trolleys” – passenger buses operated electrically with double overhead lines to supply the power – are in operation in many cities including Seattle, San Francisco, the Ruhr region in northwestern Germany, Switzerland, and dozens of other locations around the world for many decades. But Siemens idea is to electrify one lane of a limited access highway for powering trucks. The trucks are equipped with a double pantograph current collector, somewhat similar to modern trains except there are two of them side-by-side. The trucks themselves are dual-mode, they can interchangeably drive from electric power or the usual diesel engine. The goal is to eliminate diesel exhaust emissions from trucks on major highways in urban areas. Los Angeles and several other cities are reportedly looking seriously at Siemens proposal.

Regular readers know there are trackless trolleys -- in Milwaukee locution, trolley buses -- in the Cold Spring Shops.

Destination: Freedom goes on with a suggestion.

The added costs of electric / diesel trucks is anyone’s guess, perhaps $20,000 per vehicle, maybe less, or possibly far more. It all begs the question, if you want to move freight through urban environments using electric power, maybe an invention that dates backs over 100 years and today is in widespread use on five or six continents is perhaps the way to go. What is this century-old invention that efficiently eliminates engine exhaust emissions caused by moving many tons of freight through heavily populated areas? The electrified railroad.

The proper locution is "raises the question," not "begs the question". Nitpicking aside, this is what an electrified intermodal train looks like.

Charles Anderson photograph courtesy Stan's RailPix.

Mantua, Pennsylvania, May 1958.

You'd have to raise that catenary a few feet to clear stack trains, although The Pennsylvania Railroad and Penn Central did handle autoracks on the Northeast Corridor.

WHEN THE INCOME EFFECT SWAMPS THE SUBSTITUTION EFFECT.

Cold Spring Shops has long maintained that emergent worker behavior will lead to shorter working hours and getting off the 24/7 treadmill. "Whether your model of behavior is "Going Galt" or "Take This Job and Shove It", the resistance grows." Here's a report from the front lines of Manhattan, likely to be the last refuge of the frenetic striver.

Perhaps people are looking around at the intensity of how we work and are constantly connected and are taking a step back wanting to simplify and enjoy their life through something that they are truly passionate about.  I am not so sure we are slowing down but we are shifting.  We are moving into the next generation post-2008 when the world imploded.  We might be slowly coming out of that time but the economy, the Internet, the world is a very different place.  The changes are subtle now but in a few years we will see them more intensely as the generation graduating from college now makes their mark on the world and the ones jumping off their career paths.

And you have to love the graphic that accompanies the post.

Image from Gotham Gal.

Her post elaborates on the discovery by the bosses' newspaper of tired people pushing back, right under their noses.

Single professionals report going to extremes to manage non-work duties—buying extra socks and sheets to avoid doing laundry, cooking and freezing 20 meals at once to save time or jamming two or three workouts into the weekend to try to stay in shape.

A 37-year-old New Jersey project consultant with an active social life says she faces piles of dirty dishes, laundry and unanswered mail when she gets home each evening, and she can't get started on important financial planning.

Note: singles. This isn't your standard Two-Income Trap or lack of family friendly policies stuff, this is burning out your human capital, plain and simple. And the human capital is beginning to decide that, recession jobless recovery or no, it's not worth it, despite emergent attempts of employers to let workers have a life.

As pressure to increase sales kept mounting, "I was really becoming more irritable," avoiding social activities, [onetime ad-sales representative Craig Ellwanger] says. Battling insomnia, he stopped seeing friends and stayed home alone on weekends, watching football on TV and putting off laundry, grocery shopping and paying bills. Although he normally relishes cooking, he reverted to dining on ramen noodles.

Finally in January, he quit, telling himself, "I've got to do this before I go crazy."

A microeconomist's take on the economic recovery: watch the separations statistics. It's likely that a lot of workers are putting up with being on call all the time out of the fear that the only thing worse than being overworked is being out of work. But as those green shoots develop and hiring picks up, watch for people using their exit option.

It's also encouraging that employers are recognizing the folly of protecting their workers who are parents because they expect the single people to cover for them.

Many employers have added "work-life benefits," such as flexible scheduling and personal time off, in an effort to keep all kinds of employees happy, with and without kids and spouses.

But the benefits only go so far. Heavy workloads keep many employees from using them. And for men and women alike, some managers still assume singles don't have anything to do but work and pile on extra duties and projects, according to research by Wendy Casper, an associate professor of management at the University of Texas at Arlington.

It might be the case that some of those single people work as a way of separating themselves from the pack. On the other hand, observers of workplace dynamics might want to look for pushback from single employees asked to cover so that a colleague can get to a soccer match, or, more deliciously, divorce court.

SCHOOL FAILURE IS NOT FOR A LACK OF MONEY.

Former union representative and playwright David Macaray thinks he's arguing against teacher-bashing and standardized tests. Read carefully, though, and he's identifying the real problem with students not getting all they could out of school.

Nearly everyone regretted the exact same thing.  They regretted they hadn’t been better students—and not just in high school, but all the way back to elementary school.  These good people regretted that they hadn’t been more mature, that they hadn’t applied themselves more diligently, that they hadn’t paid attention in class, and that they hadn’t buckled down and done their assigned homework.  They more or less regretted their entire attitude toward education.

And while I’m not suggesting that this informal survey was in any way “conclusive,” the difference in responses between men and women was nonetheless surprising.  Virtually every man I spoke to blamed himself for his deficiency.  He readily acknowledged that in elementary school all he did was watch TV and goof off, and that by the time he reached high school he was more interested in girls and cars and sports than school work.

Gosh, did those young men arrive at school without the habits of the middle class, and did the schools do nothing to suggest that acquiring those habits might matter? Notice: although the essay disaggregates responses by sex, the responses of the females do not differ in ways that might support a war-on-boys interpretation of the troubles the males had.

But while the women also regretted that they, too, hadn’t applied themselves, their assessment differed a bit from the men’s.  Women were more willing to fault their parents (particularly their mothers) for not having dogged them enough.  They were critical of their mothers for not having sufficiently “pushed” them to be good students, and for not having “had higher [academic] expectations” for them.

It didn’t seem that any of these women (most of whom were late thirties or older) were especially bitter, or were playing the martyr card, or were using their moms as scapegoats.  What they were doing was simply looking back on their lives and candidly recalling that a lack of parental-imposed motivation and discipline had hindered them academically.

In any event, here’s the kicker.  Not one of them blamed their teachers.

Perhaps not, but when the mothers didn't develop the cultural capital of their girls, why not?  Did the mothers' schooling neglect the development of cultural capital, because doing so was oppressive?

FOURTH TURNING ALERT?

In The New Criterion, James Piereson suggests that the breakdown of The Vital Progressive Center, otherwise known as the social order that emerged out of the victory in World War II, with more than a little structure inherited from the New Deal, can no longer be sustained by piecemeal reform or by compromise.

The deeper causes lie in the exhaustion of the post-war system of political economy that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s. One pillar of that system emerged out of the New Deal with its emphasis upon national regulation of the economy, social insurance, expanding personal consumption, and public debt; the second emerged out of World War II with the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the U.S. military as the protector of the international trading system. The post-war system created the basis for unprecedented prosperity in the United States and the Western world. That system is now unwinding for several reasons, not least because the American economy can no longer underwrite the debt and public promises that have piled up over the decades. The urgent need to cancel or renegotiate these debts and public promises on short notice will ignite the upheaval referred to here as “the fourth revolution.” There will follow an extended period of conflict in the United States between the two political parties as they compete for support either to maintain the post-war system or to identify a successor to it.

It's a long article, and unrelievedly pessimistic, yet worth careful study.

HUMANS AS HAMSTERS.

The Nation's Ari Melber makes an instructive observation about today's Supreme Court ruling on the health care reform law.

While this ruling is huge political news, validating the largest domestic achievement of President Obama's presidency, it does not significantly alter Supreme Court precedent or the powers reserved for the Congress.  For all the political attacks on the Affordable Health Care Act, a year ago, few legal scholars took the [constitutional] challenge seriously. Today's opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, essentially endorses the current status quo, which enables Congress to use its taxing power to shape national policy and to incentivize certain behavior.

No less an expert on Pigouvian taxation than Greg Mankiw described the tax penalty for failure to buy insurance in such terms, back in December 2007.  Choose not to buy health insurance, lose a tax deduction.

Whether mandate-as-tax convinces people or polarizes people I leave for others to debate.  The Court's ruling, however, opens the field to critics of state action who object to tax incentives, whether optimized for second-best effects or not, on philosophical grounds.  Putting that objection simply: a tax code with targeted tax cuts, deductions, and penalties to encourage or discourage various behaviors reduces taxpayers to the status of laboratory animals, learning to press levers and receive pellets.

SETTLING INTELLECTUAL SCORES.

Paul Krugman made his reputation as a research economist applying ideas from regional science to international trade.  Of late, he's taken an interest in macroeconomic policy, with mixed results.  On one hand, he's made the case for better national income accounting.  On the other hand, sometimes he sounds like just another hack for the left wing of the Democratic Party.  A few years ago, he made the case for intellectual diversity in macroeconomics in The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, reviewed here.  The intellectual diversity he's referring to is received Keynesian macroeconomics, the mainstream intellectual tradition from the late 1950s into the 1960s, but one obscured or marginalized or ignored since the emergence of rational expectations and real business cycles and micro-foundations since then.  In End This Depression Now! one of the lines of argument he raises is that academic economists committed an intellectual error by so doing.  Because the book is written for the educated layman, not the macroeconomics workshop, it has more by way of polemic and less by way of recognition of stagflation and the rest of the real-world events of the 1970s that gave the New Classical and other lines of research the anomalies calling for a new paradigm.  Book Review N^o. 19 suggests that if readers take End This Depression in the spirit in which it is offered, and filter out the polemics and the academic score-settling, there might be a little bit of instructive stuff, such as the fundamental problem with the Euro being the absence of any sort of central bank with credible borrowing and lending ability (that problem also being an argument against allowing each state of the U.S. to have its own currency), and the possibility that when an economy appears to be in a liquidity trap, some aggressive fiscal policy might be in order.  At the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman writes something that reads a lot like Krugman.

By now, it should be obvious that the problem is not that the Fed has injected too much money into the economy but too little. The price of gold — which jumps at the slightest whiff of inflation — has plunged from more than $1,900 an ounce last year to less than $1,630.

The commodity price index is down 7 percent from a year ago. Home sales have been tepid despite mortgage rates lower than anyone could ever have dreamed.

When lenders anticipate debasement of the currency, they demand higher interest rates to compensate for the risk. But currently, five-year Treasury bills are paying 0.71 percent, and 20-year bonds offer only 2.33 percent. In the mid-90s, a period of low inflation, those rates ranged well north of 5 percent.

That, stated simply, is the basis of the Krugman recommendation for ending the depression: take those cheap borrowings, use them to employ people, and make use of the accounting identity that my purchase is your income.  Whether Professor Krugman has correctly analyzed the Obama administration as being too cautious in its fiscal policy, or whether subsequent research will understand the administration as attempting too many things with its stimulus (most notably, shovel-ready is a nod to environmental interest) will await the production of a few doctoral dissertations.  That is, if there are any academic departments left to produce dissertations.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

CURTAILING DOUBLE DIPPING.

It's not uncommon for professors to take their pensions and return to the classroom on a part-time basis.   Probably Pareto-improving, too: the former faculty members do not have to serve on committees, and the university does not have to pay as much in salary in benefits.  Those professors continue to draw pensions, and one legislator wants to curtail the universities shifting payroll costs to the inadequately funded retirement system.

“It is possible under the current law under the current pension code for an employee of the university system … to effectively offload a substantial portion of their compensation from the university to the pension system by kind of artificially retiring and returning to work,” [Evanston state representative Daniel] Biss said. “It [HB 4996] attempts to curb some of the more inexcusable instances of this practice.”

Under the proposed legislation, a faculty member teaching one course per academic year, or one conducting sponsored research, is not engaging in an inexcusable instance.

LET THE KIDS BE KIDS.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Keilman suggests that positional arms races in youth sports are for the benefit of the parents, not their kids.

I'm thinking of a recent day when my son went to a friend's house to play street hockey. At first it was just the two of them, but then other boys started pouring from their houses, and before you knew it, a dozen of them were running, laughing and blasting the lightweight puck at each other.

I'll bet he remembers that forever. It was a wonderful afternoon — mostly, no doubt,because adults had nothing to do with it.

Indeed. Go, read, and understand.

POSITIVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK.

Abraham Miller, for Pajamas Media, asks readers to reconsider a pop-social science commonplace in light of street crime intruding into supposedly safe tourist areas of Chicago.

We all know how to avoid those, unless our economic circumstances regrettably compel us to live in such neighborhoods. Last week, 53 people were shot in Chicago. Most of us will dismiss this as an irrelevant statistic.  After all, we know without reading the papers where those people live: in the south and west sides. There, the population is largely black or  Latino,  gangs fight turf wars over the drug trade, and getting a gun is not only a rite of passage but also is more common than getting a high school diploma.

We don’t ask if our laws and social system have gone astray in tolerating such violence.  After all, we delude ourselves into believing that people like us are immune to being violated in our own safe neighborhoods. Basically, we know where to go or not go in our cities and don’t question if it’s acceptable for some of our fellow citizens to live under persistently threatening conditions.

We assume that because people who look like the victims are also the perpetrators, it’s not our problem. Our continually reinforced ethnic tribalism really comes down to: we don’t give a damn about black-on-black violence or what happens in the deteriorating parts of our city. We can be smug about gun control because none of our neighbors are shooting each other. We can be self-righteous about microscopic adherence to due process because none of us will have to testify in open court against people who belong to vengeful criminal organizations.

Such delusions are part of what makes us not only smug but also hypocrites. We invoke the notion that poverty causes crime.  If only we’d have greater redistribution of income and wealth, all this would go away. We take comfort in the idea that there is a solution to the problem. Why not? It’s ingrained in our psyches, pontificated as one of the few real “laws” of social science, and comes to us as strongly from the classrooms as it does from the bar stools. We can, thus, avoid the thought of 53 white people being gunned down on our streets over a few days.

But as the late James Q. Wilson so artfully pointed out decades ago, it might be that poverty causing crime is just another logical fallacy. Wilson challenged us to think that maybe it’s the other way around: crime causes poverty.

Good research is hard, because phenomena might have multi-directional causality.  Thus, the absence of opportunities to pursue accepted lines of endeavour might lead people to live by a different line of endeavour.  At the same time, though, the emergence of those criminal endeavours might drive the productive people out, which is Professor Miller's point.

In Chicago, though, the rising frequency of flash-mob and gang-territorial incursions into tourist areas has at least one alderman fearing Chicago is becoming Detroit.  That's not wholly inaccurate: the Murder City description of Motown preceded the first Chrysler bailout and the shake-out of auto assembly plants within the city limits.  Second City Cop suggests Chicago is "most of the way" to becoming Detroit already.

A BICENTENNIAL.

Napoleon, deciding that invading England by sea would be too difficult, turned east.  Quite possibly the best statistical graphic, and the best church-consecration music to celebrate American Independence by resulted.

Six score and nine years later another former corporal repeated the error.