LET'S ACCOUNT FOR ALL THE SUBSIDIES.

Via Destination: Freedom, a useful primer on the nature and extent of transportation subsidies.

About 30% of Americans want to live in [transit-oriented developments], yet the government does not support that reasonable and healthy market demand. Instead we subsidize cheap gasoline, suburban McMansions and the "Drive Everywhere to Everything" lifestyle with $101 billion ($327/capita) in subsidies (General funds & non-transportation taxes) in 2010.

I hesitate to vouch for the extent of the demand or the absence of government subsidies for, e.g., streetcars and Passenger Rail.  But leave aside the polemics and keep in mind that there is a lot of public money in road construction, maintenance, traffic enforcement, and snow plowing, and the definitive study of whether that expenditure is a regressive transfer or not remains to be written.

PICK ANY TWO?

Ruth Conniff: "What we want is our peaceful, multicultural, civil society back."  I don't remember there ever being one.  I also fear that the more some people double down on embracing diversity, the less peaceful and civil the society will be.  Here's a particularly angry statement suggesting as much.

I know you’re not supposed to paint with a broad brush, unless you’re a liberal, in which case you are not only permitted, but expected to make Adam Lanza the poster boy for 100 million law-abiding legal gun owners.

But please, before the Kool-Aid drinkers in the Senate try to get amnesty for at least 12 million un­documented Democrats, can somebody please consider how many more of these Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs we really need?

There is one commonality between the angry white guys involved in some of the recent shooting incidents and the Tsarnaev brothers. All expressed some degree of alienation from the mainstream of society, however they perceived that mainstream to be. I'm not persuaded that deconstructing the mainstream necessarily reduces the alienation. More on this point, once the crush of end-of-semester business passes.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO COERCING UNINFORMED PEOPLE?

Don Boudreaux first counts the ways in which The Enlightened of various stripes fancy themselves able to Impress the Right Motions on the chess-pieces.  He then contemplates the way in which The Enlightened seek to expand their powers by the Consent of the Governed. "The more expansive is the scope of government authority, the more my life is subject to commands issued in part under the influence of people who read Us magazine."  Lynne Kiesling made the case for limiting what coalition-builders could do with the Public Power a few years ago.

Every individual has his/her own preferences, own view of the good life, own objective function. The “man of system” cannot know, cannot experience the wants, the needs, the social context in which each individual makes choices (individual and collective choices). To the extent that the imposed system creates an environment that does not honor the knowledge problem, it makes both the individual and society worse off. The “man of system” approach to institutional choice is not consistent with that epistemological constraint. Is this an argument for representative government, even with they “tyranny of the majority” problem?

Perhaps not, but taking away people's guns, or beer, or pressure cookers is Necessary and Proper to Producing A Better World.

SUMMARIZE IN ONE SENTENCE.

Reason TV reveals the way the technocratic vision works.

"In a great nation like ours, you can't let people do what they want. It has to be coordinated," says Hasan Ikhrata, the executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG).

It's just so annoying to Smart People^(TM) that Complex Adaptive Systems Do Pretty Much What They Darn Well Please.

MORE RENT-SEEKING BY ARCHER-DANIELS?

That's Decatur's Archer Daniels Midland, notorious as a participant in an expensive conspiracy to fix the price of chicken feed, quite happy to suckle at the public teat to produce ethanol, also quite happy to benefit from the Essential Air Service subsidy rather than develop ethanol-fueled corporate jets?

On any given day at O'Hare International Airport's bustling Terminal 3 -- amid the jumbo jets and superliners taxiing in and out of the gates -- there’s a tiny nine-seat Cessna Caravan waiting to board passengers headed to Decatur, Ill.

It’s paid for with federal money: More than $2.6 million a year in tax dollars this year alone.

The news report suggests that a Decatur resident can get to a nearby airport [or to Amtrak at Lincoln or Urbana] more quickly than many Chicagoans can get to O'Hare or Midway.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), an international food-processing corporation with its headquarters in Decatur, wrote a letter to the U.S. DOT saying it "enthusiastically supports" the subsidized air routes to and from Decatur.

"ADM employees utilize and enjoy traveling with Air Choice One thanks to their Chicago O’Hare and Lambert St. Louis connections which make it significantly easier for catching connecting flights," an ADM official wrote to the head of the EAS program.

Did you ever expect the beneficiary of public largesse to concede that the program in question is a boondoggle?

PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEMS.

Very early in the history of Cold Spring Shops, I called readers attention to the phenomenon of administrative bloat in higher education.  In retrospect, I should have been grateful for 1985 level enrollments with 1995 staffing, given that we're now working with 1985 level enrollments and 2013 staffing.  More recently, I've attempted to link financial aid, administrative bloat, and tuition bubbles.  And financial aid provides all sorts of opportunities to practice perfect price discrimination.

To the extent that vouchers make potential students or their parents less price-sensitive, the administrators are free to exercise more market power. We also have to know what preferences the students are acting on. These vouchers might be subsidizing Jacuzzi U and other creature comforts -- not a new problem -- rather than additional computer connections, journals, or smaller classes.

The passage of time didn't make me less gloomy.

Furthermore, whether you want to call the third-party payment a voucher or a guaranteed loan or a subsidy, it is still a third-party payment. Students will have less incentive to shop around and administrators less incentive to cut out the expense-preference behavior. To obtain lower tuitions and greater enrollment requires both shopping around and an end to that behavior.

The good news for today is that commentators at outlets appealing to different constituencies are picking up the argument.  First, the Via Media argument, which will probably be picked up by Insta Pundit and circulated around the libertarian cyberspace.

Once upon a time, the government-subsidized student loan system was about putting college within reach of a wider array of Americans. But this model has gone sour, as colleges have raised prices to keep pace with federal aid. Universities increased tuition by 65 percent in the past ten years alone, meanwhile taking on debt to finance lavish new facilities. The number of administrators hired by higher ed institutions has increased 50 percent faster than the number of instructors since 2001.

It’s hard to imagine that universities would have done this if they had been forced to compete with each other on price. Alas, abundant government loans ensured that the only competition that mattered to them was the quest to lure in students and their federally subsidized grants and loans.

Rents sought, rents generated, rents dissipated in climbing walls and new-age dorms with self-contained kitchens.

So here's Matt Yglesias in Slate, likely to be picked up by a different set of constituents.

I think it's misleading to say that administrative spending is "contributing to" rising costs. That's not how things work. The issue is that schools are finding that they can get away with charging high prices. Since colleges are non-profits, ability to charge high prices doesn't lead to dividend payouts or the acquisition of big cash stockpiles. The money gets spent. And the trend lately has been to spend it on administrators.

All of which is one reason I'm skeptical that you can really do much on the college "cost" front by offering more tuition subsidies. At any given level of subsidy, schools are going to charge families what they can afford to pay and then they're going to take that money and spend it on the stuff that the people running the school want to spend it on.

Where it's not strictly what families want to pay, now it's what our political masters see fit to provide in the form of subsidized loans and other attempts to introduce affordable education.  And Business Week weighs in: "From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10 times faster than they added tenured faculty." Just in case anybody needed reminding why I frequently sound tired or cranky.

UNDENIABLE TRUTH NO. 24.

Rush Limbaugh provokes people putting it this way.

See if you can spot the same argument, in this Atlantic analysis of a recent presidential gaffe.

In contemporary America, women can choose the extent to which they wish to engage with this system of power, but there's no question that it remains extant, and that in many ways the most economically successful women are those who use it best to their advantage--actresses, models, musicians, and the like. Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded. We pay homage to it, still, and young women as they face the world can make a choice to live a life--even a career--within it, just as they can choose to go to law or medical school or contend in any other way for standing and earning capacity in the world.

That is, they can enter the system of power. Power as the acquisition of status, capital, position, knowledge, property. And for a reason other than the exploitation of the resource of the physical self. The fight of feminism was the fight of women for entry into the system of power from the system of beauty. The fight in the workplace for women very often is to create a space for themselves within the system of power while continuing to operate within the system of beauty in their private lives. And the struggle of feminism has often been to acknowledge that the system of beauty is irrevocable and cannot be expunged by protest or discourse or time. To be an educated professional woman in contemporary America is to know that you operate--and often, must operate--within both systems. It's why beautiful and extremely capable women are often valued above their less glamorous or less fit peers--they are triumphs in two systems of value, double-threats.

Put alternatively, think about those double threats as holding a diversified portfolio.

NEVER ISSUED THE LITTLE TIN KEY.

A number of the cases involving lower-level employees caught up in the coffee fund investigation have been dismissed. Mark Beaird is the most recent person to be cleared.

Beaird, like the other defendants whose cases were dropped, performed duties that would not have been different had the recycling funds been directed to the proper account, [state's attorney Richard] Schmack said.

“They had no role in making a decision about which account the funds were going into, and we didn’t think the ends of justice were being served by continuing to prosecute,” Schmack said.

The coffee fund was an off-the-books account for proceeds from the sale of NIU-owned scrap metal and other materials. The account accumulated at least $13,000 since 2005 and held $2,187 when it was closed in August. The money was used for office retirement parties and similar expenses, NIU officials said.

Six cases cases have been dropped since Robert Albanese, former associate vice president of the Division of Finance and Facilities at NIU, pleaded guilty last month to violating the State Property Control Act, a misdemeanor. Albanese, 62, of Elburn, was sentenced to 18 months of court supervision and fined $825.

The investigation is not finished.

Charges are pending against Lawrence Murray, 52, of Rochelle, and Kenneth Pugh, 57, of Sycamore. They are on suspension from NIU. They are due in court in May.

These individuals held middle-management positions in the university, and their role remains to be determined.

CHEER UP, THINGS COULD BE WORSE.

The MidWeek publish a weekly retrospective of events newsworthy or unusual from years ago.  In the most recent roundup is this gem from 13 April 1988.

The public information office at Northern Illinois University used April Fool’s Day to inject some levity into the serious business of the budget crisis. The office release a list of “proposed budget cuts” April 1; the Chicago Tribune carried the story on the front page of its DuPage County section. Among the April Fool’s recommendations were to send faculty to academic conferences but provide no return tickets; lease ROTC cadets to friendly armies; offer law students course credit for watching “Divorce Court”; close the counseling center and refer students to Dear Abby; replace intercollegiate football with intramural cribbage; limit journalism majors to stories based on facts; and replace campus computers with battery-run abacuses.

Had we known then that the next quarter-century, despite two major periods of macroeconomic expansion, would be nothing but recisions, budget crises, and retrenchments, we might not have been so jocular.

We're currently looking at no recruitment, no travel, and possibly no replacements of life-expired computers.  Counseling has expanded in the past quarter-century: their influence is so great now that the university may be imposing what it calls a "syllabus policy."  The term "syllabus" is incorrect for what we properly view as a course outline.  The policy proposes so much legalese as part of the document that it's more accurate to borrow a term from railroading and distribute Conditions of Carriage on the first day.   In the intervening years, the football team went to the Orange Bowl as well as went undefeated against Alabama.

INCOME AND SUBSTITUTION EFFECTS.

The solution to any perceived pay gap between men and women is for the women to become ... more like the men?

Talented young women who aspire to be rich and powerful would be advised to major in economics or electrical engineering rather than psychology or social work. They should be prepared to work 60 hours a week at the office rather than combining shorter hours with home, family, and other pursuits they find fulfilling. Those who stick with this course will find that their W-2s are equal to those of their male counterparts.

Perhaps so, but to refresh readers' memories,

There's no intellectual basis for criticizing the individual who is willing to outwork others in order to secure income, or promotions.

On the other hand, there's no reason for a corporation to restrict its promotion opportunities to the most conspicuous time-servers, or to restrict its flexible job descriptions to mothers.

I offer a more provocative conjecture, in light of today's research seminar, an investigation of networking and C.E.O. compensation. That is, the current tournament model of business promotions screens for sociopaths.

That's probably over the top, but somewhere the opportunity cost of goofing off must collide with enhanced opportunities to goof off.

USE YOUR IMAGINATION.

Sometimes, the Perpetually Aggrieved are just plain boring.

Why are there no peace correspondents?

War correspondents are omnipresent on cable news networks—in fact, they're the superstars of TV journalism. Anchors are just a pretty face, perched on swivel chairs and shuffling papers on top of laminate countertops. The war correspondent, however, plays the role of the beautiful, disheveled hero brazenly sending dispatches from a conflict zone.

When it comes time to propose alternatives, though, you get a bundle of earnestness combined with a lack of imagination.

We need peace correspondents—Anderson Coopers that update the public on the status of peace, with as much passion, panache and gravity as they update us on the status of our wars.

We need fewer interviews with five-star military generals on Sunday Morning talk shows, and more interviews with the Mareid Maguires, Leymah Gbowees, and other unsung heros who advocate for concord over conflict.

We need journalists embedded with organizations with Women for Afghan Women, the Free Gaza movement, and Code Pink in addition to U.S. Military units.

When wartime is over, we need reporters to send dispatches from the field, showing what it's like to have families whole and together, lives restored, and money spent on more fruitful endeavors than bloodshed—and how all those gains can all so quickly disappear, as they did ten years ago.

OK, fine, a some Nobel Laureates who might have actually faced down Death rather than (cough) made a movie or just got elected can add perspective, if of that rather earnest form that placates the Perpetually Aggrieved.

Doesn't the food correspondent or the sports reporter or the person who covers the P.T.A. (or files a story from the N.M.R.A. show) also qualify?

WHY I FIGHT.

It has long been the Cold Spring Shops position that institutions of higher learning, no matter their station, view themselves as being in the same business as the Ivies.  Their failure to do so may be contributing to widening social stratification.

At its heart, the widening gap in college completion rates between rich and poor students undermines the traditional American notion of equal opportunity. It also represents a missed economic opportunity. Raising graduation rates among low- income students would significantly increase average educational attainment in the U.S. and, in so doing, bolster productivity.

In many cases, the propensity of students who might be eligible to attend more visible institutions, yet choose not to, may be self-handicapping. (There's a more cynical view of the phenomenon here, if you can stomach it.)

Self-handicapping or not, however, it might be a separating equilibrium desired by the current elite, according to Ross Douthat, proposing here that self-selection of eligible strivers out of the Ivies helps the current elite perpetuate itself, provided nobody is too open about it.

No, it’s better for everyone when these questions aren’t asked too loudly. The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite’s entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that “merit” correlates with talents and deserts.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

It's a separating equilibrium in which some of the land grants and mid-majors are complicit, in a way particularly demoralizing.

If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.

That’s the sobering bottom line of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press), a new book based on five years of interview research by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and Laura T. Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced.

It’s not entirely the colleges’ fault, Hamilton says. Declining state and federal support and rising tuition have made it critical to recruit students who can pay more (and who continue to donate after they leave). But the out-of-state and affluent students attending these colleges are not in it for the academics – those students are going to the Harvards, Michigans and Berkeleys of the world.

The students who end up at Midwestern University – a pseudonym for the flagship institution where Armstrong and Hamilton follow a group of women through their college careers, from the dorm floor to a year post-graduation – are socially minded. Thus, to lure and keep those students, institutions have come to structure their academic and social frameworks in a way that accommodates that population.

The result of this “party pathway” is more than just a substandard education for those students, whose significant family resources and connections -- which set them up for jobs after graduation, regardless of credentials -- allow them to take easy majors and spend as much time if not more drinking as they do studying. It also deters those on the “mobility pathway,” as those low-income students seeking entry into the middle class are both poorly supported and distracted by the party framework. As a result, many of these students struggle to succeed -- meandering through college for six years or more -- or drop out altogether.

Time's Fareed Zakaria communicates the same message to a wider public.

State universities--once the highways of advancement for the middle class--have been utterly transformed under the pressure of rising costs and falling government support. A new book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, shows how some state schools have established a "party pathway," admitting more and more rich out-of-state kids who can afford hefty tuition bills but are middling students. These cash cows are given special attention through easy majors, lax grading, social opportunities and luxurious dorms. That's bad for the bright low-income students, who are on what the book's authors, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, call the mobility pathway. They are neglected and burdened by college debt and fail in significant numbers.

The strategy might work as a revenue-enhancer short run. Taking the longer view, though, it's not likely to pay off in political support, as the thin envelopes arrive at the homes of strivers who can vote for legislators, and as the value of the institution's degree degrades, as the party-pathway students hit the work force.

FREIGHT TARIFFS ARE CALCULATED IN HUNDREDWEIGHTS.

Soon, too, might airline passenger tariffs be?

Samoa Air is the first airline to adopt what many others are no doubt contemplating: charging per pound. They actually weigh you at the check-in counter.

Oh — the horror. You already take off your belt, shoes, sweater and coat. You get felt up by strangers. You get ordered into the naked body scanner.

Now this.

A pay-what-you-weigh pricing plan: 93 cents for every 2.2 pounds of your luggage — plus you. It’s like the post office: The heavier the package, the more you pay.

But wait: I just learned that 
Samoans are even fatter than mainland Americans. Only a third of us, so far, are actually obese, compared with 75 percent of American Samoans — who are U.S. citizens, though at 55,000, there aren’t enough of them to tip the nation’s statistical scales.

And teeny tiny Samoa Air flies teeny tiny planes. Ever fly one of those teeny tiny Cape Air planes to Hyannis or New Hampshire, look around at six or seven supersized passengers and wonder, in panic, Can we get off the ground?

Did the pilot get a gander at that side-by-side refrigerator in 2A?

So I’m down with Samoa Air. Liftoff is everything.

I see the potential for a startup, should such pricing diffuse to the major carriers: an airline that flies only planes with bigger-than-first-class seats, at a flat rate that makes the large passengers strictly prefer flying that airline, rather than pay by the pound to get onto a standard airplane. It's not going to be a pure separating equilibrium, however, a plane with fewer seats can be loaded and unloaded through the one door more expeditiously. Almost as expeditiously, in fact, as getting thirteen bulls off the circus train.

SO MUCH FOR ACADEMIC LEISURE.

Life in the humanities sucks.  Then you're deconstructed.

Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.

Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know.

Don't do it. Just don't.

These days, that summer sequestration may not even pay off in grants funded, or in merit money. But treating summer as solely for re-creation gives headquarters one more excuse, whether it's a fall-off in departmental research productivity, or a failure to incorporate the latest deaducationist fads in your course material, to trim your department's budget.

CATCHING UP.

The summary for last year's Fifty Book Challenge didn't get posted until 21 January.  Against that standard of underachievement, the first quarter report for this year getting posted in the first week of April is progress, of a sort.  That also sets the table for additional reviews to be posted, perhaps some of them relatively soon.  Whether the fifty is achievable for this year remains to be seen.  The links below point to reviews posted at the Challenge.

1. The End:  The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945; 10 February 2013.
2. Threat Vector; 11 February 2013 (meh)
3. The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World; 8 March 2013.
4. Flatterland: like Flatland, only more so; and
5. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos; 10 March 2013.
6. Detroit: An American Autopsy; 24 March 2013.
7. Klanville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil-Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan; 31 March 2013.

Would you believe, a thunderstorm. Wonder if that helps bookworms grow.

Oooooooo

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

PERSISTENCE

Sometimes, solving a hit-and-run accident involves understanding positive and negative space.  A grocery store worker suffered injuries in a hit-and-run collision.

DeKalb police officer Jeff Winters was the first to arrive on the scene. He talked to two people who saw the crash, including one who had chased the vehicle as it sped off toward Peace Road.

There was debris left behind, including a piece of evidence that would help Winters put it all together: A broken piece of plastic grillwork with the outline of a cougar on it. Like you’d find on a Mercury Cougar.

Winters kept that, along with part of a headlight that had broken off, in his duty bag. He was relatively sure of two things: The driver was local, and they [c.q.] probably wouldn’t repair the damage any time soon.

I'm not sure, based on the evidence given in the story, that Officer Winters's conjecture is supportable as a strictly logical argument.

That's not to say broken parts of cars aren't useful in solving hit-and-run cases. There was one in Oakland County, Michigan, thirty years ago, that the police solved by bringing a piece of trim from a car to the car plant that built the car, and an officer, assisted by a parking lot guard, in the course of looking for the type of car that had that trim, found such a car with precisely the broken trim missing. The driver was duly convicted of leaving the scene of an accident, despite an ingenious legal defense based on the police running the car's plates without a warrant.

The more recent DeKalb case had a more prosaic resolution.

Winters, an 18-year veteran of the DeKalb force, kept his eyes peeled around town for an old Merc. Whenever he spotted one – whether while on duty or even while making an off-duty trip to Walmart – he would check for front-end damage.

“When you’ve got an accident with a guy on a motorcycle and [a driver] doesn’t stop to see if the person’s OK, it kind of gets you upset,” Winters said. “So I kind of took a personal interest in this one.

“There’s some things, certain cases will drive you to keep looking for more, because you know there is more.”

Presumably, had he found such a car in a parking lot, and run the plate, that Michigan case might also govern. Sometimes, though, careless drivers are habitually careless.

Then one afternoon in mid-March, Winters saw it. A black, 1993 Mercury Cougar with front-end damage turning from Fairview onto 7th Street, right in front of his squad car.

Winters stopped the car, explained to the driver what was going on.

“I went to the front of the car, and I’m like, ‘This has got to be it,’ ” he said.

Sure enough, the pieces Winters had kept with him the past three months fit perfectly. The vehicle was impounded. The driver that day didn’t have a license, but she said it was her friend who had been driving when the damage to the car occurred.

The next day, Winters found the woman who had been driving the car Dec. 14.

“Through the investigation, she admitted it was her and she was on her way to pick her friend up,” Winters said. “She was just nervous because she didn’t have insurance and [her license] was suspended, so she panicked and left.”

I'm not sure what good it does to suspend the licenses of bad drivers who will continue to drive, badly, without benefit of a valid license, and cause greater havoc in the aftermath of their errors. On the other hand, I'm not sure putting all bad drivers on house arrest, or requiring them to wear tracking devices, is a good use of resources.

INADVERTENTLY MAKING THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY.

A recent Anderson Cooper segment on CNN mischaracterized Washington State's use of federal stimulus money to improve the Cascades Talgo service as failure to produce a European style high speed passenger train.  The usual suspects pounce. "$800 million have been used to reduce the length of the trip from Seattle to Portland by 10 minutes." No, the money made additional train frequencies possible, and provided additional sidings, in order that the 10 minute reduction in trip time was actual, not notional.

Paula Hammond, former secretary of transportation for Washington state, argues that there are other benefits from the project, such as expanded routes and more reliable scheduling. She explained that the state never intended to build a system like the famous “bullet trains” of Japan and Europe. Notwithstanding grandiose D.C. promises, in the Northwest region, said Hammond, “we want the ability of our communities to be connected so that we can provide travel, a daily business trip between Seattle and Portland, and the opportunity not to have to fight traffic.”

That, despite having devoted nearly all of the stimulus money, close to half a billion dollars, to road projects that will have almost no effect on the volume of traffic drivers have to fight.  Despite the campaigning at Destination: Freedom for a true high-speed Passenger Rail service, toward which the stimulus money is at best the earnest money deposit, the high benefit-cost ratio projects remain the regional rail corridors of California, the Carolinas, radiating out of Chicago, and in the Pacific Northwest.  Most of these corridors are short enough that spending the really big money on German-style fast electric trains will reduce trip length by a half hour or so, end-to-end, and such trains will be hard pressed to realize their potential between intermediate stops.  But the possibility of doing business and returning the same day, or sometimes by early afternoon, and getting work done on the train, without the airport hassles or the road distraction, makes the provision of 110-125 mph diesel trains a task worth pursuing.

MIDDLE CLASS ATTITUDES, NOT MIDDLE CLASS TRAPPINGS, MATTER.

The Dollars and Sense collective talks sense about the value of home ownership.

Johns Hopkins University researchers Joe Harkness and Sandra Newman looked at whether homeownership benefits kids even in distressed neighborhoods. Their study concluded that "[h]omeownership in almost any neighborhood is found to benefit children. ... Children of most low-income renters would be better served by programs that help their families become homeowners in their current neighborhoods instead of helping them move to better neighborhoods while remaining renters." (Harkness and Newman also found, however, that the positive effects of homeownership on children are weaker in unstable low-income neighborhoods. Moreover, the study cannot distinguish whether homeownership leads to positive behaviors or whether owners were already predisposed to these behaviors.)

The research also does not negate the claim that providing people with middle-class trappings, such as owned houses and college degrees, does not produce middle-class outcomes in the absence of such middle-class habits as deferred gratification and perseverance.

Even the expected Dollars and Sense identification of base capitalist motives hedges.

Low-income families can run into a range of pitfalls when they buy homes. These pitfalls may stem from the kinds of houses they can afford to buy (often in poor condition, with high maintenance costs); the neighborhoods they can afford to buy in (often economically distressed); the financing they can get (often carrying high interest rates, high fees, and risky gimmicks); and the jobs they work at (often unstable). Taken together, these factors can make buying a home a far riskier proposition for low-income families than it is for middle- and upper-income households.

Most low-income families only have the financial resources to buy rundown houses in distressed neighborhoods marked by few jobs, high crime rates, a dearth of services, and poor schools. Few middle-class homebuyers would hitch themselves to 30-year mortgages in these kinds of communities; poor families, too, have an interest in making the home-buying commitment in safe neighborhoods with good schools.

Perhaps, though, there's a simple strategy for increasing asset value: stop behaving like the stereotypical member of the underclass, and work with your neighbors and the police to root out the people who insist on continuing to behave badly.

ARE THE COMMON SCHOOLS OBSOLETE?

The Elusive Wapiti counts the ways.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that public schooling is designed to "produce" "identical" cogs for the industrial age machine, cogs just smart enough to pull a level but not smart enough to rock the boat, the cure the decline in male academic achievement is for parents remove male children from the system entirely.  A system where feminine behavior is rewarded and masculine behavior punished and/or drugged into compliance, liberalist/feminist scholarship is taught, higher male cognitive variability is binned (on the low end) and ignored (on the high end), and where the presence of men in the teaching ranks is discouraged.

That's a pessimistic assessment. It is, however, based on an interpretation of conclusions in peer-reviewed research.

ANNUAL INCOME TEN SHILLINGS, ANNUAL EXPENDITURES NINE AND SIX, RESULT, HAPPINESS.

President Obama proclaims April to be National Financial Capability Month.  (It's also March Madness in Overtime Month, but I digress.)

Financial capability also means helping people avoid scams and demand fair treatment when they take out a mortgage, use a credit card, or apply for a student loan. My Administration continues to encourage responsibility at all levels of our financial system by cracking down on deceptive practices and ensuring that consumers are informed of their rights.

We also know that too many families are living paycheck-to-paycheck, unable to take advantage of tools that would help them plan for a middle class life. That is why we must build ladders of opportunity for everyone willing to climb them -- from a fair minimum wage that lifts working Americans out of poverty to high-quality preschool and early education that gets every child on the right track early. These reforms would encourage the kind of broad-based economic growth that gives everyone a better chance to secure their financial future.

Our President missed an opportunity to organize the communities of the struggling masses, in order that their teachers might put in their lesson plans the content that many of the children of prosperous districts get as a matter of course.

The state council for economic education suggests teachers, or parents, or the youngsters themselves, check out Pathways to Financial Success.  All the preschool and subsidized lunches and minimum wage jobs (if there are any) will not protect a young person from the blandishments of the payday loan hustler or the lottery: it takes awareness of the logic behind "if it sounds too good to be true, it's a scam."

The national Council for Economic Education invites teachers to submit "elevator pitch" videos of their best stuff for teaching financial literacy.  Get cracking, though.  The contest closes April 14, with a popularity contest opening April 16 on Facebook.  (There is no contradiction between teachers proscribing social media on company time and using social media on whatever they view as being off the clock.)

It's a task worth doing.  I cannot rest until I'm confident that students are capable of understanding the traps present in some of the more complicated financial instruments.

TRANSITIONS.

Northern Illinois names Douglas D. Baker (Ph.D. Nebraska) as its twelfth president.

Baker said he plans to hit the ground running at NIU.

By this fall, he will form working groups to address special topics or challenges, such as identifying the needs of the region’s employers, finding ways to leverage NIU’s competitive advantages, building a more sustainable financial model and fine-tuning action plans to improve student success in retention, graduation and employment rates.

“We spend a great deal of effort on recruitment of students, who spend a lot of money to get a degree,” he said. “I want to make sure we also are doing all we can programmatically to make sure they find employment and are on a track to becoming lifelong learners.

“My sense is the 225,000 NIU alumni can play an even bigger role in student success by helping in recruitment, mentoring, internships and post-graduation networking. NIU alumni represent a tremendous resource, and we need their involvement throughout the pipeline.”

That's all helpful. An emphasis on recruiting potential honors students is likely to be more productive than selling the Orange Bowl, Tuesday Night Football aspects of life in the Mid-American.  I'm troubled, though, with the business jargon, which crops up again in a Daily Chronicle report.

Baker emphasized his focus on students, saying his top priority in his first year would be to focus on the student aspects of the Vision 2020 plan and modify the broad set of goals for the university's future to maximize its potential.

"Being a student-centered university is critical," Baker said. "I think the 2020 plan is on target. ... We're going to work hard to make it operational."

The Vision 2020 Initiative was one of Peters' major goals for the university and will progress in some form under Baker when he officially takes over July 1.

Potential is either unbounded, or an outcome dependent on resource constraints. Put another way, one cannot power an Apollo mission with bottle rockets. The encouraging possibility, for colleagues with longer time horizons, is that a full-on bout of strategic planning may not immediately follow the installation. And the new man recognizes the university's strong points.

"NIU's big enough to matter, but small enough to care about the students that it serves," Baker said.

Baker said NIU has its greatest days ahead. Cherilyn Murer, Board of Trustees chair, said Baker would bring NIU to "different heights and different directions, and we see this as extremely positive."

"His enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of his wife, Dr. [Dana] Stover, I think is perfect for this university at this time," Murer said.

Baker said he knows NIU has faced obstacles. He said NIU must emphasize a campus culture where there's ethically inspired leadership at every level; he said he would not let the university be distracted by its challenges.

I note only that it is difficult to square "small enough to care" with departmental staffing levels that might be best practice at a liberal arts college one-fourth our size.  We somehow make do, but again, that's for people with longer time horizons than mine to grapple with.

I WILL CLING TO THE OLD FLAMING CROSS.

North Carolina was one of the more reluctant participants in the Confederacy, and residents thought of themselves as socially inclusive compared to their less-reconstructed neighbors as the civil rights movement took hold.  And yet a strong unreconstructed presence in the state led sociologist David Cunningham to investigate Klanville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil-Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan, the object of this year's Book Review N^o. 7.

The work is an academic study, extensively endnoted, and fortunately free of the barbarism of numbered endnotes accompanied by footnotes within the body of the text and identified by asterisks or other timetable symbols.  The distinction among Klans of various eras is clarified (the trappings are similar, the policy goals differ, the social prestige of being a member varies).  Professor Cunningham suggests that the influence of Klan attitudes remains, despite the organization itself being in eclipse, and the more egregious manifestations of white supremacy scattered among a variety of smaller groups.  His working hypothesis is that competition for resources based on ethnicity provides an organizing principle for Klans (as well as for associations among people suppressed by the existing order?)  Left uninvestigated, though, is the appeal of racialist organizations among the least well-off members of the dominant society as a way of keeping others in an even worse condition (the explicit or implicit logic of Klan opposition to integration.)  Poverty among the poorer members of a community does not of itself make the richer members of a community better off.  That's an anomaly for future research.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

RETHINKING THOSE DEMSETZ AUCTIONS.

Last fall, a kerfuffle over Passenger Rail operating rights broke out when Britain's Department for Transport awarded the franchise to operate the fast trains on the West Coast Main Line to First Group, stripping longtime operator Virgin Trains of what may have been its signature service, those pale shadows of the New Haven Comet called Voyagers notwithstanding.  A tussle of prodigious intensity erupted, during which franchise bidding for Passenger Rail franchises was suspended.

Railway reports franchise bidding will resume.

The Government has restarted its rail franchising programme by inviting bids for the East Coast franchise and other franchises in a timetable spanning the next eight years.

The Government has restarted its rail franchising programme by inviting bids for the East Coast franchise and other franchises in a timetable spanning the next eight years.

In addition, the DfT and Virgin Trains have concluded negotiations over the temporary 23 month extension to the West Coast franchise until late 2014 following the cancelled competition at the end of last year. The new agreement means Virgin will continue to operate the West Coast route until April 2017. It will mean that if the franchise runs to term, Virgin will have had a 20-year tenure on the line.

The article expresses a hope that the resulting extended durations for franchises will "bring more stability and also franchisees to make a greater investment."  So much for using franchise bids to introduce a form of contestability into what might be properly viewed as quasi-monopolistic or naturally monopolistic markets.  The more entrenched a Virgin Trains or a Grand Central is as a train operator, the more sunk its investment becomes, and the more difficult might be (the economic theory on this point is not settled) the ability of a competing bidder, whether it is First Group or The Milwaukee Road, to put together a successful competing bid.

THE CORPORATE DEAD POOL.

As a way of provoking students, I sometimes offer odds on a large corporation going out of business sometime in the next ten to twenty years.  To be really provocative, I sometimes roll out supposedly solid companies including Apple or Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

My task is sometimes made easier when one of the corporations evinces an intent to self-destruct.

Walmart is starting to look like a Soviet-era retailer. The prices are still low, but shelves are going empty for months while products sit unwrapped in storage, lines are interminable, and no one is around to help.

Bloomberg reports that in-store service problems for the world’s third-largest corporation are so bad that people are willing to pony up the extra cash to shop at stores like Target and Walgreens.

Via Media cites an analyst who suggests current labor market policies are making it harder for corporations to hire cheap labor.  There are at least two other hypotheses that come to mind: first, doing more with less, which appears to be de rigueur in business these days, is a formula for doing what you do badly (see the first paragraph supra); second, low wages are a signal of low productivity (see the second paragraph supra.)  Sic transit gloria Walmartia.

AT THE MARGIN, OVERTIME IS CHEAP?

Voluntary Xchange asks, "If the Labor Market Is So Poor, Why Are Overtime Hours So Strong?"  Reported work-weeks are as long now, as they were in the second quarter 1944 run-up to D-Day.  One possibility might be that employers are unable to find additional people with the ability to hold the jobs.  Another possibility might be the fixed costs of adding a new worker are prohibitive.

Compensation of employees is near historical norms. If compensation is normal, and wages are down, then the difference — benefits — must have gone up.

That gap is likely to increase under the provisions of the Affordable Care (c.q.) Act.  It doesn't surprise me that employers might simultaneously be scheduling additional overtime and laying off workers.

RENTS WILL BE DISSIPATED.

Professor Munger has produced an instructive video explaining that there is no such thing as the government giving money away.  With links to case studies consistent with the proposition.

WHY THERE ARE STATE COUNCILS FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION.

The dean at Pioneer Valley Community spends time at at a conference, comes away with a potential project for higher education.  Money management, apparently, is not in the skill sets of the young.

I’ve been told by an economics professor on campus that her students recoil in horror when she goes through the details of how credit cards make their money; they simply didn’t know.  (I can only imagine how they’d react to learning the details about payday lenders.)  Young adults who’ve never dealt with insurance may not have any sense of what a “deductible” is -- the word always struck me as misleading -- or why it matters.

If anything, I’m wondering if financial literacy might make a good substantive focus for a freshman seminar.  Yes, it could cover student loans, but it should go well beyond that.  As a subject, the relevance should be obvious.  Better, it would allow students to exercise the various general education outcomes that most colleges profess: communication skills, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning all leap to mind.  The actual math involved may be relatively simple, but the way of looking at the world is both powerful and complex.

The conversation in his comments section includes several observers suggesting that the proper place to equip the young with money management skills might be in high school.  Or earlier.

F*** ROBERT MUGABE. THIS IS DETROIT.

Thus did Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a man capable of ruining a city, keep waiting a man at the time regarded as a freedom fighter, and now recognized as capable of ruining a country.  It's one of the many events recorded in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy.  Mr LeDuff is a native of Southeastern Michigan, an itinerant returned home, and Book Review N^o. 6 suggests his book be viewed both as his own voyage of personal discovery as well as his attempt to make sense of what went wrong with what used to be the Motor City.

Mr LeDuff's personal story is that of the internal migration of ethnically ambiguous people from South to North.  That internal migration, in quest of fur pelts or factory jobs, is more colorful and less easily valorized than the internal migration of Puritans and similarly motivated, or obsessive, people, from Coast to Inland.  Thus, southeast Michigan becomes a place where regional cultures collide.  It's a place where the collapse of formerly quasi-monopolistic industries that hired people for their muscle and neglected their brains has gone on for the longest.

And thus an autopsy, for a polity, and sometimes for the people living there.  But not always.  A dime novel with dames and hard-boiled cops that spoke or carried on in the manner of people Mr LeDuff encountered would not be believable.  The stories might not be believable to people who have never spent any time in Detroit.  But as a warning about what might happen in parts of Chicago or Milwaukee or Kansas City or Cleveland (to name a few other jurisdictions with school closings and industrial decay and political malfeasance) the American Autopsy of the title is apposite.  I offer a few passages from pages 144-145.

It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader [convicted former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick] plundered, pillaged, and lied, all the while presenting himself as the guardian angel against the White Devil.

Kilpatrick, who walked into that jailhouse as a quivering-lipped pretender, walked out as the creature he always claimed to be, the preening Hip Hop Mayor. ...

He probably would have benefited from a few hours spent working in a factory.  Factory work tends to give you perspective on the importance of things.  Of course in the hip-hop world, work was for suckers.

Not that the automobile executives were much better at running things.  Turns out our masters of the universe couldn't manage a grocery store.

With Detroit going from a place that had plenty of money to a place with no money.  The malfeasance, and misappropriation of public money, and failure to spend money on routine maintenance of firehouses, has been going on for years.  This is the same Detroit, by the way, that had staff in the tax collector's office going through all the income tax returns, changing all roundings to even dollars back to dollars and cents, in order to trim a few pennies off of tax refund checks.  If you don't work you die.

What's sobering about Detroit, though, is that it's the Perfect Storm of safe congressional districts and protected markets and political corruption and education that doesn't educate and business managers that have no idea how the companies they manage actually make things.

Put bluntly, the stuff I've been posting about for years, in the hopes that people won't let it happen to them.

Ignorans quaeris epistolis meis sequi, circumspice.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

REINVENTING THE ZEPHYR?

Let's hope it's not more political patronage.

Locomotives capable of exceeding the 110-mph speed limit on the passenger rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis will be bought for Illinois and four other states under a process the Illinois Department of Transportation will lead, officials said Thursday.

I'm sure there are safety appliances to consider, and having one prime mover rather than two offers some advantages. But the officials could do worse than this.

Apparently, some members of the public thought as much.  First and Fastest published a report on last September's Nebraska Zephyr excursion.  Amtrak, Metra, and the Illinois Railway Museum worked together to make the experience authentic.  Amtrak assigned Track 12, a track normally used only for Metra dinkies, in order to load under the original remaining trainshed.  Metra assembled inbound dinky 1302 of cars (other than the cab car) lettered or relettered B U R L I N G T O N (yes, in the proper Z E P H Y R typeface) to flip as the outbound 8.40 departure, and brought it in on adjacent Track 10.  First and Fastest reports that some arriving passengers on that dinky took mobile phone pictures of the unusual move, with a few of them wondering if they were seeing the new higher-speed Michigan and St. Louis trains (!)  I'm told that 9911 has 90 mph gearing now, not the 117 it was built to achieve.

Amtrak and Illinois Department of Transportation, you could do worse.

AN ECONOMIST IN MADISON.

The new chancellor of the University of Wisconsin is Becky Blank, with an undergraduate degree from Minnesota and a Ph.D. from MIT.

From 1999 to 2008, she was dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as a professor of public policy and of economics. During her eight-year tenure as dean, the public policy school began a bachelor's degree program in public policy and moved into a new $35 million building.

"We really - literally - built the Ford School," Blank told The Michigan Daily in 2007, when she announced she was leaving. "We were responsible for raising the money, constructing the building, getting the right students and faculty and putting the undergraduate program together."

In addition to her work at Northwestern University, Blank taught economics and public affairs at Princeton University and was a visiting professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Journal-Sentinel can't resist some editorializing in the announcement.

She has advised presidents from both political parties, serving as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers first for George H.W. Bush and later for Bill Clinton.

Blank's husband, Hanns Kuttner, is a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, working with the Institute's Future of Innovation Initiative. He also served in the George H.W. Bush administration as a domestic policy staffer for health and social service programs.

There's something jarring in the juxtaposition of "conservative" and "innovation initiative", but I digress.

A Progressive column takes the opportunity of Professor Blank's appointment to distance its progressivism from that of Our President.

Gone are the days when research, teaching, and outreach at UW-Madison were oriented toward improving the health, quality of life, the environment and agriculture for all citizens of the state. Now economic growth and commercialization in the service of “job creators” take pride of place as the institution’s guiding principles, and Blank is well positioned to promote them.

Blank has a strong record of developing and promoting neoliberal economic policies that put so-called free markets and the profits of large corporations ahead of the needs of people, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership for the Obama administration, and GATT and NAFTA as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors during the late 1990s.

News of her appointment was met with bipartisan praise from her current boss, President Barack Obama, and her future one, Governor Scott Walker. Said Obama, “A tireless advocate for American businesses, Becky has helped to increase our competitiveness, support our innovators and entrepreneurs, and bring good-paying jobs back to our shores.” Walker praised her “keen knowledge of economic issues that can help the UW promote great prosperity in the state.”

Agreement between Obama and Walker on her appointment is not surprising. On many education and workforce development issues, the two are in complete agreement. They both promote policies based on the assumption that the primary function of public education is to prepare students for the workforce. They also both use the fictitious “skills gap” – a purported misalignment between the skills required for vacant jobs and the skills possessed by people looking for work – as a justification for an inordinate amount of corporate influence in public policy.

Higher education's political masters are likely to take an instrumental, workforce-development attitude toward the universities. Some of the responsibility, though, rests with higher education, either for making promises of human capital development, or for gutting the liberal arts.  One economist in Bascom Hall, more or less, will not be enough to reverse forty or fifty years of that institutional rot.

THE VIEW OUT MY BACK WINDOW.

An early spring, my eye.

Those are snow flurries, and in the distance, those are ice fishing tents.  I have to wonder about the fishers' judgement though.  That's open water on the far side of the pond.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

I've been working on the railroad.  Here are two examples of big power on the temporary test track.

That's a brand new Baldwin Double Ender and a repowered Lionel body shell that's been on hand for years.

RENTS WILL BE SOUGHT. RENTS WILL BE GENERATED. RENTS WILL BE DISSIPATED.

Mahablog offers a distinction between makers and takers based on an instructive Michael Lind essay.

If we look at some of the major economic battles taking place, they are over patents, how the risks and rewards of large, systemically important public-utility style financial institutions are distributed and who gets to control the residual over the delegated ends of the government with the mad rush for the privatization of government resources and responsibilities. These are all, in some way, about rents. And the battle over these will determine a lot about who gains in the future of the economy.

Mr Lind refers extensively to a reading of Karl Marx that attempts, to use contemporary language, to distinguish the entrepreneurial urge from the rent-seeking urge.  Perhaps, though, some of those scholars and policy wonks will discover the good in public choice theory, and consider the possibility that limiting the powers of government limits the ability of government to create rents.  It might also behoove some adherents to the contemporary Tea Party to understand the role of rent-seeking in creating the East India monopoly that led to the event that inspired the name.

THE VALUE OF RESEARCH.

Some years ago, a colleague from History developed a simulation called Vatican: Unlock the Secrets of How Men Become Pope.  The game appears now to be out of print (does my autographed copy thus have collectible value?)  Although it's a board game, a simulation, and allegorical, and thus not worthy of the Nihil Obstat, there's evidence of research in creating the game.  I give you one of the "origins" cards drawn by players to establish their base support as Pontifex Maximus.

Habemus Papam!

BREAK UP THOSE SAFE DISTRICTS.

That's been a recent Cold Spring Shops hobbyhorse, and your Superintendent was pleased to hear commentators on a point-counterpoint radio show agreeing that the creation of safe districts likely attenuated any hope of genuine bipartisan compromise (as distinct from an agreement by the political class to fleece everyone else.)

A Via Media essay argues, from a different perspective, that safe districts are nothing new, and continue to impede the progress of the constituents therein.

Democrats are shocked, shocked by the news that there is gambling going on in America’s blue cities. They do their best to avert their eyes from the close political ties between corrupt urban political machines and exploitative Wall Street banks. In the lame progressive mindset that characterizes these decadent times, Wall Street is bad, and urban politicians are good. There can’t possibly be some sort of symbiotic relationship between them. How could something so good, so honest, so dedicated to serving the poor as the Detroit Democratic machine be engaged in a vicious conspiracy with Wall Street to bleed the poor and suck the city dry?

Some Democrats don’t like this kind of talk because they are cynical and others don’t like it because they are naive. The cynics are either in the game themselves or knowingly agree to look the other way because they value the support of political allies and don’t care how much those allies bleed the poor. The naive ones, and there are lots of starry eyed intellectuals in this country who don’t know a hawk from a handsaw, think that because many of these urban thugs are African-American, and because they advocate for more government programs to help the poor, they must obviously be sincere and be part of a general wave of good progressive people fighting to make this world a better place. Surely nobody is so cynical as to lobby for government programs because they plan to cream off the money?

Others have an uneasy sense that something is amiss, but a combination of historical ignorance and race sensitivity strikes them dumb. They look around America and see a number of urban areas with predominantly African-American populations. They see that many (not all) of these cities are run by incompetent, race-baiting hacks and criminals who use identity politics to bond themselves to the voters they exploit.

Because they don’t understand that corruption and identity politics have been the hallmark of American municipal government since the 1830s and 184os, they think the ghastly spectacle of demagogic corruption ruining our cities today is somehow a racial phenomenon. The racists among us see that picture and want to draw racist conclusions about African-American capacity for self governance; most of the rest of us are made so uncomfortable by the whole topic that we let the subject slide.

But thieves like the despicable Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit are anything but a racial phenomenon. There were Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish and Greek Kilpatricks in their day. We can confidently expect a wave of Latino Kilpatricks as Latino voting power pushes African-American machines aside in more urban areas.

That's a long excerpt from a long essay. Let me give you just a little more.

If our so-called ‘progressives’ today weren’t so intellectually decadent and, well, historically challenged, they would be leading the charge to clean up American cities. Instead they are mostly silent — and sometimes even defend the machines.

It’s a terrible shame because reformers and progressives really can fight the rot and help the poor — if they can get past their messed up ‘political correctness’ illusions long enough to recognize the basic facts of the case.

That's a more challenging project. Probably worth the thought.

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF.

The schools that serve poor people are bad because the ruling circles want it that way, Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian argues.

[Former Washington, D.C. school superintendent Michelle] Rhee went on to write in her Seattle Times op-ed, “Astronomically high dropout rates and subpar math and reading-proficiency levels in lower-income, inner-city schools ought to jolt us as especially immoral."

When Rhee refers to “inner-city” schools, she’s attempting to discuss Black students and other students of color. Yet she is scared to use the word “racism” because that would open up a conversation about the relationships between race, poverty and school performance. Rhee laments the educational outcomes of students living in poverty without ever questioning the causes of poverty. Perhaps that’s because her sponsors are the corporations and super-rich who profit from under-paying the poor for their labor, and whose policies perpetuate poverty. She is right about one thing--it’s appalling that low-income students have the worst outcomes in our schools.  You won’t hear her say anything, however, about how corporate profits should be taxed to reinvest in our schools, or the fact that our nation prioritized finding trillions of dollars to recapitalize the same banks that sabotaged the global economy.

Moreover, Rhee has no understanding of the history of standardized testing or its contribution to the reproduction of inequality.  As University of Washington education professor Wayne Au has written, “Looking back to its origins in the Eugenics moment, standardized testing provided…ideological cover for the social, economic and education inequalities the test themselves help maintain.”  The stability of testing outcomes along racial lines, from the days of Eugenics until today, demonstrates standardized testing has always been a better measure of a student’s zip code than of aptitude. Wealthier and whiter districts score better on tests. These children have books in the home, parents with time to read to them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, healthy food, health insurance, and similar advantages.

There's more than a ruling class conspiracy causing poverty, according to Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds.

What we're seeing here, and elsewhere, is a breakdown in the great Progressive project of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of elevating the lower classes into the middle class. That project involved changes in society and in social mores that encouraged behaviors giving children more stable home environments and better prospects for social improvement. All of that is fading now.

His focus is on differences in marriage behavior, although the argument might apply to changes in the focus of the schools.

TIME TO COME CLEAN?

The presidential search committee at Northern Illinois University has not yet requested that stoves and smoke cartridges be installed in the Altgeld auditorium.  They have, however, gone into conclave.

“This search is formatted a little differently than in the past,” said Paul Palian, director of media and public relations. “We’re using a closed, hybrid approach with stakeholders, including faculty, staff, alumni and foundation board members, who have a confidential agreement not to speak [on the matter].”

Those stakeholders will interview each candidate and provide feedback to the Board of Trustees, Palian said.

“It’s becoming quite common for universities to have a closed search,” Palian said. “I know that ISU’s president is retiring, and I don’t believe students are going to be involved in their process either.”

Alan Rosenbaum, PSAC co-chair and executive secretary of University Council, said the closed approach is becoming typical for presidential searches.

“The Board of Trustees decided on how the search would be conducted, with the advice from the Parker Executive search firm taken into consideration,” Rosenbaum said.

During the last presidential search in 2000, the candidates’ names were not confidential, according to a March 3, 2000, Northern Star article.

“The sole purpose of the search is to find the best candidate,” said Student Association Speaker James Zanayad. “The fact that it’s confidential attracts more candidates, rather than an open one where the candidate’s employers will know.”

Somewhere, there is an argument by which the ad populum fallacy becomes a best practice. There's probably also a research paper existing, or to be written, on the formalities of executive searches.  A few years ago, governing boards voted pay raises to senior administrators, whether earned or not, so as to keep administrative salaries in line with the market.  I wonder if the same if-you-can-get-a-better-job-perhaps-we'll-match-it approach to providing merit raises to faculty is now affecting compensation of higher administrators.  The article reports that Illinois State's students will have the opportunity to meet with their presidential finalists.

The confession booth was part of an exhibit of works of art depicting virtue and vice.  There may still be use for it.  The editorial board of the Northern Star have not yet called for nails and a cathedral door.  They have issued a call for reform.

The Editorial Board wants NIU to get rid of the corrupt; they’re holding the university back. A number of employees have already been fired or placed on leave because of their connections to scandals. If NIU wants to truly create a clean slate and shed its tarnished image from this year, more will need to be done.

Let the reformation begin in the executive suite.

NIU needs a president who will watch the university’s administrators and fire the people who need to be fired. He or she needs to address scandals as they happen, then be vocal in putting forth solutions so similar ethical breaches do not reoccur.

The editorial board would like to watch the presidential search.

This is to avoid conflict with their current employers. This is understandable to a degree, but unacceptable at such a late stage in the search process. NIU is a public university that each student is paying to attend. The confidentiality of the final candidates’ identities should not override the student body’s voice on this matter.

This is a crucial moment for NIU students to start caring about who will be the university’s next president. It would be one thing if NIU was running itself smoothly, but its integrity is starting to decline from the continued negative national media attention.

We need more transparency with NIU’s inner workings and president to prevent future scandals, and that means NIU’s students need to know who the presidential candidates are and need to be able to ask them questions.

There will be additional material forthcoming, as the editorial board will be reacting to the search for a new athletic director, as well as to the upcoming mayoral election.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

University Diaries proposes to keep track of the shaming of the sanctimonious.

Sometimes, the better response is to laugh the sanctimonious to scorn.

It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts. And [Ottawa English professor Janice] Fiamengo herself, was, standing at that podium, a buoy of relative reason in a sea of everything but. “Any movement can attract hysterical detraction and unsavoury allies,” she would tell me over the phone the next morning. “That is the risk one runs.” She’s right. Take this little Facebook diatribe from an active member of A Voice for Men, one of the men’s rights groups who support her.

There has never been a great female composer. Throughout history there has been plenty of privileged woman, who have had access to pianos, and violins, yet somehow we are expected to believe that men have somehow stopped them for being composers?  Woman have the big lovely eyes, big tits, but mean [I think he meant “men”] are far more beautiful, they are more beautiful where it counts. In their wonderful creative souls.

Unfortunately, though, the other side is no more intelligent. They just use bigger words.

Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.

Slogans don’t make scholarship and being self-righteous does not make you right.

The generalization of the argument to the rest of the academy, and to the polity, is left to the reader as an exercise.

INITIATIVE FATIGUE.

The dean at Pioneer Valley Community identifies the fatal flaw of higher education.

Anyone who has worked in administration for very long knows the drill: every year or two a new project with a new acronym comes along, and most of the usual suspects address the same questions they addressed last year.  Over time, the various projects overlap, deadlines start to crash into each other, people start to forget what got said where, and after a few years, people start to adopt a “been there, done that” attitude.

[One community college] took a crack at breaking initiative fatigue by setting up a coordinating committee with a master chart of outcomes.  The idea was to map who was doing what, so redundancies could be identified and undue duplication avoided.  (Presumably, it could also help identify the areas of minimal coverage, where future projects would be welcome, and areas of ample coverage, where the horse is well and truly dead.)  Yes, it’s almost a parody of administration to suggest a “committee on committees,” but in practice it can make a lot of sense.

What's missing, though, is the presence of an Officer of the Status Quo, whose sole responsibility is to remind the more adventurous innovative spirits that much of what is best practice in higher education requires little more than a log to sit on, or a shade tree. A commenter gets it.

Maybe we observe that every fall there's some hullabaloo over some Next Big Thing that administrators are all excited about, and we're supposed to pay lip service to it on top of all of our teaching and research and mentoring and advising (you know, the actual core functions of what an institution of higher learning is all about) and then next fall it's a different Next Big Thing. Instead of figuring out how to get us excited, perhaps you could consider the possibility that the real problem is the Big Initiatives?

Quite.