AS I PREPARE TO PASS THE TORCH.

An Inside Higher Ed report on the latest John Siegfried analysis of the economics Ph.D. suggests the intuition is more important than the mathematics.

The surveys of new Ph.D.s also asked them about the doctoral education they received. Among the findings:

• Most said that the overall emphasis in their programs was “about right.”
• Most also reported too little emphasis on “applying economic theory to real-world problems,” “understanding economic institutions and history” and “the history of economic ideas.”
• Mathematics was viewed by most as more important in graduate school than in their careers.
• Skills in application, instruction and communication were more important in their careers than in graduate school.

A self-study of political science suggests that doing the job well matters.

[Miami of Ohio political scientist John Rothgeb] said he was most surprised by the data on publishing, which showed that more is not necessarily better. A one-unit increase in the number of articles demanded from tenure candidates (from one to two, for example) increases the probability of reported incompetence by 8 percent, while a one-unit increase in the “prestigious” article variable (such a publication in a top journal) decreased the probability of reported incompetence by 16 percent.

“If you’re publishing in lower-ranking journals to rack up a big total, and the chair looks at you later on down the road and says, ‘You know, you’re really not that good,’ that may be because they weren’t very prestigious publications,” he said.

The study also noted the corrosive effect of "collegiality" in tenure evaluations, as well as the obligation of tenure committees to screen for future assiduousness.

Rothgeb agreed that there are limitations to his work, including that it assumes post-tenure competence is based on the institution making the right choice at the point of tenure. (He argued, however, that competence “gets in your blood" and compared post-tenure professors to professional athletes who typically don’t stop performing once they win that big contract.) He said that his study is an attempt to add some hard data to public debates about tenure, and that more research is needed – preferably institutional-level case studies. Such research is resource-intensive but could further inform the debate, he said.

Most academicians are in the craft for the challenges. That tenure secures procedural rights against arbitrary discharge is incidental. The sports cross-reference intrigues in light of an analysis of Green Bay Packers who become free agents.

One question that has to be answered is whether the money would spoil [cornerback Sam] Shields. He has worked his tail off to go from long-shot, undrafted free agent to starter but will he be satisfied once he gets the money?

Tenure: not the only narcotic?

THE CASE FOR FINANCIAL LITERACY.

Last night, I was working on the railroad with the WGN sports-talk show on as background entertainment.  (Hockey nights are often good nights to work on the railroad, go figure.)  A brief segment dealt with an Auburn fan who, at the beginning of the season, purchased in Las Vegas the Auburn to win national championship ticket at 500 to 1 odds with a $100 stake.  At the time of the purchase, Auburn, coming off a losing season, was the longest of long shots.  At the time of the conversation, Auburn held a halftime lead.  Conversation turned to the wisdom, or lack thereof, of hedging the bet, say, by putting $100 on an even-money bet that Florida State wins.  The gentleman in question was on record as not doing so.

What I learned from that brief exchange was that sports-betting performs some of the functions of finance markets and insurance markets.  There's the transfer of risk.  Is there any difference between buying Auburn at 500 to 1 (or Northern Illinois at impossible to 1) and spending $100 on a $50,000 fire insurance policy?  There's the division of risk.  An investment of $100 in Florida State, even, yields a payoff of $49,800 in the event of an Auburn win, or a loss of nothing when the game turns out the way it did.  (And is football going the way of professional basketball, you only have to watch the fourth quarter?)  All that's missing is liquidity.  Or perhaps there is a secondary market in which the holder of Auburn at 500 to 1 can exchange that ticket at something more than $100 and less than $50,000, perhaps for Auburn and the points at $100 plus some cash to a punter with a greater taste for risk?

It's not too much of a stretch, then, to conceive of derivative securities in sports betting, and thus, to make the understanding of ordinary financial markets more relevant to people who might otherwise be looking out the window.

Our task, however, includes the overcoming of a lot of ignorance.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

Yes, let's return to those seventeenth-century days when life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, or delude ourselves that somehow the sharing and transferring of risk, and the provision of liquidity, is less evil if committed by more people on a smaller scale.  But first, let's find the worst examples of something other than bourgeois rectitude among the traders and mock them.

True, ["Wolf of Wall Street" director Martin] Scorsese missed an opportunity to tell a great morality tale about the price of excess, but the kind of people whose life goal is to enrich themselves at any cost so they can pal around with chimps or fling midgets about for an afternoon's entertainment are unlikely to have been swayed by such a film anyway.

On the other hand, Scorcese might have done us all a favor by showing us how greed unchecked really plays out. If the public become less tolerant of the reckless behavior of the stealthier wolves of wall street as a result, then the movie will, at least, be worth the admission fee.

Or treat the ability to create liquidity out of what looks like nothing as undesirable.

Financialisation represents a historic and deep-seated transformation of mature capitalism. Big businesses have become "financialised" as they have ample profits to finance investment, rely less on banks for loans and play financial games with available funds. Big banks, in turn, have become more distant from big businesses, turning to profits from trading in open financial markets and from lending to households. Households have become "financialised" too, as public provision in housing, education, health, pensions and other vital areas has been partly replaced by private provision, access to which is mediated by the financial system. Not surprisingly, households have accumulated a tremendous volume of financial assets and liabilities over the past four decades.

The penetration of finance into the everyday life of households has not only created a range of dependencies on financial services, but also changed the outlook, mentality and even morality of daily life. Financial calculation evaluates everything in pennies and pounds, transforming the most basic goods – above all, housing – into "investments". Its logic has affected even the young, who have traditionally been idealistic and scornful of pecuniary calculation. Fertile ground has been created for neoliberal ideology to preach the putative merits of the market.

Financialisation has also created new forms of profit associated with financial markets and transactions. Financial profit can be made out of any income, or any sum of money that comes into contact with the financial sphere. Households, for example, generate profits for finance as debtors (mostly by paying interest on mortgages) but also as creditors (mostly by paying fees and charges on pension funds and insurance). Finance is not particular about how and where it makes its profits, and certainly does not limit itself to the sphere of production. It ranges far and wide, transforming every aspect of social life into a profit-making opportunity.

The traditional image of the person earning financial profits is the "rentier", the individual who invests funds in secure financial assets. In the contemporary financialised universe, however, those who earn vast returns are very different. They are often located within a financial institution, presumably work to provide financial services, and receive vast sums in the form of wages, or more often bonuses. Modern financial elites are prominent at the top of the income distribution, set trends in conspicuous consumption, shape the expensive end of the housing market, and transform the core of urban centres according to their own tastes.

Perhaps we must emphasize the fundamentals.  It is at best a polite fiction to speak of a house as anything other than a capital investment, and as a capital investment, it is in competition with other capital investments.  Because capital markets exist to transfer risks, those investments can be more risky or less risky than houses (in the same way that Auburn at 500 to 1 in August 2013 is different from Florida State even after December 10).  More fundamental, though, is the concept of voluntary exchange and gains from trade.  Where there are latent gains from trade, there are arbitrage opportunities, and it ought come as no surprise that people who are alert to such arbitrage opportunities can get rich.  Thus, to limit the earning power of financial elites, equip more people with the skills to understand how to recognize arbitrage opportunities, or to hedge Auburn at 500 to 1.

People better-equipped to understand how financial markets work and how financial assets are valued are likely to be better protected against bubble economies, particularly fraudulently inflated bubble economies.

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope.

Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a “bubble,” of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured?

It's tougher to intentionally obscure something to a person who knows how to ask the right questions.

NO FINAL SAY.

On matters of methodology, I'm a traditionalist.  Theories and hypotheses are provisional.  A model is good if it's more accurate than a coin-flip, and it stays in the canon until a better explanation comes along.  Better depends on both precision and parsimony.  We reject hypotheses, or fail to reject hypotheses.  "Not inconsistent with," albeit awkward, is more precise than "confirmation of."

Now, if our colleagues can stay on that message.

We start, because we must, with the Modern Language Association conference managers getting their onesies in a twist over a request by The Daily Caller for press credentials.  The web-site's reaction to their denial won't convince anyone that it wasn't justified.

Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, explained the rejection this way: "The MLA provides media credentials to qualified reporters who are employees of or freelancers on assignment to locally or nationally recognized print or broadcast media outlets with a demonstrated history of reporting on academic issues. Based on that policy, we have accredited a range of media outlets with a history of serious reporting on academic issues, including several that have been critical of the MLA. In keeping with that policy we reviewed the archive of Eric Owens, the reporter who requested credentials for the MLA convention from the Daily Caller, but determined that his reporting was not of a caliber that merited free admission to the MLA convention."

The ensuing Inside Higher Ed bull session is instructive, particularly as to what friends of the Association understand legitimate media to be.

Turning to matters of greater importance, however, I must tell you that even settled science is provisional, and it takes a better model to beat a model.  Take the polar vortex.  Please.  (As long as it's over the NFC North part of the world, it's January.  Move that sucker to the east coast, and it becomes news.)  To policy wonks, though, there's a problem.

The more ludicrous example — when the wind chill factor is approaching record lows of minus fifty and a group of so-called climate scientists have been stuck in Antarctic ice for weeks with much of the [mainstream media] trying desperately to hide that they were there to investigate global warming in the first place – is [Vice President Al] Gore’s determination to insist that anthropogenic global warming is settled science, that the the world must stop everything it’s doing and devote its scant economic resources to preventing this looming catastrophe (not to mention filling Mr. Gore’s bank account). Only an imbecile, a corrupt UN diplomat, a New York Times or Guardian reporter, or a scientist on the dole could believe that.

Mr Gore is on record that the North Polar Ice Cap was not going to be here by now. It's here, and whether the melting it has undergone in the past few years remains a phenomenon for further study.

Sudden stratospheric warming events occur when large atmospheric waves, known as Rossby waves, extend beyond the troposphere where most weather occurs, and into the stratosphere. This vertical transport of energy can set a complex process into motion that leads to the breakdown of the high altitude cold low pressure area that typically spins above the North Pole during the winter, which is known as the polar vortex.

The polar vortex plays a major role in determining how much Arctic air spills southward toward the mid-latitudes. When there is a strong polar vortex, cold air tends to stay bottled up in the Arctic. However, when the vortex weakens or is disrupted, like a spinning top that suddenly starts wobbling, it can cause polar air masses to surge south, while the Arctic experiences milder-than-average temperatures.

During the ongoing stratospheric warming event, the polar vortex split in two, allowing polar air to spill out from the Arctic, as if a refrigerator door were suddenly opened.

When the sudden stratospheric warming event began in early January, that signaled to weather forecasters that a cool down was more likely to occur by the end of the month, since it usually takes many days for developments in the stratosphere to affect weather in the troposphere, and vice versa.

“For reasons I don’t think we fully understand, the changes in the circulation that happen in the stratosphere [can] descend down all the way to the Earth’s surface,” said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in Massachusetts.

As the polar stratosphere warms, high pressure builds over the Arctic, causing the polar jet stream to weaken. At the same time, the midlatitude jet stream strengthens, while also becoming wavier, with deeper troughs and ridges corresponding to more intense storms and high pressure areas. In fact, sudden stratospheric warming events even make so-called “blocked” weather patterns more likely to occur, which tilts the odds in favor of the development of winter storms in the U.S. and Europe.

Cohen was the lead author of a 2009 study that found that sudden stratospheric warming events are becoming more frequent, a trend that may be related to an increase in fall snow cover across Eurasia. The increase in snow cover has in turn been tied to the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, since the increase in open water in the fall means that there is more atmospheric moisture available to fall as rain or snow.

Cohen and his colleagues at AER have been using an index of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October in order to make seasonal weather forecasts for the following winter, and he said that by using this technique, they successfully predicted the ongoing stratospheric warming event 30-days in advance.

Snow cover as a leading indicator is relatively straightforward. The dynamics of mixing of air among stratosphere and troposphere are probably more complicated, and possibly chaotic in the sense of Mandelbrot and Gleick.  In that "reasons we don't fully understand" hide numerous grant and dissertation proposals.  There's a reason most academic papers have a "directions for future research" passage in the summary.

None of which stops State Line Ideologues from another round of Didn't: Did.

STUCK.

The snow and cold make for hard going on The Way of the Zephyrs.

About 500 passengers aboard three Amtrak trains were stranded overnight in a remote part of northern Illinois because of blowing and drifting snow, Amtrak officials said today.

The trains were halted late Monday near Mendota, about 80 miles west of Chicago. The passengers were aboard the Southwest Chief from Los Angeles, the Illinois Zephyr from Quincy, Ill., and the California Zephyr from the San Francisco Bay area, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari told The Associated Press.The trains became stuck around 4:15 p.m. ET Monday after they hit a 12-foot snow drift that paralyzed the engines, passenger Bryan Plummer told ABC News today by cellphone.

Must have been rough if 380, a morning departure from Quincy, is by Mendota that late in the day. Four and Six are due out of Galesburg around mid-day.

To the east, the weather, and possibly a depleted extra board, led to cancellations of several dinkies.  But it's the 21st Century, and there's an app for circulating the modified schedule.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BIG-TIME FOOTBALL.

Two Bloomberg columns by Richard Vedder suggest that them that has, gets.

While all students must pay the costs of maintaining athletic programs, few actually benefit from the services they subsidize. In this sense, the fees are comparable to a regressive tax -- and one that is more onerous for lower-income students than for the more affluent, who are able to attend schools where athletic fees are lower.

The regressive tax works two ways. First, some of the state flagship campuses claim to run an operating surplus in their athletics program, and have their football games on Saturday rather than on November school nights, with perhaps the entire payoff from the pop concession going to sports. (At Wisconsin, all the Coke money goes to Barry Alvarez. At Northern Illinois, the Pepsi money goes into general operations.)  Second, at the top of the U.S. News pecking order, the so-called income sports are irrelevant.

And more spending on sports doesn’t necessarily confer greater prestige. The University of Chicago, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Emory University and Washington University St. Louis are doing just fine.

Meanwhile, and we've noted this before, the wannabe bowl crashers among the mid-majors are making the wrong tradeoff.

Ohio University was ranked 98th by U.S. News & World Report in 2005. Despite some moderate athletic success, however, it fell 26 spots to No. 124 by 2011 (and has fallen even more since). Rutgers, ranked 58th in 2005, now ranks 69th.

It isn’t just reputation we should care about. Take the case of Boise State University, which has embraced the mantra of spending on ball-throwing contests as a path to greatness. In athletic terms, this has been a success. Yet the university’s six-year graduation rate is an extraordinarily low 29 percent, about half that (56 percent) of its less athletically obsessed state rival, the University of Idaho. Boise State, where 28 percent of athletics costs are financed by institutional subsidies, spent a lowly $9,134 on instructional spending per student in 2011, and spent $172,415 -- 19 times as much -- on “football spending per scholarship football student.”

Perhaps buying an athletic reputation is cheaper -- I'm looking at you, Central Florida -- but when the football bubble pops, making the effort to maintain academic integrity will matter.

IF YOU WOULD BE A LOCAL MEDIA STAR.

As part of a tribute to his recently deceased colleague Susan Rasky, Brad DeLong reminds readers of their joint advice to economists who take newspaper interviews.  It's useful.  Let me elaborate on a few of the points, as mentorship for younger colleagues, if you wish.

Be especially kind to the uninformed journalist. He gets ten points for calling you in the first place, and with rare exceptions, is almost surely working for editors who know less than he does. Encourage him, help him figure out what he should be asking you, and you’ll be surprised about how much smarter he seems the next time he calls.

Yes, and the subject matter is complicated, and the Popular Perspective is often wrong, and you're speaking for that hypothetical reader with a sixth-grade vocabulary.

Get over your snobbery about local television news. This is a genuine opportunity to reach the public. Learn to use it. Remember that the local TV reporter’s gasoline-price story this evening will be seen by 300,000 people. Your op-ed will be read by 20,000, if you are lucky. Your journal articles will be seriously read by 12.

Indeed. If your job is at an urban university in a state where the flagship university has a more bucolic location, the media people will prefer to make a shorter trip to the nearby campus.  Thus Wayne State beats out Michigan, while Rockford University or Rock Valley College beats out Northern Illinois.  But I did break into the Detroit market with a live interview about, you guessed it, gas prices.

Never say, “on the one hand, on the other hand.” Always say, “I think X because I believe Y is most important; other economists will tell you Z because they think Q is most important. They’re probably wrong because of R.”

Keep your sentences short. This is particularly important on radio and television. But it is wise for print as well. Pith and wit are always desirable. They are especially desirable if you are making fun of how economists talk.

Tough to do both of these things at the same time, and those 300,000 viewers worrying about gas prices aren't terribly interested in the latest pissing contest in the journals.  But at least I got off a memorable quote about how President Reagan, given the choice of incentives to steal license plates or incentives to seek oil, chose the less-bad alternative.  (I was not yet brash enough to suggest that decontrolling crude oil prices in the USA would cause OPEC to crash and burn.  Oh, well.)

Take control of the narrative. For instance, the story is how the oil market works in a time of high demand, not how evil the oil companies are. The oil companies’ degree of evilness has not risen since 1998. But industrializing China now wants to burn a bunch more oil, and two decades of low oil prices have turned the U.S. into a land where Honda civics have been replaced by SUVs.

That explanation incidentally kills pop-psychology legends of suburban machismo.

Be generous to your peers. Reporters have fairly loose criteria for expert comment, especially when they are hunting for quotes on deadline. Answer questions, but tell reporters who would answer them better.

Indeed. Share your cookies. Favors-for-favors are the journalist's stock in trade, and your colleague's name in a reporter's Rolodex (does anybody still keep a Rolodex, or are the expertss all on speed-dial?) can lead to other reporters taking advantage of your expertise.

SUMMARIZE IN ONE SENTENCE.

National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds on the state of higher education.  It's a wide-ranging interview that will reward careful study.  The heart of the higher education problem, though, is the failure of the high schools. "We need college graduates now to do things — like show up on time, speak courteously, and make accurate change — that high-school students used to do."

Indeed.  The common schools remain complicit in the college mania.  Yes, teaching is hard work, and part of that work is saying No and upholding standards.  Upholding standards is harder when students are not allowed to fail.

FINISHING UP SOME READING.

I've neglected the Fifty Book Challenge for much of the summer and fall.  The train ride reading accounted for, a few more at poolside during the summer, then the fall semester and football season got in the way.

There are a few more titles to report on for the end of 2013.  A few books were pretty good (+) and others failed to impress (-).  Links refer to reviews as posted at the Challenge.

13. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Berlin, 2 July 2013.
14. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, 3 July 2013 (+).
15. A Chain of Thunder: A Novel of the Siege of Vicksburg, 4 July 2013 (+).
16. The Crisis of the Old Order: The Age of Roosevelt, 5 July 2013 (-).
17. A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 8 July 2013.
18. American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, 30 July 2013.
19. Why Orwell Matters, 6 August 2013 (+).
20. 3001: The Final Odyssey, 8 August 2013.
21. Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream -- and Why It Matters, 9 August 2013.
22. Confessions of a Community College Administrator, 18 August 2013 (+).
23. America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), 25 August 2013 (-)
24. Enjoy the Decline: Accepting and Living with the Death of the United States, 27 August 2013 (-).
25. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, 29 August 2013.
26. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, 4 September 2013.
27. Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, 26 December 2013.
28. Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, 27 December 2013.

There was no third quarter report. The second quarter report is here, and the first quarter report here.

It has not been a good year for bookworm growth.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH COMES ON MONDAY THIS MONTH.

If I did make any New Year's resolutions, they included however many it takes to clear out the backlog of draft posts, archived electronic mail, and incomplete rail mileage records that have been building up.  Perhaps a place to start is with an idea Marginal Revolution posted toward the end of 2011, the Hanke-Henry calendar.  This calendar corrects for the irregular length of a year by replacing the Gregorian 365 day year with leap years in years that are integer multiples of four but not integer multiples of 400 -- making the recent millennium a once-in-two-millennia event -- with a 364 day year and occasional sabbatical weeks.

That modern calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate the “rip-off factor.” To determine how much interest accrues for a wide variety of instruments — bonds, mortgages, swaps, forward rate agreements, etc. — day counts are required. The current calendar contains complexities and anomalies that create day count problems. In consequence, a wide range of conventions have evolved in an attempt to simplify interest calculations. For U.S. government bonds, the interest earned between two dates is based on the ratio of the actual number of days elapsed to the actual number of days between the interest payments (actual/actual). For convenience, U.S. corporates, municipals and many agency bonds employ the 30/360 day count convention. These different conventions create their own complications, inefficiencies and arbitrage opportunities.

Perhaps I'm a brain-brother of those traditionalist preachers of the Gilded Age who objected to Standard Time as the Vanderbilts trumping God, or perhaps, as a relatively small investor subject to banksters calculating my interest payments on a 360 day year, never mind the calendar, I have trouble mustering much sympathy.  Or perhaps I like the idea of extra-long down-time whenever Christmas and New Year fall on a Wednesday -- that we get a chill day the official first day back is an extra bonus!  But business interests find the Gregorian calendar inconvenient, and they have for years.

George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company in 1892 and a consummate man of business, was a strong advocate of calendar reform in the interest of business and commerce. Eastman favored 13 identical months of 28 days. Writing in The Nation’s Business, Eastman complained that, with reference to the present Gregorian calendar, “There can be a difference of three days in the two half-years, and of two days in two quarters of the same year. Holidays occur on various days of the week, changing each year; shutdowns for holidays occurring in the middle of the week are expensive in certain plants. Complications arise in setting regular dates for meetings, in providing for holidays that fall on Sunday and in reckoning the passage of time, as for instance, in interest calculations.” But, Eastman’s calendar drifted relative to the seasons, which is unacceptable. He suggested fixing that problem by adding occasional extra days that would not bear weekday names.

Yes, and Irving Fisher weighed in, publishing an essay, "How Many Months Should There Be in a Year," in Pit and Quarry (sometimes the incidentals to archival research are more fun than the project objectives), endorsing some of the same ideas.  Two different versions of a business-friendly calendar received popular attention, here at page 51 of the 1940 New Wonder Book of Knowledge.

The Gregorian calendar works well enough.  It's a reasonable accommodation to an unaccommodating Nature that sends Earth around the Sun in just over 365 days (a figure whose prime factors are 5 x 73) and it allows each festive day to occur on a different day of the week.   Wired's Brandon Keim notes that the variety in festive days is to some people a feature.

“I gave a presentation at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta. Two young ladies came up to me, and one said she liked it. The other said she didn’t,” recalled [calendar redesigner and NASA astrophysicist Richard] Henry. “And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘My birthday is always going to be on a Thursday.’ I said, ‘You’re free to celebrate when you want! What the devil difference does it make what it says on the calendar?’”

National Public Radio's Neal Conan interviews Mr Keim, and we'll let George Orwell have the last word.

And actually, on the subject of measurements, I would refer people to a lovely little essay by George Orwell, whom would expect to be so very rational and yet, he liked the - just the sound of the words, inches and pounds. And there you have a man who just holds with tradition sometimes, even when it doesn't make sense.

But it does make sense, and, unlike the dirigiste metric system, it's emergent.

FOR THE FESTIVE SEASON.

I'm not sure Venite adoremus translates syllable-for-syllable in Polish.

On church organ accompanied by steam whistle, it's pretty good.

Might be too cheeky of me to propose that we conclude Epiphany with a singing of "We three Kings from Paddington are, Bearing rakes of carriages far."

THE ETERNAL TUSSLE.

George Will, on Sunday television.

Oh, there is nothing better for American conservatism than periodic examples of untrammeled liberalism. Lyndon Johnson, after 1964, had huge majorities in Congress, had his way. Republicans won five of the next six and seven of the next nine presidential elections. Let [new mayor Bill De Blasio] have his way in New York City and let people see what happens.

A differing view of the same history.

A small reminder that the last President with genuinely progressive domestic policies was Lyndon Johnson. Too bad his Administration crashed and burned in Vietnam, but at least he wanted to expand the New Deal, not cut it. And, yeah, we’re talking 50 years ago. Since then, we’ve had varying degrees of timid, let’s not scare the chickens moderation to full bore, rape the earth uber-Reaganism. Johnson’s War on Poverty was gutted decades ago. The biggest financial disasters of our lifetimes came about because New Deal regulations were cut so that markets could be freer. Every time we let the Right get its way, things get worse.

The ways in which life has gotten better, or gotten worse, over the past fifty years, will likely keep the few remaining social scientists who understand how to get their hands dirty with data busy for the next fifty years.  The public policy debate, however, remains mired in warmed over Henry George.

But anything that might actually rein in capital and especially the financial sector, empower labor, significantly redistribute wealth or expand the welfare state — well, we can’t have that now, can we? Virtually unregulated markets with a little welfare capitalism penciled in — some midnight basketball, perhaps? That’s Rubinomics in a nutshell. Unless the Democratic Party can find a way to free itself from the iron grip of the Wall Street types, we’ll be left an economy in which high rates of unemployment and soaring levels of inequality continue to ruin the lives of millions of Americans. Progressives need to dream bigger and bolder. Myerson provides an example of how to do this. Progressives may argue about the particulars of his plan, but I strongly suggest emulating his basic approach.

That passage, mind you, is the work of the kind of person who argues with Democrats yet votes for Democrats.  But rediscovering Henry George, or Robert Bellamy, is what passes for new thinking these days.

RECAPTURING THE TRADITION.

Minnesota's High Speed Rail Commission submits a budget request.

Eventually MnDOT wants to run six roundtrips between the Twin Cities and Chicago each day at speeds up to 110 miles an hour.

The preferred route chosen for the future trains would run on the Canadian Pacific tracks along the Mississippi River and through Winona.

Swift of foot was Hiawatha.

Image from Mike's Railway History.

With Wisconsin's reluctance to put any money into Passenger Rail, there's the old Milwaukee Road line on the west bank, as well as the Way of the Zephyrs, itself a racetrack, on the east bank and only in Wisconsin for about 115 miles.

THE PACKERS NEVER LOSE.

Sometimes the clock runs out.

One more time would have done it.

THE ORDERS OF THE DAY:

WIN AND KEEP PLAYING

THE HARD WAY

In yesterday's wild-card games, New Orleans found a way to win on the road, while Kansas City (the old Dallas Texans, after all) had a collapse of Dallas proportions.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel coverage of today's game is on message.

On Sunday the 49ers (12-4) will bring the fight to Lambeau Field and the Packers will be their opponent. Green Bay will hope it is better than the week before but be prepared to win the hard way once again.

Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

TENURE CONFERS PRIVILEGES AND DUTIES.

I'm not sure whether saying No and uphold standards is duty or privilege.  The Wall Street Journal recently gave South Carolina State's Geoffrey L. Collier, a utility infielder sociologist cum psychologist the opportunity to riff an old Soviet joke with a lengthy op-ed, "We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn."

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" and "The Five Year Party." To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

Bad Students is in the stack of works to be read and reviewed, a task that is currently preempted by work on the railroad.  I reviewed Five Year Party three years ago and found it wanting, although I there noted faculty complicity in creating subprime party schools, perhaps motivated by egalitarian sentiments.

The faculty is complicit in the failure. Mr Brandon suggests that sub-prime party schools have fallen into what I call the Wayne State trap: the presence of non-traditional or first-generation or commuting students becomes an excuse to lower standards. (That attitude is a libel on non-traditional or first-generation or commuting students, but it persists.)

Professor Collier's argument appears to build on the non-aggression pact Indiana's Murray Sperber introduced in his Beer-'n Circus years ago.

Education thus has degenerated into a game of "trap the rat," whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

That's a difficult passage to parse, in the absence of an actor responsible for instilling, or for reinforcing, the "disengaged, credentialist attitude" among students. I'm not sure I could even identify that attitude in a student, despite 35 years in the trenches.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don't even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

Wow. Has South Carolina State invested heavily in mass lectures and videotaped (DVDed?) courses as a "productivity" measure? Is the real Soviet joke made life in the discontent of faculty with increased workloads, no pay raises, and legislative disrespect?

To be fair, cadres of indefatigable souls labor tirelessly in thankless ignominy in the bowels of sundry ivory dungeons. Jokers in a deck stacked against them, they are ensnared in a classic reward system from hell.

All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments, or to enforce standards generally. Indeed, these acts are rarely rewarded but frequently punished, even litigated. Mass failure, always a temptation, is not an option. Under this regimen, it is a testament to the faculty that any standards remain at all.

And it is a dereliction of duty for the tenured faculty to not push back, to go-along-to-get-along, to let the deanlets and deanlings and assessment weenies preempt the curriculum.

As tuition has skyrocketed, education has shifted from being a public good to a private, consumer product. Students are induced into debt because they are repeatedly bludgeoned with news about the average-income increments that accrue to additional education. This is exacerbated by the ready availability of student loans, obligations that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Let's at least stay on topic, rather than engaging in dubious economics. An instrumentalist view of a credential implicitly suggests private benefits predominate. I'm inclined to agree, but for a different reason: the marginal spillover benefits of higher education are small, particularly if kindergarten and the elementary grades get the socialization right. Share your cookies. Take your nap.

In parallel, successive generations of students have become increasingly consumerist in their attitudes, and all but the most well-heeled institutions readily give the consumers what they want in order to generate tuition revenue. Competition for students forces universities to invest in and promote their recreational value. Perhaps the largest scam is that these institutions have an incentive to retain paying students who have little chance of graduating. This is presented as a kindness under the guise of "student retention." The student, or the taxpayer in the case of default, ends up holding the bag, whereas the institution gets off scot free. Withholding government funding from institutions with low graduation rates would only encourage the further abandonment of standards.

So students get what they want: a "five year party" eventuating in painlessly achieved "Wizard of Oz" diplomas. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons in which individuals overuse a shared resource—in this case the market value of the sheepskin. Students, implicitly following the screening theory that credentials are little more than signals of intelligence and personal qualities, follow a mini-max strategy: minimize the effort, maximize the probability of obtaining a degree. The decrement in the value of the sheepskin inflicted by each student is small, but the cumulative effect is that the resource will become valueless.

Just the opposite. U. S. News and the other providers of league tables make their money helping strivers, and their parents, identify universities that are not sub-prime party schools, and the test-prep and essay-counselor services dissipate some of the rents of the positional arms race.  To the disadvantage of students who wind up in the academic gulags (to use Charlie Sykes's expression from Profscam) where the disengaged, unmotivated, and unprepared adversely select into.  And the further abandonment of standards, or the valuelessness of subprime diplomas simply allows for a market test to work.

There is excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention. The degrees produced from that capacity fail the market test. Perhaps consumer awareness of the nature of the excess capacity will speed the elimination of that capacity.

Professor Collier seems to recognize the dynamic, but with a different inference.

The body politic lately has become aware of the cracks in this game. With about half of college graduates under 25 currently unemployed or underemployed, the income advantage of a four-year degree may be on the decline. Employers are justifiably fed up with college graduates lacking basic knowledge, to say nothing of good work habits and intellectual discipline. Yet the perennial impulse toward bureaucratic command-and-control solutions, such as universal standardized testing or standardized grade-point averages, only leads in the direction of more credentialism.

No, the employers will only be more encouraged to recruit only at institutions that have the U. S. News imprimatur, or to insist on an exit examination administered by someone other than the university.

If the body politic desires this, so be it. However, these are essentially supply-side solutions, in that they attempt to staunch the supply of poorly prepared students or increase the supply of well-prepared students. Such approaches are notoriously problematic, as in the classic case of black markets.

I've learned to be skeptical of any argument that uses "problematic", as it's generally a tic that signifies "I don't like it but I can't articulate why." Besides, there's a simpler solution: let the faculty at South Carolina State resolve that they are in the same business as Harvard or Northwestern or Wisconsin and retake control of the curriculum so as to offer their students the same intellectual challenges as their future competitors face, or to weed them out.

Better to address the demand side. To be sure, there is plenty of student demand for credentials, but there is little demand for the rigor that the credentials putatively represent. Rather than more attempts at controlling output quality through standardization, what are needed are input changes provided by creative alternative routes to adulthood that young people find attractive; a "pull" rather than a "push." It would be helpful, too, if faculty started viewing undergraduates less as whining boors and more as lost souls who have been scandalously misguided by a feel-good "everyone's a star" culture.

Put another way, view undergraduates at South Carolina State or Northern Illinois or what have you as strivers who deserve the same challenges as their counterparts elsewhere. It begins, though, with faculty who view their work, wherever that might be, as a calling worthy of their best efforts, and with the privilege and high honor of upholding standards, and saying No when that is the proper response.

EXPLAINING AWAY THE COVERAGE GAP.

Dr Strangelove, too intellectual for Chicago?

Chicago Tribune photograph by Phil Velasquez.

The disappointing finish casts a more critical light on [current Bear coach Marc] Trestman, whose intellect, demeanor, straightforward approach with the media and apparent impact on his players seemed like a breath of fresh air at Halas Hall. [Despite the Dr. Strangelove spectacles and the prole cap.] Now, his choice of Mel Tucker as defensive coordinator appears dubious; his curious decision to have Robbie Gould attempt a 47-yard field goal on second down in overtime against the Vikings looks like an even more disastrous move; and all those one-hour practices and extra days off make him look too much like Lovie Smith.

With an offense that figures to get better and a defense that can’t get any worse, the Bears are likely to improve from here. But the way this season ended, Trestman has even more to prove now than when he arrived. The Bears wouldn’t have done any better if they had kept Lovie Smith. But with Bruce Arians — Phil Emery’s runner-up to Trestman who just went 10-6 with the Arizona Cardinals and nearly beat the 49ers at home on Sunday? After Sunday’s loss to the Packers, that is a question worth asking. After a disappointing 8-8 season that left them out of the playoffs for the sixth time in seven seasons, the Bears certainly could have done better. And they’ll have to next season.

Lose the play-in game and the loyalists gripe.  Fail to qualify?  The purges are already underway in Detroit and Minneapolis.  Packer loyalists celebrate.

Gary Greicar, a Cudahy native who lives in Texas, called this a "bucket list game." He paid $2,600 for four seats in the first level near the 50-yard line behind the Packers' bench and was overcome with emotion after the last touchdown.

So was his daughter Crystal Greicar.

"You can't doubt the Pack," she said.

Elizabeth Johnson, a Tomahawk native who lives in the Chicago area, said the game was "an epic."

"An awesome win," she said. "There was divine intervention, and the Bears stink."

Rich Scholwin, who grew up in northern Wisconsin and lives in Illinois, gave high fives and bear hugs to Packers fans and Bears fans after the game.

"I'm speechless, absolutely speechless," he shouted. "Aaron Rodgers is the best player in the NFL."

It sure felt that way Sunday.

Next up: San Francisco at Green Bay late on a Sunday afternoon.

THE ORDERS OF THE DAY:

WIN AND KEEP PLAYING.

THE HARD WAY.

THOSE VAUNTED CHINESE SCHOOLS.

Here's a dissenting view.

A major reason why certain students do poorly in China is that their skills are ignored. Creativity and critical thinking are seen as objects of western frivolousness. Although Chinese students analyze literature, they never write essays and instead they simply memorize the texts. I have never memorized so much in my life as I did in Shanghai. The ideal Shanghainese student is like a sea sponge blindly absorbing any and all information and spewing it all out during the tests.

Don't get me started on the absence of explanation of mathematical answers Chinese schools enable.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL FIRST WORLD PROBLEM.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests UPS and FedEx Ruin Christmas for Late Shoppers.  And yes, the local television stations had their coverage of unhappy people who had to arrive at parties empty-handed, or have empty space under the trees.

I years ago learned an expression, "crying with your mouth full," that fits the situation.

We’re so accustomed to being able to order something and have it arrive, like clockwork, at our doorsteps two days later that it’s completely shocking when it fails. They could, of course, reset expectations by not absolutely, positively promising to meet that deadline during the Christmas season, given that the number of orders not only surges but does so at an unknowable volume. If Amazon had a banner atop their site all month proclaiming, say, a December 19 deadline for absolutely guaranteed before-Christmas delivery, many of us would have changed our behavior accordingly.

Yes, and if your biggest gripe is late-running presents, you might pause to count your blessings.

THE ORDERS OF THE DAY:

Despite a set-back last week, they remain in effect:

WIN AND KEEP PLAYING.

THE HARD WAY.

The Packers fulfilled them both.

The Green Bay Packers couldn’t have asked for anything else. The game, the season came down to one drive with the ball in Aaron Rodgers’ hands.

And on fourth and 8, Rodgers lofted a 48-yard touchdown pass to a wide-open Randall Cobb.

Sam Shields picked off Chicago’s Hail Mary attempt. And the Packers are heading to the playoffs — momentum in hand — with this 33-28 instant classic of a win.

The second-guessing has already begun in Corruptistan.

Chicago is a Democrat stronghold.  In the words of Nancy Pelosi, embrace the suck.  Along with your overcooked pizza cut into pathetic little squares.

The Black and Blue Division has resembled a sheepshead game played for leaster all year, or certainly since Aaron Rodgers was injured in November.  In the other game, it doesn't matter whether Minnesota or Detroit ended up holding the blind.

Jay Glazer, the NFL reporter for Fox, said on "Fox NFL Sunday" that two head coaches in the NFC North, Leslie Frazier of the Vikings and Jim Schwartz of the Lions, will be fired by their teams on Monday.

"Leslie Frazier and the Minnesota Vikings - we told you last week that the window was slightly open," Glazer said. "Well, boom, that window is closed. Tomorrow morning ownership will meet with GM Rick Spielman. Leslie Frazier will be out.

"Jim Schwartz, we knew it was playoffs or bust," Glazer said. "They did not make the playoffs. Ownership will meet about him tomorrow morning. Jim Schwartz will be out."

Coach Joe Philbin of the Dolphins, the former Packers' offensive coordinator, will not be fired, according to Glazer.

Meanwhile, NFL Media reporter Ian Rapoport also said Schwartz will be fired.

“The expectation from inside the building, including from Jim Schwartz I’m told, is that they will be fired," Rapaport said. "I am also told it’s a strong possibility the entire front office could be cleared out there. Some serious dysfunction with the Lions, including the front office bringing in players (and) the coaches simply not using them. By the end of the year, the two sides they weren’t really talking to each other.

For Detroit Free Press columnist Drew Sharp, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Schwartz cannot erase the stain of the last two months. Blowing a gift-wrapped divisional title by blowing six fourth-quarter leads in the last seven games is a bigger organizational embarrassment than going 0-16 five years ago.

That’s the Schwartz legacy.

It’s no longer a question of whether he should be fired, but whether the line at the guillotine should stop at him.

The prevailing wisdom is that Bill Ford Jr. will make the final call. If so, he might sweep a massive broom through the entire front office that could claim president Tom Lewand and general manager Martin Mayhew as well.

“We can’t worry about decisions that we don’t make,” Schwartz said. “I’d certainly like to be back. I think we have some unfinished business here. We’ve come a long way in these years, but we still have some ground that we can make and I’m anxious to have a chance to be able to do that.”

I asked Schwartz what would be his argument to the Fords for returning for the next-to-last year of his contract, believed to be worth about $12 million. He declined to answer my question, saying he would rather keep that private. But if his case for coming back was the closeness of the losses over the last two months, then that speaks quite loudly about why he should get axed.

Close losses aren’t a badge of honor in the NFL. The games are deliberately engineered toward consistent single-score outcomes. When the inability to finish games turns chronic — as it did with the Lions the last two months — it’s a combination of a team neither talented nor tough enough to make the half-dozen plays every game that distinguish victory from defeat.

That's more analysis than the Free Press ever devoted to the death of Yuri Andropov under somewhat suspicious circumstances. But Mr Andropov departed this life the same day Billy Sims took a contract to arbitration, and that's what sells newspapers in Detroit.

That's another Democrat city. Embrace the suck.

In Minnesota, the underachievement of the Vikings is overshadowed by the closure of the Rollerdome, which prompts veteran Minneapolis Star-Tribune pundit Patrick Reusse to have an E-T-T-S moment.

There were empty seats to be found in the Metrodome through the 1990s, even as Dennis Green was coaching the Vikings into the playoffs on a regular basis. Then, in 1998, Randy Moss was drafted. A younger crowd adopted this football outlaw immediately and started to fill the building all the way to its Teflon sky.

The Moss crowd proved to be rowdier, fueled by what seemed to be an even greater fondness for mood-altering beverages than their Purple predecessors.

Surprisingly, they also have seemed to enter new seasons with a higher degree of optimism than did we earlier generations of Vikings followers made cynical by four Super Bowl losses.

It is sad to report that those randy fans brought to Vikings' zealotry by Randy are now getting age on them and becoming sedentary.

Yes, a thug team better known for its extracurricular activities on Lake Minnetonka than for any titles, a team which in its later years was a Brett Favre interception at New Orleans away from a Super Bowl, is a team that is going to make even the most committed fan prefer the quiet life.

This was a shameful way for the generations raised in the Metrodome to say goodbye to their stadium. My generation, the Met's generation ... we did ourselves proud on our stadium's last day. We took away everything, including items that had been bolted down.

Mr Reusse began his career when Hubert Humphrey carried the Democrat standard in Minnesota. Senator Humphrey gave way to Senator Wellstone who gave way to Senator Franken.

Embrace the suck.

RISING UP ANGRY.

Book Review N^o. 28 features Charles Ferguson's Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.  The title summarizes the message.  Although the book occasionally provides intuitive and insightful explanations of some of the more complex financial instruments, its angry tone detracts from that message.  It's difficult to take seriously an author who continues to push the fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court somehow stole Florida for George W. Bush, and E-T-T-S followed.  People of modest or no means do have reason to be angry with the machinations of the financial sector.  Perhaps a book about the machinations of the financial sector can limit itself to that.  But people of modest or no means also have reason to be angry with the common schools and the conceits of government expertise.  Whether the financial crisis will inspire those other sources of anger remains to be seen.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SELECTIVITY, PLUS RIGOR?

Universities are failing at their mission. At Inside Higher Education, Brooks Kohler suggests professors have good reasons to resist recent curricular and pedagogical fads.

In America, after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the creation of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, emphasis was placed on math, science, and foreign language studies, as these three disciplines were deemed crucial to national security. Move forward 10 years and by the late 1960s one out of seven Americans was employed in the defense industry, military spending had risen from 1 percent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product, and corporations were increasingly profiting from an infusion of money from government contracts.

Perhaps so. On the other hand, in those days, the focus of college preparation was to identify gifted students to enroll in the lab sciences and calculus. Today, the gifted are on their own. Deal with the consequences.

America had slipped into post-industrialism as jobs moved away from manufacturing toward more office based and service type employment opportunities.

The end result of shifting from assembly line to office tech, resulted in a college degree becoming a necessary component to a career, and as universities and community colleges began to accept more and more applicants, higher education began to trend course loads to part-time instructors.

It's wrecking faculty morale. Not everyone is as well-positioned to walk away from it as I am, but everyone is free to gripe.

At worst, more than a few professors feel they are becoming little more than a retention tool, a gimmick or novelty act whose entire future depends on whether or not one can “get with the program” of algorithmic evaluation, spreadsheet printouts, and constant barrage of software programs designed to make keeping track of grades easier, as if a pen and pad were inherently inferior, and all the while the academic is asked to maintain a classroom atmosphere that is not only educational but also so entertaining that even the most mind-numbing of subjects can compete against the fixative trance of the portable handheld device.

Ironically, the analog education one received before the Digital Age, an educational model that emphasized literature and writing, is admired for its fine attention to detail, as detail is considered to be hallmark of success. Yet that style of learning, though suitable for Fitzgerald and Stein, will not work in world where students are groomed as future customers and national security is commingled with corporate wants that drive the areas of study that schools find most lucrative.

Perhaps, though, the second thoughts of UNLV president Neal Smatresk, headed for Northern Texas, might be a harbinger of better things to come.

Smatresk's biggest regret remains the years of delays and false starts on the UNLV stadium project. His greatest achievement, in his eyes, is convincing state education officials of the need to build a four-year medical school at UNLV. However, it will be his successor that will need to convince Carson City to fork over the cash.

Smatresk says his greatest surprise is the attention given to coaches instead of academic deans.

"If we had paid as much attention to what the quality of the incoming deans were, as we were for a football or a basketball coach, I know this institution would already be at least on a peer with Harvard or anybody else. The level of scrutiny over athletics is a conundrum," the out-going president said.

I fear that a serious effort at UNLV, or at most of the mid-majors, and at more than a few land-grants to become more like Michigan or Wisconsin or Northwestern would produce only legislative scrutiny. "What, you want to pay that economist $400K a year to teach two Ph.D. seminars?" It's worth doing, though, as the current dispensation leaves many people ill-served.

There are two types of workers in the finance world. There are the polished Ivy League guys (and they are mostly guys). They tend to have the big money jobs and interact directly with clients. Blond WASPs with the house in Connecticut.

The other type is the crazy smart person (more women in this group), who came from working class or immigrant backgrounds. The Italian guy from Brooklyn who, by an unholy amount of  brains and determination, got himself into Cooper Union and now creates the computer systems that run the company. The Irish dude from Staten Island. The Jamaican woman who worked too hard to ever get married. They tend to work in the back office in operations or IT or documentation. They don’t have the pedigree to interact with clients. They always hit a glass ceiling after a while.

Because Steve and I love the underdogs, we admire the crazy smart, ambitious people in the back office and refer to the others as “Third Basemen,” as in “Born on Third Base.” The backroom types aren’t perfect. Many have chips on their shoulders. A few aren’t exactly nice people. But you have to admire them for their grit. Scrappy fighters all of them.

Yes, and the scrappy fighters deserve better, or better preparation. The current academic caste system has failed to deliver where it matters most.

The growth of educational credentialism has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people who believe that their college degrees…entirely irrespective of any actual accomplishments that they have made or actual knowledge that they possess…have given them preternatural wisdom and hence they right and duty to control the lives of their less-enlightened countrymen.

We could be reading about Obamacare, or about the financial bubble, or about any of the business fads that have laid many a firm and more than a few non-profits low over the past forty years.

IF YOU LIKE YOUR INSURANCE PLAN, YOU CAN KEEP IT(*)

The campaign promise neglected to mention that only insurance that meets some sort of minimum standard of coverage can be put on sale.   Henry Aaron of Brookings suggested that ruling some policies off the market is akin to banning unsafe food under pure food and drug legislation, or prohibiting the sale of dangerous toys to children.  A number of articles appeared at about the same time, either extending or questioning the analogy.  In The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn argues that outlawing sub-prime policies is desirable:

If you buy your own insurance now, it probably doesn't live up to these standards. For starters, it probably isn’t as comprehensive as you think. It may not cover prescription drugs, for example, or it might leave out rehabilitative services and mental health. It might expose you to out-of-pocket expenses greater than $6,350 (if you have a single person’s policy) or a $12,700 (if you have a family policy). Until three years ago, when Obamacare’s first regulations went into effect, it was even possible the insurer could yank it retroactively—a process known as “rescission”—if you got sick and the carrier scrubbed your medical records for some previous sign of illness, maybe even one you didn’t know you had.

In addition, unless you live in a handful of states, the premiums you are paying come from insurers who knew, going in, they wouldn’t have to cover people who represent high medical risks. If the policy is affordable, that’s because the insurer figured you were pretty healthy and unlikely to have big medical bills. If you’ve had the policy for a while, and prices haven’t gone way up, that’s because the insurer is still making money from this arrangement—which means, overall, the people in this plan aren’t very sick. Until now, insurers have been able to hike premiums on plans that start to lose healthy customers, and they keep doing so until they become unaffordable—leaving those remaining subscribers unable to find new policies at affordable rates.

Read on, though,and discover the limitations of making policy by anecdote.

But there are real people who must pay more and, in some cases, put up with less. Some of them are people walking around with junk insurance, the kind are practically worthless because they pay out so little. Some of them are young people, particularly young men, whom insurers have coveted and wooed with absurdly low premiums—and make too much money to qualify for substantial subsidies. And some of them arereasonably affluent, healthy people with generous, open-ended policies that are hard to find even through employers. Insurers kept selling them because they could restrict enrollment to healthy people. Absent that ability, insurers are canceling them or raising premiums so high only the truly rich can pay for them.

Those people are the ones everybody is hearing about now, partly because they are a compelling, sometimes well-connected group—and partly because, absent a well-functioning website, stories of people benefitting from the law’s changes aren’t competing for attention. It’s impossible to know how big this group is.

That's how it always seems to be with the implementation of public policy. The people adversely affected by a change are the most vocal, and detailed analysis of the tradeoffs, and the gains and losses, take a long time to produce, to publish, to debate, let alone to be put to use in changing policies. (And in some cases, the change may be seriously mis-timed: that's a common argument critics of the financial sector make about repealing Glass-Steagall just in time for the popping of a major bubble).

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD.

In signalled territory, the timetable and the operating rules often stipulate a minimum time interval between trains following each other on the same track.

Recent plans by Naperville historians to build a memorial to the April 25, 1946, rear-end collision involving the Advance Exposition Flyer and the Exposition Flyer illustrate the value of the rule.  The trains departed Chicago Union Station simultaneously, with the Advance preceding the Flyer on the center track, under protection of automatic block signals.  A reprint of a contemporary story indicates that a trainman on the Advance was preparing to comply with the first two paragraphs of Rule 99.  The engineer of the Flyer might have been passing restrictive signals at track speed, a forbidden practice that train crews routinely engage in to keep time.  As long as the train ahead keeps moving, nobody is the wiser.  Should the train ahead stop, however, the result can be a broken train and 47 dead people.

This accident is not usually mentioned as one of the proximate causes of subsequent Interstate Commerce Commission mandates establishing maximum speeds on tracks protected by various levels of signalling, from none to cab signals with automatic train stop or train control.

STYMIED.

Northern Illinois encountered two good defensive teams in the post-season.  The Poinsettia Bowl went Utah State's way.

After halftime, the Huskies tallied only five first downs, 21 rushing yards on 13 attempts, and 60 passing yards on 6-of-17 passing. NIU went three-and-out on three of its five possessions in the half, with only a successful conversion on a fake punt preventing four consecutive three-and-outs.

"On offense, the errors started to snowball on us [in the second half] and we weren't able to move the ball the way we have," [coach Rod] Carey said. "We probably missed some throws in the second half."

[Quarterback Jordan] Lynch said Utah State grabbed the momentum after he threw an interception on the first play of the half and the Aggies did not allow the Huskies to get it back.

"They had all the momentum in the second half," Lynch said. "We looked for someone to make a play and get us going, and there wasn't anyone who could do it, including me. They played a straight cover one, packed the box and were well-coached and played smart football."

Those unsparing comments are from the university's release on the game's results.  No doubt, the national sports pundits will once again note the record (no wins, thus far) of Mid-American teams in Festive Season bowl games as a reflection, generally, on the weakness of the conference.  We will wait to see if they will take a page from the Washington press corps and investigate the misallocation implied in the widespread use of student fees to underwrite athletics in the conference.