ET VITAM VENTURI SAECULI.

Years ago, Cambridge's Joan Robinson noted that the only thing worse than being exploited by a capitalist was not being exploited by a capitalist.

A parallel proposition appears to apply in the Levant, where the only thing worse than a post-colonial order is a post-post-colonial order.

The underlying idea of post-WWI mandates in the Middle East—including the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, which replaced the formal British Mandate for Mesopotamia under the Covenant of the League of Nations—was that established powers would ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of nascent powers until those regimes could stand on their own. In practice, it was imperfect; it was, in fact, badly abused. But it nevertheless represented the ideal of an international system of sovereign nations, the weakest and most insecure of which would be protected by the strongest and most stable.

That system, based on the Sykes-Picot Agreement, has more or less held the Middle East together for nearly a century, preventing the region from cracking up and descending into widespread civil and ethnic war. Last week, the system rapidly began to dissolve. In time, history may well judge that its dissolution was the direct result of negligence and inaction by the United States—whose de facto mandate over Iraq began with the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and whose erstwhile leaders simply threw it away.

A longer analysis of the situation suggests the same proposition.

To an extent, what is happening in the Middle East is what happens when America and the West suddenly lose interest. But for the US, the reasons for that new lack of interest are obvious. With America soon predicted to attain energy independence, why should the country continue to involve itself deeply in a region which has cost it so much in blood, treasure and international reputation? Why should the US 5th Fleet continue to attempt to maintain regional security in a continent whose regional resources are increasingly rewarding nobody so much as the Communist Party of China?

But in that fracturing of Sykes-Picot, long held ambitions stir.

It was only as Syria fell apart and the regional powers were pulled inexorably into a more open battle, that the cold war between Iran and Saudi found its hot battleground.

There are those who think that the region as a whole may be starting to go through something similar to what Europe went through in the early 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, when Protestant and Catholic states battled it out. This is a conflict which is not only bigger than al-Qa’eda and similar groups, but far bigger than any of us. It is one which will re-align not only the Middle East, but the religion of Islam.

Ominous signs proliferate.

Certainly the sides remain fundamentally irreconcilable. As one of Saudi Arabia’s most important figures, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said on a recent visit to London, ‘Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and the birthplace of Islam. As such, it is the eminent leader of the wider Muslim world. Iran portrays itself as the leader of not just the minority Shiite world, but of all Muslim revolutionaries interested in standing up to the West.’

Left unanswered: whether the fighting will be confined to the proxies (as was mostly the case during the Cold War) or whether the regional powers will come to blows.

It is only two years ago that the Iranians attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The plan was thwarted only because the two suspects — an Iranian-American and an officer from Iran’s Quds Force — unwittingly connected with an informant from US Drug Enforcement Administration. Of course Iranian officials denied the assassination plot, but America’s attorney general, Eric Holder, announced at a press conference in Washington that the plot had been ‘directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Quds force which is an integral part of the Iranian government.’

The war between Saudi and Iran has already reached America’s shores. It has been devastatingly fought out across Syria’s wasted land. In fact the only place where it has yet to strike meaningfully is on the soil of the main protagonists. If what has been happening so far looks bloody, it is the work of an Armageddon-ist to consider what will happen when those gloves come off. In a region replete with bitter rivalries and irreconcilable ambitions, that will be perhaps the ultimate clarification.

How bad can it get?  It's already bad enough that Turkey's government now prefers an independent Kurdish state in what we still refer to as Iraq, and that state is cooperating with Turkey's government.

Kurdistan has exported its oil through Turkey, while the Iraqi Kurds have helped the Turks suppress the PKK. Experts thought until recently that this also involved a deeper trade: the Turks would back de facto Kurdish autonomy within Iraq, and in return, the Iraqi Kurds would make no claims on full independence, so as not to encourage Turkey’s Kurds to break away. From Turkey’s current pro-Kurdish stance in this crisis, and especially if emerging reports about the AKP’s stance are true, however, this may have just changed.

Washington may also be taking another look at the Kurdish question as Iraq falls apart. A newly-independent Kurdistan would likely be both anti-extremist and friendly to America. If Kurdish independence is a fact on the ground, and the Iraqis don’t think they can reverse it, what then is the White House’s plan? Where do US interests lie? Even by Middle Eastern standards, the future of Kurdistan is one of the most explosive questions out there. Washington needs to think fast, think hard, and keep in close touch with the Turks going forward.

Developing.

PUNCTUATED DISEQUILIBRIUM?

Years ago, I did some work with the Department of Energy touching on inter alia technical progress and energy intensity.  At the time, our taxonomy spoke of fundamental technical changes, which might (or not) involve substantial reductions in the energy intensity of industrial processes, contrasted with incremental technical changes, which would bring some reductions in energy intensity.  (And we struggled with whether that distinction was best, as it was hard to come up with a priori criteria for

THE CASE FOR BOURGEOIS VIRTUES.

The dean at Pioneer Valley Community is perturbed with what he sees as a proposal to write off the community colleges.

If community colleges were to screen out those least likely to succeed, they could do better by the ones who do get in.  As a bonus, high school students would lose the perceived safety net of community college and would try harder in high school.

Arguments can be made well or badly, so I’ll reserve judgment on Scherer and Anson’s execution of the argument until I’ve read it.  But at the conceptual level, it’s hard not to react.

I’ll start with conceding an easy piece.  Yes, we could get graduation rates up if we screened out the highest-risk students.  Selective four-year colleges have known that forever.  We wouldn’t even necessarily have to set the bar terribly high.  Just requiring that students place directly into college-level coursework upon enrollment would, by itself, do wonders for our graduation rate.  And a few basic demographic queries to IR reveal quickly who we should target.  If you know anything about racism in America, you won’t be shocked.  Catering to the middle class is easier than catering to the poor.  This is not news.

Yes, and elementary schools that take as a prime objective the inculcation of middle-class habits even among the most desperate and troubled youngsters will have a salutary effect on those course placements.  Ecological fallacy or no, common schools that produce less Distressed Material translate into improved graduation rates.  Underserved is as much about attitude as it is about resources.

I wonder if community colleges are too egalitarian, or utopian, for a culture that has forgotten that a significant middle class is a human construct, rather than a natural law. I’d be up for a principled moral argument about whether we want a political economy that’s more like Sweden or more like Brazil.  Let’s have that argument, and have it honestly.

That's what fifty years of deconstructing bourgeois institutions gets you.  Identity politics gives you Asterisk-Americans and Privilege-Americans.  The United States is too much a melting pot to have any hope of a Swedish political economy (and in Minnesota, "Finlander green" is a put-down that originated with the descendants of Swedes).  Consider, though, whether people are forting up in gated communities (themselves nothing new) in response to that deconstruction.

THE CASE FOR SELF-ORGANIZATION.

Myth Busters illustrated the value of emergent order in an experiment sending drivers through an intersection first controlled by a cop, then configured as a North American courtesy corner, and then set up as a rotary.  This appears to be an older experiment, as one of the cast donned a British bobby helmet as part of the rotary setup.  The rotary -- note, a simple one, none of those hermaphrodite Wisconsin channelized multi-lane abominations -- handled the greatest number of cars, and the traffic cop served more to delay cars than to facilitate flow.  In the experiment, cast members flipped signs on the approaches to the intersection instructing drivers to go ahead or to turn.  There was no provision for pedestrians as far as I could see.

The good news is that traffic engineers in Rockford are experimenting with British-style simple rotaries in residential neighborhoods beset with speeders.

Barrels are slowing cars; it's a temporary fix for now. Over the next three months the city will decide whether to install traffic circles at South 2nd and Oak, 2nd and Grove, and Crosby and Highland.

It's a change that could make the intersection safer for not only drivers, but also for those who live in the area.

If Rockford goes with the rotaries, keep them simple. Maybe a ten-foot radius circle in the middle of the intersection. No multiple lanes, no channels, no complexity.

IT LOOKS LIKE A BASEMENT.

The legacy of The Pennsylvania Railroad's cash-flow problems includes crude redevelopments of New York's Pennsylvania Station and Chicago's Union Station, both of which give the impression of a place to be gotten through as quickly as practicable so as to get home and open up a cold one (particularly now that there are no bar cars on any of the commuter trains.)

In Chicago, Fix Union Station hopes to apply a corrective.  Among the intriguing ideas: an improved entrance along Clinton Street.  There is a way in, next to the south taxi driveway, that goes through a depressing corridor of vacant storefronts.  Once upon a time, the railroad watch inspector did business there.  There is also a logical way to provide such an entrance.  On the Clinton Street side of the Great Hall is a vacant space that used to be a Fred Harvey eatery, until the place caught fire.  I recall that eatery as having a high ceiling, just the kind of space to adapt to a new grand entrance.  But with all those support columns for the old Mercantile Exchange trading floor running through the concourse building, there's little hope of improving that space.

POST-MODERN ILLITERACY.

Republican Congressional hopeful David Brat correctly characterized the government as that institution that has a monopoly on violence, and the Perpetually Aggrieved went off.  At Forbes, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry located the origin of the phrase with Max Weber.  (I first heard it from Robert Lampman, whose Great Society credentials are impeccable).  Apparently nobody in the current cohort of Big Name Commentators ever heard it.

That's unfortunate.  When the monopoly breaks down, the struggle to secure it is generally more like what's going on in much of the Moslem world these days than it is like West Side Story.

CLOSED MORE PERMANENTLY THAN THE EAST BROAD TOP.

Emily "I Ride the Harlem Line" Moser visited Ukraine to study the abandoned railroad lines serving Chernobyl.  Some lines may never see trains run again, but work continues on a more permanent containment structure for the failed reactor, and the reactor units that did not fail remain in service as power stations.  One of the lines affected serves Korosten, not far from ancestral settlements in Walki and Jagodinka.

IT USED TO BE ABOUT BECOMING AMERICAN.

Among the patriotic artifacts preserved on USS 393, the former Highway 16, is this morale poster from World War I.

Note: not Franco-American or German-American or Greco-American.  Americans All.  Even German-born immigrants by way of Ukraine to Wisconsin who get drafted and killed in France.  There was a brief attempt after September 11 to revive the idea.  But institutional identity politics is so entrenched that we have all manner of hyphenated Americans, which might better be thought of as Asterisk-Americans and Privilege-Americans.  How else interpret the latest identity-politics folly, in which (some) Americans with Asian ancestry become de facto white people? (But not, apparently, Cambodian, Hmong, and Samoan physicians, whose numbers are not in proportion to the general Californian population.)

Here's more from Eugene Volokh.

Calling Asians white also creates new lines, possibly very dangerous ones.  "White" has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean "those racial groups that have made it."  "Minority" has started to mean "those racial groups that have not yet made it."  (A recent San Francisco Chronicle story even excludes non-Mexican-American Latinos from the "minority" category.)  This new division is as likely as the old to create nasty, corrosive, sometimes fatal battles over which racial groups get the spoils.  So long as we think in terms of "white" and "minority," we risk disaster, no matter which races are put in which box.

It's less constructive, precisely because of that "not yet made it,"  to think of "privilege" and "asterisk." But then, those Mediterranean and Slavic gentlemen drafted into General Pershing's army had children who passed for white.  Perhaps for lack of any better alternatives, Americans All.

DEMOCRATS CULTIVATE LOW-INFORMATION VOTERS.

Ralph Nader says so.

The most manipulated voter is a single-issue voter. If a voter tells a candidate, all I care about is abortion, the candidate controls that person by giving them that issue, OK? By agreeing with that issue. Voters get more powerful when they have half a dozen or a dozen demands. Then you see the antennae of a politician starts – there’s a little cognitive dissonance here; they have to broaden out. And that’s why I fought the single-issue people.

The single-issue people are guinea pigs for the Democratic Party. They give them what they want. They take the stands they want, and the single-issue voters could care less about criminal wars of aggression, empire, corporate welfare, bailing out Wall Street, corporate crime, mishandling consumers, all of that. Healthcare. They’re not savvy in the sense of making themselves more wanted. They sell out too easy for their issue.  I don’t mean sell out for money. They sell out too easy for their issue.

Yes, and the symbiosis goes further.  Without gerry-mandered districts full of chronically desperate people, Bobby and Gwen and John and Maxine don't get re-elected.  And Bobby and Gwen and John and Maxine are much more effective at campaign speeches about "fighting" for jobs and schools than at insisting on schools that expect a level of responsibility out of young people that might make employers enthusiastic about hiring graduates, rather than fleeing those districts for more business-friendly climes.  And the best Our President can do is exploit changing electoral dynamics to produce even more desperate people.

NO MORE ME-TOO REPUBLICANS?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor got primaried.  By Randolph-Macon economics professor Dave Brat.  Here's Sean Trende on what might be happening.

In short, the GOP base is frustrated over the direction of the country. Obviously a large portion of that frustration is directed at the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama in particular.  But it is also directed at the party establishment and Washington, D.C. When pundits say that the Tea Party seems like it is more interested in defeating Republicans than Democrats, they aren’t entirely off base. They just miss the reasoning behind that animus toward the GOP establishment.

It's Government Failure. Not in the Eastern Establishment sense of "gridlock" or "lack of consensus." There's a new consensus afoot.

Which brings me to the other aspect of the Cantor Conundrum, the Brat Braining: the contention that, in addition to being “staggering,” “stunning,” etc., it is also of vast importance.  Is it? In the sense that it (like the European elections of a fortnight ago) bespeaks a profound unease among the electorate with politics (and nota bene, pollsters: politicians) as usual, I’d say, yes, it is important. We’ve been told that the “tea party” is a spent force.  The trouble is, the millions of ordinary people who are disgusted with Washington, who fear and loathe the the rise of the imperial state with its vast armory of regulation and surveillance, not to mention its untouchable self-enriching nomenklatura — those millions haven’t gotten the memo. They don’t know that their interests and desires are de trop, even though their masters in Washington have done everything possible to reinforce that idea.

The new consensus is that the Old Consensus isn't working.

But on the policy issues and political ramifications of this race, it’s not easy to box Brat into a neat caricature of an anti-immigration zealot or Tea Party demagogue, or, in TIME’s hasty reporting, a “shopworn conservative boilerplate.” If Brat ascends to Congress, which is quite likely given the Republican-leaning district that he’ll run in as the GOP nominee, he may actually continue taking on powerful elites in Washington.

The emerging populist consensus might either be libertarian or socialist.  There's dawning awareness, though, that traditional process and technocracy no longer works.

HIGHER EDUCATION LOWERS ITSELF.

The latest Harper's offers a lengthy essay on the effect of neo-liberal philistinism on the humanities.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

When the humanities get into trouble, the strongest non-instrumental arguments in their defense are the arguments from tradition.

The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.

They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

This, I would submit, is value—and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?

Yes, but that requires scholars to adhere to some rules of construction, in order to draw coherence out of confusion.  It's difficult to establish a cutting-edge reputation that way.

English departments have pretty much given up on their mission of preserving a literary canon or teaching poetic form and rhetorical strategies.  Decades ago, politics of race, class, and gender overtook any concern for preserving and perpetuating poetic art.  In fact, to claim that there is such a thing as Literature was to align oneself with the right-wing Imperialists.

That is, at least until the enrollments fall, and enrollment-driven budgets shrink.  "Here is the bitter reality that the MLA won't face - professors have been killing their market with all of their ideological zealotry and quirky tangents."  Indeed.

THE CASE FOR EMERGENT ORDER.

I've been cleaning out a lot of stuff recently, including the January 1975 Progressive, which I had been holding onto for its investigation of food monopolies.  (The self-styled progressives are worked up about exactly the same thing today.  No more Soviet Union but reactionary middle eastern regimes.  Global economic development is still about making more people poor.  Concentration in the food business is not in the public interest -- now-a-days advanced genetic modification is the latest way of enhancing profits despite making the food cheaper and more plentiful.)

In the book review section, Charles Kadushin's The American Intellectual Elite, which has collectible status these days, gets reviewed.

Sociologist Charles Kadushin has done the impossible: he has surveyed, quantified, and dissected America's intellectual elite.  He has accomplished this by rather narrowly defining the animal, taking the leading writers for influential intellectual journals such as the New York Review of Books, Commentary, The Nation, Partisan Review, and others, including, of course, The Progressive, and then interviewing and surveying these 110 leading intellectuals.  Kadushin discovered some interesting facts.  The intellectuals, while sympathetic to a rather abstractly defined socialism as a means of organizing society, are quite pragmatic in their suggestions for American society.  The opposition of the intellectuals to the Vietnam war (the study was made in 1970-72) stemmed, for the most part, from pragmatic rather than idealistic reasons.  Most intellectuals are strong liberals, a few are moderate radicals, and a few are conservatives.  They are mainly based in New York City, and they tend to talk mainly to themselves.  One might quibble with the rather narrow definition Kadushin has used for his study, but the book is without question a valuable one.  Although written by a professional social scientist, the book is admirably readable.

First, we have the emergence of concentration.  In 1975, there are about 225 million Americans, yet 110 do most of the serious chin-pulling.  In those days, it's not surprising that Pauline Kael could have a social circle in which nobody voted for Richard Nixon.

Second, we have the emergence of competition in the marketplace of ideas.  Commentary had not yet crossed over.  The review does not mention whether any National Review writers were among the 110.  Reason and The Alternative (now The American Spectator) were start-ups.

And we now have the Internet.  Anyone with a keyboard and a logon can play at being a public intellectual.  The New York set may still interact only with itself, but there is now countervailing power.

THEY DIED TO MAKE MEN FREE.

The Chicago Tribune posted a then-and-now of D-Day sites as they appeared in 1944, and as they are now.  This is what victory looks like.

Omaha Beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer, 23 August 2013

Reuters photograph by Chris Helgren, courtesy Chicago Tribune.

On Monday, the USO of Wisconsin held its annual fund-raising golf outing at Ironwood Golf Course.

Almost looks like a motor pool somewhere in England.  The Milwaukee Fire and Police Pipes provide  suitable music.  The golf outing was of the scramble format, meaning the camaraderie of the day, rather than the quality of any player's shots, was prior.  And the USO have resources to do their good works on the front line, and in the clinics.

Our war dead are not able to participate, but perhaps their survivors and heirs can share in the fruits of their victories.

THEY'LL RUN THE PLAY UNTIL YOU STOP IT.

Two related, trenchant observations on the Technocratic Imperative. Insta Pundit, shorter form: "Have you noticed that the nature of the crisis du jour may change, but the solutions always involve higher taxes and more power for the political class?" Yes, but the formula still works.  You stop the Packers from running 49 and 36 by reading the keys and blowing up the play.  You stop the Washington Establishment from converting an inconvenience into Crisis or Scandal and leading the evening news with it until Congress. Does. Something. by pointing out that It. Doesn't. Work. Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek has an elaboration. "It is inexcusably naive to think that 'reform' or 'cleaner elections' or this or that shiny new silver-tongued orator vying for political office can remove the practical certainty that the agency set up to do X will often be run by people not committed to X – or who, regardless of what the politicians or administrators currently in charge think of X, find ways to appear to pursue X while really pursuing Y."  Yes, although it probably takes a serious dose of Government Failure to provide sufficient evidence for voters to reject the usual formula of got-a-problem-get-a-program in the face of the default advocacy by the political class for more of the same.

FINANCIAL FITNESS FOR COLLEGIANS.

In my work with Econ Illinois, I had ample opportunity to introduce Learning, Earning, and Investing and Financial Fitness for Life to elementary and high school teachers.  The Center for Economic Education is part of the Financial Literacy Collaborative at Northern Illinois.  Aleister of College Insurrection muses on the value to collegians of knowing personal finance.  In Oregon, some students are catching on.

[Portland State's] personal finance class doesn't require knowledge of Excel or 70-year projections of saving and spending. But it does require students to prepare their own financial plan.

They start by setting short-, intermediate- and long-term goals; picking their ideal job; researching how much income they'll make in that career after two years and drafting a resume for the job search.

Part 2 requires them to get a grasp of their current financial picture. They estimate their net worth, obtain their credit report or FICO score and take stock of their insurance coverage. They complete a detailed worksheet comparing renting with buying.

They also go on a "Dollar Diet," writing down what they think they spend on food, transportation and other categories. Then they track what they actually spend for a month. The exercise changed some behaviors.

The course is required of business minors, but not yet of business majors (or, as far as I can tell, students in food science or fashion merchandising).  The act of keeping track of where the money is going concentrates the mind.  Perhaps those students will more actively request receipts of vendors, a practice too often honored in the breach by all too many businesses.

STREETCARS REBORN.

At the Illinois Railway Museum's July, 2013 Trolley Pageant, Chicago and West Towns streetcar 141 was in presentable condition for the beginning of the streetcar section of the parade.

All dressed up for Independence Day, running 6 July 2013.

It takes a fair amount of work to restore a streetcar to operation.  The Central Electric Railfans' Association report on 141's return to museum service details the work involved.  Among the images in the post is one of 141 as-delivered to the museum, in rough shape and on a flatbed trailer.

North of the Cheddar Curtain, Milwaukee 846 was providing transportation at the East Troy Electric Railroad.

Army Lake Road is not a car stop.  There is a convenient side-road hard by the tracks for photography, and the railroad's current schedule has cars leaving both ends of the line on the hour, and meeting at the Army Lake siding just east of here.  There are spring switches at both ends of the siding, permitting proper trolley meets, sometimes with neither car stopping.

SEVENTY YEARS AGO

One Landing Ship, Tank, serves as a war memorial in Muskegon, Michigan.

We have her to tour today as she had a civilian career as the new-car transport, Highway 16.

The anti-aircraft weapon is probably a restoration, there were no pirates on Lake Michigan in those days.  (Pittsburgh came to County Stadium either on a train or flew Northwest.)

I sometimes fly the White Ensign to commemorate the Dunkirk evacuation.  The Royal Navy was instrumental as well in OVERLORD, and in maintaining operational security for the rehearsals.

MAKING A CASE FOR MORE TRAINS.

A guest commentary in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wants more funding for Amtrak.

America can't compete in the 21st-century economy with an Amtrak system forced to get by with decades-old equipment and decaying infrastructure. We need a fully modernized Amtrak that can accommodate the higher speeds that many states are already planning. And that takes long-term investment by the federal government, in partnership with states and the private sector. We also need to make sure that our freight rail system, which provides the track for much of Amtrak's service, is safe and adequately staffed — just the way Badger State residents say they want it.

There are ways in which the freight railroads and the passenger train operators can benefit mutually from upgrades to the tracks. Union Pacific get faster tracks for piggyback trains out of the in-progress speeding-up of the Alton Route.  The editorialists miss the opportunity to make a few salient points.  First, connectivity of the corridor trains in Chicago is a must.  Second, accommodating faster trains doesn't have to be a massive project.  Let me show you a train, and coaches, capable of 110 mph operation.

That's the Illinois Railway Museum's Nebraska Zephyr, still capable of track speed on the Way of the Zephyrs.  As I noted at the time, "Amtrak and Illinois Department of Transportation, you could do worse."

On May 1, 1971, these 1942 ribbed-side Hiawatha coaches were assigned to Twelve and 23, the Watertown - Milwaukee "Cannon Ball" (not so named in the timetable, but identified as such on station bulletin boards.)  But they must have put away more than a few fast miles behind the likes of One and Fifteen and 105 and the other Hiawatha power.

What intrigues, though, is the picture the Journal-Sentinel runs with the editorial.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photograph by Gary Porter.

The Hiawatha Service ordinarily runs with plain vanilla Amfleet and Horizon coaches and it draws passengers.  The former Great Northern Great Dome comes to Chicago around Thanksgiving to provide additional passenger seating.  (Spare dinette cars also turn up, these are popular with packs of collegians looking to get some studying in.)

Is it too much to ask for some dome cars, some first-class seating, a day train Chicago to Fargo or Grand Forks and return (there may even be a case for an overnight service Chicago and Williston), some day service to Madison and Green Bay, and some late-evening trips on the C&M for opera or Summerfest or sports traffic?

THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.

Last month, May 10 was National Train Day and the occasion of a fund-raiser for the Midwest Steelmakers scholarship fund.  I arranged my grading efforts in such a way as to be able to get away, and it was a lovely day to travel.

Between Union Station, where the National Train Day festivities took place, and Randolph Street Station, for the interurban to Gary, is Daley Plaza.  And Spring is for protesting.

The cause of the day was #bringbackourgirls.  It started in Nigeria, after some True Believers kidnapped some girls for immoral purposes.  It's still a cause celebre in some parts of the internets.  (Elsewhere, it's been supplanted by #yesallwomen and #notallmen and #NoVoyABrasilPorque.)  For all the good it's done.  The girls are still being held by the True Believers, and the social media types have other distractions.  Because hashtag campaigns tend to be the work of trendy young lefties, it's no surprise that Right Wisconsin's Kevin Binversie would describe them as feel-good-do-nothingness.

Lost in all the feel-goodism is how unserious it must look to America’s allies. None of these hashtags have stopped Putin’s advance into Ukraine, brought peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, ended human trafficking and the child sex trade, or brought a conclusion to the global war on terror.

If anything, this type of advocacy is an updated version of how celebrities used to show up with a rainbow of colored ribbons on their lapel for different causes. It didn’t really matter what they were for, it eventually morphed into a status symbol to showcase their perceived moral superiority to the rest of us.

On Duck of Minerva, Megan Mackenzie offers a similar criticism, translated into cultural studiesese.

The point here is not to provide a complete gender and post-colonial critique of #BringBackOurGirls, it is really to pose some questions that I hope those retweeting the letters ask themselves. Words should MEAN something. Activism should be about DOING something that will promote peace rather than legitimize Western imperialism and further military expansion.

In the absence of Western imperialism or military involvement in the underdeveloped world, you're hoping for the primitives to throw off their primitive ways of their own accord.  That may work.  It is also likely to take centuries.

I'm hoping that the contribution I made to the Midwest Steelmakers will show more immediate results.

And I got an interurban ride out of it, and a chance to sit in the sun.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

The latest self-inflicted wound to higher education is the trigger warning.  Again, Oberlin College sets the pace for the world.  "However, even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler." Yeah, it's the same silly statement I mocked before. I'm not sure if there's even reason for faculty to issue spoiler alerts in a world with online Cliff Notes and all sorts of other aids for slackers.  Perhaps, though, the best thing to do is to run a trigger warning contest.  (The closing deadline is midnight Eastern this evening, about the same time the sun will come up on Omaha Beach.)  I hope these economics entries are being offered for criticism.  I got the link off Newmark's Door.  Craig is still in the fight, and he can vent about academic idiocies as well as anyone.  If you're not going there, go there.  I still have a dog in the fight, but it's not my fight in the same way any more.

WHEN THE MILITARY LOSES CONFIDENCE IN CIVILIAN AUTHORITY.

Ordinarily, a campaign slogan might be innocuous.

"Retired Marine, not Madigan Machine," rhymes, and it contrasts competence with hackery, certainly a valid campaign point in Illinois of the dysfunctional politics.

As part of a Memorial Day observance, in the presence of continued governmental incompetence, however, something more ominous might be at work.

It's no surprise that when veteran's organizations do the logistical work for Memorial Day observations, including providing the honor guards, that the accompanying speeches include advocacy for proper care of injured veterans.  When that call comes a few days after disclosures of administrators gundecking waiting lists in order to earn performance bonuses, before an audience sympathetic to active duty and veteran alike, it's not necessarily the usual epideictic rhetoric being aired.

And when news comes of a missing trooper being exchanged for five high value Taliban targets after six men died on search and rescue missions, "Soldiers never forget.  Civilians rarely remember."

One can hope that National Command Authority simply slipped up.  But a trashy, splintery, litigious common culture in a continued weak economy is a dangerous place for the military to become alienated.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Bernie Reeves of Phi Beta Cons questions the effectiveness of the Famous Colleges that the Deep Thinkers always obsess about.

Owning a sheepskin in the early 21st century is similar to owning a contract for a tulip bulb in the 1630s. Will it keep its value? It didn’t for tulips and will not, in the long run, for college graduates when the cost for a degree surpasses the projected return in salary. Or, business owners figure out that new hires who attended a classy institution of higher learning are unsuited to integration and success in the workplaces of capitalism.

Employers, witnessing  the laughable political views on display at top-tier campuses today, are likely to react negatively. Who wants a New Left or Third Left employee who thinks U.S. wealth is gained by stealing from the Third World; that America is an unsuccessful society foaming with racism, sexism, and homophobia;  that capitalism is evil and exploitative?

Methinks he doth protest too much. Here the (ordinarily misguided) mindset of treating general education as something to "get out of the way" might work to those employers' benefit: the economics or mathematics or engineering or programming major can treat Victim Studies much the way those finishing school gentlemen treated compulsory chapel back in the day.

Captains of industry are bound to be seeing  through the artifice of a college education provided on elite campuses – such as the recent antics resulting in the elimination of commencement speakers at several schools. Executives with brains will seek graduates from tech universities, community colleges, and state universities located in the remote hinterlands. Here, tuition is reasonable and commensurate and students are not infected with immature, anti-American radicalism.

Not necessarily: the trendy methodologies of the Ivies, and the legions of diversity hustlers, are more likely to be imitated than the adoption of higher admission and completion standards or the protection of an academic environment conducive to learning something.

THAT WISCONSIN TRADITION.

Scott Tolzien understands the difference between a course for freshers and a course for majors.  "Last November, Tolzien said he was learning the [Packer] offense on a '101' level. Now he's up to '301'." Spend a few minutes with the University of Wisconsin course catalog and you'll get the reference.

THE FALSE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY.

Let the Discontent be Shared with a Candid World.

First, in National Interest, Stephen Knott takes the Cult on directly.

Both Professor Wilson and President Wilson believed that the Constitution was not fit for the complexities of twentieth-century American life. A document written at a time when the horse and buggy was the main mode of transportation was seen as an obstacle to creating an activist government capable of checking big business. Wilson held that it was the responsibility of the president to break the gridlock caused by the Constitution’s separation of powers and unleash the power of the federal government to restrain the barons of industry.

Perhaps those Smart People forgot that the British East India Company was a public utility that captured its regulators.  The Cult follows immediately.

The president would break this gridlock by serving as his party’s leader, thereby bridging the separation of powers between the executive and the legislature, and would preside over an executive branch composed of experts who would regulate the economy in the interest of the common man. In addition to presiding over this regulatory state, the president would serve as an educator and visionary who would lead the nation through his oratorical skills.

Meanwhile, the Wise Experts get Congressional authority to issue regulations consistent with the objectives of the laws.  Reality, however, is messy.

Wilson upended the Founding or Constitutional understanding of the role of the president and overturned the expectations of what a president could be expected to achieve. Unfortunately, the Wilsonian conception of the presidency, adopted wholeheartedly by Democrats and eventually by Republicans, produced a massive expectations gap—a long train of heightened expectations followed by dashed hopes.

Not that there weren't presidential hopefuls who fancied themselves policy impresarios before Woodrow Wilson. But that's been the default position for national politics all my life.  Perhaps "It is actually harder to do some of these things in reality than we thought when we put it down on paper" will become a new watchword for the policy wonks.

MAKING MONEY FROM SHARING.

Last week, we looked at Jeremy Rifkin fretting over the possibility that shared property such as spare bedrooms, garden tools, bicycles, while lowering the pressure to make more stuff, might be another opportunity for entrepreneurs to make money.  Now comes Dean Baker, fearful that those entrepreneurs are engaging in a contrivance to evade taxes and regulations.  (And how things change: the self-styled progressives of the early twentieth century set up public utilities so as to make regular the pricing and taxation of businesses clothed with a public interest.  Thus the passenger and freight transportation cartels, and later, the telephone cartel.  I got to establish my teaching chops making sense of how those cartels outlived their usefulness.)  David Henderson suggests Mr Baker is excessively fearful.  The two services that received the most space are Uber, a cellularly-dispatched version of the jitneys that gave the streetcar companies of the 1920s fits, and Airbnb, which strikes me as a much more orderly market in temporary housing than looking in the classified ads for rooming houses, or finding a hippie commune.

#NOTALLMEN

Laura McKenna notes that it's difficult to conduct a debate within the constraints of 140 characters. That doesn't stop people from attempting to do so. The problem with many sharp-sign, er, hash-tag (why does that sound like a price sticker in a Colorado pharmacy?) campaigns is excessive aggregation. Perhaps it's more accurate to think of such devices as stereotypes. Rush Limbaugh decides to provoke his listeners, essentially proposing #notallmoslems as analogy.

You have one male go nuts here, and every man is capable of what this guy does, right?  Now, follow me on this, the way the feminists and the way the media and everybody else portray it, so Elliot Rodger goes nuts and that becomes symbolic of what every man is capable of.

And yet when militant Islamists blow up the World Trade Center, what's the first thing we're told?  Now, don't judge the whole religion by this, no, no, no, no, no.  These are just some isolated events with some isolated malcontents.  But you let some Looney Tune go nuts in a sorority house or wherever he went nuts, and all of manhood is indicted.

An Uncle Tim at Time suggests that "not all men" is a derailment tactic. In making that claim, he only makes it easier for the Perpetually Aggrieved, whether of the feminist or the boutique multiculturalist ilk, to antagonize people who might otherwise be sympathetic to arguments such as "it's easier for men to get away with being boors" or "the people of the book have more in common than not."  Cathy Young sums up what follows.  "But the worst possible answer is a toxic version of feminism that encourages women to see themselves as victims while imposing collective guilt on men." Indeed.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE.

Apparently, getting into Harvard becomes a downer once you get there.

Number One finding in the annual survey of Harvard seniors: about 60 percent of African-Americans and more than 40 percent of Latino and Asian-American students have felt marginalized because of their race while at Harvard. "Marginalized," an invitation to aggrievement, is now a mainstream college term, raising the question, "How marginalized can you be if they let you into Harvard?" Another survey finding provides a rough answer to that query: "Seniors are nearly unanimous in the view that, if given the chance, they would choose Harvard again."

Other findings: 42 percent of seniors and 67 percent of homosexual or LGBTQ students have sought mental health support; 90 percent support same-sex marriage; 38 percent are agnostic or atheist; 44 percent want Harvard to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies; 21 percent of students say they are virgins; 12 percent of women were sexually assaulted; 12 percent have had ten or more sexual partners, and the median number of dating partners while at Harvard is one. Nearly half of the senior class, 758 students, responded to the survey, conducted this month.

Make of this information what you will.

PATHETIC HISTORY.

History Channel's six-hour The World Wars has ended, and it's an instructive clinic on how stories become legends become fantasy.  (And thus one Ragnar Lothbrok can figure in events that took place over a 200 year span in History Channel's Vikings, as at twelve centuries remove, because there's enough uncertainty about the record to allow the bard all manner of artistic license.)

But at a century's remove, retelling the interactions of Hitler and Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt in a way that buries the richer true stories annoys me.  Germany's failure to take Moscow before the 1941-1942 polar vortex was a consequence of forces being diverted to Leningrad and Kiev, the attempt to block the Volga at Stalingrad came later, and Hitler's recorded mockery of the notion that the city was important because it was named for Stalin would have illustrated his Wolkenkuckucksheim much better than just another temper tantrum.   The Anglo-American campaign across Africa and into Italy was something the U.S. command resisted, preferring to prepare a cross-Channel invasion, although it allowed the soyuznichki the opportunity to show Stalin something other than preparations at the same time that the attrition in the Caucasus was in full flow, and Churchill's "underbelly of Europe" concept for the Italian invasion has more in common with his failed Gallipoli campaign than the show credits him for.  And Patton and the U.S. forces did not conquer Italy in six weeks.  The Italian government fired Mussolini and switched sides, but the Germans were more effective at conducting a fighting retreat in Italy than they ever could be in Ukraine or France.

The Pacific Theater gets a more superficial treatment, although it's going to give future students of that conflict the impression that four Japanese carriers were sunk in six minutes at Midway, despite the Japanese Navy having Aegis destroyers.  In another hundred years, "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" may well be a legitimate opening paragraph of a history term paper.

MAY IS SUPPOSED TO BE FESTIVE.

This time of year, the seniors are graduating (full of hope, despite years of failed economic policies) and the returning students take their decompression time, or perhaps jobs as lifeguards or camp counselors, or at the worst job in town so as to better appreciate university when they return.

Aranye Fradenburg of California at Santa Barbara has a more difficult task.

And so we know — partly because we are part of a knowledge-making community — how true it is that we are all affected by the shootings, how much we have reached out to each other and how long it will be before we can enjoy again the shockingly good fortune of being alive. We are just so terribly sorry for those who had to leave us before they were ready.

Please be well. If we can help, tell us, and we will help you. If you need peace and quiet, we will be respectful. If you want to cry, we will cry with you. We will protest the unfairness of life right alongside of you. Please be well, and remember that we love you.

They've all lost a piece of their youth.  We understand.

VLADIMIR PUTIN, ROMANOV.

The signs were all there at the Olympics.  The cover of the May 19, 2014 Time suggested as much.  Somebody at Time was thinking along these lines seven years ago.

AUTHORITIES ELIMINATE AMENITIES.

We anticipated, four years ago, the end of club cars on commuter trains.  It once took four years from petition to abandon to complete closure of The North Shore Line.  These days, that's the implementation lag for abolition of bar cars in the New York City commuter service.

Long Island Rail Road had bar cars on regular commuter trains until sometime in the 1990s. The railroad also operated “parlor cars” to the East End of the Island on Fridays and back on Sundays during the summer, until a few years ago. These cars were commuter clubs, at least unofficially, patronized primarily by managers who spent their summer week-ends together at the Hamptons and other seasonal playgrounds at the east end of the Island. The parlor cars are gone, but the LIRR still sells drinks on the seasonal Cannonball, a summer express train from New York Penn Station to Montauk on Friday afternoons, with a return trip on Sunday evenings. This service is for “Hamptons Reserve” customers who sit in two special cars with bar service. The equipment is the normal bi-level equipment used for the rest of the train consist, but the extra fare is $20 or $21. This season’s Cannonball made its first run this past week-end.

It appears unlikely that Metro-North eliminated the bar cars merely to save money. Illinois rail advocate Pete Loomis posted this reaction to their demise: “How … do you lose money (or not make enough) with a bar car? A captive, thirsty and mostly wealthy clientele at cocktail time? The profit on drinks is sky-high.” It also seems unlikely that passenger-carrying capacity was an issue. New York advocate Joseph M. Clift, former Director of Planning for the LIRR, told this writer: “The bar cars can hold more people than any other cars. Many of the riders would stand and hang onto a post while they drank.” Still, Metro-North is retiring the M-2 Connecticut cars and replacing them with the new M-8 cars. It appears that the railroad does not wish to spend money on special-order interiors for a few cars.

Standardization, and a reluctance to spend public money on anything fancier than passenger accommodation that would violate the Geneva Convention play a role.  But we're not in the Don Draper or Man in the Gray Flannel Suit world any more.

In some ways, commuting is not what it used to be, and neither is drinking. The bar cars were men’s clubs, and so were commuter trains generally. More women are commuting today, and young commuters were not flocking to bar cars as their elders did. Also, commuters do not necessarily take the same train every day, as their predecessors did in an earlier era. The unofficial “commuter clubs” that formed in the bar cars have been moving steadily toward the attic of history for several decades. Cultural attitudes about drinking have changed, too. It is not as fashionable an activity as it had been years ago. Drinking on a train, and then getting off and driving the rest of the way home, is a recipe for danger and possibly jail time.

Friday, May 9th marked the end of an era. Fortunately, the smoking that had been associated with drinking on trains for so many years is long-gone. Drinking habits have changed. Commuters have changed, too. Some, who emulated the fictitious Tom Rath, will miss the opportunity to unwind by having a drink with their bar-pals on the way home on the train. Others are more interested in getting home to their families and other aspects of their lives. Many no longer commute at traditional peak-commuting times. Whenever they travel, there are plenty of places where they can grab a drink, either before leaving the City or after getting off the train.

Or, in proper City of New Orleans fashion, "penny a point, no one keeping score, Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle."  Bring your own is the Chicago going home tradition these days, except if Metra implements a container ban on trains, which is common during festival season.

A HERMAPHRODITE KARMANN-GHIA.

Men's Magazine offers readers "10 Cars You Don't Want to be Seen Driving."  Worst, or first, is the late, unlamented, Chevrolet SSR, which also made Time's Fifty Worst Cars.  I've never understood the logic of combining the worst features of pickup trucks and sedans, but the car companies insist on rolling these out from time to time.  Perhaps there's a counterexample to Mencken's "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence" proposition.

MARKING OFF.

My send-off from the Center for Economic Education.  Thanks!

INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE TO CONSERVE ON TRANSACTION COSTS.

The collectivist mindset is oft troubled by some of the conspicuous duplication of private property that often sits idle: the parking lots full of cars whose owners are riding the train to work or flying somewhere for business or pleasure; all those backyard swimming pools; those garages full of bicycles and garden tools and those lawnmowers.  So here comes Jeremy Rifkin with yet another attempt to reduce the conspicuous duplication, by enlisting the Internet to lower the cost of forming sharing groups.

The distributed, collaborative nature of the Internet allows millions of people to find the right match-ups to share whatever they can spare with what others can use. This is a different kind of economy -- one far more dependent on social capital than market capital. And it's an economy that lives more on social trust rather than on anonymous market forces.

Apparently, the internet makes the establishment of crash pads (to use the 'Sixties locution) simpler and children's toys can be passed along from child to child as long as the toys don't break before the youngsters tire of them, and clothing can cascade without the intermediary of the thrift shop.  And yet, incentives matter.

These new economic models seem so benign. Sharing represents the best part of human nature. Reducing addictive consumption, optimizing frugality, and fostering a more sustainable way of life is not only laudable, but essential if we are to ensure our survival.

ut even here, there are winners and losers. The still-dominant capitalist system believes it can find value in the collaborative economy by leveraging aspects of the sharing culture toward new revenue-generating streams.

To Mr Rifkin, that's a bug. Again, it's nothing new.  The environmentalists of the 1970s suggested that there'd be no development of alternatives to fossil fuels until Mobil figured out how to profit by them.  A more likely "profit by them" would be General Electric, but perhaps the Fortune 500 turns over every twenty years as new companies figure out how to profit by new things.  I fear, though, that he expects too much of the new ethos of sharing gently used stuff.

Although hotels will continue to book, they are already seeing their markets decline as millions of young people migrate to Airbnb and Couchsurfing. How does a huge hotel chain, with its high fixed costs, compete with literally millions of privately owned spaces that can be shared at low and even near zero marginal costs?

Retailers of all kinds, already on the ropes with disappearing profit margins, are going to be equally disadvantaged by a sharable economy where clothes, appliances, toys, tools, and thousands of other items are continually in use through rental and redistribution networks. Extending the lifecycle of stuff by passing it on from user to user significantly cuts into new sales.

Recent surveys underscore the broad economic potential of the Collaborative Commons. A 2012 study by Campbell Mithun, a Minneapolis ad agency, in partnership with Carbonview Research, found that 62 percent of Gen Xers and millennials are attracted to the notion of sharing goods, services, and experiences in Collaborative Commons. These two generations differ significantly from the baby boomers and World War II generation in favoring access over ownership. When asked to rank the rational benefits of a sharing economy, respondents to the survey listed saving money at the top of the list, followed by impact on the environment, lifestyle flexibility, the practicality of sharing, and easy access to goods and services. As for the emotional benefits, respondents ranked generosity first, followed by a feeling of being a valued part of a community, being smart, being more responsible, and being a part of a movement.

That was the logic of the hippie crash pads, with the internet replacing the bulletin board at the local college, and without the acid and Acapulco Gold.  I ask readers to contemplate the implicit accounting identity here: might businesses that attempt to make do without workers simply be feeding a dynamic in which people who are no longer working attempt to make do without buying?

IT IS CORPORATE WELFARE FOR ROADHOGS.

Michael Giberson contemplates methods for the government to raise money for government-provided roads.

In Texas two things stand between the fuel taxes and the user fee concept. First, about half of the gasoline tax is federal, 18.4 cents/gallon for gasoline, and Texas gets only about 80 percent of the Texas-sourced federally-collected fuel taxes back from Washington DC. The money comes back with some federal strings attached and some of the money is diverted from projects that benefit fuel taxpayers. Second, the feds 20 percent cut off the top is actually better for Texas fuel taxpayers than the state’s cut. By law, 25 percent of fuel taxes collected in Texas go to state government educational funding, so Texas road users only get about 75 percent of the Texas-sourced state-collected fuel taxes back from Austin. The 25 percent cut of fuel taxes for education is enshrined in the state’s constitution (a holdover, I suspect, when fuel taxes were paid primarily by the wealthy).

Bundling is always like that. Because some gasoline goes into lawnmowers, powerboats, and off-road redneck toys, a fuel tax is not as direct a user charge as a toll, based on time-of-day and vehicle weight, is.

I also urged more use of toll roads, which have become much more efficient these days, and congestion-based tolls on roads where congestion is a frequent issue. (Nothing annoys me more than some denizen of east coast metropolitan areas saying federal gasoline taxes ought to be higher because it will reduce congestion. For example. No amount of taxing my cross-Texas drives is going to speed your east coast metropolitan commute.)

And drivers of passenger cars are subsidizing the motor trucks, and the delay they cause with their underpowered acceleration, space occupied, and weight.

I had two promising suggestions from conference attendees. One is that, given that almost all of the actual wear and tear on the roads in Texas come from heavy trucks rather than cars and light trucks, we should tax large commercial vehicles more–probably on a vehicle-miles traveled basis–and the “user fee” for personal vehicles likely falls to something reflecting the modest consequences of driving relatively lightweight vehicles. Trucking companies would complain, and the political prospects of the idea are probably not good. Otherwise makes a lot of sense to me. The other suggestion was to employ certain oil and gas drilling fees currently in surplus for road work, at least for the road improvements needed in the parts of the state experiencing significant increases in commercial traffic due to the oil and gas drilling boom. The suggestion seems a bit kludge-y to me, but comes with enough symmetry between the payers and the beneficiaries to be plausible.

The Benefit Principle appeals as a way of designing taxes. If I were king, any movement of a trailer longer than 40 feet would require a special movement permit.

WORK IS BETTER THAN ALCOHOLISM.

The Last Psychiatrist elaborates.

At some point during the Truman Administration home life became more stressful than work life, where stressful is defined either as hysterical drama or rheumatismy boredom, and by Reagan II the home was no longer a respite from modern society's incessant demands to produce or at the very least a place to get a nap.  Home became work, it became a work, and not coincidentally this parallels precisely the history of homework.

It's a long article (via Voluntary Xchange.)

Let me suggest a simple therapy. Save those wooden stir-sticks from the coffee shop, until you have enough to build some circus wagons.

LEARN THE WAYS OF THE BOURGEOISIE.

A Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts) dean of students explains that being able to think critically and make connections matters.  But the life-management skills matter more.

We routinely place students in positions of responsibility on our campus -- to manage money, to respond to behavioral issues, to serve on search committees and host a candidate for lunch -- and I know what many of them are capable of. I don’t always know their majors, but I know their prospects. They will find themselves in a job, maybe not the job of their dreams at first, but they will be able to manage the small, and then slightly larger, tasks placed before them. And they will think back, I believe, to some of the challenges they faced on the campus of this small college, which they often claim is not “the real world.”  But it is the real world in many ways -- fraught with hassles, battles, disappointments, requiring self-advocacy, empathy, patience -- and it is preparing them for the work world in ways that their academic coursework may or may not be.

I've sometimes told students that it's important to do what looks like a trivial or bulls*** assignment well and for the right reasons, as that might be a way of identifying who is going to screen for future promotion.  And if the parents aren't providing that lesson, and the common schools are too distracted by testing to do the work, it's up to the colleges.

I had the opportunity to teach a class this past semester. It was a small seminar with eight students, seven of them seniors. They were all different majors, and I'm not sure I could tell you who was what.  They were, though, smart and verbal and engaged in the discussions we had. They spoke, and they noticed when another person was trying to speak. They brought to the class their other academic interests, one of them using something learned in a religion and sexuality class to interpret one of our texts. Another explained to the class a landmark affirmative action case she learned about in her Constitutional law class.  A third offered her own experience as a resident adviser to provide context to a discussion on race relations on campus.

They are justifiably worried about their job prospects, especially since they have spent a semester with me reading about the various crises of American higher education and its roots in the global economy. I’m sure their parents are worried, too.

But I'm not as worried. I'm not sanguine, because it is difficult to find a job these days, but I believe that once they get into a work setting, they will do fine.  And their chances of getting into that work setting are better than average, because they can make eye contact and put several sentences together in service to their ideas. Not all of their classmates can do the same. Those are the ones I worry about.

We need to lessen our obsession with the obvious value of a liberal arts education and instead focus on the values of personal maturity, accountability, a sense of proportion and perspective. We need to be certain our students know how to give a good firm handshake, look someone in the eye and introduce themselves. We need to reinforce the importance of deadlines. We need to address (dare I say it?) personal hygiene and appropriate dress. We must make sure they can get to their feet at a college-sponsored dinner and thank guests for coming, or introduce a speaker at a lecture, or send a thank-you note to the director of an office that has provided them funds to attend a conference.

Is this the work of higher education?  Some would argue it absolutely is not, that postsecondary education is about mastering content and developing all-important critical thinking skills, about becoming self-taught, curious researchers and life-long learners. To those who would argue those points, I would say yes -- it is all about those things, and I am grateful for the liberal arts education that helped me develop those skills.  But I would then suggest, respectfully, that as maddening as it might be to spend valuable teaching time engaged in building the personal economy of our students, it is perhaps the best way to support the successful launch into that life we want for them.

Yes, but ...

“Whether it’s gender, religious preference or anything that might be a group that might be coming in that may feel like there isn’t enough understanding about them, we try to make sure that our staff are prepared as our population has diversified and that we’re prepared to help our staff best communicate with those groups and those individuals,” he said.

These meetings are strictly for WWU staff members—no students are allowed to attend—and it is unclear if they have had any influence on the student body.

“It’s really important, I think, that somebody continues to look into these and ask people who are at these colleges if we are really preparing our young people to be prepared to be global citizens, to have that kind of exposure, and for me, if we’re asking the student to have that kind of growth and development than we without question should be making sure that our staff are equally prepared,” [Western Washington dean of students Theodore] Pratt said.

Never mind that in making the staff sensitive to class oppression and hegemonic biases and all the rest, the Western Washington graduates are never going to learn how to introduce themselves or bathe or dress properly, and they'll forever be working for Wheaton graduates.  That is, unless the dynamic of rooting out privilege further destroys civilization.

Снова?

It's the first day after the end of the academic year, and the Russian again? (snova) is fitting.

That's at eight this morning.

I should be grateful we're not seeing a rerun of 2012, when there were 80 degree temperatures in mid-March, and a hard freeze in April that wrought havoc with plants already well leafed-out.

LIE DOWN UNTIL THE URGE GOES AWAY.

Samuel Goldman poses seven questions to anyone contemplating graduate work.

1.  Do you want to be a professor?

My response: it's not a bad gig if you can get it, but there are fewer gigs than used to be got, and the gig used to be better.

2.  Do you understand what professors really do?

My elaboration: the gig used to be better until meetings and electronic mail and the intrusions of special education got in the way.  Serious departments will protect their probationary colleagues from most of the scut-work until they make tenure, but that cramps the continued development of the senior faculty, particularly as administrative burdens increase while downsizing and attrition is de rigueur.

3.  Do you understand where professors really work?

Here's Professor Goldman.

Despite all the possible disadvantages--remote location, relatively low salary, long hours--a secure position at an elite university or college is a pretty great job. That's why so many people want it.

But institutions with selective admissions, verdant quads, and lively intellectual community are only a tiny sliver of American higher education. The vast majority of students attend community colleges, regional state universities, or private colleges with a local or regional draw and pre-professional emphasis. So that's where most professors teach.

Would you be happy working at unglamorous institution where students' abilities and interests are likely to be different from your own? Can you imagine teaching introductory surveys, semester after semester, year after year? If not, you're unlikely to find satisfaction in an academic career.

You have to bloom where you're planted.  The kind of student who contemplates an academic career is the kind of student that has kept his distance from the rabbit culture and the lifestyles of the boozy extroverts.  And graduate school is full of similarly self-selected strivers.  Thus, it doesn't matter whether you're at Stanford or Berkeley or Northern Illinois or Wayne State or Joliet Junior: your first encounter with undergraduates is going to be a shock, because you now have to deal with the life-management deficiencies of the people whose company you could avoid as a student.

4.  Do you understand the job prospects in your discipline and area of interest?

See point 3. Pick the best program you can, and expect to be disappointed.

5.  Is someone else paying?

Professor Goldman has it about right.

In the social sciences, that means the only Ph.D.s worth borrowing for are probably economics and clinical psychology.  In the humanities, currently-employed teachers who receive raises for additional degrees might be another exception. In general, however, you cannot responsibly pursue Ph.D. study unless you are independently wealthy or able to rely on support from others.

A lucky few are born rich. Others can count on extended family to chip in. But most graduate students depend on their universities to pay their way. So you should not enroll in a graduate program unless you are certain of being "fully funded".

But "fully funded" doesn't always mean the same thing. At some universities, full funding covers tuition, but not living expenses. At others, it requires teaching--sometimes a burdensome amount. And funding is usually time limited. For that reason, it's crucial to find out the average time to completion in the departments you're considering. If it's longer than the funding they offer, don't bother.

Also, keep in mind that you may not be able to provide financial support to others for some time--or ever. Apart from a few stars, even academics who are lucky enough to have "real jobs" don't earn much money.

Many graduate departments structure their financial aid as teaching assistantships, which often involve the introductory classes the research stars are allegedly avoiding, or there's a lot of grading, particularly in writing-intensive classes.

I must be fortunate, to be thought of as in the "star" class when it comes to earning money.  But getting to the position to earn that money comes at a price.

6.  Are you willing to delay starting a family?

Again, Professor Goldman has it about right.

Many young parents have told me they found it almost impossible to balance the intense focus required for graduate study and the early phases of an academic career with childrearing.

Most departments tout family-friendly policies, and some of them make a real effort to help graduate students with children. But fact remains the academics are expected to do their hardest and best work between the ages of roughly 25 and 35. Needless to say, the burden on women is especially heavy.

Yes, and I have heard stories of intense professors advising incoming graduate students, "if your marriage survives first year, you're not working hard enough," and I've seen more than a few faculty marriages come undone, sometimes before tenure, sometimes after.  There might be more at work, though, than the demands of academic life: ask lawyers or real estate hustlers or railroaders.

7.  Are you willing to move around -- and can you afford it?

That's a serious question for economists.  Yes, you have to move to where your job is, and that can mean exile to an unfamiliar part of the country or the world, irrespective of discipline.  Economics, however, used to hold the job meetings the week between Christmas and New Year's, and now it's the first week of the New Year.  End of semester stress, the holidays, the job meetings, beginning of the semester stress, and then the campus visits begins, just when the airlines are most subject to immoderate weather.  It's a wonder there isn't more domestic discord.