CONGRESS FOULED IT UP. CONGRESS POSTPONES THE FOUL-UP.

A Congressional mandate that required railroads to install positive train control on trunk lines transporting passengers or hazardous cargoes was supposed to take effect at the end of the year, a deadline that may have been unrealistic.  The railroads, and tenant Passenger Rail authorities, and shippers, have been warning Congress of possible railroad embargoes on hazardous cargoes, all the way to a system shutdown at year's end.

Congress, in the usual end-of-year burst of activity, have avoided that shutdown in the usual way, by packing two essential bills together.  It's instructive, though, how Washington Post reporters frame the story.

The House on Tuesday appended a deadline extension being sought by the railroad industry to a must-pass highway funding bill and approved both, delaying for at least three years a safety measure that could have prevented the Amtrak derailment that killed eight people and injured more than 200 in May.

We have the positive train control mandate because of inattentive engineers, who haven't had sufficient encouragement from the Grumpy Old Road Foreman of Engines to control the speed of the train and pay attention to circumstances.  But I digress.

Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) added the extension for an automatic braking system known as positive train control (PTC) to a highway funding bill, hoping to encourage the Senate to follow suit.

Congress has agreed to extend until Nov. 20 funding for all highway and transit, a measure that must be voted on this week so that money to state and local governments does not expire.

Sometimes, that's the only way to get bills out of the House or through the Senate, and the way in which the bills are combined ensures rent-seeker pressure on wavering senators.

To the Post's reporters, though, it's a chance to suggest that the railroads are exerting undue influence on Members of Congress and slow-walking the implementation of positive train control.

“We need to extend the Positive Train Control deadline as soon as possible to prevent significant disruptions of both passenger and freight rail service across the country,” Shuster said in a statement announcing his plan to marry the highway and PTC extensions. “The sooner we extend this deadline, the more certainty we will give our agricultural, manufacturing, and chemical industries to ensure there will be no supply-chain disruptions.”

Fine. It's easy enough to second-guess and question motives, as long as the chlorine gets through to the waterworks. The prudent course, though, might be to keep the trains running, and establish a feasible deadline later.

JUSTIFYING HER LARGE SALARY.

There's no money at Northern Illinois University for faculty hires, but a director of diversity is another matter.  And yes, administrative revealed preferences do not sit well with the faculty, who are suffering through something called "program prioritization" that has to rank degree programs, and perhaps other academic and non-academic activities, with a view to yanking up to a fifth of them.

But with Hallowe'en coming, it's obligatory to pronounce anathema on all sorts of costumes.

What is not considered fun, however, are costumes that reinforce negative and inaccurate stereotypes about any group. Costumes that contribute to ethnic, racial, religious or sexual stereotypes only exacerbate the problem and do not contribute to a genuine understanding or individual persons and cultures.

For example, many Halloween stores this year are selling costumes packaged for couples who would dress as both the 1970s version of Bruce Jenner as well as the Vanity Fair cover photo of Caitlin Jenner. While those outfits might make some laugh, members of the transgender community are unlikely to find their sexuality as an appropriate basis for a Halloween costume.

Since when is Hallowe'en about "genuine understanding?"  It's about mocking the demons in advance of the Day of All Saints.  And the Perpetually Aggrieved, with their privileging of all that is over-the-top and freakazoid, offer plenty of demons to mock.  What's next, only Approved Hillary Costumes?  (Oh, wait.)  Hillary as Baba Yaga is more like it.  And you don't dare go as a Kardashian sister by padding your tush, that's body shaming.

But the director of diversity gets to issue a ukase.

“Many people think that it’s really OK to perpetuate or reinforce stereotypes through costumes. Halloween should not be viewed as that vehicle,” said Vernese Edghill-Walden, senior associate vice president for Academic Diversity and chief diversity officer.

“As a university, I believe we have a responsibility to educate and remind the larger community that this is a diverse community. We value what everyone brings to this community, and there’s a certain level of respect that we expect in this community,” she added. “Perpetuating stereotypes, diminishing of culture and false assumptions about people’s identity should not be celebrated during Halloween.”

And the illustrations that accompany the announcement suggest that celebrating the Sexy Librarian or the Hunky Firefighter are also out.

Fortunately, the university's Facebook posting of the article is taking a beating in the comments.

ENVISIONING THE FOURTH TURNING.

During the summer, Ed Driscoll remarked on a series of space movies from 1995 that highlighted an America that Worked.

But in addition to looking back at the near-unanimous national approval of the moon landings in 1969 and ’70 even as the left’s culture war was about to accelerate to escape velocity, 1995′s Apollo 13 also reflects the era in which it was made. The Cold War was over — or at least undergoing an extended time out, and it was also concurrently a strange interregnum in the left’s culture war, when our “liberal” betters in Hollywood and in New York gave their enthusiastic blessings to an America that narrowly rejected moderate liberal George H.W. Bush and replaced him with moderate liberal Bill Clinton.

Put another way, once the Consciousness Revolution undoes the strictures of The America That Worked and entrenches itself, and the remaining structure unravels, there's an opportunity to look at the positive parts of The America That Worked as The Good Old Days.  Impeachment and global jihad and financial crisis are still in the future.  What's instructive, though, is that Mr Driscoll links to a Charles Murray essay in order to reinforce his thesis that consensus, or an America that Works, is fleeting.

Johnson’s own Great Society programs—plus Supreme Court decisions, changes in the job market, and the sexual revolution—would produce a lower class unlike anything America had known before. Changes in the economy and higher education would produce a new upper class that bore little resemblance to earlier incarnations.

Half a century after Johnson’s dream of a geographically and culturally homogeneous America, the United States is at least as culturally diverse as it was at the beginning of World War I and in some respects more thoroughly segregated than it has ever been. Today’s America is once again a patchwork of cultures that are different from one another and often in tension. What they share in common with the cultures of pre–World War I America is that they require freedom. In one way or another, the members of most of the new subcultures want to be left alone in ways that the laws of the nation, strictly observed, will no longer let them.

Yes, and after World War I came The Great Depression and World War II, and the emergence of that evanescent consensus.  Perhaps, once Global Jihad or Climate Change or whatever the next Grand Secular Challenge will be is resolved, there will be a new consensus.  Or perhaps the big cities are obsolete and the voters will self-segregate even more and national political consensus will be no longer possible.

THE NATIONAL COALITION IN FAVOR OF CAMPUS CENSORSHIP.

Thus does Eugene Volokh correctly characterize the latest group complaint from the Perpetually Aggrieved.  There's apparently a short-distance social media forum called Yik Yak that allows people to anonymously vent for the edification, or the baiting, of anyone else who also subscribed.  And saying mean things about the Perpetually Aggrieved, or their mascots, must be prosecuted.  It's just another ploy for the purveyors of failed academic policies to make people who point out the failures shut up.

It seems their real goal is to silence dissent on campus by eliminating students’ ability to express their opinions anonymously. The ability to speak anonymously gives moderate and conservative students a chance to speak without [being] vilified or punished by left-wing campus administrators or bullied by student government officials (who sometimes defund campus newspapers for having the temerity to print a moderate or conservative viewpoint about a racial or sexual issue.).

Yes, and it also gives people the opportunity to voice heresies that Student Affairs would rather not hear.  Apparently, as Mr Volokh's column notes, more than a few posters have figured out that "protected-status-minority" is the latest euphemism for "not-college-ready."  But how dare you point that out!  And on social media, it's no longer a muttered remark in confidence among people who trust each other, it's out there for all to see, but impossible for the Organs of State Security to catch.  Thus, the Perpetually Aggrieved require Organs of State Security.  Mr Volokh notes, good luck with that.

Of course, if Yik Yak and the other applications listed in the letter are banned from campus networks — which would, of course, block access to all speech on the applications, whether the speech is threatening or not — then either (1) the ban will be ineffective, given students’ ability to access those sites from their own cellular devices or (2) the speech will migrate elsewhere, onto new applications. Presumably universities would then need to ban access to those applications as well, running a constantly expanding Great Firewall of China American Higher Education. And since many states ban discrimination in education based on religion and sexual orientation as well as race and sex, the logic of the coalition’s arguments would equally apply to speech that harshly criticizes certain religions or sexual orientations.

Not to mention that using social media to conduct study sessions where any of the readings are triggering or contrary to the Received Ethos, or where there are strong objections to the works supposedly promoting the Received Ethos, would also have to be shut down and the readers brought up on charges.

WE NEED MORE PROBLEMATIC PEOPLE.

"Problematic" is a favorite term of the Perpetually Aggrieved, who generally use it to mean "I don't exactly agree with what you just said, but I don't want to do the work of rebutting it."  Thus do some words get ruled out of bounds, and some speakers disinvited.  Most recently, the Perpetually Aggrieved at Cardiff University decided that second-wave feminist Germaine Greer was too, well, reactionary, to speak there.  (I wonder if any of the snowflakes know that the Great Western Railway engine shed in Cardiff was called Canton.  The horror!)  Ms Greer's sin is in resisting thinking of trans-sexuals as women.  That's a strange place for the author of The Female Eunuch to be.

Greer has described trans women as men ‘who believe that they are women and have themselves castrated’. Which has the benefit of being factually correct — they’re men, they want to be women, they get castrated — but it’s nonetheless a speech crime to the PC.

If these be micro-aggressions, make the most of them!

Ms Greer also called B.S. on the use of "-phobia" as a way to cut short discussion. "I didn't know there was such a thing [as transphobia]. Arachnaphobia, yes. Transphobia, no."  The short affirmation: Silly, made up words. "Anyone who thinks [enter buzz word here] is in any way unacceptable can be automatically smeared as being both mad and bad simply by trotting out this silly, meaningless word."  There are longer ways to reach the same conclusion.  Here's Trouble and Strife, about to go down a culture-studies rabbit hole.

‘Ism’ words and ‘phobia’ words name essentially the same phenomenon: the unjust treatment of one social group by others. But they frame that phenomenon in very different ways, as we can see if we consider what ism and phobia mean in the language more generally.

Words ending in –ism most commonly denote systems of ideas or beliefs–political, religious, intellectual or artistic (e.g. feminism, communism, nationalism, Buddhism, surrealism). Terms like sexism andracism were also intended by the radicals who coined them to refer to systems—organized social systems of dominance and subordination. Though they are often used now to mean just ‘prejudice or discrimination based on sex/race’, that is a liberal watering-down of their original meaning. In the radical framework, prejudice is not the cause of systemic oppression but a consequence or by-product of it. If you are going to oppress your fellow humans—exploit them, abuse them, disregard their needs and rights—then you have every reason to buy into the belief that they are Other, inferior and deserving of unequal treatment.

Words ending in -phobia, by contrast, most commonly denote clinical conditions. The first ‘phobia’ word to appear in an English-language text was hydrophobia (Greek for ‘morbid fear of water’), meaning rabies; in the 19th century the term became associated with mental rather than physical illness, and in current medical usage it means a class of anxiety disorders in which something that is not objectively a serious threat triggers a pathological response—intense fear, panic, disgust, an overwhelming desire to avoid or escape the danger–in certain phobic individuals. In everyday parlance the term is used more loosely: it retains the sense of ‘a pathological (over)reaction’, but there is less emphasis on uncontrollable anxiety, the main symptom of clinical phobia, and more emphasis on the idea of aversion or hatred. Terms like homophobia and transphobia thus carry a strong implication that the root cause of the oppression they name is the pathological fear and loathing felt by some individuals towards a certain minority group.

Despite going deep into the rabbit hole, the author emerges with a sensible conclusion.

The progressive/liberal position is like a mirror image of the conservative one: whereas the conservative is revolted by queer/trans people, the progressive/liberal is revolted by the conservative’s homophobia/transphobia: she is morally disgusted by the moral disgust she attributes to others, and the strength of her disgust becomes a claim to the moral high ground. (‘You have upset me, therefore I am right’.) As Marina S. says, it is impossible to argue with this: moral disgust is instinctive and visceral, beyond any challenge based on rational argument.

Yes, better to say "problematic" and move on. To do so, though, is unlikely to convince anyone not already convinced.

Suggesting that any judgment you disagree with must stem from ‘phobia’—that it is not a question of your opponent having different principles or values, but is simply an expression of their irrational fear and loathing—is a way of making their position appear illegitimate without actually having the political argument. It is using language to silence views that you do not want to hear or engage with.

Precisely. We could even add a few words to the "micro-aggression" poster. "Problematic." Micro-aggression. [noun]+"phobic." Micro-aggression.  Toughen up, buttercup.

Talking Philosophy deconstructs "-phobic" further.

Having a rational fear is not a phobia. For example, a person who is momentarily afraid because he discovers a black widow on his arm does not have arachnophobia. Someone who lives in ongoing fear of spiders even when they are not present might well have arachnophobia.

Interestingly, the term “phobia” is often used to indicate dislike, prejudice or discrimination rather than fear in the strict sense. For example, people who dislike homosexuals are often labeled as being homophobic. Perhaps this is based on an underlying assumption that there dislike or prejudice is based on fear. In any case, using the term “phobia” seems to be intended to convey that someone who has the phobia (such as homophobia) is irrational in this regard. So, in the case of homophobia the idea is that the person has an irrational dislike of homosexuals.

Not surprisingly, this usage of “phobia” is generally intended to be judgmental and critical. To be labeled as having such a phobia is, in effect, to be accused of being both irrational and prejudiced.

Just as there are rational fears, there are also rational dislikes. For example, pedophiles are reviled and disliked. But to claim that people who dislike them have  pedophilephobia would be an error. This is because the label would imply that disliking pedophiles is a prejudice. However, this does not seem to be a prejudice but a correct moral view. As such, if a “phobia” of this sort can be shown to be rational and correct, then it would not be a phobia at all.

No doubt, among the Perpetually Aggrieved are people who would describe "correct moral view" as "problematic." But to deny coherent beliefs of any kind is to produce incoherence.  At the same time, the article notes that distinguishing a rational objection to a practice from an uninformed prejudice against a practice (whether it's Islam or unconventional sexuality or anything else) isn't easy.

The way to deal with a controversy, though, is to engage it, not to problematize it.

CROWD-FUNDING THE DISSENTER.

The administration at Marquette University has more than a little of the Spanish Inquisition about it.  In addition to attempting to discharge John McAdams for cause, they have tossed more than one diversity hustler brought into the university without the protections of tenure.  One of those individuals is former director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center Susannah Bartlow.  The Perpetually Aggrieved are taking up a collection.  Here's Professor McAdams offering the effort a backhanded compliment.

That being the case, Marquette owed her a reasonable severance package. We won’t contribute, although only because we would accused of some nefarious purpose if we did so. But we think certain Marquette administrators should step up and see that this campaign reaches the goal.

There are undoubtedly plenty of deanlets and deanlings working in the area of student affairs and the rest of the freakazoid coalition to make it so.

But why, dear reader, does the freakazoid hegemony persist in higher education?

NEGOTIATE FOR A BETTER JOB DESCRIPTION.

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan is taking stick from the Perpetually Aggrieved for negotiating a family-friendly job description despite opposing federal imposition of family leave on employers.

Ryan also is revealing himself to be a hypocrite of the first degree. The congressman has authored several policy and budget proposals that would directly and negatively impact working parents, especially those in lower income brackets.

He's taken direct aim, for instance, at funding for child care subsidies. Given the skyrocketing costs of child care in this country, the subsidies are a vital resource, especially for lower income parents, who can use them to help defray the costs of finding a good place to leave their children while they go off to work — instead of having to rely on family members or potentially unstable arrangements.

Never let logic get in the way of a good vent. Cheap day care is probably unstable or hazardous, and if you think good day care is expensive now, just wait until it's subsidized. But I digress.

Frankly, when it comes to ensuring that we all have the opportunity to balance our work and life choices without having to make significant and often damaging sacrifices, for the vast majority it's no laughing matter. And it's not something about which most folks can currently make any demands without fear of losing everything.

We're all underemployed compared with our great-grandparents. And people have ways of negotiating for less burdensome job descriptions.  In conditioning his acceptance of a thankless job on fewer burdens, Representative Ryan is serving as a role model.

Paul Ryan was asked to take a job he does not want. At all. He is happy with his current job and the family time it affords him. In the current climate of division among the various Republican caucuses, this new job will be thankless and presumably terrible. And, if Ryan has any presidential ambitions, this job is almost always a politician's final resting place (save for the lone exception and everyone's favorite speaker-turned-president, James K. Polk).

But because he knows that House Republicans are desperate, Ryan has made the smart calculation that he can make some demands if he is to consider assuming this new role that he does not want.

This is what a job negotiation looks like between a person who has made himself invaluable and an employer in a bind. Ryan's boss -- in this case, House Republicans -- are free to refuse his requirements and consider another candidate for the job. Or they can decide that his demands are reasonable and that they are willing to meet them.

It's one more margin along which employers can optimize. And the norms of employment can evolve accordingly.  Hint: that's likely to be different from what a federal mandate specifies.

THAT DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

Most South Carolina students are not college ready.

In English, 61.3 percent of students tested “not ready.” In math, it was 78.4 percent. On the reading test, 74.2 percent tested “not ready.” The science scores were the worst, with 82.1 percent “not ready.”

Anybody surprised that it's the culture, stupid?

Melanie Barton, executive director of the Education Oversight Committee, says, “The results of the ACT, ACT Aspire tell us in South Carolina that we have a long way to go in getting all kids college- and career-ready. We’re struggling especially in reading and mathematical skills and we really need to start focusing on, especially in the high school years, what students need to be able to take, as far as course selection, the rigor, and just to really help students and parents plan for their future.”

The rot probably starts in kindergarten, but perhaps there's poetic justice.

Barton says the fact that so many students aren’t ready for college will likely cost them, or their parents, a lot more money. “Because if our children aren’t ready for that two- or four-year degree and they go in, they have to take remedial courses, or they take longer than four years to complete their degree, that costs mom and dad and the students loan money and tuition payments.”

I've long been on record as favoring the colleges sending high schools a bill for all the repeated high school courses sailing under the remediation flag, and applauding states that take steps in that direction.  But in Ms Barton's observation, there's the possibility that the same parents who aren't bringing their spawn up properly in the first place end up footing the bill for those do-overs of high school.

On the other hand, it's frustrating to still be pointing these things out, ten years on, and seeing that the rot isn't confined to South Carolina.

Millennials in the U.S. fall short when it comes to the skills employers want most: literacy (including the ability to follow simple instructions), practical math, and — hold on to your hat — a category called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments.”

Not only do Gen Y Americans lag far behind their overseas peers by every measure, but they even score lower than other age groups of Americans.

Enjoy the rot.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD.

When the railroads had to get the goods there, they ran the Red Ball Freight.

Here's what they looked like.

Enjoy.

IT DOES LITTLE GOOD TO RUN FASTER IN THE COUNTRY.

We left off our story of the Texas Eagle from San Antonio to Chicago at bedtime, still in Texas.  A brief, more current report on a weekend trip to Springfield on one of the speeded-up corridor trains hinted at the troubles hampering timely operation. "On the one hand, it's exhilarating to buzz past the traffic on Interstate 55 and the remnants of Route 66 at speeds up to 110 mph; on the other hand, the track work at Joliet and the delays attendant to trains running out of course on what is still a single-track railroad defeat all that the fast running does."  So, too, will delays hammer the Eagle.  A Chicago Tribune story, datelined about the same day I left San Antonio, notes that the carrier is aware of the consequences of delays.

Amtrak ridership dropped an average of 4 percent in Illinois on downstate corridors with connections to Chicago in fiscal 2014, the passenger railroad reported Tuesday, putting much of the blame on late arrivals and departures caused by freight train interference.

The problem of freight congestion blocking passenger trains is affecting Amtrak service across the Midwest and also stretching from Chicago — Amtrak's busiest hub — to the East Coast, officials said.

"Delays of four hours or more for Amtrak trains operating between Chicago and Cleveland have become a near daily occurrence,'' said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. "These and other major delays have ripple effects across the Amtrak national system."

Amtrak's Capitol Limited trains, which operate between Chicago and Washington, D.C., were late 97 percent of the time in September, records show.

No kidding. Amtrak management set out to mitigate their damages.

[Amtrak president Joseph] Boardman acknowledged that apart from investment in tracks, tunnels and bridges, Amtrak also needs to do more to help itself.

"Amtrak senior management needs to understand we are failing in Chicago because we cannot get trains in and out on time," he said. "We want a change in operating plans so that we get an on-time (departure out of Chicago) even if the train comes in late from the East."

Part of the problem turning trains at Chicago is insufficient rolling stock, the westbound rake often being the only cars available for the eastbound rake. Then the hours of service law affects Toledo based crews turning to return.

Those problems aren't as severe on the regional trains, where 110 mph capable stock off a Michigan train might be sent to St. Louis, and an inbound train from St. Louis turns for Michigan. But the delays tear a big hole in whatever time advantage the free rein to 110 confers, and riders notice.

In Illinois, Amtrak ridership declined 5 percent in fiscal 2014 compared with 2013 on routes between Chicago and Carbondale and Chicago and Quincy, according to Amtrak data. Passenger traffic on the Chicago-to-St. Louis route, which is being upgraded to 110-mph service, was down 3 percent.

Amtrak ridership on the three routes totaled 1.3 million in fiscal 2014, which was about 52,300 fewer passenger trips than in fiscal 2013, according to Amtrak records.

Much of that time is being lost just getting through St. Louis and Chicago.  The Eagle, due out of St. Louis at 7.55, reaches Gateway Station at 8.37, plenty of time to look at mists rising off the Mississippi River south of town during breakfast, train is ready to go at 9 am, but we're awaiting signals to clear, or perhaps for a maintenance permit to expire, until 9.23.  Alton, 27 circuitous rail miles away, 10.26 - 10.27; now the pace picks up; Carlinville, conditional stop, no passengers, pass 10.57; Springfield 11.39 - 11.42; Lincoln 12.10 - 12.11, evidence of recent track work, nothing like the sound of freshly ground rail at speed.  Bloomington 12.42 - 12.47; Pontiac 1.15 - 1.16; Joliet double stops, 2.12 - 2.16; now in Chicago terminal area, encounter freight interference near Argo and Brighton Park, arrive Chicago 3.35, 1 hour 43 minutes late.  Fortunately, there's a semi-fast scoot for Elburn that gets away from North Western Station on time, at 4.11.

A resident of suburban Chicago or St. Louis might contemplate using Joliet or Alton as a station, rather than going downtown, but unlike the airport station outside Milwaukee, neither is convenient to expressways nor provides much parking.

NOW FINISH THE ARGUMENT.

President Obama expresses support for the grievances often aggregated under the slogan "black lives matter."

“I think everybody understands all lives matter,” Obama said. “I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that’s happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other communities.

“And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”

Yes, by all means, let's scrutinize police profiling and zero tolerance ordinances that might exist as a way of taxing a population when the municipality has insufficient commercial activity to provide governance conducive to commercial activity, and let's scrutinize controlled-substance policies under which Masters of the Universe and entertainment moguls can do their lines of coke, while their suppliers, and the sellers of loose cigarettes, are prosecuted beyond the fullest extent of the law.

But, Mr President, let's push that further.  Let's scrutinize the links between insufficient commercial activity and generations of young people rendered unemployable by government schools and the minimum wage.  Let's understand the effects of fifty years of urban renewal and Model Cities and the War on Poverty in creating a cohort of voters dependent on Democrat policies that somehow never lift people up.

NAGASAKI SYNDROME.

Vladimir Putin isn't likely to be squeamish about protecting Russian interests in Asia Minor.

Here's a Stephen (Vodka Pundit) Green post from a few years back proposing a different way to settle the jihadis' hash.

Imagine instead that Bush had actually waged the war in accordance with his own (correct) formulation of the Axis of Evil. The major sponsors of state terror were North Korea (chiefly as an arms merchant), Iraq, and Iran — and Iran’s junior partners, Syria and various Palestinian groups. North Korea, as a non-ideological foe, could be safely isolated by taking away its customers. Israel can — and mostly does — keep the Palestinian problem a local one.
As for the rest? An ultimatum, mid-2002, after ejecting the Taliban, to turn over all records, funds, and materials related to terror. If not, a long, rapid march from the beaches of Syria to the streets of Tehran, destroying all government buildings — and any military forces stupid enough to stand in the way. Then get our soldiers back on their ships in the Persian Gulf, with the stern message: “Don’t make us come back here again.”

Would it have worked?

Who knows — but the troops would have been home by Christmas, their casualties in the hundreds not thousands, and we’d be a trillion or two dollars richer. And I’d wager that whoever was left in power in the Middle East, they’d be much less likely to indulge their terrorist fantasies.

Instead, we’ve wound down to an exhausted finish in Iraq while we engage in never-ending nation-building in Afghanistan. We’re so exhausted that now even a punitive expedition, smaller than the one I’ve just described, might be discredited before it began.

Yes, and the Russians are simply continuing the southward quest for warm-water ports that tsars since Ivan (Grozny) IV have made.

I suspect, though, that the "you broke it, you own it" school of international relations would have none of it.

LOOKING AT THE WRONG END OF THE PRODUCTION LINE.

It's election season, meaning politicians promising pie in the sky with somebody else's dough.  The flavor of this season appears to be universal college, brought to you by the same people who pretended to deliver universal health care.  The provision problem differs, though, in that a collegian is not the passive beneficiary of a procedure or an inoculation.  Here's Tyler Cowen's version of There's Distressed Material Enrolling.

A more pressing issue is that community college is already close to de facto free for lower-income individuals, if they piece grants and aid together.   Yet the completion rate at these colleges is at best approaching thirty-eight percent.   The real problems come before college, and encouraging more people to attend four-year colleges is unlikely to do much good.   In any case, here is further evidence that higher subsidies to community college attendance very often do not lead to more actual education.   The same or worse is likely to hold for state universities.

Then there's the possible regressive transfer inherent in investing in human capital that's likely to yield its owner higher returns.

It could be the goal is not “college for more people” but simply to redistribute income to students who otherwise would have debt burdens.   But they, with their above average human capital, are not the most deserving recipients of additional redistribution.   Might a cynic wonder if this is simply a way to reward a constituency which often votes Democratic?   Or a way to make the Republican Congress look like meanies?

Why not, that con-job has worked before. But without operational support (here's Dean Dad raising a related point) it's not going to end well.

The end result of the plan would be price controls on tuition, even though the plan itself does not stipulate that.   There simply isn’t the political constituency to support an extra federal $350 billion for higher education (over ten years), plus the state kick-ins which are supposed to follow.   The federal money will sooner or later dwindle, while the tuition restrictions will stick.   In the longer run, this isn’t even a net subsidy to higher education.   In the short run higher ed quality will go down, and in the longer run the move away from tuition support will imply more fiscal starvation for these institutions rather than less.

Not that conditions are that great now.  Not that the current crop of incoming students is that great anyway.

To knowingly push unprepared students into college only leads to frustration for students and instructors alike. It is not just critical thinking that is sorely lacking. It is intellectual curiosity that is absent in most college campuses where I teach. Yet, this intellectual curiosity is a key ingredient that "sparks science, art, all kinds of innovation." What, then, does this portend for our country?

We have much to look forward to.

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY.

Bethany Mandel, in Acculturated.

The state of our culture is such that men aren’t allowed to do nice things for women without any sort of short-term payoff, and women aren’t taught to appreciate chivalrous gestures, but instead to be insulted by them. The result isn’t a victory for feminists. It’s a defeat for everyone.

Just as I've been suggesting for years.

Have a good weekend.

HARD TO MAINTAIN THEIR LOFTY ACADEMIC AIRS.

University Diaries has been calling out the perversities going on in big time college sports, most recently with an assist from Richard Vedder.

Whenever the heads of public universities condemn the stinginess of their legislatures, they loftily remind everyone that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Yet as Vedder suggests, when your school looks like a money-hemhorrhaging joke run by idiots ... you make it awfully easy for politicians to shrug you off.

I await the day when the diversity weenies and the sports establishment emerge as the last defenders of business as usual in higher education.  That will be the day for celebratory toasts.

Until then, I won't lack for stuff to post.

IT'S CALLED LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT.

How shall we count the ways in which people aren't learning civics?  Start with the headline of an S. E. Cupp column. Yes, the Benghazi hearings are political. So what? Let's get beyond the tu quoque assertions that pass for argumentation these days.

Of course there’s an element of the political to these hearings, as there was to the Iraq hearings. Both occurred during the run-up to presidential elections, both involved themes that were central to the opposing party’s campaign messages and both featured presidential players. And to boot, this one has a Clinton at its center, and she is as much a creation of partisan politics as she is proponent of them. She was kind to remind us of this at the Democratic debate, where she volunteered “Republicans” as the enemy she’s most proud to have made.

Partisanship is a by-product of legislative oversight, but one of the ways in which the voters' agents in government provide the information that voters can use in consenting to be governed is to have members of one party pointing out the failings of the other party's policies. Duh. Why do I even have to point this out?

Why didn’t Clinton, if her claims are accurate, receive the requests for more security from Ambassador Chris Stevens? Why were his requests ultimately denied? Why as violence increased did security in the region decrease? Why, despite the Obama administration’s warning not to involve Sidney Blumenthal and other friends in State Department policy decisions, did Clinton continue to share his intelligence briefings with other diplomats, including Stevens? These are questions we need to ask not only to give the families of the four men killed that night some answers, but also to prevent future attacks like the one in Benghazi.

And yes we will also ask these questions to expose Hillary Clinton’s lack of credibility and good judgment. She is, after all, running for President.

Shouldn’t those things matter?

In principle, yes, but her answers are straight out of Slick Willie's playbook. Gol-lee! The buck never got here.  Reason's David Harsanyi raises the questions that didn't come up in the hearing.

Clinton isn't responsible for all the awful things people do, but she certainly is responsible for America's role in the whole mess. If voters are supposed to judge Clinton's asserted foreign policy expertise based on what she did while in power, they should take this into account: Clinton, according to her own admission, voted for one foreign policy disaster and instigated another one. Her fans might concede that Iraq was merely a vote of political expediency or perhaps one made on bad information (a stretch), but there is no such comfort with Libya. Clinton can't blame this one on George W. Bush.

Republicans were generally quiet about the Obama administration's unauthorized war in Libya—even though it circumvented congressional authority—because intervention generally matches their own foreign policy objectives. Americans didn't die, at least at the beginning, so it was forgotten. But if John McCain, who supported the Libyan intervention, would have been in charge, we would never have heard the end of it.

Instead, people would be asking: Please explain how the Libya intervention was a success? And should Ambassador Christopher Stevens have been in Benghazi at all?

Fifty-four more weeks of this, dear readers. Fortunately, there will be model railroad content to lift your spirits.

MORE ACADEMIC FOLLIES IN MILWAUKEE.

First Marquette University banishes political scientist John McAdams, then initiates a dismissal-for-cause case against him.  The hearing was in September, but the decision is not yet public.

McAdams spent much of the summer preparing for a September hearing of a faculty committee that will recommend whether he be stripped of tenure. “I’d much rather be there,” he says. “I’d much rather be teaching.”

At 69, McAdams could simply have gone quietly, as perhaps Marquette thought he would. But that’s not his nature. “First of all, I enjoy a good fight,” he says. “It is also a matter of principle. That is, some people need to be taught a lesson — people who think they can run roughshod over people’s academic freedom.”

How far will he take his fight to get his job back? “As far as necessary,” he says, “including a lawsuit.”

So McAdams finds himself at the center of what is shaping up to be one of the most unusual academic freedom cases in the country. Even in an era of rising political correctness — trigger warnings, speech codes and the battle against “micro-aggressions” — the decision to fire McAdams nearly stands alone.

As far as anyone knows, no other major university has tried to fire a tenured professor for something that he wrote on a blog.

The imbroglio has already gone on longer than the Siege of Petersburg, and yet Professor McAdams will continue to fight it out on this line.

Knowing the hostile environment he would face, would he want to return to Marquette if he wins his fight? “I would,” McAdams says without hesitation. “And continue to make trouble. Just to spite the authoritarians.”

There's a longer version of the story here.

POLITICALLY CORRECT CUPCAKES GHETTOIZE NORMAL PEOPLE.

If these be micro-aggressions, make the most of it!  I don't have to make this stuff up, high-paid diversicrats, in this case at the Center for Inclusive Excellence at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (is that in the class of Jumbo Shrimp or Penn Central?) is now advising students to watch what they say.

The microaggression culture has been widely documented on college campuses across the country. "Safe spaces" have popped up in response to speakers who may espouse a view that is controversial. Efforts from various diversity and inclusiveness centers on campuses are trying to root out words and change the language.

It transpires that the diversicrat-in-charge is of the "free speech for me, not for thee" class.  In other news, the Bears still suck.  Perhaps, though, Wisconsin at Milwaukee is attempting to emulate the public Ivies, which is the default setting at Cornell.

At her inauguration as Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett said, “We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.” Later she issued apparently contradictory statements on free speech, calling herself “an avid supporter of freedom of speech” at a press event in New York. Later, she said, “Speech can be regulated. Speech has to be regulated in the narrowest possible way to serve a compelling state interest.”

And the diversicrats at Milwaukee will no doubt deflect criticism by referring to the Inclusive Excellence propaganda as "suggestions."  But, taking a page from the British playbook (no more "man up, cupcake" -- what happens when the kids taught in day-care about special snowflakes discover that "snowflake" is oppressive?), perhaps peer interventions will be next.

In addition, many schools have already established task forces of students who will be policing their classmates’ language and attitudes and reporting (read: tattling on) any student who dares to violate the new standards.

It's gotten that creating hothouses for the freakazoid spawn of the priviligentsia is too much, even for the establishmentarians of the Washington Post, who give Catherine Rampell a forum to remind higher education of that which should be self-evident.

As someone who once wrote inflammatory columns for school newspapers, I find this thinly veiled retribution deeply saddening. Not just for sentimental reasons, and not just because student papers serve an important watchdog function unlikely to be filled by, say, the school music blog.

Crippling the delivery of unpopular views is a terrible lesson to send to impressionable minds and future leaders, at Wesleyan and elsewhere. It teaches students that dissent will be punished, that rather than pipe up they should nod along.

Indeed. At the hothouses for freakazoid spawn, such as Oberlin or Wesleyan, unpopular views might be uncommon simply because of self-selection, and social ostracism. But to impose the aesthetics and commonplaces of the Trendy Left on students at public universities, which like to brag about serving first-generation, non-traditional, all the other Approved Categorities, is to deprive students of the kind of intellectual give and take that might be part of the human capital endowments of higher-status individuals.

CARDIAC PACK.

The Green Bay Packers survive a late flurry by the San Diego Chargers.  Charger quarterback Philip Rivers does not hold the record for most passing yards in a loss to the Packers.  Just ask the Detroit Lions.

The Packers brought back the blue and yellow jerseys of the Great Depression era.  I rolled out some refrigerator cars of that era for the play value, in the background..

There should be more progress on the railroad to report.

WHO WILL OPT OUT FIRST?

It's college football season, and you can count on University Diaries to chronicle the business follies that accompany it, with a little help from the economists.

Econ professors are a seriously weak link in the American jock school chain. This blog has covered tons of economists who, with their specialized knowledge, subject their athletics departments to withering critique and then tell everyone about it. Here are some instances of professors, who, like Shulman (‘“Of course it sucks resources out of the academic side of the university,” Shulman said. “And it’s dishonest to deny that it does that… We are a land-grant university, and our mission is grounded in service to the citizens of Colorado. And to me what that means is keeping tuition low and affordable.”’), go after the game boys.

So far, though, nobody has gone so far as to suggest that opting out of the positional arms race in college sports is the superior strategy.  The spin out of the athletic directors' offices is that following the dominant strategy is still the way to go.  Take Colorado State (or as occasional source Historiann calls it, Baa Ram U.)

The asking price for college football and basketball coaches has increased significantly in recent years, Cottingham said. Bobo’s annual salary of $1.35 million ranks 64th among the 121 schools in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision included in a USA TODAY Sports report released last week.

Bobo is the second-highest paid coach in the Mountain West, behind the $1.49 million of Fresno State’s Tim DeRuyter. Sonny Lubick, CSU’s coach from 1993 to 2007, made $530,000 in his final season.

For comparison, Alabama’s Nick Saban is the nation’s highest paid coach at $7.09 million per year, according to the USA Today report. Louisana-Monroe’s Todd Berry makes the least, at $360,000.

“We live in a free-market economy, where if you’re going to compete at the national level, you’ve to pay national salary rates to be competitive,” Cottingham said. “We don’t control what the pay scale is for head football coaches or head basketball coaches or volleyball coaches.”

No, but your scheduling practices enable it.

Coaches’ pay isn’t the only reason CSU’s athletics budget has skyrocketed, Cottingham said. The costs of scholarships, recruiting, team travel, game guarantees and day-to-day operation of each of the school’s 16 varsity sports programs has increased, too.

CSU spent $7.1 million on athletics scholarships in 2013-14, an increase of nearly 92 percent from the $3.7 million it spent in 2004-05 because of the rising cost of tuition and fees. They have have increased 279 percent, from $3,790 in 2004-05, to $10,590 this year for in-state students, and 189 percent, from $14,413 in 2004-05 to $27,258 this year, for out-of-state students.

I suppose, somewhere, there's an analysis to the effect that raising the profile by way of sports brings in more full-fare-paying out-of-state students.  But in the "game guarantees" is an interesting dynamic.  Football program on the make hires highly regarded coach, then buys the coach wins. But I'm not persuaded.

Then there's Rutgers.  Rut-roh!

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds. As even the university president concedes, athletics is "siphoning dollars from the academic mission."

Subsidizing deficits only leads to bigger deficits, and to bigger subsidies.

Athletics actually plans on getting 2 percent more each year from student fees (at most other Big Ten schools, there are no student fees for athletics). Since athletics can simply tap student fees and the academic program to pay its bills, it doesn't need to work hard to raise money. So it is no surprise that sports teams generate only $8 million in contributions, only half what a Big Ten school such as Purdue manages to raise. (Purdue!)

Athletics isn't just a public-relations disaster and a financial disaster. It's also a management disaster.

But someone has to opt out. The Christian Science Monitor dares go where the athletic directors would rather not.

College sports may be a culprit for the student debt crisis.

A new documentary short is highlighting the exorbitant amount of money colleges and universities are spending on athletics while tuition continuously grows for students and faculty positions slowly diminish.

It may take trustees, or a legislature, to direct the president to abolish the Division I sports, as no director of athletics is likely to ask to have his department, financial failure notwithstanding, to be shut down.  It has been over twenty years since the Illinois Board of Higher Education recommended that Northern Illinois University drop out of Division I.  The trustees (in common with much of the Mid-American Conference) imposed athletics fees on students (free admission to the games, in exchange for, in most of the conference, not much) and went on with business as usual.

YOU HAVE TO FIX THE CULTURE FIRST.

Dean Baker takes issue with a George Will column that I recommended.  On the political economy of reactionary progressivism, he's predictably conventional.  But in defending "Social" "Security" he's undermining the reactionary progressives' argument that it's really insurance (after all, the original title is Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance.)

Okay, but in the real world we know that people pay for their Social Security over their working lifetimes, so it is no more a handout than the interest on government bonds that they hold is a handout. In both cases they paid for this income stream. Will does have a case for a regressive redistribution with Medicare, but there the redistribution is to the doctors, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers who charge us twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. If Will wants to bring these costs down, then he's got a good case.

If "Social" "Security" is really a form of forced savings, why not just put each contributor's payments directly into government bonds, or let contributors decide which mix of investments to make?  Seems to work well enough with, for instance, TIAA - CREF.  And give Mr Baker credit for recognizing the rent seeking in the so-called prescription drug benefit.

But then the rent-seeking vanishes.

As far as big regulatory government helping the strong, he certainly has a case as we just saw with the [Trans-Pacific Parnership].

Thus ...

The moral is that the government is part of the economy whether George Will likes it or not. The battle is over who is likely to be better served by its actions.

Yes, well, on this score count me as more Jesuit than the Pope.  The more activist the government is, the more rents there will be for K Street to dissipate.

Then, Mr Baker continues his rebuttal with an anemic endorsement of Our President's economic record.

As far as zero interest rate policy pushing up the stock market, relative to the size of the economy the stock market is no higher than its was in 2007 before the crash. The stock market was not being pushed up by ZIRP then, what is the case for it now? And of course tens of millions of middle and moderate income people have benefited from getting lower mortgage interest rates. And, the additional purchasing power has added one to two million jobs according to a number of different studies on the topic. So, the data don't quite fit Will's story here.

Thus: no reflation of the stock market bubble, no net gains in wealth, and at best a halting economic expansion, probably hobbled by the excessively constrained "economic stimulus," the adjustment costs of the so-called Affordable Care Act, and perhaps the failure of imagination in gridlocked Washington to build anything new, despite the low interest rates.

But when it comes to the primary driver of inequality, Mr Baker only hopes to enable more of it.

Will goes on to complain about single-parent families. Yes, it would be great if the Will's government could give every child two loving parents, but governments actually are not very good at coupling people. This means that we have to try to create a situation in which a single-parent can provide a comfortable upbringing to their children. This means child care, paid sick days and family leave, and decent wages. But that may require some government interventions of the sort advocated by Bernie Sanders.

Yeah, enabling dysfunction to get more of it is going to work real well.  Haven't we been doing precisely that for the past fifty years?  It's the bastardy and the desertion, not the lack of Denmark's welfare benefits. Stop throwing money at it, and stop holding up the likes of the Kardashian sisters as role models.

IT'S CALLED A FOURTH TURNING.

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin asserts, "America is Due for a Revolution."  He's remarking on James Piereson's Shattered Consensus.  Short form: despite the internet and smart-phones, we are not exempt from the saeculum.

Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

He identifies two previous eras where a general consensus prevailed, and collapsed. Each lasted about as long as an individual’s lifetime, was dominated by a single political party and ended dramatically.

First came the era that stretched from 1800 until slavery and sectionalism led to the Civil War. The second consensus, which he calls the capitalist-industrial era, lasted from the end of the Civil War until the Great Depression.

It is the third consensus, which grew out of the Depression and World War II, which is now shattering. Because the nation is unable to solve economic stagnation, political dysfunction and the resulting public discontent, Piereson thinks the consensus “cannot be resurrected.”

That’s not to say he’s pessimistic — he thinks a new era could usher in dynamic growth, as happened after the previous eras finally reached general agreement on national norms. But first we must weather a crisis that may involve an economic and stock-market collapse, a terror attack, or simply a prolonged and bitter stalemate.

"May involve???"

It's not until deep into the saecular crisis, which may have unfolded only half-way, that the outlines of a new consensus emerge. "The resolution will come once the various pushbacks coalesce on one or a few major objectives, such as ridding the world of fascism in 1944."

MOSTLY BUSY WORK.

A student objects to the packaging of Northern Illinois University's UNIV 101, the for-credit course on how to navigate college.  Her suggestions say much more about the state of preparation of incoming students, than about flaws in the course.

NIU could change the UNIV 101 curriculum so that students spend more time talking about where the important buildings are and where students can get academic and career assistance. It could also spend time talking about where students can go to get counseling. The class could also actually go over blackboard, MyNIU and e-portfolios like the website says it does.

Some other important things the course could cover are study, time-management and note-taking tips.

That's the author's idea of work that's not busy-work? What has been going on in the high schools?  And how hard is it to do a walking tour of campus the day before classes start, which is something I'd seen people doing in the past.

But even the good parts are troubling.

NIU could also change UNIV 101’s description to a class that builds cooperation by emphasizing group work and encourages diversity through the Common Reading Experience. Something needs to be done about the course because its description gives students false expectations about what it will be like.

In common with many other universities, the Common Reading Experience is an opportunity for the cultural-studies types to push their worldview on students not yet prepared for the nuances.

In this morning's paper (the print edition only appears on Mondays and Thursdays now) a letter-writer offers a lukewarm defense.

In 2014, nearly 60 percent of incoming freshmen and transfers took UNIV 101/201. The overwhelming majority (84 percent) felt the course met or exceeded their expectations. UNIV 101/201 is an outstanding way to begin your college experience at NIU. You will meet new friends, get to know important campus resources and start to build essential skills for academic, personal and professional success.

Put another way, two courses that do what college readiness in high school ought to be doing. And somehow reducing the number of class meetings from 26 to 16 doesn't inspire confidence.

HOW CARTELS EXPAND.

In the May 1936 issue of Mass Transportation, the trade journal at the time for streetcar and bus operators, there's an article titled "Kenosha Wins Fight Against Jitneys and Weather."  The opening paragraph testifies to the power of rent-seeking.

Voters of Kenosha, Wis., on April 7th cast an overwhelming majority against the operation of ten cent taxicabs in the first city of the United States to operate its entire mass transportation system with trackless trolley vehicles.  Although the vote was a referendum on the repeal of a section of the ordinance passed in 1934 which established a minimum of 15 cents and a maximum of 25 cents per taxi passenger, thereby opening the way for cut-throat competition, the ballot offered the public an excellent opportunity to express their appreciation of the high standard of service maintained during a winter of heavy snows, icy streets, and extremely low temperatures.

Any time a business lobby refers to "cut-throat competition," it's almost surely referring either to price cutting behavior by some practitioners, whether they be operating busses or cars for hire.  The jitney is a precursor of the taxicab, although, beginning in the 1920s, they would cruise along streetcar or bus routes, picking up a rider or two headed for a destination elsewhere along the car line, offering both a lower fare and a faster delivery.  The streetcar operators, in particular, chafed at such competition as they were often also subject to municipal regulation holding fares down -- thus did the nickel fare persist from the end of the nineteenth century until after the first World War.  And any measure to limit the commercial freedom of jitneys, including Kenosha's extension of rate regulation to cars for hire, had the support of the streetcar companies.  But check out the claims Mass Transportation makes about the taxi drivers.  Go directly to the club-car if you hear an echo today.

Drivers of the taxicabs were in reality victims of the taxicab company as the wages even under the present minimum 15 cent and maximum 25 cent rate of fares average very low for most drivers.  Income per day of taxicab drivers is said to run from as low as 25 cents net up to $1.50 per day during the week and a good Saturday may net about $4.  The drivers pay the cab company $2.00 per day plus 10 cents for insurance for the use of the cab for a 12-hour period and 60 miles of operation.  After 60 miles, the driver must pay a stated fee per mile.  Formerly there were up to 40 cabs in a city of approximately 50,000; today there are about 30 cabs in operation.  Repeal of the ordinance undoubtedly would result in more cabs and more fees from drivers.

Thus does the trackless trolley operator benefit from a law suppressing competition "in the public interest."  Thus, also, does the taxicab company benefit.  It is by the dynamic of suppressing price competition so as not to be cut-throat, that taxi-medallions, in jurisdictions where those are part of the regulatory apparatus, take on their great value.

And thus does the incorporation of the taxi companies into the cartel fail to protect the public interest.  For the very incentives that led the flivver-owner of the 1920s to seek a gain from trade by selling rides to passengers waiting at the car-stop are the same incentives that lead the car-owner of today to seek a gain from trade by participating in Uber.  But the distributed network in Uber is less costly to organize, with no daily car-hire fee or insurance paid to the central office, the way the traditional taxi company does.  But it should come as no surprise that transit authorities and taxi companies might make common cause to suppress Uber or otherwise incorporate ride-sharing into the cartel.

I'm not sure which of the transportation trade journals is the successor to Mass Transportation.  The journal was circulating during the second World War, during which it published a Guide to Hiring Women.  That might be for another day.

WITHOUT PROPER TECHNIQUE, THERE IS NO ECONOMIC CONTENT.

I repeat myself.  But repeat myself I must.  The life of an economics student is easier if he keeps in mind such things as substitution, arbitrage, opportunity cost, and indifference at the margin.  But the dissertation does not write itself.  To write a proper dissertation requires understanding both of price theory and of quantitative methods.  Here's Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux on what happens when the mix is poor.  It's superficially about research on the minimum wage, but substantively, it's about what gets people published.

I suggest that the warm reception that Card’s and Krueger’s paper received by many economists reflects the (to me sad) reality that the percentage of economists who have mastered sound price theory has shrunk.  Mastery of technique, as impressive as such mastery is, has both selected in to the economics profession people who are especially good at technique to the exclusion of people who are especially good at economic reasoning, and – because mastering technique is not costless – pushes students of economics to spend more time mastering technique and, hence, to spend less time mastering sound microeconomic reasoning.

There's no necessary conflict. Perhaps the recognition Angus Deaton just received will help.  Without the Almost Ideal Demand System, no improvements in the understanding of consumption behavior in poor countries.  And the Almost Ideal Demand System allows the researcher to check that the laws of conservation in economics, such as the symmetry of compensated substitution effects, and Engel and Cournot aggregation in the price and income elasticities of ordinary demand functions.  As the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences puts it (ellipsis means I yanked the notation),

It allows expenditure ... to be non-linear in ܿ[consumption]. It can be used to test for rationality; homogeneity, symmetry and negative semi-definiteness imply restrictions on parameter vectors ... and by estimating [budget share equations] one can check if these restrictions are satisfied in real-world data. The AID system aggregates over consumers under weaker assumptions about preferences than did earlier models.

In other words, the specification of an econometric model starts with the behavioral conditions of an optimization.  I claim to have some familiarity with the approach, whether it's input choices affected by asymmetric regulatory policy, or location affected by transportation costs and consumer demand elasticities, or allocating resources among multiple outputs possibly under regulation.  The optimality conditions can tell the researcher a lot about what econometric pitfalls might arise.  Professor Boudreaux suggests that failure to do so leads to misguided research.

Such people suppose that if they gather and process data and then generate statistically significant results, they are doing sound research.  The conformity of such statistically significant results with some coherent underlying theory is either of no concern (“The data speak for themselves!”) or, more frequently, such conformity is forced in an ad hoc manner – such as when those economists who find empirically that modest hikes in the minimum wage cause no negative employment effects for low-skilled workers explain their finding by asserting that this finding is evidence of monopsony power in the market for low-skilled workers.

But to understand price theory is to be able to ask the right questions about specification, although this will surprise some practitioners.  There was a workshop, not long before I retired, in which I started with the optimization of agents in the data set and ended with a question about endogeneity.  One of our stronger graduate students later asked me how I came up with that, it was not obviously about the econometrics at first, but it was about the econometrics.  Practice, plus understanding of the underlying structure.

WITHOUT TECHNIQUE, THERE IS NO TALENT.

Andrew Balio, principal trumpet of Baltimore's symphony orchestra, argues against trendy deconstruction of the conservatory.

We have rejected the traditional standards of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness as purely subjective: what is beautiful to you might be unappealing to me, your truth might be different from my truth, etc.—and there is no way to judge between them. But if there is nothing aesthetically objective by which to judge a created thing, we are left to judge it by its creativity alone. And this is what we accept as the point of art today. Judged only in this light, it is impossible to distinguish a complex, highly structured, masterly crafted Bach fugue from a stunt like John Cage’s 4’33. And if you point out that even you could have written the score for Cage’s four and half minutes of silence—as if to differentiate the stunt from the skill with which Bach composed his fugues—a quick answer will remind you sharply that creativity was the point: “But you didn’t.”

Creativity becomes a great equalizer wielded in this way. A childlike scribble can be as important as one of da Vinci’s sketches, a pickled shark as monumental as Michelangelo’s David. And when you walk through our museums of modern art, you can see how convinced of the idea we are. It’s little wonder that creativity, like social justice and disruptive innovation, has become a holy grail for those who have taken up the reformation of our music schools.

Mr Balio's essay (the Pope Center ran it in three parts, by all means, go, read, understand) is an extended reflection of exactly how denial of coherent beliefs of any kind leads to incoherence.

The more straightforward explanation for John Cage being able to pull off something like 4'33 where no non-musician could seriously get away with it is likely that Mr Cage understood enough about the structure of actually existing music to establish a reputation for stretching the limits whilst putting notes to paper first.  That's Mr Balio's message to the trendy defenders of incoherence, who seek to develop interpreters who don't know the structure of actually existing music.

What the revolutionaries and reformers, in their zeal, also seem to forget is that the vast majority of musicians – that majority they profess to have always in mind—even in Bach’s, Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, Liszt’s, or Schumann’s time, were interpretive performers. Though they’d like to imagine it otherwise, we can safely say that virtually none of us are born with creative powers even remotely equal to those of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart. In fact, we’d be lucky to have one such genius in our midst during the course of an age. And I think that even today, most of the students who enter our conservatories do so, not because they believe they are in line to be the next Mozart, but because they love performing the music that has found its way into our canon – and the time and energy they’ve invested in learning to be worthy of playing it attests to that fact. It’s part of the great miracle of classical music that the preponderance of musicians who have come and gone throughout the long course of its history were interpretive performers inspired to play “repertory created in, and for, another time and place”—overlooking for the moment the sophistry already mentioned, and taking that phrase to mean instead “music composed before one’s lifetime”—because if they weren’t, we’d know little or nothing about the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart today. Perhaps that’s fine with the Modernists, but I think the rest of us would object loudly.

It seems to be a triumphal bit of amnesia that confidently injects the modern reformer’s rhetoric with that “false and vulgar opinion” that “the subordination of creativity to technical proficiency” is somehow a detriment to the development of a student’s creative genius. But it’s an argument that is as popular as it is unexamined.

Yes, Beethoven was an interpretive performer. But without his father compelling him to practice, practice, and without Albrechtsberger drilling him on counterpoint (I spend an instructive half hour just at that exhibit in Bonn's Beethoven Haus last fall)  And his Third and Fifth Symphonies, inter alia, are so compelling in part because their innovative structure begins with something as simple as an E-flat-major chord.  It takes mastery of the fundamentals.  As sailing's Melges brothers learned, time on the tiller, time on the tiller.  So mote it be with music, or economics, or building a reliable model railroad.

But it is hard to convince us of this because we really want to believe that technical proficiency—which concerns itself ultimately with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness—is a dictatorial grey area eclipsed by the shining genius of innate creativity. And after all, if four and a half minutes of silence can stand next to one of Bach’s fugues as a work of creativity, why do we need to bother with technical proficiency? Of course, when faced with this absurdity, we realize that there is something that precedes creativity, just as we know that there is a way for creativity to reach beyond technicality.

Yes, successful basketball coach Vivian Stringer, the daughter of a jazzman, enjoyed improvising but found arpeggios boring.  You can read about it in her book.  You'll also read about how her teams work on the fundamentals of basketball.  There's a connection.  Disciplined talent wins.  Without the proper technique, no creativity.

Or just go to the circus.  The most talented tumblers are in the clown acts.  Anybody can sit at a keyboard for four minutes and change, but executing a flip on a trampoline badly gets you in the hospital.

REACTIONARY PROGRESSIVISM.

George Will points out that today's Democrats are still stuck in the New Deal.  Yeah, that's no great surprise.  Neither are his four indictments of government policy.  To repeat, those are a welfare state that works to the benefit of pensioners, many of whom have had time to accumulate assets, the technocratic imperative that turns every collective challenge into something for the commentariat to chew over on Sundays in front of pictures of the Capitol, although those sessions rarely get around to the rent seeking,  the Federal Reserve pushing on a string,  and, last on Mr Will's list but probably first as a driver of inequality, broken institutions that would otherwise build social capital (read: inculcate the habits of the middle class.)  They're not listening, they're not listening still, not to me nor to George Will.

IMPROVING THE COMMUTER RAIL NETWORK.

I'll use Worcester, Massachusetts, as my base of operations in eastern Massachusetts as there is convenient rail access to Boston and the Amtrak network (change to the Orange Line at Back Bay for North Station.)

The intermodal terminal at right belongs to CSX, which has its own reasons for avoiding the congestion toward Boston.  Sometimes the intermodal trains and the commuter trains are in the station area at the same time, and sometimes one train photographer gets into another photographer's picture.

I think I got the better lighting and view.

Recently, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority announced plans for faster (because non-stop) trains for and from Worcester.

One nonstop train will depart from Union Station at 7:55 a.m. and arrive at Back Bay Station in Boston in less than hour. Another nonstop train will leave from Back Bay and return to Worcester in the evening. The new service is part of a planned series of improvements to the Worcester/Framingham Line, the MBTA says.  The new nonstop service should save riders about 30 minutes. The current trip between Worcester and Boston takes about and hour and a half, stopping as many as 16 times before reaching South Station. Plans have also been made to add two additional express trains to the Worcester/Framingham Line in both directions daily.

Improvements including welded new rail installations are also in the works for the Worcester/Framingham Line. Work will be done to “de-stress” the rail, which helps eliminate track buckles and help curtail speed restrictions in times of high heat. Installing new rail should also make the system more resilient to winter weather.

The improvements to the rail are desirable, on last summer's excursion, one of my return trains from Boston, at the time the first stop Framingham semi-express got hammered by those heat-related slow orders, and there were more than a few disgruntled riders griping into their smart 'phones.

But the authority's reference to the limited stop trains as "bullet trains" is jarring, these will neither look like contemporary bullet trains nor carry expedited freight in the way of the Maine Bullet of years gone by.

Two new express trains will be added. One is a new train, the other is a conversion of an existing, full-service train. Those trains will not stop after reaching Framingham, about 42 minutes into the trip. The overall trip will take about 75 minutes.

Those conversions are additional semi-express trains. The demand for the trains suggests a steep bid-rent curve in the Boston area. Is there a shadow price for congestion, in case anyone reading this wants a senior thesis topic?

The cost to live in Worcester is lower, almost by half, as it costs to live in Boston, [selectman Philip] Palmieri said. With a commute of less than one hour, some of those employees now debating where to buy a home may choose Worcester. That is the critical mass that will then draw businesses to serve those residents, which results in local jobs, he said.

City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. agreed, noting the bullet train and the additional express lines make it "that much easier to market Worcester" to people who work in Boston.

"It allows people to be more flexible with their time," Augustus said.

The expanded service is particularly encouraging as Boston to Worcester is not yet the Burlington Racetrack for passenger volume or train density.

MBTA General Manager Frank DePaola said Worcester does have good ridership, with about 100 people boarding in Worcester on its current lines. That's about 10 percent of what reaches Boston, which is about 1,000 people, he said. The service announced today is looking to increase that number.

"We're hoping this is an opportunity for even more ridership," DePaola said. "We are hoping to attract even more people to get out from their cars. We can now beat the commute to Boston by car, with a train – assuming people follow the speed limit."

Speed limit or not, expressway congestion and high parking charges have a way of convincing commuters to take the train. I sometimes think there are more than a thousand people waiting to board each Naperville Zephyr at Naperville.

But Southeastern Massachusetts is such a pain to get around in by car that there are people seeking to restore passenger service between Worcester and Providence, Rhode Island.

Massachusetts-based Boston Surface Railroad Co. would be the first [interstate] private passenger rail company in the U.S. since 1983. The company recently completed a feasibility study that proposes the operation of daily commuter trains on the Providence & Worcester Railroad between its two namesake cities, a distance of 45 miles.

Once upon a time, New York and Maine through trains hauling the elite to Bar Harbor and Kineo Station and the other Down East refuges used that routing, although such service, and a few Providence and Worcester local trains vanished long before the New Haven Railroad became part of Penn Central.