RUNNING OUT OF HOUSEHOLDS TO TAX?

Strong Towns have been asking questions this week about economic growth, mostly to suggest that the weak suburban and exurban communities that seem to be blighting the landscape depended on the kind of growth that counted on an expanding population.  Think a simple balanced growth path in which savings finances investment proportionally to population growth, sf(k) = nk, where s is the savings rate, n the growth rate of the labor force, k the capital-labor ratio, and f(k) the factor-intensive aggregate production function.

But we have complications, including capital-augmenting technical change, and changes in the composition of the labor force, which affect both k and n.  And changes in the labor force participation rate of married women become part of the diffusion of blight, that is, just another growth imperative.

There is a tragic paradox to the women’s movements of the past century, specifically when it comes to women in the workplace. What started out as liberation – the choice of whether or not to work and to have that labor valued and respected in the same way as a man – has evolved into something else. Today most women do not have a choice as to whether or not they work. Work is an economic necessity.

Gosh, there are laws of conservation?  "Pie-slicing, and deckchair arranging. But that's a lot easier to grasp than as more hands are involved in baking and eating the pie, prices will adjust to reflect both the increased size of the pie and the increased buying power of the additional hands." Don't say I didn't warn you.  And thus does labor force participation by married women change from a signal of independence to an economic necessity.  And you cannot change the laws of conservation.

In a theoretical sense, women entering the workplace should have meant a number of positive things at the family level of finance. For a home that now had two breadwinners, it should have meant a higher standard of living. It should have provided the household with more capacity for leisure time. It should have given the other spouse the ability to work less or to choose a different job that perhaps was more fulfilling. In short, the sacrifice of extra labor should have provided the benefit of a better life for everyone.

That second income can produce a higher standard of living when there are relatively few two-income households. Make the two-income household the standard, and prices will adjust accordingly, and providers of child care might appropriate the gains. It might be that assortative mating might lead to the highest-earning two-income households being early rejecters of the traditional corporate job description.  The adjustment of house prices, automobile prices, day care prices, and the rest will follow, but slowly, and, like everything else, the adjustments will be uneven.

But the growth that the Strong Towns post addresses appears to be the old kind of growth.

It may have in the early years, but our insatiable lust for additional economic growth wore away those benefits. We've now reached a point where we have sucked all the productivity gains out of employing the other half of our workforce -- as economists like to call women -- and still we need more growth.

No, you're getting growth, but you're on a different path, where k reflects the increased labor force participation, and n is smaller because of the labor force participation, and those tax-starved suburbs and exurbs are confronting the realities of a different sort of balanced growth equilibrium path, if we can even think in those terms.

On the other hand, perhaps the post is asking readers to think about what being comfortable means.

Imagine how spartan and deprived your life was back in the 1990's (not). If you were to have sacrificed and simply maintained that standard of living -- house sizes, gadgets, automobiles, etc... -- today it would only take three days of your labor each week to sustain that quality of life. So, if we measured success in terms of....say....leisure time instead of growth, the path we've been on the last two decades has resulted in a vastly reduced standard of living.

We don't measure success in leisure time, however, which is actually an interesting observation when one stops to ponder it.

We used to measure success as being comfortable.  One of the sources of disagreement during the Gilded Age was precisely the rising industrialists obsession with accumulation.  That ran counter to the hopes of the yeomanry, for whom starting with a log cabin and passing a frame house to the children was success.

Social norms, though, are emergent, and perhaps in thinking about them do the new ones emerge.

THE CASE FOR BUYING INTO AMERICA.

The European social democracies remain advanced tribal societies, with all the challenges that follow when cheap immigrant labor moves in.

Beginning in the post-World War II era, Europe was in need of workers to pad its depleted work force. A natural place to look was North Africa, in former colonies of Spain and France. While it was assumed that migration would be short-term, the reality is that the men who came to work stayed, and later brought over their families. Europe made no plan for how to house and assimilate these families (see Christopher Caldwell’s excellent book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” for an in-depth discussion of this topic).

More to the point, Europe was uncomfortable asking its Muslim communities to assimilate. European leaders felt that would be too reminiscent of the colonial era. Their guilt and newfound “enlightenment” guided them to leave these people to their communities, culture, and religion. At the same time, however, they also ostracized them. What resulted was tight-knit majority-Muslim enclaves often on the outskirts of major European cities (like Saint Denis on the outer edge of Paris, where one of the Paris attackers was found).

Where there are no mediating institutions, there's no mediation.  Thus Paris and Brussels.  Betsy Newmark notes the deconstruction of the mediating institutions might be under way in the United States as well.

Here in the United States, we've done a better job of assimilating immigrants into our culture, but those efforts have been deteriorating as more and more people, especially leftists, are more interested in criticizing the United States and American culture than looking to inculcate such a thing as "American values" in immigrants. Look at the demise of the term "melting pot," which used to be the aim of our approach to immigrants.

If the blame-America-first mentality were confined to the likes of public radio and the victim studies departments, the assimilation might proceed anyway.  But there's Donald Trump, pointing out that among the third world opportunity-seekers are the third-world troublemakers, but pointing it out in a way that is likely to antagonize the opportunity-seekers.  Max Boot calls that campaign approach a strategic error.

In fact, only a tiny percentage of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims is waging war on us. To defeat those Islamic extremists, we will need the cooperation of moderate Muslim states and of the Muslims who live in the West.

A large part of the reason why European states such as Belgium and France have such major terrorist problems is because they have done such a poor job of assimilating Muslim immigrants. The United States has less of a problem in no small part because we have done a better job of assimilation. Trump’s crude attacks on Muslims risk undoing all of that progress. Trump could not possibly do more damage to our security if he were an actual ISIL agent.

There are policy generalizations to the United States versions of les banlieues, if you know where to look.

NEVER OUT OF IT.

Sunday evening, Wisconsin's basketball team played Xavier's in the round of 32.  Going into the game, Xavier looked, on paper, like a prohibitive favorite.  With six minutes and change to play, Xavier was leading by nine points.  Xavier forward Jalen Reynolds had batted a loose ball to himself in such a way as to get a One Shining Moment clip out of a breakaway dunk, and Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes went to the bench with his fourth foul.

Xavier head coach Chris Mack's two young daughters were demonstrating shooting moves from the Nicholson seats.

Xavier assistant coach Luke Murray's father, actor Bill Murray, was deputising as Jack Nicholson.

There were six minutes to play in the game.

[Wisconsin center Ethan ] Happ attacked the rim, drew a foul and sank a couple of free throws. [Bronson] Koenig did likewise. Happ then poked the ball loose for a steal and Zak Showalter converted on a run-out.

Xavier 59, Wisconsin 55.

"We're never out of it," Showalter said of the team's mindset while rallying. "We've been in games where the situation looked even worse for us and we pulled it out. We had to get something quick. It's a credit to Ethan. He initiated that. I saw an alley and took it."

A similar Showalter run-out started a Wisconsin rally in the opening game against Pitt. That rally went on for about ten minutes.  This rally had to be faster.

With 2:09 remaining, Happ scored on a put-back. Hayes cut into the deficit some more by making one of two free throws before Sumner got loose for another layup with 31 seconds left.

Xavier 63, Wisconsin 60.

"At the beginning of the year," Showalter said, "we were in a lot of close games that we didn't pull out. Now we're comfortable in these situations and we just find a way."

In one of those games, Maryland's Melo Trimble broke a tie with a three-point basket from far outside the arc.  Buzzer beater.

With 14 seconds left, Koenig drained a deep 3-pointer from the top of the key.

Xavier 63, Wisconsin 63.

Talented team, lots of height, ball in the hands of a clutch player.

Just about everybody knew that Xavier would keep the ball in the hands of [guard Edmond] Sumner, who has blow-by explosiveness to the rim. [Jordan] Hill attempted to simulate him on the scout team.

"That dude is so fast," Hill said. "It's hard to believe that he's that quick."

But Showalter had guarded him from the start of the game, tagging off with Hill when he needed a breather. So he had a good feel for his speed and athleticism.

A handful of possessions earlier, Showalter had drawn Xavier's leading scorer, Trevon Bluiett, on a switch and Bluiett had beaten him off the bounce but missed a layup.

"When we had a timeout," said [assistant coach Lamont] Paris, who compiled the scouting report on the Musketeers, "I told Showy, "You were playing him (Bluiett) on the wrong side. He drove and missed but we've got to play those guys on their right hand."

That's what Showalter would do against Sumner on Xavier's final offensive possession.

"He was going right all game," Showalter said. "I anticipated it. I knew he was going to try and attack with his right hand so I just tried to take that away the best I could it and luckily it paid off."

Sumner and Showalter collided and Sumner was called for the charge.

"Showy timed it right and got hit right in the chest, that was a charge," emphasized Hill, who has been victimized by Showalter in practice that same way. "It's really annoying actually."

Not so annoying for Xavier as what came next.

[Wisconsin coach Greg] Gard was contemplating calling a timeout immediately following the foul on Sumner.

"But Nigel came running over to me and said, 'Hey, let's advance it and then take it,'" Gard related. "I said, 'All right, we'll do that.'"

How many head coaches would be too stubborn to listen to a player in that situation?

"We obviously have a better chance of shooting the ball on our side of the court than theirs," Hayes said. "So I sprinted over to him (Gard) and said, 'Don't call it, don't call it.'"

Gard listened. It's one of his strengths. Happ inbounded to Koenig, who dribbled into the front court and called the timeout with 2 seconds on the clock.

"When we were drawing up the play (in the huddle)," Hayes said, "we were all like, 'This shot is going in. One of us is going to make this basket; whether it's Bronson or myself, the ball is going in.'"

Just before play resumed, Hayes and Koenig crossed paths on the floor. Both smiled.

Final Four experience at work.  Plus, when the defense double-teams somebody, there's somebody open.

The Badgers had a couple of options on the final possession. Hayes was one of them.

"I was going to try and catch the ball in the 15-foot area," Hayes explained, "and try to either turnaround or quick drive to draw a foul and get to the free throw line."

But Xavier doubled Hayes with [Trevon] Bluiett and Myles Davis.

Koenig went up to Happ, the inbounder, and told him that he wanted the ball.

"Pass to me if I'm open," he said.

Hayes had also approached Happ with the same wish.

"That's something special," Happ said, "to have two leaders that want the ball when it's crunch time."

Happ had a passing lane along the boundary and fed the ball to Koenig, who darted into the right corner and launched a shot over Remy Abell, a former Indiana Hoosier and Xavier's best defender.

Excitement for UW; distress for Xavier.

Now comes a regional with a lot of basketball tradition.  Indiana plays North Carolina, Notre Dame plays Wisconsin.

THE OUTLINES OF THE SAECULAR CRISIS.

Perhaps it's in the contradictions of an economic order in which people in the United States organized their lives in the expectation that the World War II peace dividend would always be present, and there would always be monopoly rents to divide between Labour and Capital.  But there are still people who remember, and people who have heard the stories, and perhaps, as Virginia Postrel suggests, that's what's behind the Donald Trump surge.

Trump promises a triumphant, can-do United States that strides the world like a colossus, building grand new public works and bending other nations to its will with adroit negotiation — all while lowering taxes. It’s his version of 1950s America, without the unfortunate mess of World War II to wipe out the competition. And he makes it all sound so easy, like magic.

If we apply the generational morphology of The Fourth Turning, we're at the time when the next "unfortunate mess" (last time around, first came the Great Depression, then the War) is in progress.  When Strauss and Howe wrote, the country was in the middle of what they termed an "Unraveling," and by their logic, it is not possible to get from Unraveling to a new High without the Saecular Crisis.  And the Gray Champions of Crisis, who will guide the public, will be aging Baby Boomers.  (I wonder what Nathaniel Hawthorne would make of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as exemplars thereof.)

Because the saecular crisis is a time when tensions within the existing social order become too much for the structure and the structure breaks (generational morphologies have in common with Hegelian dialectic a thesis, an antithesis, contradictions, and a synthesis, but the turnings go on forever) it's not likely that the resolution of the saecular crisis will be a kinder, gentler version of the 1950s or a more civilized version of the 1960s.  But the getting there, as George Lakey, no fan of Donald Trump, warns, is not necessarily to a better place. "Where do his working-class supporters go if they find that the electoral arena did not work for them and believe that elitist leftists scorn them? The militias await."

That's reinforced by Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez, who gets that in a secular crisis, the old rules don't apply, and the wise course is to expect the unexpected. "In retrospect the Tea Party, whose death the media announced repeatedly and often, may have signified the start of rebellion the pundits refused to take seriously. Now having failed to strangle it in the crib, the unrest will likely outlast November, 2016."

The militias await.

Today's developments out of Brussels will remind people that it's not phobic to check your boots for scorpions when you're camping in the desert.

Maybe I'm the optimist.  "Perhaps, once Global Jihad or Climate Change or whatever the next Grand Secular Challenge will be is resolved, there will be a new consensus."  But Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, a Trump skeptic still hopeful that the old order can hang on, might be anticipating further combustion of the social order to come.

[Conrad] Black actually believes that Mr. Trump can fix the corrupt U.S. government system. In fact, he wants to destroy it, along with what remains of the culture of consensus and compromise. He’s a wrecking ball. He believes experts are idiots and wears his ignorance with pride. He acts on instinct and impulse, makes up stuff as he goes along and scatters his lies like confetti. He’s written more books than he’s read. This does not hurt his ratings. It enhances them.

The militias await.

Three years ago, I surveyed the failures of Hope and Change and hoped for a better outcome. "The harder intellectual work to be done might be in establishing that emergent order and distributed networks are far more effective at overcoming difficulties than a small committee of The Best and The Brightest can ever be, even if that committee sits around a Round Table in Camelot." Right Geek, no fan of Mr Trump, scornful of the gentry liberals (by their fruits!),  proposes a libertarian vision for after the crisis is resolved.

Number one, we must radically expand educational choice, restoring the respectability of vocational education and adjusting what we offer in such programs to match what is actually available in our post-industrial job market. I'm not talking a Common Core here; I'm talking about listening to folks like Mike Rowe, who know where the solid, secure, decently paying work that doesn't require a college education can still be found. Number two, we must loosen regulatory barriers that inhibit both small business development and domestic energy development. Number three, we must be more discriminating when crafting our immigration policy.

As is generally the case in a saecular crisis, there is a role for the government.  Defense.  Immigration.  Funding Schools.  Doing so in a less intrusive way, ah, that's the challenge.

BETTER IS THE ENEMY OF GOOD ENOUGH.

I've long been an enthusiast for New England style rotaries, but in their current Midwestern form as roundabouts, they're overthought.  Do I have to make everybody stay after class and write out, repeatedly, the following two sentences.

1.  The point of traffic taming is to lessen complexity.
2.  The temptation of traffic engineers, however, is to provide complexity and call it intelligent design.

Thus, the roundabouts that are showing up in more thickly settled, and sometimes, walkable, neighborhoods, are becoming as dangerous to pedestrians as are the signalled crossings, with or without walk lights, walk lights with or without beg buttons.  There might be room for improvement, such as turning the center of the rotary into some sort of public space.

BAD POLICIES IN AN UNPLEASANT PACKAGE.

Substantively, there are good reasons to object to Hillary Clinton as president, even if her opponent is Donald Trump.  Barack Obama was apparently good enough for Mrs Clinton, despite his lack of experience.  But not good enough for former president Bill "awful legacy of the last eight years" Clinton.

That the package is aesthetically unpleasant is of secondary importance.  But I'm going to have fun with that all the same.

Birch twig broom wipe server clean!

You'd think, natural politician or not, somebody would have coached her to act like she's winning when she's winning, and not to yell over her applause lines.

Like many other people, Hillary’s voice becomes less engaging the louder she speaks. And for some reason she frequently gets angry when giving victory speeches. Even Donald “I Insult Like An Emotionally Scarred 3rd Grader Who Misses His Mommy” Trump usually, if not always, switches to “somewhat decent” during his victory speeches.

Some of the millions of people watching Hillary last week noticed that she seemed angry while claiming victory.

That's the way it is, despite what the palace guard thinks.

Hillary likes to emphasize the fact that she’s a woman as a reason to vote for her for president. Fine. But noticing that she does not have the dulcet tones or speaking ability of an NPR host is not sexist. Neither is noticing that Bill and Hillary Clinton have legendary problems telling the truth. It’s not sexist. It’s not even that observant. It’s just obvious and true.

What also ought be obvious and true is that the Democrats are pushing the same technocratic-Four-of-Five-Experts-Agree Fatal Conceit that has worked so well from the Great Society to Hope and Change.

WORD.

Jonah Goldberg notes that elevating learned lawyers to the status of philosopher kings means picking a philosopher king matters. But those philosopher kings are not a Platonic ideal, they're an emergent phenomenon.

We’ve invested in the Supreme Court powers never imagined by the Framers. And when I say “we” I mostly mean progressives. The growth of the administrative state and the encroachment of federal law into every nook and cranny of local life has been a century-long project of the Left.

It should be no surprise that when we bequeath monarchical powers to nine — or eight — lawyers, the battle for succession to one of the nine thrones will be ugly. Indeed, it’s surprising it’s not uglier. We spend billions of dollars trying to pick a president of the United States, and in many respects the Supreme Court is now more powerful than the presidency. It’s certainly far, far, far less democratic. We appoint justices for life and many of their decisions cannot be overturned by the Congress, or the people, short of a constitutional convention.

The Left, which pays a lot of lip-service to the “people power” and democratic action, has given us these black-robed kings and queens. They shouldn’t be surprised when the game of thrones gets ugly. It’s their game.

It's possible that judicial usurpation goes back to Marbury v. Madison, and yet, however it has come to pass that nine philosopher kings matter, they do matter, and nomination battles will be consequential.

MY TRANSGRESSIVENESS IS OK. YOURS IS NOT.

There's been a lot lately about the correlation of forces that is bringing downscale white folks to Donald Trump if they can or to crystal meth if they must.  My conclusion remains, "we squandered the peace dividend on experiments against reality."  Or, more colorfully, stop enabling dysfunction, you'll get less of it.  In The Atlantic, Molly Ball tours with the Trump campaign, and poses a social-science hypothesis featuring "racial resentment based on historic white entitlement and a backlash to the upsurge in leftist identity politics that has marked American politics in the age of Obama."  In plainer language, it's the downside of the Oppression Olympics.  Reduced to a question, it's questioning the privilege of the protected classes.

Why are they allowed to do things that we’re not allowed to do?

Sometimes, you have to do the ethnography, and report back.

Trump’s supporters have told me that minorities commit crimes with impunity, that illegal immigrants get benefits at higher rates than Americans, that gays and Muslims are afforded special status by the government. They lament that Confederate symbols, and the people whose heritage they represent, are sidelined while diversity is celebrated. They don’t understand why Democrats can campaign on overt appeals to the interests of blacks and women and Latinos, but Republicans are deemed offensive if they offer to represent the interests of whites and men.

You can fact check the perceptions, but that comes close to rationalizing the failures of protected-status minorities by performing logical arabesques to conceal things that appear perfectly clear.  Here's James Howard Kunstler, no fan of Donald Trump, with a salty interpretation of the logical arabesques.  It begins by noting where the enablers of dysfunction hang out.

The Left has lost its mind in a climax of zealotry over the new religion of social justice, with its sacred “victims” (blacks, LBGTQs, etc), its sacred tenets (“diversity,” “inclusion”), and its endless charges of blasphemy (renamed “micro-aggressions”) against heretics (“racists,” “homophobes”) who object to absolutist thought policing. This was nicely described by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University in a recent podcast with author Sam Harris. (Skip to 1 hour 30 minutes in the long discussion.)

The religion got started on the campuses, where social science careerists ginned up an elaborate doctrine to justify the self-importance of their new departments in so-called race, gender, and privilege studies — the main point of which was to create new categories of sacred victims suffering spiritual torments (“traumas”) that could never be healed. These crypto-religious “studies” led to a multiplication of demons that had to be exorcized by an equal multiplication of diversity deans and committees aimed at punishing blasphemies — such as arguing against affirmative action (“racist”), or wearing a Mexican sombrero at a tequila party (“cultural appropriation” + “racist”), which happened recently at posh Bowdoin College.

The hysteria incited by the academic diversity corps spread readily and easily into Democratic Party politics, where badly-needed minority votes could be harvested to shore up the dwindling votes of traditional supporters such as labor unions, and make up for (you might say cover up) the Party’s complete surrender to both Wall Street and the war industry.

That's about as pithy a summary description of the way the Democrats have to have an aggrieved base that never gets out of poverty, because people who discover the connection between behaving like a respectable member of the middle class and voting like a respectable member of the middle class follows directly.  And the surrender to rent-seekers follows directly.  The more involved the national government is in mundane matters, the more rents will be generated and dissipated.

GET THE MISSION RIGHT. THEN PROVIDE THE RESOURCES.

Here's Remaking the University's Chris Newfield on the "new normal" in university funding.  It opens with a recognition that institutions of higher learning, whether highly regarded private institutions, state flagships, regional comprehensives, land-grants, mid-majors, playing in the B1G or the Mid-American, are all in the same business and ought act accordingly.

The democratic vision of U.S. higher ed was that the burgeoning masses could get a degree that was cognitively the same as that of elites, even though they lacked the latter's social networks and private resources.  Twins separated at graduation, one going to Stanford, say, and one to UC Berkeley, with a sibling already enrolled at San Francisco State, would have student experiences that would differ in trappings but not essentials.  The great faculty and facilities at the two public universities would allow them to offer cognitive gain that was functionally similar to that received by the Stanford twin, who would have social but not intellectual advantages.  No one thought they were dooming public university students to second- or third-tier status in a secret caste system.

That was not anybody's intent, but that is what is happening.  The way Mr Newfield proceeds is instructive.

Of course four years of Stanford seminars, where the student:faculty ratio is now 4:1, had advantages that SF State's 50-student courses or Berkeley's 600-student lectures did not. But economists calculated that by 1980, public colleges spent 70 cents for every dollar spent by the privates (p 237). The assumption was that the gap would continue to close. As it did, artificial and unjust barriers of gender, race, religion would continue to erode as the wider society became more prosperous and more enlightened.

Instead, by the 1990s public colleges were spending only 53 cents on the private dollar.  The five public flagships that had been in the top 20 in US News & World Report's first ranking, in 1987, later all fell out of that bracket (p 237).  By 2013, public research universities were on average spending 45 cents on the private research university dollar.   Public masters universities like SF State were spending 21 cents.  Community colleges, the favored political cure to our national attainment ills, were spending 14 cents on the private research university dollar (all from Figure A2).  Meanwhile, UC Berkeley's Pell Grant rate--a proxy for low family income--is 35% while Stanford's is 15%. Since UC Berkeley enrolls over 27,000 undergrads to Stanford's 7000, UC Berkeley educates 9 times the number of low-income students each year.  It has much less money per poorer student to educate them.

We have been taught to call this efficiency.  It is grossly inefficient, socially speaking. It is also unjust.

We will not know whether an allocation of resources is efficient until we know that the marginal product of the last dollar spent on each productive activity is the same.  It's quite likely that legislative stinginess is making it more difficult for public research universities to compete for faculty with well-endowed private research universities, and I'm of the view (recent link!!!) that U.S. News and the like sell those guides because ambitious students (or perhaps their parents) seek either intellectual challenges or the opportunities to form social networks with similarly ambitious students.

Thus, Berkeley, or the California State universities, are unlikely to be allocating resources efficiently, in any sense of the word.  And by no stretch of the imagination can the students at California State be receiving the same familiarity with the disciplinary state of the art or the same engagement with their professors.

Cal State defines their basic teaching load to be 5 courses a term, which is similar to the load at a community college or high school. Faculty members then buy out courses with administration and research, generally one course per term for each activity.

Perhaps the California State campuses and the community colleges are simply doing, for the second or third time, the work of the high schools, and that is something that ought be fixed. But it's not special pleading to note that the work of higher education requires a lot of custom work.

Ideally, a humanities or social science course would assign each student two papers in a semester and then offer detailed grading of the kind that allows students to see their full range of issues and address them.  But one professor can only grade 300 papers on top of the rest of their teaching, research, and administrative job by sacrificing the rest of their life.  The other solution is to cap the quality of feedback at a modest level, by replacing at least one paper with an exam and standardizing the exams as much as possible.  The normal workload sharply limits the intensity and detail available to an individual SF State student.  Politicians who like the "efficiency" of these low costs are not thinking about the cost to educational quality for non-elite students.

CSU faculty are also expected to do research.  These days, state college tenure-track faculty have research university doctorates and the intellectual lives and research ambitions to match.   SF State students are supposed to be exposed to the same up-to-date material as their siblings at research universities in order to avoid the educational class system we're discussing here.

Yes, and California State faculty might be interested in publishing their way out, if that is even possible any more, because riding herd on unprepared, disengaged, and unmannerly students doesn't square with the life of the mind. Thus,

Public flagships no longer have the resources to do teaching and research at the top level of quality--and for new social conditions-- that the state assumed for all its non-elite students.

To repeat: the state flagships, and the land-grants, and the mid-majors, are in the same business as the high-prestige privates, and Mr Newfield argues for behaving accordingly.

Without restored public funding, the New Normal means the permanent downgrading of all levels of public higher education, and the reversion of top-quality learning and research to small elites.  Unless we restore cut public funding, California will continue to pioneer educational post-democracy.

But there is no point in allocating resources to fund institutions that admit unprepared students and call it access.  Fix the common culture and the common schools first.

THE RETURNS TO HUMAN CAPITAL.

In relatively egalitarian Germany, the rich might be paying a greater share of the taxes, and yet the rich are getting richer.

Whereas in 2000 Germany had arguably the lowest income inequality in the world, it has now fallen behind the Czech Republic, Sweden and Denmark.

The report does however emphasise that Germany is still one of the most equal countries in the world when it comes to disparity in earnings, due to its progressive tax system.

The figures show that, whereas in 2000 the top 20 percent of earners were taking in 3.5 times the amount of those in the bottom 20 percent, that ratio has now increased to five times.

Earnings in the bottom ten percent of German society actually decreased significantly in real terms across this period, with an increase in earnings of 6 percent clearly being outpaced by a 24 percent rise in consumer prices.

In contrast the top of German society saw earnings increases of 39 percent.

I must look at my old notes on such topics as balanced growth equilibrium and factor augmenting technical change.  We are probably living in a world where the sufficient conditions for the stylized facts of economic growth no longer apply, and their absence is more than theoretical.

NOW SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITIES.

During the relatively civil Republican debate that aired on CNN on March 10, Senator Rubio explained why Donald Trump's "ban all Moslems" policy proposal was an error.

Two days ago, I met this extraordinary couple who were on furlough because they are missionaries in Bangladesh. It's a very tough place to be a missionary. It's Muslim.

And their safety and security very much relies upon friendly Muslims that live along side them, that may not convert, but protect them and certainly look out for them. And their mission field really are Muslims that are looking to convert to Christianity as well. And they tell me that today they have a very hostile environment in which to operate in because the news is coming out that in America, leading political figures are saying that America doesn't like Muslims. So this is a real impact. There's no doubt that radical Islam is a danger in the world.

I can also tell you if you go to any national cemetery, especially Arlington, you're going to see crescent moons there. If you go anywhere in the world you're going see American men and women serving us in uniform that are Muslims.

That argument offers a number of promising extensions.  As the senator is pointing out, winning this kind of war requires the participation of people who practice Islam without wishing death to America.  There might be something stronger, along the lines of wanting to work with Moslems elsewhere in the world who aren't mad jihadis, raising the notion that the crazies are not the strong horse.

Here in the US, it's the actions of the mad jihadis that are making life miserable for other practitioners, including plenty of people who understand that the United States is still a land of opportunity.  Apparently the Sillies would like fellow-travellers in Minnesota to hit law enforcement.  That's not good for law-abiding practitioners, whether newly arrived or to the Midwest born, notes Chicago Boy TM Lutas.

Before the first law enforcement victim gets attacked off that list, there are already injuries, the reputation and community standing of loyal, reasonable, peaceful Muslims who have to get checked off as not a risk of attempting to act on the list. These Muslim american citizens, permanent residents, and visitors have their quality of life degraded every time ISIS or any other extremist organization tries to associate these Muslims with extremist violence. And unlike the law enforcement officers who are on such a list and are statistically unlikely to actually be targeted, the damage to these Muslims is certain and is already happening.

Clearly the bulk of the US response to such a list should be to protect those targeted for death and to try and find the list creators to stop them. But minor injuries are still injuries and are at least a tort. Why not run with it and create a class action lawsuit to recompense the non-radicals for the damage done to their reputation? At the very least it might give some pause to the moneybags of the Muslim world who are currently supporting the violent radicals.

Put another way, there has to be a traditional conservative message that expands the base of support for law enforcement and against the pernicious cult of authenticity that enables the crazies as somehow deserving of celebration.

Turning to the rest of the world, there are likely to be plenty of law-abiding practitioners of Islam, in India, in Indonesia, in Albania, in Bangladesh, and elsewhere, whose lives are being made miserable by True Believers who would just as soon kill the wrong kind of Moslem as kill a Christian, or an atheist.  Thus, a United States foreign policy that works with the governments that protect law-abiding practitioners and crack down on the True Believers has promise.  Same principle, applied at home and overseas.

Further, in such an approach, there are parallels to attracting new Republican voters in the urban hellholes that the Democrats have owned.  Thomas Frank and Bill Press recently wrote books identifying the failure of the Democrats to improve social and economic conditions therein.

Together, the authors offer an early postmortem on the Obama presidency and a bleak, bitter vision of where liberal elites are taking the Democratic Party. In the 2016 campaign, anger and disappointment are not the sole province of the right.

In a link-rich column, Thomas Edsall gets specific.

The Democratic Party cannot continue to reap the electoral rewards of the black vote — or embark on a comprehensive revaluation of life at the bottom of the economic scale — without fundamentally reconceiving how it deals with the neighborhoods where many of its voters live.

That's the opportunity.  Republicans, too, can reconceive how their party deals with those neighborhoods.  In those neighborhoods are law-abiding people fearful of both the police and the street gangs, young people rendered unemployable by the minimum wage and government schools, yet the Democrats take their votes for granted.

COWBOY UP.

I've been less than impressed with the pearl-clutching among college faculty fearful of students legally carrying concealed weapons in class.  Now comes Arkansas State historian Erik Gilbert, suggesting there are probably students and faculty packing heat in class in Texas already.  More to the point, though, he suggests that students being moved to draw by too much of the metrofexual smug are suddenly demonstrating a level of engagement with class that is, shall we say, unexpected.

Speaking of flawed risk assessment, suggestions that Texas faculty avoid teaching controversial topics are predicated on the notion that students are so intensely engaged with the material in their classes that they are willing to risk doing 20 to life (and not receiving a passing grade) to challenge our ideas with gunfire. I find this utterly implausible. In every other context where we talk about student engagement, it is to decry its absence. This is especially true in the humanities (and I am guessing that it’s not the accounting faculty who are being advised to keep mum about their radical ideas on valuing inventories so their students won’t fly off the handle). Most of us complain that our students won’t even read, and now we are worrying about them being so engaged that they might throw caution to the wind and start shooting?

That is, it doesn't matter whether you're teaching the controversies, or being transgressive, or simply reading your slides aloud and counting on the students to read them silently.

Teach however and whatever you want. Don’t worry about the presence of legally carried guns in your classrooms. If you are going to worry, worry about someone illegally bringing a gun on campus with the intention of causing mayhem, not someone who legally carries a gun in the hope of protecting himself from harm. And those students whose faces cloud with anger when you attack their complacently bourgeois understanding of Jane Austen, they are probably just reacting to something on their phones. And, anyway, they’re too worried about their grades to shoot you.

Besides, drawing a pistol might bring law enforcement in.  Get a bad grade, there's a deanlet somewhere to whine to.

ALL INCOME BELONGS TO THE GOVERNMENT

Here's a trip down memory lane, during the Era of the Blue Fist in Wisconsin, when governor Scott Walker took on the Democrat Rent Seekers. Michael Moore says the governor is not being aggressive enough at glomming onto other people's money.

Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers [c.q.], entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs.  That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

We'll leave for another day whether taxation at achievement-resenting levels creates a climate within which the next generation of inventors, entrepreneurs, and job-creators emerge and flourish.  We'll draw the curtain of charity over Mr Moore conflating, as he often does, stocks (wealth) with flows (circulation.)

Of course, you can depend on the heirs to Leon Trotsky to view the gains from trade as something to be held in common.

Contrary to the claims of the politicians and the media, it is not difficult to find the money to close the state and local budget gaps, with enough left over to begin a massive social rebuilding program. Implementing just some of the above proposals would generate sufficient funds, for example, to provide jobs in the next two months for 5 million Americans.

What, no talk of Abolition of the Wages System?

Let Mary Katharine Ham provide the reality check.

So, Michael Moore, you’ve wiped out the country’s richest Americans, millions of jobs, and billions to charity. What are you going to do next? Go to Disney World?

Nope, that’s gone too. The Mouse makes billions, and that money is ours, not theirs.

At least, in this election cycle, the heirs to Leon Trotsky are not feeling the Bern.

RECOGNIZING THE FATAL CONCEIT.

Chicago Boy Jonathan picks up the sent.  Start with Nassim Nicholas ("Black Swan") Talib on Facebook.

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

How have they messed up? Richard ("Belmont Club") Fernandez elaborates.

Rightly or wrongly Americans used to have a sense of place in the world.  It was once a comforting place where the president -- be he from either party -- protected them.  It was a place where secretaries of state and defense stood guard over the borders and  American children could count as their birthright having better lives than their parents.

Now that place, that sense is gone; demolished by a confluence of events; diluted by apparent betrayals and conflicts of interest.  It was sent rolling down the hill not in the least by an administration eager to fundamentally remake America, little thinking they were manacled to the great edifice they cast down the slope.

If Trump represents the Great Fear his origins can be traced in the arc from the Three AM Call to the Barking Dog.  We needed to believe, in this dangerous world, that the former was true and not the latter.  What Trump did was look behind the curtain and destroy one faith without giving us another. What now?  What now?  That may be the real question this campaign should answer.

Deny coherent beliefs of any kind? Enjoy the incoherence.

GOING COUNTER TO THE BUBBLE.

Last week, we noted en passant the reluctance of Wisconsin-Milwaukee athletic director Amanda Braun to accept a tournament invitation for the men's basketball team, which beat Minnesota and Wisconsin before the Horizon League season began, then finished fifth in the Horizon League.

Now Ms Braun has fired coach Rob Jeter, and the fan base (could we call them streetcar alumni if Milwaukee had streetcars?) is not happy.

Braun's desire to get rid of Jeter was so strong that she was "willing to disenfranchise the student-athletes in her effort to hurt him," said one source close to the program who asked not to be identified out of fear of retribution.

"She would constantly try to throw him off and create distractions," said another source who worked in the athletic department and no longer is at UWM. "All the time. It was bad. I felt bad for him all the time. I told him, 'You're a bigger man than I am.' It was brutal. Sabotage was in the cards."

According to several sources, Braun didn't congratulate the team after it won the Cable Car Classic to start the season. Where was she when the Panthers stunned the Badgers at the Kohl Center? Certainly not slapping Jeter's back or high-fiving his players.

And now the large donors -- perhaps one reason I continue to push the argument that all institutions in higher learning are in the same business as Harvard or Wisconsin is that you'll likely find a financially successful donor or six no matter where you look -- are withdrawing their support of Panther athletics.

But the director's ambitions are curious.

One can argue the relative merits of the College Basketball Invitational and the CollegeInsider.com Tournament, but there is no denying that a postseason appearance of any kind helps a mid-major program in many ways, not the least of which is recruiting.

Braun, who has been the AD for three years, said her decision was based solely on the team's performance.

"Fifth place, again, doesn't really merit...rewarding a postseason," she said.

Thus, she'd like to see a basketball team that's "a top program in the Horizon League."  Comparisons to "a top military in a banana republic" or "a top producer of film for intellectuals" come to mind. But in doing so, she's antagonized Wisconsin state senator Lena Taylor, who (unwittingly) is raising the possibility that there is a trade-off between hiring for diversity and hiring for merit.

IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE.

A graduate student takes to Inside Higher Ed to describe her current reality.

Like most people, I came to graduate school because I was smart, curious, and inquisitive; however, now that coursework is over, I spend most of my time grading essays, writing emails, communicating with administrators, and writing grant proposals. None of my day-to-day labor is particularly intellectually rewarding, and I am suffering because of it.

Life as a contingent faculty member will also be like that. Life on the tenure track might be more bearable, if she's lucky enough to hire out at a department that protects its junior faculty from a lot of the bullcrap administrivia.  There will still be a lot of grading, dealing with electronic mail (and the ability to send a clueless inquiry at near zero cost at any hour guarantees that there will be a lot of clueless inquiries, and more than a few will be cluttered with attachments) and writing grant proposals.  Survive the tenure mill, however, and the bullcrap administrivia will hit the fan.

She suggests, however, that academicians take mental health days, which she refers to as Scholar Dates.

The goal of these dates is to get out of your normal rut and experience something new. This cannot happen in your pajamas within sight of essays to be graded and dissertations to be written. No exceptions allowed.

Indeed so. And, dear reader, get beyond the usual academic ruts.

[V]isit a brewery, take a tour, participate in a tasting, and ask the brewmaster questions. The same goes for wineries and artist studios, too. Any sort of artisanal experience has the potential for learning, so cast your net wide and look for learning opportunities in any skill that interests you and enjoy some beer along the way.

That's a start, but that still reeks of the academic rut.  Use your imagination.  You'll likely be a more effective scholar the more conversant you are with the ways of people who may never have heard of your discipline or your institution and yet make their way.

YOU STILL HAVE TO RECLAIM THE CULTURE.

Recent columns by Kevin Williamson and David French on the social decay in smallish industrial cities of the Rust Belt have hit a few nerves.  Mark Thoma's reaction is simply "Wow."  But the bull session is pretty good, much more thoughtful than what goes on in the comment sections maintained by lamestream media sites.  Paul Krugman suggests a straightforward economic explanation, based on the outmigration of factories, first from the big cities with their emerging black underclass, then paralleled by an emerging white underclass in smaller ones..  "This story contained a clear prediction — namely, that if whites were to face a similar disappearance of opportunity, they would develop similar behavior patterns."  He suggests that it's not globalization alone at work.  Governmental backstops might be helpful, but he does not rule out cultural influences.  In a subsequent column, he credits Mr Trump for feeling the lumpenproletariat's pain.  And a Brookings report breaks down the numbers on the emergence of distressed neighborhoods.  We have much to look forward to.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.

Apparently, that's the view Andy Puzder of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's takes.  His reason for rolling out a completely automated restaurant appears to be the usual induced innovation argument.  "Puzder says the automated restaurant would be cheaper since he wouldn’t have to worry about rising minimum wage."  Read on, though, and something else might be at work.

Ordering kiosk robot, the perfect moron.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines. “Millennials like not seeing people. I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks… and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”

Perhaps that says something about the effects of public education, the corrosion of the common culture, what have you, on the comportment of the counter help.  Or about the cluelessness of device-addled Millennials when it comes to interacting with people.  But the moron always does what it is instructed to do.  I can see how these kiosks are going to develop.  Do you want fries with that?  Touch yes or no.  Are you sure you do not want fries with that?  Touch yes or no.  We have a special on custard pies today.  Would you like one?  Touch yes or no.  Will the machine offer the option to touch Shut Up And Sell Me My Stuff?

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Posting has been light the past few days, because I've been working on the railroad.

That is, I've been finishing a proper drop ceiling in the train room, in order to help keep dust off the trains.  And once I got done applying joint compound to the drywall surrounding the stair well, and sanding the edges, and priming, and painting, and putting the grid in place, all of which burned more than a few calories, why, here is the Train Gallery.

On the other side of the stairwell, a crew lounge.  That's fifty years' worth of O Scale related reading material on those shelves.  Look sharp, there flies Ye Salem Witch.

Now all that's in place, the next thing to get built will be additional benchwork.

CONTESTING THEORRHEA RUN AMOK.

Last week, we noted social science research on the political and social structures of responses to melting glaciers.  My view, at the time, was that such research was sensible, albeit once couched in the wordnoise of contemporary culture studies, it was unlikely to advance intellectual conversation in a meaningful way.

Lead author Mark Carey, a science historian at Oregon, inadvertently made that case in a defense of the work for Science.

Professional research is published in journals for specialists in a given field. When removed from that context and described to nonspecialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented. What is surprising about the brouhaha is the high level of misinterpretations, mischaracterization, and misinformation that circulate about research and researchers—though this has, unfortunately, been happening to scientists for centuries, especially climate researchers in recent decades.

That does not excuse impenetrable prose, particularly in the abstract, the introduction, or the conclusion. Yes, the main body might have to use disciplinary terms of art, particularly if the researchers are applying advanced techniques to tackle contested problems. That's precisely what Mr Carey's next statement does.

The good news is that people are talking about glaciers! But there’s much more to the story than just the glaciers.  People and societies impose their values on glaciers when they discuss, debate, and study them—which is what we mean when we say that ice is not just ice.  Glaciers become the platform to express people’s own views about politics, economics, cultural values, and social relations (such as gender relations).

Phrased another way, people's responses to glaciers depend on the institutions and traditions within which they live, and changes in glaciers may lead to changes in the institutions, the traditions, and the responses.  Academic inquiry contemplates such questions as "what sorts of changes?" and "for what reason?" and "what is the direction of causation?"  It appears as though Messrs. Carey et. al. are dealing with one such question, or a small set of such questions, as is proper for a thirty page journal article.

We chose the title “feminist glaciology” to provoke discussion about who is producing knowledge about glaciers and what the implications of that existing knowledge are, including whose voices are left out and what types of scientific questions are asked (and which ones might thus be ignored). We also wanted to present a variety of different sociocultural forms of glacier knowledge that go beyond science, to generate discussion. Our goal was to ask questions about the role of gender in science and knowledge—to start a conversation, not conclude the discussion.

A provocative title can be a useful way to get eyeballs on the paper, or to get the referees interested enough to turn around the report sometime before the next Ice Age.  Perhaps the authors should be grateful that Jerry Coyne wasn't called upon to review the paper, which he characterises as horribly written.  Plus it doesn't test any hypotheses.

The paper is an exercise in confirmation bias, picking and choosing bits of the literature that confirm the authors’ preconceived views that science is a male-dominated, Western hegemony that tramples all over women and minorities. Reading the paper, you see that it’s a series of cherry-picked anecdotes that support this view. While it’s certainly true that minorities and women have been discriminated against in science, that is well known, and remedies are already being formulated. The paper itself adds nothing to that discourse but to apply it to glaciology, and in an anecdotal rather than systematic or statistical way. One could write exactly this kind of postmodern paper about any discipline in which women and minorities are underrepresented.

Thus, "Granted, if you want to incorporate scientific findings into social policy, you need to know something about society. But the examples in this paper don’t tell us anything useful about that."  Let alone comment on the strength of a feminist null hypothesis against a maintained hypothesis of evolutionary emergence or randomness.

Reason's Robby Soave reminds readers that the research is Your Tax Dollars At Work.  Half a million dollars and no hypotheses tested.

FIRST RECLAIM THE CULTURE.

Some years ago, I reflected on a James Howard Kunstler visit to upstate New York.  My conclusion.

It's part of a longer meditation on the effects of deindustrialization coming on the heels of the Interstate Highway System which wiped out the Space Age commercial strips.

It misses the simpler lesson: an industrial era in which monopoly rents attenuated the incentive for some people to invest in human capital, followed by an era of do-your-own-thing nonjudgementalism could only end badly for the people who didn't make the investment, who have been left behind by their neighbors who did.

In the middle of this intriguing election season, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson visits upstate New York, to see Chaos in the family, chaos in the state.  Things have turned out badly for the people who stayed behind, and Mr Williamson lays off some of the blame on the people.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.

Scott Greer of The Daily Caller and Hot Air's Jazz Shaw take offense, suggesting that Mr Williamson is blaming the victim.  Perhaps so.  And yet, the outmigration of productive people and of industry from regions doesn't happen randomly.  Enable dysfunction, Mr Williamson suggests, and you'll see more of it.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

David French expands the argument. People have agency. Sometimes, not much agency. And yet, people have agency.

I have compassion for kids who often see the worst behavior modeled at home. I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.

Nor does a focus on personal responsibility mean that the government or cultural elite are blameless. Far from it, and I’ve written at length about the role of progressive culture and progressive policies in cultural decline. I loathe the progressive welfare state and the elitist sexual revolutionaries who do all they can to create a culture that it simultaneously dependent and self-indulgent. I hate the mockery that poor and working-class people of all races endure, but we live in a nation of mutual responsibilities, and the failure of the government does not require the failure of the citizen.

Here's Mr Kunstler, perhaps seeing a different set of causes, but seeing the same effects.

We took the collateral winnings of World War II and poured it into a suburban sprawl alt-universe so depressing that our citizens are the most over-medicated people in the world. That alone might help to explain how Hillary and Trump lumber inevitably toward their respective nominations. The cheering “folks” marshaled out in the Piggly Wiggly parking lots are so buzzed on Klonopin and Zoloft that they can’t tell how these two odious celebrities epitomize the very forces behind their pharmaceutically-masked despair.

No, we squandered the peace dividend on experiments against reality, pretending, for example, that widespread home ownership would midwife bourgeois respectability, and that the dissolute behavior of entertainers would do no harm when adopted by the lumpenproletariat.

MORE PRIVILEGE IDIOCY.

Campus Reform finds a statement from a high official in student government at the University of New Orleans that somewhere veers into the surreal.  It's the usual sort of privilege-checking manifesto, and it commits instructive errors.  To wit:

You may be in debt, but the eligibility to take out thousands in loans, qualify for grants or scholarships to attend lectures and have so many resources at your feet is something many people aren't capable of or fortunate enough to experience.

Perhaps because accumulating resources requires work, and allocating educational resources on the basis of capability is evolutionary stable?

US citizens are a privileged group - check that privilege. We are all born with basic human rights, constitutionally, that give us the freedom of speech and expression and to form our own identities. As unfortunate as the fact is, human civil rights and freedom of choice are a privilege that many people don't have in foreign countries.

Gosh, there might be some forms of diversity not worthy of celebration?

I'm not sure if the article swerves into parody territory when right-handedness becomes another form of privilege.

BUBBLE TEAM.

Among the participants in the inaugural Vegas Sixteen basketball tournament, the Northern Illinois Huskies.

The Vegas 16 is a single-elimination, eight-team postseason basketball tournament. The event will begin on Monday, March 28, with the quarterfinals and continue with the semifinals on Tuesday, March 29 and the final on Wednesday, March 30. All games will be televised on CBS Sports Network.

The Vegas 16 field includes six 20-win teams; the winner of the NIU-UCSB quarterfinal will meet the winner of the Tennessee Tech-Old Dominion quarterfinal. The other half of the bracket includes Oakland, Towson, Louisiana Tech and East Tennessee State.

All have won, and all must be given prizes, although tournament organisers must be disappointed that there weren't more also-rans and programs who thought the selection committee screwed them last Sunday.

What's interesting, though, is that the National Collegiate Athletic Association underwrites some of the expenses for post-season play, and money is fungible.

Where there's a little tin box, there must be a little tin key to unlock it.

Northern Illinois athletic director Sean Frazier said it won’t be donors who pay for the pricetag of the Vegas 16 tournament.

Frazier said money given by the NCAA to the school has been allocated to pay the $50,000 it will cost for the men’s basketball team to play in the inaugural eight-team tournament in Vegas this month.

“We have NCAA dollars dedicated to postseason,” Frazier said at a news conference Tuesday. “There’s no magic hat, there’s no money tree in the backyard. We know the constraints around resources, but the NCAA dedicates resources for postseason and what we’ve done is dedicate those resources to men’s basketball.”

Because television exposure.

Frazier said one of the benefits of the Vegas 16 tournament compared to other “pay-to-play” tournaments such as the CollegeInsider Tournament and College Basketball Invitational is that it will be in one site – Mandalay Bay Arena – over three days.

Also, all of the games will be broadcast on CBS Sports Network.

“The other thing I like about this tournament is we’re going to be on TV – national television,” Frazier said. “It doesn’t get any better than that. We’re going to be right in the mix.”

The spin is worthy of a spokesman for a losing political campaign.

The Vegas 16 was the last tournament to be finalized Monday evening. Although the bracket only had eight teams instead of 16 – causing ridicule on social media – the teams have an average RPI of 123, which is higher than the CBI (161) and CIT (168). Frazier said although there were some rumors the tournament would fold, he was confident a deal would get done.

Because there's an art to making great deals. Or a lot of upside potential. Or something.

THE LIMITS TO THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY.

My skepticism about the Cult of the Presidency has been primarily pragmatic: there are limits on what anyone, whether a Washington or a Roosevelt or a Reagan or a Fillmore or a Cleveland can accomplish.

Now comes Donald J. Trump, with the buyer of influence likely facing off against the seller of influence, to use a felicitous line from Senator Cruz's speech last night, himself making full use of the trappings of the cult.  And it's concentrating minds on the left, notes Charles C. W. Cooke, and in a good way.

Barack Obama’s extra-constitutional transgressions have been many and they have been alarming, and I do not regret my opposition to them. But their result, thus far at least, has been the marginal undermining of democracy and not the plain indulgence of evil. Will our executives’ excesses always take that form? Is it wise to appraise our current situation and to conclude that it will obtain for the rest of time?

To listen to the manner in which our friends on the left now talk about Donald Trump is to suspect that it is not. Time and time again, Trump has been compared to Hitler, to Mussolini, to George Wallace, and to Bull Connor. Time and time again, self-described “liberals” have recoiled at the man’s praise for internment, at his disrespect for minorities and dissenters, and at his enthusiasm for torture and for war crimes. Time and time again, it has been predicted — not without merit — that, while Trump would almost certainly lose a general election, an ill-timed recession or devastating terrorist attack could throw all bets to the curb. If one were to take literally the chatter that one hears on MSNBC and the fear that one smells in the pages of the New York Times and of the Washington Post, one would have no choice but to conclude that the progressives have joined the conservatives in worrying aloud about the wholesale abuse of power.

There might be a general principle at work, and its emergence is encouraging.

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

There's more in that vein at the article. By all means, read and understand.

If the polity follows through in the right way, there's something I posted a while ago that I would happily be shown to be wrong about.  "The gentry liberals, and the academic-entertainment complex, have done much damage, as have the rent seekers. But like any other ruling class, they will not relinquish power graciously."  Perhaps introspection is the first step back from hubris.

CLICK OUT.

The board of curators at Missouri - Columbia, having voted to fire assistant communications professor and fantasy ferroequinology scholar Melissa Click, have now voted to reject her appeal.  The American Association of University Professors see the board's action as an unwarranted administrative intrusion, and further litigation is likely.

THE DEFLATING COLLEGE BASKETBALL BUBBLE.

The brackets are filled in, the office pools are under way, and the annual push-back against telepressure is under way.  (That's a rant for another day.)

But outside the field of 68 teams, ominous signs proliferate.

In addition to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's tournament, and the National Invitational Tournament, there are a couple of vanity tournaments.  But athletic directors are thinking more carefully about paying to play in those tournaments.

As of Monday evening, the CollegeInsider.com tournament had announced 26 teams instead of its planned 32, and the Vegas 16 announced a field of eight instead of 16.

Call the roll of teams that thought better of it.

Evansville, Northwestern, Kansas State and Penn State were among the other teams that said they had declined postseason invitations to one or more tournaments and chose instead to end their season.

Privately run tournaments like the College Basketball Invitational and the CollegeInsider.com event tend to make financial demands on teams as well, asking them to pay to host a game, though some or all of that can be defrayed by ticket sales.

The most notorious team to take its toys and go home is Louisiana State, which got off to a promising start, then faded.

LSU enjoyed wins over NCAA Tournament teams Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Texas A&M this season and a two-point loss to then-No. 1 Oklahoma, but the Tigers lost three straight regular season games in mid-to-late February to fall into the 90s in Ratings Percentage Index and out of the NCAA Tournament running.

Colorado State also decided it was time to put the unis in mothballs.

CSU players had said during the Mountain West tournament that they would like to keep playing, if the opportunity presented itself. [head coach Larry] Eustachy said players and coaches would meet before making any decisions.

“If their heart’s not into it, it’s just a waste of time, and sometimes it becomes embarrassing, and they don’t deserve that,” he said after a practice last week.

Steve Cottingham, CSU’s executive associate athletic director, said through a school spokesman that finances were not a factor in the decision. Bids to host games in the CBI include financial guarantees, and the new Vegas 16, which was reduced to an eight-team field Monday, was planning to charge an entry fee of $50,000 a team in exchange for providing air transportation and lodging for the participants, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Sometimes, the irony is palpable.

At Wisconsin - Milwaukee, another team that had a promising start, the withdrawal from any dance card might be a symptom of deeper troubles.

Like all state schools, UWM has been hit hard by state-mandated budget cuts and [athletic director Amanda] Braun faces tough decisions when it comes to spending money. But program boosters would have covered the costs incurred by participating in a tournament.

"It wasn't about funding," she said. "Middle of the pack, that is not the standard for Milwaukee athletics — not for any of our programs. We're not going to invest money just to say we played more games."

Several players tweeted their frustration at being denied a chance to continue their season. In light of what they went through last year, even one additional game in a "quote-unquote" postseason tournament would have been a reward for their hard work.

Surely, Braun could understand their disappointment?

"I can understand people feeling that way," she said. "Everyone has their own perspective. Everybody wants to play more games. But maybe not every player on the team is interested in that quote-unquote postseason."

If she polled them, she might arrive at a different conclusion.

Perhaps the days of Everybody Has Won and Everybody Must Be Given A Prize are coming to an end.  We will have confirmation when some of these vanity tournaments close shop.

LIBERATING TOLERANCE AT WORK.

In advance of last Friday's scheduled and cancelled appearance by Donald Trump at the University of Illinois - Chicago arena, a number of students, staff, and faculty petitioned the university administration to reconsider providing space for the event.  The petition is a classic illustration of the protest constituencies shifting the blame for their obnoxious behavior from themselves to the presence of potentially obnoxious behavior from others.

We value free speech and the right to assemble and we appreciate the university’s commitment to those constitutionally protected rights, as well as its commitment to exercising no political bias and neither endorsing, sponsoring nor supporting (nor condemning, excluding, or censoring) any political candidate who requests to lease a space on our campus. From the now 40,000+ signatures (growing by the minute) on the petition requesting that the university cancel the event to the 7,000+ people who have RSVP’d via social media to attend a protest against Trump’s positions on a number of issues and the over 13,000 who have expressed interest in protesting, it is clear that our community is poised to engage publicly in vocal opposition to speech we find unacceptable and violent.

Strip away the wordnoise, it becomes "We are prepared to engage in verbal terrorism."  Editor's note:  in the sense sixties protestors used the term.  It's precious, though, how it's the people engaged in vocal opposition who are not creating the hostile or dangerous environment.

The alarm behind the petition, emails and calls you have received extends to more than opposition to political positions or speech acts. We write to turn your attention to the extremely important issue of safety, which you also cite as paramount in your letter to the campus. We are deeply distressed that this event threatens to create a hostile and physically dangerous environment to the students, staff, faculty and alumni who come out to express their opposition.

This at a time that professional protest constituencies such as Move On (The rally has no place in Chicago) and the Comrades of Bernie were organizing to create the kind of hostile and physically dangerous environment to the supporters of Mr Trump.