THE CONRAIL OPTION.

Right Wisconsin honors Obamacare (formally, the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, two lies for the price of one as its Loser of the Day.  "The collapse of Obamacare continues to speed up even faster than many believed."

The premise of the column is that the legislation was supposed to Fix Something.  That might not be the real intent.  "[I]f we view the exchanges as a necessarily messy way to destroy the insurance companies and pave the way for universal Medicaid, all is proceeding as the true believers would have it."  That's the way Power Line's John Hinderaker sees it.

Democrats don’t expect to be punished for inflicting an expensive, failed program on the American people. Instead, they believe they will be rewarded. As Obamacare continues its slow-motion collapse, they will shift to Plan B. “We tried the market-based approach,” they will say, “and it didn’t work. Now there is only one alternative left: single payer health coverage.” At that point, with the government already dominating health care through Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, and with genuinely free and private health care a dwindling remnant of the industry, they think the road to socialized medicine, the holy grail of modern leftism, will be open.

They may well be right. In any event, the Democrats’ confidence in that scenario explains why they don’t care that Obamacare has utterly failed to live up to the promises they made for it, and is widely unpopular with the American people.

The people don't matter. Mrs Clinton has proposed adding a public option to the existing legislation, and her cheerleaders in the academic-media-entertainment complex are pushing for Democrat majorities in the House and the Senate to "get things done."  That public option is the camel, further into the tent.  You saw it here first.  And Robert B. Reich, who was a Bernie Bro until that ended, is on board with doing just that.

It’s not just people with pre-existing conditions who have caused insurers to run for the happy hills of healthy customers. It’s also people with genetic predispositions toward certain illnesses that are expensive to treat, like heart disease and cancer. And people who don’t exercise enough, or have unhealthy habits, or live in unhealthy places.

So health insurers spend lots of time, effort, and money trying to attract people who have high odds of staying healthy (the young and the fit) while doing whatever they can to fend off those who have high odds of getting sick (the older, infirm, and the unfit).

As a result we end up with the most bizarre health-insurance system imaginable: One ever more carefully designed to avoid sick people.

If this weren’t enough to convince rational people to do what most other advanced nations have done and create a single-payer system, consider that America’s giant health insurers are now busily consolidating into ever-larger behemoths. UnitedHealth is already humongous. Aetna, meanwhile, is trying to buy Humana.

Insurers say they’re doing this in order to reap economies of scale, but there’s little evidence that large size generates cost savings.

In reality, they’re becoming very big to get more bargaining leverage over everyone they do business with – hospitals, doctors, employers, the government, and consumers. That way they make even bigger profits.

Mr Reich elides the proximate cause of the insurance death spiral, which is that the new law compels insurance companies to issue, irrespective of condition, which skews the incentives in the direction of only buying coverage after one gets sick; and that skewage is exacerbated by tax penalties lower than the cost of coverage even when one is healthy.

The consolidation of the insurance companies?  That was the logic of the regulated railroads; at least when Penn Central finally came apart, there were relatively few companies to consolidate into Consolidated Rail.  So too with a nationalization of insurance.

But that dig about bargaining leverage?  Oligopsony bad, monopsony good?

Color me skeptical, Mr Reich.

NOT YET READY FOR MARTIN LUTHER?

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen asks, "In which ways is today’s world like the Reformation?"

It might be just another Fourth Turning, or something more dramatic might be taking shape.

Consider his first reason.  "Many of the structures in places are perceived as failing, even though in absolute terms they are not obviously doing worse than previous times."

Perhaps so, although those structures might be running on momentum and tradition.

The elites keep getting the basics wrong.

That leads to his second reason.  "There is a rise in nationalist sentiment and a semi-cosmopolitan ethic is starting to lose influence."

It is a corrupt system, and it stinketh.

The journey might not be fun.  Here is his sixth reason.  (No, the list does not extend to 95 ...)  "The world may nonetheless end up much better off, but the ride to get there will be rocky indeed."

That's the nature of reformations.

Don't expect the Ruling Party to do anything other than those things on which their continued salaries depend.

DOES ANYONE REALLY RUN 400 METERS?

During some breaks in the Steel Mill Modellers gathering, I was watching coverage of the Olympics, er, let's be formal, the Games of the XXI Olympiad, and there were some real track events going on, including the sprints.  That got me to thinking: to fit the 400 meter dash (the successor to the Twenty Chains Sprint) onto a curved track and provide a common finish line, the start lines are different lane-by-lane with the person who drew the inside lane starting somewhere along the end of the stretch and the person on the outside lane up in a curve.  Makes sense.  Then came the overthinking, always a dangerous thing: as the circular constant, π, is transcendental, whilst 400 meters as a straight line distance is a natural number, you have at best an approximation to 400 meters in each lane, and the runner who stays as close as is legal to the inner lane stripe all the way around travels a shorter distance than a runner who would stay closer to the outer lane stripe (which itself might be a speed-enhancing strategy in the outside lanes, think about it.)

Relax.  The margin of error is probably small enough as to not fret about it.  But there is a margin of error, and Dave "Voluntary Xchange" Tufte researched it in the use of timers in swimming.

[I]n swimming there are a lot of ties.

How is it possible that there are ties when we can measure time accurately to 3 to 6 digits?

Here’s why: because in 0.001 seconds a swimmer travels about 2 millimeters, but the construction tolerance for differences in pool lane lengths is plus or minus 30 millimeters (due to expansion and contraction from heat and cold).

FINA (which governs international swimming) recognized 40 years ago that improvements in timekeeping simply is not differentiating swimmers better.

There's a more intriguing recent rule change in swimming.  In the past few Olympics, I've noticed racers coming off the blocks or the turns and making like an eel rather than surfacing and starting to flail immediately.  And there are apparently rules governing the eeling zone (dear reader, if you know the technical terms and the rule references, please advise) that include designating it with different colors on the lane dividers (yet another margin of error?)  And it appears that the eeling zones are different for sprints than they are for the distance races, e.g. the 1500 meters.  Or is it as simple as, at the margin, a small advantage from staying submerged matters more in the shorter races?

ON MY WORKBENCH.

The Midvale Maritime Steel Company's Revere Works will provide a lot of traffic for the model railroad.

Last weekend the Steel Mill Modellers gathered at Merrillville, Indiana.

I brought along reprints describing a different sort of steel mill modelling, in case any industry professionals were about.

There might be a few of the things I learned about modelling steel mills present on my railroad, perhaps in time for the open days during the March Meet.

MILWAUKEE IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

Another hellion with priors boosts a powerful weapon he can't use properly and gets himself killed threatening the police, this time in Milwaukee.  The usual civil disobedience ensues.

[Alderman Khalif] Rainey, who represents the area where the man was shot by the officer and the disturbance occurred, was particularly pointed. He said Sherman Park had become “a powder keg” this summer, and ended his remarks by implying that downtown could be the site of disturbances if the issues facing African-Americans here not addressed.

“This entire community has sat back and witnessed how Milwaukee, Wis., has become the worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country,” Rainey said. “Now this is a warning cry. Where do we go from here? Where do we go as a community from here?

“Do we continue – continue with the inequities, the injustice, the unemployment, the under-education, that creates these byproducts that we see this evening? … The black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their existence. This is their life. This is the life of their children.

“Now what has happened tonight may have not been right; I’m not justifying that. But no one can deny the fact that there’s problems, racial problems, here in Milwaukee, Wis., that have to be closely, not examined, but rectified. Rectify this immediately. Because if you don’t, this vision of downtown, all of that, you’re one day away. You’re one day away.”

No justice, no peace, and all that. Such a splendid way to wrap up the Wisconsin State Fair, also going on "one day away."  Plus more than a few Sherman Park residents dismayed with the "insurrection."  "The good thing is that to get up early in the morning, a Sunday morning, and watch so many people come out to help out, just to help out because it’s the right thing to do — it proves not just to this community, (but) to the city, to the world, that we have more good in this world than we have bad. We just tend to focus on the bad." But the usual policy to-ing and fro-ing goes on.  Thus Kenya Downs for National Public Radio.

Milwaukee is a vibrant city known for its breweries and ethnic festivals and can be a great place to live — unless you're black. Statistically, it is one of the worst places in the country for African-Americans to reside. Here's a breakdown of how — and why — being black in Brew City carries a heavy burden.

Round up the usual suspects: excessive school suspensions, excessive imprisonment, residential segregation.  On the other hand, enabling dysfunction and calling it authenticity doesn't help.  Nor do schools that have a controlling gang.

YOU MEAN TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH WORK?

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg reacts to Amy Schumer's senatorial relative proposing to reduce the tax burden on Olympic medalists.  "Government is the things we all do together taking from net creators and giving to net consumers."

I've often heard advocates of soak-the-rich taxation suggesting that higher marginal tax rates, at the margin, have little effect on the behavior of high achievers, particularly motivated high achievers.

Motivated high achievers, particularly in endeavors that enjoy broad popular support, a category that applies to Olympic sports far more than it does to advanced economics research, strike me as exemplars of a class of people for whom tax breaks matter little.

Reason's Ira Stoll notes that Senator Schumer is making common cause with Grover "drown government in an Olympic Pool" Norquist on this tax break for the medalists.  But there's a less restrictive way of getting the incentives right.  "The politicians would probably be better off just lowering everyone's taxes, rather than picking and choosing a few already lucky Olympic athletes to reward with tax cuts. Good luck getting Sen. Schumer to back that idea, which would really be worth a gold medal."  Quite.

LONG ON INVECTIVE AND LONG ON GIVEAWAYS.

Reason's Nick Gillespie is not impressed with Naggin' Crooked Hillary's version of Let Us Continue.

What are the odds of success for plans that simultaneously punish companies, force new mandates on them, and shovel tax breaks and handouts their way? If the past 15 or so years—rife with just these sorts of mixed, schizophrenic incentives—are any indcation, the answer is: less than zero.

Plus a reminder of who it was that caused the mess in the first place.

It's nice to hear Clinton fret over a "shrinking pie." It would be better still if her plans didn't lead precisely to such an outcome.

Thus as Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes, it's important to keep the House and the Senate from becoming rubber stamps for the Dowager Empress.

Remember the legislative damage done by Democrat supermajorities in just two years following Barack Obama's election?

2009-2011 gave us the failed, trillion-dollar stimulus, the slow-motion trainwreck called ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank's shotgun marriage between Wall Street and Washington, the virtual militarization of the EPA, and so many others.

Perhaps the GOP House and Senate have disappointed you, but they've kept the lid on discretionary spending, and haven't succumbed to the progressive temptation to DO SOMETHING COMPREHENSIVE ABOUT EVERYTHING, like Obama's short-lived Democratic supermajority did.

It is also no accident that there were Democrat majorities in the House and Senate commencing in 2006; the financial crash that came after might have (research opportunity) come with.

A properly gridlocked House and Senate also offer a check on the wilder impulses a President Trump would exhibit.  But watching Naggin' Hillary's eyes bug out whenever she pitches a hissy fit at Congress might be the sole consolation during her presidency.

ADVANTAGE: EVOLUTIONARY STABILITY.

Richard Cocks takes on the social constructivists.  "Evidence that moral thinking is not a 'social construct' can be shown further by pointing to elements of morality that are demonstrated in the animal kingdom."  His example is more about envy than it is about justice, but it's more straightforward to observe that young animals that behave in too unmannerly a way are the ones most likely to be killed and eaten.  Mannerly behavior, including grooming and sharing, confers evolutionary advantage.

So, too, with more complicated conventions.

I have had success in getting students to agree that the Holocaust was immoral, that female genital mutilation is immoral, that slavery in other cultures is immoral. Some students express the concern that for changing their beliefs in these ways, they will be judged racist and immoral by their contemporaries. But that is a risk that all moral realists must face.

Yes, in the same way that the use of evolutionary stable strategies confers evolutionary advantage on adopters, the non-use leads to outsiders and Othering.

WHAT A DEEP BENCH LOOKS LIKE.

The first week of Olympic competition is done, and U. S. swimmers have been acquitting themselves well.  The civil rights community even has a new stanza of We Shall Overcome to sing.

[O]ur parents likely never learned to swim because the community pools were legally or illegally designated "Whites Only," or that the one decrepit community pool in their black neighborhood was a cesspool best to be avoided.

Well done, Simone Manuel.

But I kept wondering, as the medals kept coming, what had happened to one of the Rising Stars from London's Games?

A breakout star at the London Olympics with four gold medals and an ever-present smile, [Missy] Franklin’s good humor remained at these Games, but her performance in the pool wasn’t the same.

She won a gold medal for swimming in the preliminary heat for the 800-meter freestyle relay, but was dropped from the team for the final and faded in the semifinals of both her individual events.

In the 200 backstroke, Franklin’s signature event, her semifinal time was about six seconds slower than the world record she set in 2012.

Sporting News pundit Adi Joseph offers perspective.

[Gymnast Gabby] Douglas and Franklin are adults now, which means we’re allowed to be meaner to them or something. They have been outshone by younger American women (19-year-olds [Simone] Biles and Katie Ledecky) in their arenas. The easy reaction is to wonder what happened, why Franklin hasn’t set a personal best since 2013 and why Douglas was beaten out not only by Biles, but also by countrywoman Aly Raisman, whom she edged in the 2012 all-around competition.

Did we mention that Douglas and Franklin both have gold medals already in Rio?

He continues with a reminder that past performance is not a guarantee of future results, particularly if past performance inspires rivals and new entrants, such as this year's swimming phenomenon, Katie Ledecky.

Douglas and Franklin were so young in 2012 that they were simply expected to win even bigger, get even better for 2016. Never mind that Douglas was the silver medalist at the 2015 world championships (behind Biles) and is either the second- or third-best gymnast in the world, depending on the day. No one was paying attention to that or to Franklin’s stunning 2013 world championships performance in Barcelona, when she won six gold medals including adding a 200m freestyle crown.

But let's compare and contrast the emergence of new stars in the Olympic sports with, OK, I'll start with the worst case scenario, the complete failure of the Republican deep bench in the primaries and the complete absence of a Democrat bench, system rigged for Naggin' Crooked Hillary or not?

Is it as simple as, in many of the sports, there are objective and transparent standards of excellence? Faster!  Higher! Stronger!  And with absence of Soviet judge, carrying off a round-off-multiple-flip-Lomcevak-and-stick-the-landing gets properly rewarded.  Whilst in business, or academic research, or politics, the criteria for standing out are messy?

Or, might something calling for all the subtleties and intellectual ammunition of social science to understand be present?  Something like a popular culture in which achievers in sport are lauded and catered to from a young age; in which school districts appropriate large sums of money and conduct bond referenda for ever better locker rooms?

A popular culture that also frets about income inequality, particularly if it's earned in commerce or the trades?  Now comes Naggin' Crooked Hillary using Bernie Sanders's line about making corporations and millionaires pay their fair share of taxes (whatever that means) and Fauxahontas guilt-tripping achievers for claiming credit whilst not acknowledging the government schools and infrastructure and what have you.  Valid points ... and yet, the coach gets a hug or a handshake, and the team doctor languishes in obscurity, whilst the medalists alone sing along to The Star Spangled Banner.

A popular culture in which the resources go into special education and accommodation whilst the gifted students have to make do as best they can?  And press coverage of college signing days almost always focuses on the youngsters signing the athletic letters of intent.  Partial softball scholarship at Anonymous Community!  Golf scholarship at Barely Normal!  And yes, the basketball signing at Wisconsin.  Going into politics?  What a nerd.  (Until you see the class clown give it a go.)

What we don't reward we get less of.

But we don't notice it until the political class fails, and the business wizards can't make payroll, and the pipes no longer hold water.

On the other hand, we can enjoy the decline, following the next crop of rising Olympians.

DEAR ESTABLISHMENT: STUFF IT!

Kurt Schlichter, this morning.  "Dean Wormer? Come on – he’s a college administrator. He’s with her."  Cathartic.

Hillary? She’s the sorority mean girl, a frosty, neurotic, mid-western over-achiever whose freaky daddy issues compelled her to marry a guy who treated her with the same contempt as Pops. She’s the a bitter, striving, hard-four Mandy Pepperidge who hooked up with a cleaned-up Bluto because she knew he was going places, but then finally broke him and forced him to become a vegan.

Bill Clinton absolutely understood the outsiders back in his prime, but Hillary would, thankfully, never be caught dead at a toga party. Such frivolity offers nothing that she could use in her quest for whatever objective she thinks will finally fill the void in her blighted soul.

What's at stake?

Wormer and the Omegas don’t just hate the Deltas for their outrageous behavior; they hate the Deltas because the Deltas are a threat to their unearned position. The Deltas commit the unforgivable crime of refusing to acknowledge the snobs’ divine right to rule them. They defy their betters.

Will that be enough? Here's V. D. Hanson, on the elements of the neoconservative establishment throwing in with Hillary (a development that is driving some of the Bernie brigades nuts, but I digress.)

Clinton versus Trump is a war of NPR, CBS and the New York Times against the National Enquirer, conservative talk radio and the Drudge Report. Clinton supporters such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, onetime Bush officials Hank Paulson and Brent Scowcroft, and billionaire Meg Whitman certainly have nothing in common with Republican Trump supporters such as Mike Huckabee and Rush Limbaugh.

Culture, not just politics, is rapidly destroying -- but also rebuilding -- traditional political parties.

We shall see. But lost among the to-ing-and-fro-ing about electronic mails getting Iranians hanged and Second Amendment voters turning out is this fracture in the Democrat coalition.

At its annual meeting last month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came out against new privately-managed charter schools—even though said schools are one of the best tools for providing poor black kids with quality education.

But where is Mr Trump, or anyone else, pointing out that the government school lobby is at least as responsible as Common Core or the Department of Education for rendering urban youth unemployable, no matter what the minimum wage is?

Meanwhile, Acculturated's Mark Judge suggests, the fractiousness is itself of the elite's making.

We’ve witnessed the a slow and steady debasement of our politics and popular culture—see, for example, those “man on the street” interviews where Americans can’t name who won the Revolutionary War. Enter the unelected bureaucrats who appoint themselves to steer the ship; in other words, we’re liberals and we’re here to help. Inspired by the idea that to be against them is to be “on the wrong wide of history,” both communism and contemporary liberalism demand absolute submission to the progressive plan.

Yeah, but that plan isn't working out so well. Unfortunately, the debasement that gives Jesse Watters or, back in the day, Jay Leno, material, is the same debasement that precludes a rational removal of the Wise Experts who midwived the mess.

Three more months to run.

THE CASE FOR CLOSE READING.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan uses another blunt Donald Trump comment to offer a way of reading William E. Stafford's "A Ritual to Read to Each Other."

Cruelty, the root of cruelty, says the poet, is willful blindness to the vulnerability and complexity of the human beings around you. It’s the decision to shrug off the moral imperative to be careful what you do and say with vulnerable and complex people:

Two roads diverged in the wood.

One way leads bourgeois convention.

The other way leads political correctness, in which exaggerated carefulness is for the virtue-signallers and vulnerability is for the oppressed only, and normal people are less worthy, because of privilege or whatever, of respect.

Sometimes, as with T. S. Eliot, you just have to mock the virtue-signallers.

Why do we have the conventions?

We know intimately, deeply, historically, how it feels to be the object of someone else’s cruelty. That feeling never goes away.

(We have all inflicted cruelty too, and, if we are decent people, our recognition of our capacity to be cruel in the way of Donald Trump provokes things like shame, apology, and reflection on why we behaved that way.)

Deconstruct that at your peril.

THE TRADE-OFFS OF SNOB ZONING.

In Marietta, Georgia, a complex that used to be starter apartments, back when real incomes were lower and real housing prices higher, has turned into cheap rentals.  Thus, the Wise Experts have it removed, to the dismay of City Commentary's Joe Cortright.

Along the way, the economic and and racial makeup of the apartments transformed from nearly 90 percent white in 1980, with a poverty rate around five percent, to 20 percent white in 2010, with a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent.

Despite the usefulness of filtering, which increased the diversity of suburban Marietta, the city perceived these units as growing concentrations of poverty and, thus, a problem. So it used the proceeds of a voter-approved bond measure to purchase and begin demolishing the housing complexes. It’s worth noting that no one ever claimed that the buildings themselves were a problem, despite their age. Rather, it had everything to do with the demographics of their occupants.

In Mr Cortright's narrative, it's more class snobbery at work.

In any large city—say New York, Los Angeles or Washington—the wholesale demolition of affordable housing to provide discounted land for new businesses would undoubtedly be treated as the most pernicious form of gentrification. But because it happens in a suburb, somehow it doesn’t count, or at least isn’t objectionable.

Perhaps this reflects a deeply ingrained but seldom-voiced bias in our views about place: Suburbs are for rich, mostly white people. Cities are for poorer people and people of color. Anything change that runs counter to this worldview (like gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood, or efforts to build affordable apartments in suburbs like Marin County) is an affront to the order of things. The apparent prevalence of this outlook shows just how hard it will be to make progress on economic integration.

Gentrification, we have noted previously, is emergent and complex and not amenable to interventions by Wise Experts let alone by boutique multiculturalists.  And perhaps the willingness of this suburb to rid itself of potential Section 8 housing is the predictable fruit of fifty years of do-your-own-thing and situational ethics and the bad habits of poor people being excused as "their culture" or "a response to conditions" or the most pernicious of all, "authenticity."  Thus, there are people behaving badly, irrespective of race, color, national origin.

In a world in which "why are they allowed" becomes just another ratchet downward, what else would you have the remnant do?

There is one bit of good news, though.  The apartment complex will be redeveloped as corporate welfare for a professional soccer team.  The team will pay $1 a year "for the first ten years of a thirty year lease."

What's the over-under on Atlanta United holding up another community for an improved practice field in 2027?

LIFE OUTSIDE THE COLLEGE BUBBLE.

It's not all climbing walls and culturally appropriative food.  Campus food pantry reopens in fall.

The Huskies Student Food Pantry opened in March 2014 in Grace Place Campus Ministry, 401 Normal Road, when Zuidema saw there was a need on campus for student food security. After the first year of operating two times a month, 700 students were served, according to a March 2015 NIU Today article.

There are so many students making use of the pantry now, that it outgrew the space at Grace.

That's why it matters for faculty and administrators at Northern Illinois, and its counterparts around the state and the country, to understand that they are in the same business as the Ivies and the flagships.  Many of their students are striving in difficult conditions, and ought not be left with high debts and little new human capital.

ILLINOIS IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

George Will sees more futility in Springfield than at Wrigley Field.  (Historical reference: the media's senior Tory admitted developing his contrarian streak by way of liking American Flyer trains and the Chicago Cubs as we've generally known them.)

At last count, $7.6 billion was owed to many of the state’s vendors. But the law in its majesty requires that the state’s legislators — those who write the laws — get paid under any circumstances. This removes perhaps the most important potential pressure for compromise. If schools were unable to open this month, parents with pitchforks would march on Springfield, so a quasi-budget was cobbled together to keep government semi-funded for six months.

The state's budget is currently about $6bn in deficit; that's about the magnitude of the float the vendors are carrying.  (And the palace-guard media trashes Donald J. Trump for stiffing creditors.)

That's another reason for state and national governments to modify their income accounts to include both annual statements of receipts and expenses, and a balance sheet.  Perhaps, then somebody would be willing to finance an equipment trust for new coaching stock for Metra.  That, however, requires the legislature and the governor to agree on a capital budget.

Nationally, neither party is eager to talk about the rickety structure of the entitlement state, although the Democratic platform promises to make matters worse. Although scheduled Social Security benefits vastly exceed the value of worker and employer contributions plus interest, the platform, a case study in reactionary liberalism, opposes even raising the retirement age.

Among other things. Makes one wonder what the term "conservative" even means.

THE QUINTESSENCE OF PRICE THEORY.

With the back to school sales in full frenzy, and the State Line county fair season winding down, despite the heat, it is time to contemplate the fundamental economic problem, as captured by Armen Alchian and William Allen in University Economics, and cited at Cafe Hayek.

Two villains – nature and other people – prevent us from having all we want.  Nature is niggardly: it provides fewer resources than we could use, and much of what is available is made useful only by hard work.  As for other people, the problem stems not from malevolence: their wants and ours simple exceed what is available.  Do not suppose that if they were less greedy, more would be within our grasp.  Greed impels them to produce more, not only for themselves, but, miraculously, more for us, too – provided that productivity-inducing arrangements exist.

Develop your intuition, emerging economists.  Master the fundamentals, and the bordered Hessians and equilibrium refinements will take care of themselves.

THE REGRESSIVE TRANSFER DOESN'T COMPLETELY GO AWAY.

In political economy, it is necessary to contemplate the ultimate, as well as the immediate, consequences of a policy action.

Last week, we noted an immediate consequence.  Because many high-income students are paying list price at the state flagship universities, rather than the Ivies' prices, even with financial aid, the flagships are able to offer tuition breaks to students less well-endowed.

But it's what the matriculant does as a graduate that offers the ultimate consequence.  Here, tuition breaks for all might still be helping people who would otherwise be well-off stay well off.

For people who grew up in families with income below 185 percent of the poverty line, the college wage premium—the additional lifetime earnings from a college degree—is 71 percent. For those earning above that threshold, the premium is much larger—136 percent. As the authors write, “The average college graduate from a low-income family earns as much at career peak as the average college graduate from a higher-income family at career beginning.”

Put pithily, there is a smaller "bachelor's bump" in earnings for the poorer kids.

Plus, as is always the case with research, there are unanswered questions.

[Upjohn Institute researchers Brad] Hershbein and [Timothy] Bartik plan to further dive into the data more in the months ahead to determine why this gap exists, but they have a few theories, including that network effects, which are typically stronger for people from middle class or high-income families, play a larger role in life outcomes than previously imagined. A college degree is not enough for people from low-income families to make up for that advantage in connections. Further exacerbating this trend could be that people from middle class or high-income families often go to elite universities that offer access to high-paying careers, which may be unavailable for college grads from less prestigious schools.

None of this means that the individual decision to go to college is a bad idea. On the contrary, the college wage premium is significant, even for people from low-income households. But it does mean that college isn’t the solution to rising inequality.

That finding doesn’t just push back on [failed presidential aspirant Bernie] Sanders’ free college plan. It pushes back on much of the public policy world which has held for years, on the right, left and center, that education is a key to reducing income inequality.

Your neighborhood probably matters, yes.  Standards at the "less prestigious" schools might fail to equip matriculants with the proper human capital, yes.

At the same time, the youngsters with the bourgeois upbringing might go along with the boutique multiculturalists whilst at university, yet reclaim those conventions as adults.  They'll prosper, and the cult of authenticity will claim the hindmost.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

At Minding the Campus, John Leo re-posts a speech he made early in 2001, wherein he documented the rot setting in early in the Nineties.  "This was 1990. It proved for the first time that a small number of agitators could make the president of a university grovel and impose identity politics, and it’s become a pattern in the culture, at least the campus division."  It hasn't gotten any better since.

We are in the heyday of censorship. The PC culture says: We are right; our opponents are wrong. Why should we let them speak? Oppressors should have no rights, anyway. This is our college, these people are backward, so let’s just get rid of them. So there is no give and take in argument or debate. The PC job isn’t education. It’s simply to root out villains.

Today the compassion fascists call it "no-platforming." But the push-back gets stronger, and there is, today, a vigorous culture of mocking and scorning the Perpetually Aggrieved.

TAKE YOUR EXPERTISE AND CATCH THE NEXT TRAIN OUT OF TOWN.

"Rebellion is stirring in the West, and maybe that's not a bad thing," according to The American Interest's Andrew A. Michta.

The experience of open borders, mass migration, and top-down regulation has undercut the people’s sense of their own sovereignty in Western societies, leaving many to grapple not only with economic hardship but also, and perhaps even more importantly, with a growing sense of cultural marginalization in their own states. The backlash against immigration has been the key driver of the revolt. This backlash, however, is less against the principle as such; the West has been historically welcoming of immigrants. Rather, opposition has swelled against the speed and manner in which immigrants are brought into the national culture, as well as the official policies that exert little pressure on new arrivals to acculturate. Multiculturalism, with its anti-Western bent, in combination with the ascendency of the liberal left across national media and in culture debates, has convinced more and more people that their communities are being transformed with minimal elite concern for their aspirations and priorities.

Did those geniuses really think they could forever intimidate regular folk with a lot of wordnoise to make it sound like every sort of aberrant behavior was something to be affirmed, when the corrosive presence of excessive authenticity and jarring transgressiveness was everywhere in plain sight?  Mr Michta, writing in a journal dealing with international relations, understandably focuses on the geopolitics, and yet something simpler is at work.

And yet there has been precious little introspection on the part of the intelligentsia on either side of the Atlantic as to what policies and factors of the past three decades have generated this surge of popular anger. The visceral response of our academic and professional classes to this rising tide of popular resistance in Europe and America has been initially to dismiss it as either another familiar populist spasm mixed with the fallout from the 2008 recession or as the inevitable aftershock of our transition to a post-industrial West. It has been called a manifestation of anger from those who lack the skills to adapt to a new economy—sore losers, unwilling or unable to retrain for new jobs, and therefore apt to fall through the cracks in the floor of our global edifice, which is otherwise seen as continuing to support unprecedented prosperity. This of course leaves aside the question of how one transforms a 55-year-old laid off automobile worker into a computer programmer, but such objections rarely figure prominently in academic debates on globalization.

The nationalist rebellions that are stirring across the West have thus far generated almost uniform elite condemnation on the grounds that such movements and the parties they have spawned are fed and driven by prejudice and intolerance, racism, discrimination, and—to quote one university discussion—a “desperate attempt to preserve white privilege.” And yet the vision of a globalized post-Westphalian, postmodern, and ultimately post-national future, which only a decade ago seemed well on its way to dominating political discourse as the new consensus in classrooms and boardrooms, is today shaky at best.

The people who play by the rules get dismissed as rubes or racists or bitter clingers, while the fashionably authentic or avant-garde or just plain ill-behaved get to behave badly.

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

Here's Mr Michta, proposing the corrective.

However, thus far the narrative of this surge of public anger aimed at Western elites has been confined to the simple, safe, and ultimately maddeningly imprecise concept of “populism,” with its implicitly negative connotation. After all, populists are by definition unsophisticated rubes who pitch the public simplistic solutions to the increasingly inscrutable complexities of the modern world. But this dismissal does nothing to help us understand what these movements are about. Were it all that simple, we could double down on the narrative of the forces of enlightened progress under assault by those of retrograde parochialism, and in this modern tale of cosmopolitanism betrayed by nativism keep on shaking our heads at the lack of judgement that surprisingly ever larger segments of the general public across Europe and the United States are displaying.

The reality is quite different. The West is experiencing a nationalist awakening of a magnitude not seen in decades because the policies of those decades have run their course and are no longer accepted. It is time we stopped and took it seriously, instead of dismissing it out of hand as an aberration defying explanation and unworthy of consideration. Like all incipient movements, this new nationalist awakening has its low points, and its spokesmen and spokeswomen can be clumsy, clownish, and downright rude; however, the public sentiment behind it deserves a hearing not because we like it or dislike it, but because it is reshaping our societies. And most of all, the latter-day peasants have shown that they will not stand for being ignored.

Let's try something simpler. The current day elites messed up.  Thus Michael Barone.

The common thread [among the British EU referendum and the national-populist strains of electoral politics, and the financial collapse] is the dysfunction of political, economic, media and academic elites. They persist in the belief that they understand what is best for ordinary people better than those people do themselves. In their persistence one sees complacency about actual results. Ordinary voters seem to be responding as Queen Elizabeth II reportedly did when, just after the 2008 financial meltdown, she asked a group of experts, "How come nobody could foresee it?"

Perhaps, as Mr Barone suggests, because the Wise Experts got it right. Until they stopped getting it right. Oops.

Thus we find ourselves in the strange situation, as Salon's Andrew O'Hehir notes, where the so-called progressive political party becomes the conservative party.

They were normal. They were pleasant. They were Democrats.

That was the idea, of course. Faced with an opposition party that has visibly gone insane and turned itself into a Gathering of the Juggalos, nominating not just the stupidest and least qualified candidate in political history but pretty nearly the worst person of all time, the Democrats have doubled down on normal. They have defeated or absorbed the defiantly non-normal left-wing opposition, at least for the moment, and driven the renegades out of the tent. Now they are ready to stand together, in nice pants, and save whatever can be saved of the American republic. They have built the last fortress of what Jeb Bush plaintively described last winter as “regular-order democracy,” a Minas Tirith of whole-grain wholesomeness, standing alone against the Dark Lord.

If Hillary Clinton herself has spent too long in the enclaves of power and privilege to qualify as fully normal, she remains normal-ish, a convincing simulacrum of the normal person she used to be. Clinton is not an orator in the Barack Obama class or a master showman like Donald Trump, but her speech on Thursday was well-crafted and well-modulated. She used the gendered perception that she is shrill or harsh or unlikable to her advantage, presenting herself as the unflappable adult administrator — the high school principal, writ large — prepared to make tough decisions while other people yell and lose their minds.

As the onslaught of Dad jokes on Twitter established, a person cannot be more egregiously normal than Tim Kaine, who seems deeply torn at every moment between a desire to take the Cub Scouts camping and a desire to take his wife to brunch. (At someplace, y’know, nice.)  Kaine’s primary role on the ticket is to soften and humanize it and lend it a snuggly fleece lining on cool fall evenings, which at the very least is a new role for a male politician to play. I don’t think the full historical force of the moment hit me until I saw Clinton and Kaine on stage together, clasping hands as running mates, and realized that the shorter one in the white pantsuit was at the top of the ticket.

I saw that same speech, and that same closing scene, and my reaction was "the harridan and the beta." Maybe that's going to be our new normal.  But Mr O'Hehir appears to be clinging to the old version of normal after all.

But I have questions about what normal means in 2016, and whether there is any such thing. There’s also the question of whether normal will work as an electoral strategy against the nuttiest political amalgamation of recent history, a Republican Party that has sold itself to a billionaire con man, emptied itself of its so-called core principles and imbibed massive doses of Alex Jones-style paranoia and conspiracy theory.

This is an obvious and unoriginal insight, but looking around me at the crowd of normals streaming toward the SEPTA station, I reflected that they (or, however reluctantly, we) do not know the Trump electorate, cannot understand what they believe or what they want, and have no effective way to communicate with them. While the assumption that “nice and normal” will outnumber and outvote “crazy and delusional” sounds reasonable to me — setting aside any interrogation of those terms for the moment — how the hell would I actually know? Ask Jeb Bush how his “regular-order democracy” is going. Ask David Cameron. Are “we” just playing the role of Charlie Brown, convincing ourselves that this time the collective Lucy of the disgruntled electorate won’t yank the ball away?

Put another way, we have the palace guard media preemptively framing a Trump victory as yet another temper tantrum by the people it's OK to sneer at.

INSTITUTIONS ARE CIVILIZATION.

Intersectionality "theorists" are nuts.  "Present-day feminism has gone completely off the rails," argues Pajamas Media's Tom Knighton.  Wouldn't we have to call his metaphor sexist, too, as without fire and alphabets and mathematics, there wouldn't be any rails for real trains or stupid arguments to go off of?  Specifically.

I know plenty of women who prefer civilization to the uncomfortable and dangerous life of prehistory. Women dying at the ripe old age of "in childbirth"? Men being ripped apart by wild beasts as they battle to put sustenance on the rock that serves as their "table"? That may sound like utopia to the New York Times and Leonard Shlain, but let's see if they follow through and really live like that.

More importantly, how many feminists want to live like that?

Or, as Milton Friedman once had it, often the critics of the way things were would take the good things for granted and lay off all the ills on The System.

Perhaps the best response to people who gripe about the origins of fire, or the alphabet, or any other evolutionary stable strategy, is "check your privilege."

NO SCREWING AROUND ON THE PERMANENT WAY.

The railroad track is no place to play.

Even if you're homeless and forced to have relations in public, a railroad track would seem to present a host of problems, not the least of which would be with comfort. I have never been to Siberia, but from what I've heard wilderness space really isn't difficult to find.

I don't know which section of Siberian track is involved here, but there must be a Russian version of "Expect movements of trains on any track, at any time, in either direction."

I sincerely hope this made an impact on those of you who had drunk train track sex plans for the upcoming weekend. If you need pointers on train and track safety, L.A. Metro recently released these helpful videos about avoiding dismemberment.

Kindly be governed accordingly.

DRESS FOR SUCCESS.

It's time for the students to return to school, which means it's time for the conscience-cowboys to make it more difficult for the schools to inculcate the values of the middle class in the students who could benefit most by it.

Last year, visiting a local high school in a majority black working class community in Georgia, I confronted a poster posted all over the school. The poster, titled “The Dress Code,” included figures of two young adolescents; a black male wearing baggy jeans, bandana, tank top with a beer logo on front and a white female wearing short shorts, halter top with spaghetti straps and a hat. The poster was meant to visually portray the inappropriateness of hip hop clothing, revealing too much skin and working class attire at school.

In the picture, representation of working-class masculinity and femininity was vivid, which was, of course, entangled with race as well. It conveyed a message to working class as well as black students (and faculty and staff) that it aims to exclude their culture from the school environment. It also emphasized what is valued as modesty in the South. Knowing that clothing is a socio-cultural construct and potentially represents ethnicity, class, sexuality, and many other things, posting this picture simply means that white middle-class clothing and culture is privileged over working class and black ones.

Idiot. What the author refers to as privilege is simply an evolutionary stable strategy. People who do not want to be perceived as thugs or tramps don't present as thugs or tramps.  That's not how the conscience-cowboy sees it.

In a community in which the majority is African-American and from a lower socio-economic status, this implicitly teaches students their culture is disruptive for their education and academic success. However, all individuals should receive an equal respect and all cultures should be valued equally in a public institution. How could we call for diversity and multiculturalism, and yet tell students to leave their cultural knapsack at the door?

If you want to see the fruits of that sort of multiculturalism, just look at that community, and compare the quality of life there with communities that adhere to bourgeois norms.

Will Rierson of Campus Reform interviews the conscience-cowboy, who stands by his position, getting off this howler.“We need to acknowledge diversity. We need to realize that other peoples’ cultures are different. The key is multiculturalism and acknowledging that diversity. Not everyone needs to act white; not everyone needs to act middle class.”  Good luck with that.  Perhaps in two thousand years we got a few things right.  Here's Pamela Constable, apparently an aging ex-hippie, recognizing that deconstructing convention didn't turn out so well.

Still, it was only after witnessing the desperation and cruelty of life in much of the world that I began to reexamine my prejudices against the cloister I had fled. In some countries, I saw how powerful forces could keep people trapped in poverty for life; in others, how neighbors could slaughter each other in spasms of hate. I met child brides and torture victims, religious fanatics and armed rebels. I explored societies shattered by civil war, upended by revolution, and strangled by taboo and tradition.

Visiting home between assignments, I found myself noticing and appreciating things I had always taken for granted — the tamed greenery and smooth streets, the absence of fear and abundance of choice, the code of good manners and civilized discussion. I also began to learn things about my parents I had never known and to realize that I had judged them unfairly. I had confused their social discomfort with condescension and their conservatism with callousness.

By all means read and understand her full essay.

Perhaps the code of good manners and civilized discussion are among the things that in two thousand years we got right, and there are taboo and tradition that ought not be celebrated: indeed, that ought be understood as habits that keep their adherents poor and alienate other people from dealing with them.  I laid down my marker in favor of power ties and dressing for success long ago.

Today's young people, particularly those insufficiently conversant with the ways of the middle class, deserve no less.

ADAM SMITH GOES TO THE FAIR.

I doubt that the concept of a cream puff occurred to him.  But the way in which its manufacture is carried on, not only is the whole work a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches.

To prepare the shells is a separate trade.  Then a worker, or a team of workers, cuts the shells.

A second team prepares the shells to receive the filling; to prepare and apply the filling requires two or three distinct operations (and the cream must be procured from the dairy); another applies the top; to sprinkle on the powdered sugar is a peculiar business.

It is even a trade in itself to put them into boxes or onto plates, and the important business of making a cream puff is divided into distinct operations performed by several dozen hands, although at a county fair a smaller team will perform two or three of the operations.

At the Wisconsin State Fair, the cream puff production line is in operation only for the eleven days of the fair.  Lines appear long, but the wait is short, and the product generally no more than ten minutes old at purchase.

THE BEST THING FOR THE WISE EXPERTS TO DO IS TO GO AWAY.

You'd expect that from Reason's Matt Welch.

While it's folly to expect too much introspection at a political convention, what's striking is that almost never do you hear about whether a program is actually working. Cost-benefit analyses are not required. It is enough to say, "There is a victim class or predatory corporate class, and we either gave them money or restricted their latitude." Good intentions are what matter, not performance.

Here's an elaboration by Curtis Kalin, this time for Town Hall.  Again, not unexpected.

Defenders of bygone bureaucracies claim that without the benevolent hand of government, Americans would be left “on their own,” abandoned, and bereft of aid or quality services. These assumptions stand on weak ground in the face of free market innovations like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. These services prove that Americans are willing, if not eager to share with each other without the compulsion of a government bureaucrat.

Big-government lawmakers underestimate Americans’ propensity to create new and innovative pursuits, particularly those that provide a necessary service to others. It is time for lawmakers across the country to allow the sharing economy to flourish and leave bygone bureaucracies back in the twentieth century.

The ride- and room-sharing services might be covered under the "clothed with a public interest" rubric, and yet the existing car-for-hire operators (taxicab, primarily) and hoteliers have generated some rents as a consequence of Regulation in the Public Interest.

But then comes Stephen Kinzer, long of the palace guard media, begging to be mugged by reality.

American elites are hardly the only ones who have cynically misled their people. The same happened in Europe. “Ever closer union” was another product of the dopey optimism that infected the West in the 1990s. It ignored the evident fact that most Europeans, like most people everywhere, feel loyalty to their own nation or group, and that this loyalty is not easily transferrable to diffuse and distant conglomerations. The EU has been run largely for the benefit of the business class. Ordinary Europeans have come to realize this, and it has angered them. The same anger is enveloping countries from Egypt and Nigeria to Brazil and Venezuela.

In our complex modern age, the interdependent world does not run smoothly by itself. It requires farsighted leadership that takes the fate of ordinary people seriously and favors diplomacy over coercive force. Blaming the masses for stupidly supporting demagogic politicians is mistaken. People quite reasonably resent what their leaders have done to them over the last quarter century. They demand something different, whatever it is. That is the central cause of the new world disorder.

No, Mr Kinzer, an interdependent world cannot be run smoothly by farsighted leadership.  Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please, and it's the application of Expertise, whether by an intellectual elite in a remote capital or by smart guys with algorithms at the trading houses, that midwived the disorder.  But it's rare for a ruling class to recognize that the best thing for it to do is to rule less.

PAIRED STREETS ARE DUBIOUS TOOLS TO EXPEDITE TRAFFIC FLOW.

Strong Towns's Rachel Quednau explains the ways in which treating Prospect Avenue, one-way northbound, and Farwell Avenue, one-way southbound offers none of the benefits of a quasi-expressway and makes Milwaukee's Fashionable East Side (this street pairing being the principal driving route between downtown and the University of Wisconsin's Milwaukee campus) less fashionable and less safe.

My neighborhood is a place to go to, not a place to drive through. The city owes it to me, my neighbors (this is the most densely populated zip code in Milwaukee, so I have a lot of them) and the hundreds of thousands of people who come to this neighborhood every year to enjoy all that it has to offer, to make this a safer, more productive and easier to navigate area. All it would take to turn these streets into two-ways is repositioning signage, painting new lines and perhaps some minor adjustments to traffic flow at a few intersections.

This is a home and a destination, not a place to pass through quickly on your way to somewhere else. The streets should be designed to reflect that.

All the one-way streets in the neighborhood also make getting somewhere legally on a bicycle (if one really wants to risk mingling with the road warriors zipping along on Prospect or Farwell) more of a chore than it has to be. It's not quite "I wouldn't start here if I were you" but it's close.  Want to pick up a prescription or a pizza.  Go the great way around.  "That should’ve been a 3 minute stop. Because of one-way streets, it is closer to a 15 minute stop."

Remind me again, why do so many people still put their faith in Wise Experts?

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE METRA ELECTRIC?

There's a lengthy essay in South Side Weekly about the former Illinois Central suburban train operation.  Most of the content elaborates on an observation about the way Metra conceives of the line.

The more complicated, broader one is that starting in the 1970s, and coincidental with greater public sector involvement in running the line, it was re-envisioned and transformed from a real rapid transit line to a “commuter” rail line.

And where there was once frequent operation all day, it became very specialized and focused on transporting suburban commuters on a nine-to-five schedule.

It always was a commuter operation, but the geniuses who managed Metra misapprehended the way in which the trunk line could best be used.

In 1946, the main line had service every 40 minutes all day, plus additional peak service. In the ‘70s that increased to every 30 minutes all day, but since 1982 it’s been cut back to once an hour.

Perhaps reduced frequencies are a rational response, with Chicago's city center becoming more of a financial district, and less of an all-hours destination.  But the way in which the Metra managers scheduled trains to each of the several branches destroyed much of the utility of the line.

It might make sense operationally for off-peak trains on [other Metra routes such as the Union Pacific's three lines or Milwaukee District's two] to all leave at about the bottom of the hour, because a rider can remember to be to [the station] by half-past and make the train, and the lines split immediately beyond the station. It makes less sense on the Electric, where the first branch occurs near the Museum of Science and Industry. Passengers headed to or from McCormick Place, the University of Chicago, or the Museum have a choice of three trains within a few minutes or a wait of the better part of an hour. Dumb idea.

It's in the adaptation of the same sort of memory-pattern schedules present on Union Pacific or Milwaukee District lines that the Electric uses some of its value.  It's not solely about bestowing favors on suburban riders.

Metra Electric is the only example in the country of a mainline rail line that was once run as rapid transit, and has since been reduced to commuter rail. Bringing back frequent service is restoring past glory, not doing something new—and that’s what I think the political messaging should be. Metra Electric is special, and it doesn’t fit into the paradigm that RTA and Metra have tried to fit it into for the last thirty-five years.

It doesn't, but restoring more useful frequencies on the main line isn't as difficult as it looks.

NOT IF WE CAN HELP IT.

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson is less than impressed with the "first woman" dimension of Mrs Clinton's candidacy.  Better still, he's less than impressed with the presidential cult, no matter what sort of firsts we can ascribe to a holder of the office.

Presidents are not as important as we think they are, and not half as important as they think they are. America’s black leadership and its would-be black leadership are in the midst of a political convulsion that has thrown up a great deal of asininity and irresponsibility in the form of Black Lives Matters and allied movements, but that doesn’t have much to do with the complexion of the president. It has more to do with the fact that large-scale immigration and the new social prominence of Hispanic and homosexual interest groups is eroding African-Americans’ historical position as the living barometer of American liberalism. For centuries, the racial conversation in the United States was black and white, notwithstanding the occasional atrocity against the Indians or a Chinese Exclusion Act or three. Now that conversation is something else, and this is a source of anxiety for black leaders who do not wish to see their role in the nation’s affairs reduced to that of a Choctaw chief with no casino.

Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will have a similarly negligible effect on the lives of American women. It isn’t exactly a Muppet News Flash that women can run for high office in these United States: You can be Sarah Palin and be on a major-party ticket and be called a “c**t” by all the nice people who will be urging you to vote for Mrs. Clinton as a show of solidarity with women.

But it's the Right Sort of Virtue Signalling.  Put another way, showing support for Mrs Clinton takes the place of making the proper obeisances to all the saints as the Pope raises money for a new St. Peter's.

RETHINKING REGRESSIVE TRANSFERS.

I have long subscribed to the view that there's an element of regressive transfer in state subsidies to universities, particularly the flagship campuses.  Perhaps, though, as stingy legislatures give admissions offices reasons to chase out-of-state students who pay full freight, the regressive element diminishes.  Two researchers, writing under the imprimatur of Brookings, offer confirmation.  The regressive element, ceteris paribus, ought emerge at the state flagship universities.

The basic argument [American Enterprise's Jason] Delisle and [New America's Kim] Dancy sought to test starts with the idea that states shell out larger appropriations to their top public universities than they do to their less competitive institutions that enroll higher levels of low-income students. Those universities in turn enroll more students from high-income families, and they spend more per student. At the same time, less selective schools draw a higher percentage of their students from lower-income backgrounds while receiving less in appropriations and spending less per student.

The value proposition the flagships have offered out-of-state students, a price break compared to the Ivies, appears to be working to the benefit of lower-income, in-state students.

High-income students are much more likely to attend out-of-state institutions, the report said. In doing so, many forgo government subsidies. Students from the wealthiest backgrounds actually averaged a negative subsidy, meaning on average they paid more tuition than universities spent on education services, even after factoring in scholarships and aid.

“What you have is essentially rich students opting to pay three times as much as the in-state rate,” Delisle said. “That frees up a bunch of resources for universities to keep tuition low for in-state students.”

Three times the in-state rate might still be less than the private university rate. The onus remains, however, on the flagship universities to offer comparable intellectual challenges in order for the employers to come to the job fairs and the graduate and professional schools, to the extend that such things matter any more, to accept their graduates.

EVOLUTIONARY STABLE BUNIONS.

Ana Swanson of Washington Post's Wonkblog meditates on the diffusion of high heels.  Perhaps the well-off neighborhoods totter around on stiletto heels, or perhaps the norm is the sensible.  Whatever the favored style is, when in Rome ...

People conformed much more when they moved to a place with higher socioeconomic status, as the chart [click the link] shows. It didn't matter whether heels were higher or lower in the higher-class destination — in fact, they were about evenly split on that measure.

Duh.  What possible evolutionary advantage is there in emulating the coarse?

This isn’t always true of course — sometimes street style filters up, as in the case of grunge or hip-hop fashions. But for the most part, people ascribe to the fashions of those above them on the socioeconomic ladder.

Yeah, and as the current crop of tweens sees the Thirteenth Generation hit old age, and the ink fades and the colors run and the muscle tone goes, well, that might take some of the cachet away from the body art and the bolt-holes everywhere.

WHAT COMES NEXT WILL BE WORSE.

Donald Trump is no Martin Luther.  But there is a corrupt system that deserves to be reformed.  Perhaps he's an imperfect herald of the reform, although his movement is enough for Daily Pundit.   Thus his version of the elite keep getting the basics wrong. "They don’t want to Make America Great Again, because they are terrified (rightly so) that in a Great America their iron gravy bowls would be greatly at risk, and their Donor Class owners equally fear a loosening of their iron grip on the Ruling Party."  Don't expect the Ruling Party to do anything other than those things on which their continued salaries depend.

Should he fail, next will come his smarter, scarier successor.  Here's where things currently stand.

Trump has gotten where he is by combining that base with a new movement of voters he stumbled upon, almost by accident. It is this cadre of disaffected conservatives who crave a candidate who says “screw you” to the establishment, both Democratic and Republican. The establishment has left them behind and they want no part of it. These voters also know Trump is an unqualified buffoon, but that doesn’t matter — he gives them a chance to say “screw you” and they need it. The global trends are leaving them behind, and we intellectuals don’t see that very well. Alone, neither group is large enough for victory, but together they might be. The outsider group was enough to get Trump the nomination, and now they have combined their voting power with a large fraction of the base. This has overcome the unease and defection of some establishment Republicans upset over Trump’s buffoonery.

But one must get beyond "screw you" to explaining why here is where you stand and you can do no other.

What if a more calculating candidate, now that this new body of voters has been discovered, knew better what to say and what not to say? What if there were a candidate who applied advanced political techniques, testing and polling new positions, rather than just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks and depending on an imagined invulnerability to get away with it?

If Clinton continues her lead and wins, then this candidate is coming in 2024 or even 2020. If the trend described above that works against the incumbent party continues, that candidate will have a head start against Clinton or her Democratic successor and a strong chance at victory.

Particularly because whether Mrs Clinton continues from Mr Obama or Mr Clinton, we will still be seeing the elites getting it wrong.

I repeat, because repeat I must.  "It is a corrupt system, and it stinketh, and there is discontent, perhaps, not yet with a reformer of the stature of Martin Luther before us."

WHY INCOME INEQUALITY PERSISTS.

In an economic expansion, even an anemic one, deficiencies in human capital surface.  Then employers who seek competent people must offer better pay packets or more attractive working conditions.  Perhaps the less capable can rejoin the labor force, but they will not do as well.

"Entry-level candidates cannot read or follow instructions. Most cannot do simple math problems. What is wrong with the educational system?" one respondent in chemical manufacturing said.

"The ability to find qualified employees is our largest problem at this time," a respondent in fabricated metal product manufacturing said. A respondent in textile product mills expressed a similar sentiment.

Theoretically speaking, the idea of labor quality becoming a pressing issue for employers suggests that economic concerns are shifting from weak demand to tight supply. And that — again, theoretically — points to higher wages for workers. The basic thinking here is that when employers have a hard time finding quality workers, they end up having to shell out more money to attract them.

Via Newmark's Door.

THE PASSENGER EXTRA IS USEFUL.

This past weekend featured a number of events in Chicago, including Lollapalooza, the Tall Ships at Navy Pier, a home stand by the Cubs, and good weather for hitting the beaches (fortunately, no big thunderstorms overwhelming the Deep Tunnel) or for bringing the kids to the museums (the aquarium continuing to be a particular favorite of the younger set.)

I let Amtrak do the driving, went to Milwaukee on the Saturday for German Fest.

It's just past noon in Milwaukee. So what, it's after five in Hamburg or Willenberg.  Probably should have stopped at two of these.  But Amtrak and Metra were doing the driving.

At weekends, the Metra pass is good Saturday and Sunday.  Metra also sold a four-day pass for Lollapalooza enthusiasts, of which there were plenty on the trains.  (The kids are alright, from what I saw.  More on that in a subsequent post.)

There were so many people heading in on Sunday that the 10.25 ex-Elburn was effectively full at College Avenue on the east side of Wheaton.  Somebody was paying attention, as Metra had made up a relief train to turn at the Lombard crossovers (new in the past five years) to pick up the Lombard, Glen Ellyn, and inward points passengers, and my fellow riders and I had an express ride from Lombard to Oak Park.

Here's the departure board at North Western Station at midday.  The Ravinia train is a regular Sunday extra during the summer.  Some late evening runs were offered, including 11.40 departures, all stops except Kedzie to La Fox on the Elburn line, and a paired train service, with the leader running express part way out the Northwest Line and the follower making all stops.  Sometimes traffic warrants a similar pairing on the Elburn line.  At Union Station, the Burlington line had an extra carded, first stop Downers Grove, with a scheduled departure time and the notification "will leave earlier if full."

It was eight car trains all day on the South Shore Line.  To conserve on collectors, the conductors loaded all South Bend passengers into the head three cars, which is all that will fit on the platform at South Bend.

But thanks to new Federal Railroad Administration regulations that require a walking inspection of the brakes after any add or cut of cars, the entire rake of eight cars ran through to South Bend.  Some rules are foolish.  We've known how to dock and un-dock space vehicles since the mid-1960s, and adding and cutting electric multiple unit cars has been the state of the art since around 1900.  Heck, that's what "multiple unit car" is all about, and the South Shore used to do adds westbound or drops eastbound at Michigan City and Gary, with one of the trains combining at Gary comprising a local from Michigan City becoming the head end of a limited from South Bend.  Without the walking inspection, that took about a minute.  Come off it, Federal Railroad Administration.

Back to Chicago in time for a leisurely supper and an earlier train back to Elburn.  The crowds as Lollapalooza closed down turned out to be YUUUUGE.

ANTICIPATING A REFORMATION?

Where is the secular Martin Luther?  It's interesting, just from a day looking at some of my usual sources, to see a theme of elite decay emerging.  Start with an observation from Matt Reed.  His column is notionally about the scholarship-funding potential of Stanford's endowment, but toward the end is an observation that generalizes.  "Stanford is beautiful, preposterously well-funded, and entirely separate from the realities that the community college people live. To the extent that elite policymakers hail from there and places like it, I can see why they keep getting the basics wrong." I want to take that observation in a different direction.  Dean Dad and I are in accord on the importance of the community colleges and the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors doing their job as well as the institutions that buy rankings in U.S. News, and on the irrelevance of the virtue-signallers at the ranked institutions to what goes on in the lives of most collegians.

But it is to the antics of the virtue-signallers that I will ultimately turn.  Those antics, dear reader, are evidence that our universities are being run by stupid people.

ARE HUMANS MORE FINICKY THAN TIGERS?

Effective tiger training is all about observing the things tigers like to do and providing inducements for them to do those things on your schedule.  At the time I noted that story, I added, "The highest form of teaching people, by contrast, is in equipping people with a larger set of activities they can do of their own volition, and withdrawing your inducements."  That is not, however, the direction education is heading.  There's more fretting about apathetic students.  (At least apathetic tigers can be given the incentive to sit on their haunches on their stools.)

In classrooms all over the country, the teacher cares more about her students’ grades, learning and futures than they do.

Teachers are expected to combat apathy by continually finding new and innovative ways to reach students – through multimedia lessons, group work, games, alternative assessments or whatever it takes. To ensure student engagement and skill acquisition, we must teach to the individual learning styles, interests and abilities of each of our students. If a student can’t learn the way we teach, we must teach the way he learns – times infinity.

To some extent, that is the same approach the competent tiger trainer use, observing the things the tigers wish to do and designing a training routine and an act around it.  But nobody expects a tiger to chart a course to Mars or find a cure for the common cold.  Some humans aspire to more, and the article suggests there are depressingly many students who aspire to very little.

The real danger is that this way of thinking has shifted the responsibility of learning, and of caring about learning, from the student to the teacher. Because it isn’t just administrators and parents who believe that it is a teacher’s job to make learning fun. Kids believe it, too. As a result we have a generation of students who think that if a lesson or an assignment or a class is not interesting, if it isn’t engaging and fun and inspiring, then it simply isn’t worth caring about. They are not obligated to care about it. It’s a teacher’s job to make all learning exciting. If the teacher hasn’t lived up to her responsibility, why should the child?

In a workshop I recently attended, teachers were told that kids are so attracted to video games because of the constant feedback – the progress, praise and prizes. We were encouraged to design our instruction more like a video game. How else can we expect to hold their attention?

That is a frightening mentality because it has created a generation of consumer learners. Many students don’t see education as a privilege. They see it as a product. And if they don’t like the salesperson, if they aren’t impressed with how it’s packaged, they aren’t buying. But our kids have to learn to be self-motivated because at some point in every person’s life, either at school or in a job or in a marriage, he or she will have to buck up and say, “This is hard. This is boring. I don’t want to do this. But I’m doing it anyway. And I’ll do my best.”

Apparently, working with disengaged humans is, at first, a lot like working with finicky tigers.  But the secret (no surprise, dear reader) is that instilling discipline and persistence, a little bit at a time, gets the job done, where the faddish methods and video game envy do not.

Unfortunately in a consumer-oriented educational system, words such as habit and discipline have all but gone by the wayside. We emphasize concepts like differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning and data-driven instruction over student responsibilities like organization, perseverance and hard work.

The good news (at least for kids) is that the best hope for developing any habit is to start small – especially when good habits need to replace bad ones.

The rest is a matter of technique.

LET'S JUST END THE CORPORATE WELFARE.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn talks some sense about letting 53 foot trailers go everywhere.

Efficiency is one of the core values of our economic system. We don’t care if we’re doing the right thing or not – or, more precisely, our economists assume we are – so long as we do it more and more efficiently. Hauling one big load of merchandise is far more efficient than hauling multiple, smaller loads. Thus whoever can configure their operation to take advantage of this efficiency should win, right?

I'm indulging my theoretical bent here, or perhaps being more Jesuit than the pope, but there are two concepts of efficiency in play here.  Hauling one big load of merchandise might appear to be productively efficient (the vulgar form of which is "doing more with less") albeit such a use of resources might not be allocatively efficient, which is the more restrictive condition that there be no further gains from trade to exploit.