THE OBAMACARE COLLAPSE IS WELL UNDER WAY.

Family members are reporting the bad news from their exchanges.  I'm still on the State of Illinois's dime, but that may not be all good, as the state continues to play cash flow games with reimbursements, and local practitioners have been requesting advance payment from state employees.  It's the nasty late October surprise we anticipated.  Whether Mr Trump will be able to make any political hay out of it remains to be seen.  I suspect that his complaints about employees in his companies getting bad news from the exchanges is going to be spun as more evidence of stinginess, in this case relying on temporary and part-time workers.  Insurers are saying enough and walking away, and the plan you had last year may no longer be available this year.  (The efforts by the national government to bend the cost curve are driving physicians out, but that's a separate matter.)  "Normal disruption," a bureaucrat says, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of people experiencing normal disruption in Florida and North Carolina, both battleground states.  That disruption is concentrating minds ahead of the election.

“Without any significant statutory and regulatory changes on the federal and state levels, we may face the crisis again,” said North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, a Democrat who’s up for election this year. “There needs to be a wholesale re-evaluation by leaders in Washington.”

The insurance reform has accomplished two things that its framers probably didn't anticipate, which offer potential for improvements in working lives, once the dirigiste impulse goes away.  By requiring employers to cover only full time employers, defined as thirty hours or more a week, the law has broken the tie between employment and health insurance, and it might lead to new thinking about whether a forty hour work week ought to be the standard for all time.  Now, if we had proper markets, including interstate sales of insurance, we might have something resembling functioning exchanges, not the current muddle.  More markets in insurance, not less.  More markets in medical services, as well.  You really can't talk about "bending the cost curve" until there's something resembling price discovery at work.  But don't expect Mr Obama (or Mrs Clinton) to get that.

Obama believes that only comprehensive insurance policies are real insurance. Conservatives generally believe, by contrast, that people should be free to buy cheaper policies that protect them only from financial catastrophes arising from their health needs.

It’s a difference that leads to others. Obama says that people who are having trouble buying insurance on Obamacare’s exchanges should receive more generous subsidies. The conservative alternative -- relax the regulations that make the insurance unaffordable for them -- is unacceptable to him because it would be a retreat from comprehensiveness.

All of the president’s shows of open-mindedness include similar caveats. He noted that Obamacare allowed state experimentation. But that experimentation is allowed to proceed only if the experiments promise to end with at least as many people having coverage that is at least as comprehensive as what Obamacare delivers. A policy that resulted in more people having catastrophic coverage wouldn’t qualify.

Catastrophic coverage, plus health savings accounts, plus greater commercial freedom for routine procedures are more likely to bend the cost curve than any comprehensive reform. And yet, Mrs Clinton continues to push for her Conrail option.

Who says the gods of politics don't have a sense of humor.  Let's suppose that the Democrat-Media-Academic Complex is correctly anticipating a Hillary win in two weeks, with a sympathetic House and Senate.  They'll own the revelation of the two lies in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and they'll own the Conrail option, or something more European.

For a preview of what something more European would look like, contemplate Colorado's Amendment 69.  (Yeah, I'm having impure thoughts, involving suckitude, but let's stay on topic.)  It's currently a referendum, thus in proper Jeopardy fashion, the proposal is in the form of a question.

Shall state taxes be increased $25 billion annually in the first full fiscal year, and by such amounts that are raised thereafter, by an amendment to the Colorado Constitution establishing a health care payment system to fund heath care for all individuals who primary residence is in Colorado, and in connection therewith, creating a governmental entity called ColoradoCare to administer the health care payment system; providing for the governance of ColoradoCare by an interim appointed board of trustees until an elected board of trustees takes responsibility; exempting ColoradoCare from the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights; assessing an initial tax on the total payroll from employers, payroll income from employees, and nonpayroll income at varying rates; increasing these tax rates when ColoradoCare begins making health care payment for beneficiaries; capping the total amount of income subject to taxation; authorizing the board to increase the taxes in specified circumstances upon approval of the members of ColoradoCare to contract with health care providers to pay for specifics health care benefits; transferring administration of the Medicaid and children's basic health care funds for Colorado to ColoradoCare; transferring responsibility to ColoradoCare for medical care that would otherwise be paid for by workers' compensation insurance; requiring ColoradoCare to apply for a waiver from the Affordable Care Act to establish a Colorado health care payment system; and suspending the operations of the Colorado health benefit exchange and transferring its resources to ColoradoCare?

That's everything you need to know about single payer.  You start with some kind of tax increase to get it started, then set up a committee to determine when and by how much taxes must be increased, and who gets classified as rich and subject to further fleecing.  At the national level, a Hillary presidency with a Democrat Congress is likely to continue the myth of cutting costs, just watch the bond markets, if you can stand it!

Single payer within one state, however, is going to face the same problem socialism in one Germany or one Korea faces: the productive people are going to opt out, until they get fenced in.  "Can single-payer work in an individual state or does it really require a national program?" That ducks the more important question, which is, How expensive will health care be when the national government picks up most of the tab?

In two weeks, we'll know who gets to manage this policy failure.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S HALLOWE'EN HYSTERIA.

I ordinarily don't link to student commentaries, under the general principle of picking fights only with people of comparable experience.  This Northern Star column, however, features silly comments from some deanlet who has to justify her salary.

Dressing up as a member of the transgender community essentially mocks their struggle to go outside of society’s common labels and be themselves, said Molly Holmes, Director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center.

“[Costumes that] portray people dressing up in a gender that they don’t identify are for humor,” said Holmes. “Outside of costumes and Halloween, when we look at somebody’s gender identity as humorous, it really actually degrades the person. [It] inevitably is bad for [transgender] people because they’re targeted on their gender identity.”

In the scheme of things, the crosser, or gender dysphoric, or hermaphrodite, or what have you, is probably less dangerous than the sociopath.  There's nothing in the column cautioning against a goalie mask accessorized with a chain saw.  On the other hand, there's now targeting of professional identity.

Sexualized costumes with blinged-out badges and short skirts make it harder to respect actual professionals, especially women, who, even without these degrading costumes, are still fighting to be taken seriously, respected and equally paid.

Students should consider those who have gone through schooling and training to earn those uniforms and professions, rather than just picking them up at a costume shop.

The article comes complete with what the deanlets would rather not see, which means true transgressivity is to put this outfit together.

Fight the Power.

Retrieved from Northern Star on 25 October 2016.

Here's what's still permissible.  "Some fun examples could be a DIY pumpkin costume, Scooby Doo, a favorite candy bar or a clever pun costume such as a basketball jersey and a large doughnut to represent Dunkin’ Donuts."  That is, until somebody suggests that anything involving food is fat-shaming.  I'm not going to put that past the Diversity Weenies.  At Tufts University, for instance, The College Fix suggests that the Thought Police have deputized the campus police in case some comrade steps too far over the line.  There will be consequences.  The post rounds up other administrative atrocities.

Our universities are being run by truly stupid people.

This year, I will be at home for Hallowe'en.  In previous years I have greeted the urchins as Sherlock Holmes and as Ray Nitschke.  That latter gets a rise out of the local Bear fans, but we all know what the Bears still do.  This year, they'll get to meet Herr Doktor Stephan Ludwig, Freiherr von Masuren, from the King of Prussia's delegation to the Bavarian royal wedding.  Perhaps I'll report on the reactions next week.

KEEPING THE TRAINS APART.

In the Cold Spring Shops primer on positive train control, I note that two trains cannot occupy the same piece of track at the same time.  And I've been particularly caustic about German and Italian signalling systems that allow a station agent to override safety interlocks.

At major junctions and busy stations or yards, it has long been the practice to provide a signal tower configured in such a way that two trains cannot be cleared onto conflicting routes, i.e. brought onto the same piece of track at the same time.  The railroad term of art for such installations is "interlocking," and I illustrated a simple use of the principles with science-project switches.

PAY ATTENTION TO THE DETAILS.

A few years ago, I read some of the Hunger Games books and posted reviews.  Let's say that I never bought the idea of an advanced tyranny with such a primitive political economy.  Here's an Unusual Things post with advice for the writer of apocalyptic fiction.

I was shocked by not just the lack of research and basic common sense on display, but by even the lack of basic knowledge of things like “science” that these literary works displayed. One story, for example, was trying to present itself as a critique of society. It did so by setting itself “after the end.” The government had collapsed, and people were losing all their technology. The message of the story was “Technology has removed us from nature” alongside “technology has given us violence, and that makes it bad.”

Yeah, fairly psuedo-intellectual. Or wanting to be, anyway.

Hmm, don't recall anyone calling Brave New World pseudo-intellectual, although the primitive political economy is present there, as well as in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But this writer's gripe?  The technology failed because the copper wires rusted.  (They tarnish.  I'd be more inclined to accept climate change leading to the capacitors decaying, but that's off point.)  But wait ... as the pitchman says, there's more!

The book went into detail about how people were surviving in their new “agricultural” society by returning to farming and hunting practices. Except … holy cow, as someone who grew up on a freaking farm, it couldn’t have been more ill-put if the author had talked about onions growing on trees.

It was awful. Factual errors everywhere. At one point, a main character talks about wanting to go hunting, but waiting until the next day because if they get their prey (moose, I believe), they have to kill it early in the day or they’ll be forced to leave all the meat behind at the end of the day when they come back, as they won’t have enough time to butcher it. They also comment that they’re down a man, so they won’t be able to carry all the meat back anyway, since there’s snow.

Sleds, people! Wooden sledges! We had this figured out five-thousand+ years ago!

And this is where I run into issues with a lot of “literary” fiction. When it’s set in contemporary times and doesn’t step outside of the little box the author lives in, it’s usually not bad (though maybe a little melodramatic). But for a style of literature that’s often touted as the “intelligent” form of such … it’s not.

There are many other things we got right five millennia ago that the deconstructionists destroyed, but I digress.  His main point is one I often make, if I'm griping about press coverage of ferroequinology, or industrial economics.

I can’t trust an author to offer societal ideas, concepts, or messages when they can’t get the basics of how a phone works correct, after all. To me, that just smacks of someone who thinks they’re smart, and wants to be smart, perhaps even wants everyone to look at them and see how smart they are … but is unquestionably demonstrating with their work that they’re not nearly as intelligent as they think they are.

Perhaps the author is engaging in the literary equivalent of rivet-counting.  And yet, your writing is more credible if an informed person can't throw the bunkum flag on a relatively minor detail.

THE SOCIAL ENGINEERING VICE.

Joel Kotkin cautions that a bad Republican-by-courtesy presidential candidate who loses badly does not mean a mandate for more Governance by Wise Experts.  Follow both links, read and understand, and follow additional links if you wish.  Politics is downstream from culture, and it's fifty years since the Consciousness Revolution led to the destruction of presidential politics as it is currently playing out.  The correction might also take fifty years.  But there are rumblings of a correction, if you know where to look.  Thus Mr Kotkin.  "Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles."

Writing for The Guardian, David Runciman sees a deeper divide, this in the two potential fatal flaws of representative governance.

In the long history of intellectuals worrying about democracy and its failings, two basic fears keep nagging away. The first is that democracy will mean rule by the poor, who will use their power to steal from the rich. The second is that democracy will mean rule by the ignorant, who will use their power to do the dumbest things. Both these worries go back at least as far as Plato. The ancient Greeks understood full well that democracy meant letting the have-nots get their claws into the haves. For Aristotle, that’s what the word meant: it was rule by the poor (the demos) over the wealthy. But if class conflict came with the territory, the deeper fear was what the masses might do out of sheer foolishness.

For Plato, democracy suffered from the basic defect of putting decision-making in the hands of people who were not competent to decide. Politics was a skill – and most people were simply clueless. Worse, that made them prey for hucksters and demagogues who would promise the earth and get away with it. Democracy was fertile ground for fantasists with a taste for power.

Thus, the Fatal Conceit of the latter-day Platonists (the self-styled progressives) is in creating that cadre of Wise Experts who are going to protect the masses from their own foolishness.  And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  I like the idea of limiting and enumerating the powers of government, something that neither major party shows much interest in.  That way, there aren't as many things the Wise Experts can screw up, and the opportunities for those in the masses who give in to their sheer foolishness to live at the expense of everyone else are fewer.

In focussing on the possible effects of an education divide within partisan divides, Mr Runciman misses this.

These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise.

The good news is, expertise often goes wrong. If you like your insurance policy, you can keep your insurance policy.  Fortunately, there's an easy response to the advocates of Governance by Expertise, one suggested by D. McCloskey as The American Question.  If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

FREQUENCIES MATTER.

During the summer, the Amtrak Hiawatha service offered a late night departure from Chicago and Milwaukee, Saturdays only.  The experiment continues.  More encouragingly, the state departments of transportation are seeking public comment on additional frequencies.  Ten round trips are not quite the service levels as recently as 1968, when there were four round trips as far as the Twin Cities and three or four round trips as far as Green Bay, as well as about a dozen Milwaukee and Chicago trips operated by two railroads, but it's still an improvement on the three round trips plus the Empire Builder on Amtrak Day.  And they're contemplating some accelerated timings with 90 mph maximum speeds outside the Chicago area (apparently there are constraints threading Amtrak in amidst the scoots.)  But the current service offers some 89 minute trains (sometimes 85 minutes in practice) while the best the proposed faster trains attain is an 87 minute timing.  I think there's room for improvement.

But some local officials aren't on the train.

Glenview Deputy Village Manager Don Owen has a different idea.

Come up with something better that will not send property values plunging along a two-mile stretch in Glenview and Northbrook where freight trains will park while faster passenger streamliners pass. There are currently seven daily round trips.

The holding track he's objecting to is along the Chicago and North Western's Techny Cutoff, which freight trains off The Milwaukee Road use to get into Bensenville Yard. These days the cutoff belongs to Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific run the Hiawathas for Amtrak.

But his alternative is ludicrous.  "Owen said a solution could be as simple as adding a car to the more popular trains on the Amtrak schedule."  Yes, that will be helpful to a harried commuter on the 5.08 for Milwaukee, which strains the capacity of the six-car rakes in use on the Hiawathas.  That extra car will be of no use to the symphony-goer or Milwaukee Bucks fan who has no late evening train north.

There's a neglected actor for your consideration.  "There was also an alternative of creating a freight bypass from the Wisconsin state line to the area."  The backbone for such a bypass is already present.  The Techny Cutoff connects to a Chicago and North Western freight bypass that at one time was two tracks most of the way to St. Francis interlocking southeast of Milwaukee, where the Milwaukee freight bypass began.  The old Chicago and North Western passenger main continues into downtown Milwaukee.  At one time there was a connection between that passenger main and The Milwaukee Road at Washington Street, when all Milwaukee passenger trains called at the station now called the Intermodal Station.  Canadian Pacific freight trains generally pass through the Intermodal Station.

Thus one possibility is to use some infrastructure money to restore the Washington Street connecting track, rebuild the Passenger Main to St. Francis, and add additional sidings on the Freight Bypass.

Alternatively, use the infrastructure money to restore the outside sidings that were once on The Milwaukee Road near the current airport station, and further south at about Caledonia (Tower A-68, to be railroad specific) and lengthen the existing outside sidings at Sturtevant.

But to propose that an additional coach or two on the rush hour trains is a sufficient fix?  Please.

TSAR VLADIMIR IS WAVING HIS WILLY.

A Russian carrier battle group is transiting the English Channel, and the Royal Navy are observing.  Remain calm, all is well, counsels The Guardian.

Military experts disagree on whether the 30-year-old aircraft carrier and its support vessels are truly needed to augment the already impressive Russian air capability in  Syria. After all, most of the Russian aircraft capable of using the carrier – such as the Su-33s and newer MiG-29Ks – have been using Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal province of Latakia since September 2015, and the base is capable of launching even more sorties than at present.

Although Admiral Kuznetsov rates as one of the largest aircraft carriers at sea, it is smaller than, and carries fewer aircraft than, any of the Nimitz class carriers, mostly named for former Presidents.

What's interesting is the Expert Commentary, about Tsar Vladimir strengthening his position in Syria in advance of a "more hawkish" President Hillary.

IT'S THE DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

When you admit unprepared students and call it access, what do you have to do to boost retention?  Regular readers know the answer.  At Illinois State University, the faculty are being mugged by reality.  And the administrators are behaving like administrators, bringing in consultants to push the new party line.

David Attis, the managing director of strategic research at [Educational Advisory Board], who presented at Illinois State earlier this year, didn’t deny that he advised professors to limit high-failure courses. But he said the comment was part of a larger conversation about rethinking courses with relatively rates of failure, withdrawal and students earning D grades so that more undergraduates finish them and earn credit to advance toward their degrees (many high-fail courses are gateway classes to certain majors).

That doesn’t mean handing out A’s, B’s and C’s, Attis said. Instead, universities are encouraged to run controlled experiments in which a pilot course redesign runs in tandem with a longer-running version of the course. Students in both sections are given the same final assessment, and their grades are compared. If students in the new course do better those in the old one, he said, it’s clear rigor wasn’t sacrificed -- instruction was simply improved.

Or, perhaps, the longer-running version of the course is doing what the high schools should have done (perhaps did do, but the Distressed Material blew it off).  Here's the consultant position.  But sometimes the truth comes out.

Attis acknowledged that some professors bristle at the notion of catering their courses to students, rather than students adjusting to meet their teaching styles. But more underprepared students are now attending college as result of access efforts, and universities both want and need to help them succeed.

Mike drop.

TWO LIES FOR THE PRICE OF ONE.

Patient protection and affordable care.  Not.

USA Today graphic retrieved from Town Hall on 21 October 2016.

As the article puts it, The Cascade of 2017 Obamacare Premium Hikes Has Arrived.

The reason that so many major insurers are pulling out of Obamacare is that the disproportionately sicker risk pools are quite expensive to cover, resulting in huge financial losses to the providers.  To offset those losses, enormous rate increases are being approved, making coverage even less affordable for the relatively healthy consumers trying to keep their heads above water -- including millions who receive taxpayer subsidies through the law.  As their costs skyrocket even further, more and more younger, healthier people will either walk away from the law, or continue to avoid signing up for it.  After all, paying the individual mandate tax is much cheaper than shelling out big bucks every month, on top of out-of-pocket costs; plus, in the event of a health emergency, insurers are required under the law to accept all comers during open enrollment, regardless of pre-existing conditions. 

It was HillaryCare before it was Obamacare. Will the Opposition be able to do anything with the nasty surprises arriving in so many mailboxes?  Or are we staring at the Conrail Option during the first hundred days of a Hillary presidency?  Such a nasty prospect.

THE EVOLUTION OF INFRASTRUCTURE.

The Lincoln Highway name lives on, even though the contemporary roads are often different.  The name often goes with U. S. Highway 30, particularly east of Chicago, although Thirty is often widened and relocated to avoid the villages and hamlets through which the Lincoln Highway was often the main street.  Across Indiana, for example, Thirty is a four-lane road offering the truckers an opportunity to bypass the Indiana Toll Road, and the tolls charged thereon.  (The operator of the Toll Road is not doing much these days to win friends and influence people, with construction going on forever toward the west end, and several service plazas out of service for rebuilding all at once.)

In parts of Indiana, however, the original two-lane Lincoln Highway remains as a rural road, or as the main street of the smaller villages and hamlets.  And just to its south is what remains of the Pittsburgh Fort Wayne and Chicago, which as a component of The Pennsylvania Railroad's Lines West provided a racetrack for passenger trains, particularly in the flatlands west of Crestline.

But now, pull into the appropriately named hamlet of Hamlet, Indiana, and you find the offices of the Chicago Fort Wayne and Eastern Railroad.

Splendid weather for mid-October.  Friday the Thirteenth comes on a Thursday.

The Fort Wayne line is now a Genesee and Wyoming property.  Wisconsin and Southern is not, but that's a Wisconsin and Southern diesel in front of an elevator that appears to generate more than a few carloads.

I stopped at Hamlet in order to get in front of a short freight train pulled by a locomotive in Indiana and Ohio colors.  That's another property not in Genesee and Wyoming's portfolio.  Go figure.  But the one remaining main track has been given proper care, and the railroad is good for forty mph running.  The track improvements offer shippers another choice for through cars bound east of Chicago, but these must be handed off to a connecting carrier at Crestline.  Single-carrier service to Pittsburgh and the east coast ended with the partitioning of Conrail, perhaps the idea of moving all the freight to The Water Level Route (cargo bound for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia making a right turn at Cleveland) hived off inefficiently much capacity.

In a few minutes, the freight train showed up.

I wonder if there are more sidings at Hamlet now than there were in Pennsylvania Railroad days.  Executives of the more successful railroads in the sunbelt contrasted their efforts at attracting shippers with the long stretches of rural operation in the Great Lakes region and relatively few shippers.

Once upon a time, Hamlet was the crossing of New York Central's Kankakee Belt line and the Fort Wayne, complete with a tower.

Undated photo from the Conrail era retrieved from Kankakee Belt history page.

The crossover and crossing are east of the elevator.  The Kankakee Belt is gone here, part of the Conrail elimination of duplicate facilities.  Look closely at the left, that's the original Lincoln Highway.  Those tracks still look capable of carrying a poppet-valve duplex drive at 120 mph with The Broadway Limited or The Trail Blazer.

I was able to get ahead of the freight train one more time.  At Donaldson, that appears to be another carload of ferroequinologists out for the photography.

The road paralleling the tracks may be another section of the original Lincoln Highway.

A regional freight carrier replaces Lines West of The Standard Railroad of the World.  It could be worse.  In the Chicago area, the former Erie Railroad grade, which offered ample clearances for high and wide loads, is now a bicycle trail.

YOU'RE NOT OBLIGATED TO VOTE.

Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe has a few things to say about the presidential nominations, and what it means to have a right to vote.  First, a recognition that politics is downstream from (the trashy, splintery) culture.  "Sure, we can blame the media, the system, and the candidates themselves, but let’s be honest – Donald and Hillary are there because we put them there. The electorate has tolerated the intolerable. We’ve treated this entire process like the final episode of American Idol. What did we expect?"

Then some advice about how to get yourself a liberal education, something the higher education establishment has forgotten how to do.  "Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with 'Economics in One Lesson.' Then try Keynes. Then Hayek. Then Marx. Then Hegel. Develop a worldview that you can articulate as well as defend. Test your theory with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy as necessary. Then, when the next election comes around, cast a vote for the candidate whose worldview seems most in line with your own."

But if a voter opts out?  Just because you can, it doesn't follow that you must.  We enjoy a right to keep and bear arms, but somehow a lot of people go through life without an arsenal at home.

TRUTH ACCOMPANIED BY PRECISION.

This year's economics Nobel went to contract theorists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström.  In Bloomberg View, Tyler Cowen explains the significance of the results, and notes the importance of the researchers taking the time to understand the refractory empirical phenomena being theorized about.

Not everybody is cheering.  Start with Arnold Kling.

Think of their work as consisting of three steps.

1. Identifying some real-world complexities that affect how businesses operate. For example, output may result from both effort and luck. Output may be joint. A worker’s job description may include more than one objective.

2. Construct a mathematical optimization model that incorporates such complexities.

3. Offer insights into designing appropriate compensation systems, including when to outsource an activity altogether.

A big question is: how important is step 2?

In the eyes of the mainstream economics profession, it is extremely important. Without it, you either do not get to step 3, or your claims in step 3 lack reliability and credibility. Step 2 is why Hart and Holmström earned the Nobel Prize.

In my view, step 2 is unnecessary. If anything, it tends to get in the way, often creating a barrier to doing step 1 properly, because economists limit themselves to what is mathematically tractable. I think that Hart and Holmström sometimes (often?) made good choices in step 1, and that is what accounts for the value of where they arrived at in step 3.

Mr Kling's contention is a common one in economics: it's sometimes possible to conceive of something in general terms using words, but being able to produce a more careful delineation of conditions under which it is present using mathematics is hard. I have boxes of scribblings yet dealing with problems I thought I could make some headway against and yet fell short.  And veteran theorist Hal Varian once wrote an essay on doing research wherein he noted, in response to a workshop comment from a colleague who was attempting something more challenging, that his first attempts were more challenging (and failed.)  There's an element of complaint present, as well, in his observation that the late Alchian Allen and the still-living Harold Demsetz had worked on similar contracting problems, using a more literary form of price theory.  But the prize goes to the work that more precisely delineates the conditions under which the phenomenon is present.

THE STATE IS THAT GRAND FICTION.

Deep in the heart of blue-state Austin, residents are discovering that they are the everybody else, or the fellow behind the tree, and they're not happy.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”

The arrival of this year’s appraisal notices — which in Travis County showed homes’ average market values jumped 12.6 percent and average taxable values rose 8 percent for 2014 — is sparking a push for reform. Similar jumps have occurred in Williamson and Hays counties.

There are no state income taxes in Texas, which complicates the analysis, but rising property values put homeowners in a rough place, particularly if those homeowners want their city government to spend money on amenities.

In Illinois, there is a state income tax, but rising property values push some homeowners to protest.

Jeff McGrath and Dan Aylward paid thousands of dollars of real estate taxes with $1 bills at the county treasurer's office and vowed to do so again in September and every due date afterward until the taxes stop increasing.

You want good schools, you get good schools, then property values go up? Not necessarily.

Both men say there is too much government and way too much being paid to school administrators. Both men say though the market value of their homes may not be considered pricey, their properties won't sell because the taxes are too high.

With the state legislature being unable to put proper budgets together, property tax relief extracted by Springfield through the income and sales taxes might not be immediately forthcoming.

JUST CALL IT GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

Trains Magazine's Fred Frailey is dismayed with the slow implementation of positive train control by the Passenger Rail operators.

The spectacle we now have is that the freight railroads have spent almost $7 billion of their dollars diligently inventing and implementing PTC technology, while at least three of the nation’s largest commuter-train railroads haven’t really done a damn thing. I’ll stop here to credit Amtrak with implementing its version of Positive Train Control on its own Northeast Corridor trackage, and between Philadelphia and Harrisburg. And I’ll tip my hat to the politicians in California who provided the funds for Metrolink in Los Angeles to do the same—Metrolink, of course, being the entity whose own disaster prodded Congress to act in the first place eight years ago.

But what of Metra in Chicago, Jersey Transit, and Metro-North Railroad in New York and Connecticut? As I said, not really a damn thing. Illinois is broke, and New Jersey close to it. New York and Connecticut are stressed out as well. And appropriating scarce capital dollars for huge technical projects that neither politicians nor journalists can explain clearly is something of a non-starter when you’re competing against all the other uses of public dollars. Ask the average Joe or Jane in Newark or New Haven or Cicero: Do you want PTC or more cops and more meds for grandma? Your choice. Guess how they’ll reply?

I bet they won't reply, "Raise my taxes."

HIGHER EDUCATION CONTINUES TO BECLOWN ITSELF.

Vast tracts of the social sciences have gone insane, Margaret Wente of Toronto's Globe and Mail contends.  It's culture-studies interrogation of pumpkin spice latte and other metrofexual affectations this time around.  From the abstract:

Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.

Come. Off. It.

It's more of the trendy, terminally silly stuff crowding out real education.  I've been pointing this out for nearly thirty years (long before anybody heard of the Internet, let alone web logs) and it's gratifying to have Ms Wente bringing the smack.

How does this stuff get published? Because critical thinking has gone out the door. The standard methods of research and inquiry do not apply. In fact, they are widely thought to be sexist and racist, because they’re rooted in white male ways of thinking. Science that built on the foundations of masculine rationality and abstract logic can’t possibly reflect the experience of women and minorities. Therefore, feelings, anecdotes and “lived experience” vastly outweigh what used to be known as “objective truth.”

Why am I so irate about this? One reason is that such work is a discredit to genuine academics and the pursuit of knowledge. Another is that race, gender and oppression studies have metastasized far beyond their little enclaves and spread to many other disciplines, including much of the humanities and parts of the sciences. Some universities have launched feminist biology programs because regular biology is too sexist. No one seems to mind that kids are squandering their time and our resources (to say nothing of their parents’ resources) on rubbish. I believe the damage to the public image of our universities is not inconsiderable – something their administrations might want to ponder in these straitened times.

The worst part is that these bad ideas metastasize into the wider world, into politics and public policy and ordinary life. Today we think the only way to fight racism and sexism is to identify everyone by race and sex – and that the only way to respond to people who claim victim status is to grant them special privileges.

Yeah, and that generates all sorts of affirmative action asterisks. The rot has been a long time in coming, and the recognition of it has been there for a long time. It may not be given to me to finish the task of reclaiming higher education, and yet there are others still in the fight.

PROTEST WITH YOUR VOTE.

Here's how the electoral college helps you.  "Americans, if you live in a "safe state" (about two-thirds of the population does), now's your chance to rock the boat and make your vote count."  Heck, if you live in a swing state, and you understand the lesser of two evils to still be evil, tick the box for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or one of the other options anyway, as at the margin, your vote is unlikely to affect the outcome.  You're not going to get what you want, but picking the lesser evil isn't going to give you what you want either.

THE HIPSTERS' LIONEL SET IN 12" = 1'

A City Lab post is, shall we say, skeptical about streetcars.

It’s hard not to succumb to the charms of the streetcar, the frisky chocolate lab of urban transit. Urbanists delight in their walkability-promoting scale and commitment to permanency—those rails stuck in the street seem to embody the faded promise of public transportation itself. Environmentalists dig their cleaner emissions (assuming your local grid isn’t coal-fired) and greater passenger capacity, compared to diesel-spewing buses. Older folks appreciate their nostalgia factor and low-floor boarding, which makes them easier on wheelchair users and aging knees. The business community enjoys the developer-friendly subsidies and other sundry tax breaks that that often accompany their construction. And just about everyone likes the whole Euro-classy vibe they evoke.

Put another way, the rent-seekers and the aesthetes go for the streetcars. But a proper streetcar service is a network.  Most of the cities have installed short lines in shopping districts, which bus riders can still reach on the city bus.

The fact that both Cincinnati and KC’s systems are more popular on weekends seems to support one of the fundamental arguments against them: They’re more tourist toys than transportation systems used by residents and commuters. Too slow and short to function as bona fide people-movers, they’re just expensive downtown amenities for out-of-towners, opponents say, gobbling public dollars that should be devoted to more useful forms of public transit.

Read on and you see that streetcars are part of the same infrastructure medicine as sports stadiums and concert halls.  Oops.

I understand the Milwaukee streetcar project is going forward.  Let me refresh your memory.  Here's how you do streetcars to the Plankinton Arcade (a precursor of the Grand Avenue Mall.)

Image from The Transport Company Web Station
(properly subtitled "Where the Streetcar Bends the Corner Around".)

ECONOMICS IS ABOUT SEX, DEATH, AND WHY THE LINES ARE LONGEST AT THE ROLLER COASTER.

Yes, that's long been one of my tag lines, but it's as useful a way as any to introduce Noah Smith's Bloomberg View column explaining why contract theorists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström merited recognition from a prize committee in Stockholm.

The research here is deep microeconomic stuff. It’s about incentives, and imperfect information, and long-term relationships. It’s about delicate strategic interactions between people who don’t know each other’s capabilities or intentions. But it’s related to lots of real-world economic issues -- performance pay, mergers and acquisitions, bank lending and corporate structure.

What it’s not about is the kind of economics you read about in the news. It’s not about growth or unemployment, fiscal stimulus or interest rates, trade agreements or productivity. It might be indirectly related to those things -- Holmström’s work on financial crises and debt certainly has relevance for what happened in 2008. But it isn't what you expect to see economists arguing about when you open up Bloomberg or pick up the New York Times.

It’s not macroeconomics -- the study of how the broad economy works.

Mr Smith reminds readers why the history of economic thought is important.

Economics debates in the news media and on the blogs tend to make a big distinction between macro and micro, painting the former as unscientific and the latter as serious science. There’s a grain of truth to that, but it’s not that simple.

What really happened was that macro developed first. Economists saw big, important phenomena like growth, recessions and poverty happening around them, and they wrote down simple theories to explain what they saw. The theories started out literary, and became more mathematical and formal as time went on. But they had a few big things in common. They assumed the people and the companies in the economy were each very tiny and insignificant, like particles in a chemical solution. And they typically assumed that everyone follows very simple rules -- companies maximize profits, consumers maximize the utility they get from consuming things. Pour all of these tiny simple companies and people into a test tube called “the market,” shake them up, and poof -- an economy pops out.

It might be more accurate to say that macroeconomics as we understand it emerged out of political economy, which beginning with Adam Smith and progressing at least through Karl Marx and J. S. Mill, focused on why wealth happened and who got it and who would be left out, and what might be done to Change Things.  But the notion of a company was new to Adam Smith and misunderstood by Karl Marx and it took a long time to get a handle on why some transactions might be handled more effectively by markets whilst others were within the locus of control of a management.  And, to use a phrase from Harold Demsetz, who really ought be considered for recognition, to think about how a world in which information is costly is different from a world in which information is free.  The standard blackboard economics supply-and-demand model rests on free information.  When information becomes costly, other models, such as Hart's, Holmström's,  Jean Tirole's (from last year), Oliver Williamson's (from a few years ago) and the game theorists offer information.

500 DEAD IN TRAIN WRECK.

I'd have to search the archives for a while to find evidence of a fatal train wreck with that sort of death toll.  But on the roads, it's business as usual, writes editor Jim Wrinn of Trains Magazine.

Just today, I read that the U.S. is on target to see an increase in traffic fatalities for the second year in a row. Just in the first half of 2016, more than 17,000 people have died in traffic accidents. That is 34 500-passenger commuter trains smashing themselves to pieces and taking every life on board with them.

That's part of a reflection on press coverage of last week's commuter train overrunning the bumper at Hoboken Terminal, where at least one national source confused the absence of positive train control on the train with the absence of an automatic brake??

I've grumbled over the years about the sloppy reporting that frequently accompanies coverage of economics, or of railroading.  Why can't the rest of the press corps be as knowledgeable about the subjects they cover as the sports reporters?

THE NEGLECTED ACTORS.

Reason presents its quadrennial survey of presidential preferences among its writers.  There's not a lot of love for the major party offerings.  Contributors also have the opportunity to offer their impressions of the Era of Hope and Change.  A sampling.

Nick Gillespie will miss "The foolish, momentary optimism some people had that nothing could be as bad as the Bush years."

Bill Kauffman will miss "I'll miss Barack's empathetic understanding of small-town Americans and Michelle's sparkling wit."

David Weigel offers a longer meditation.  "I think it's a very good thing that the wild optimism that accompanied Obama was put in check. One of the stranger aspects of this election cycle was seeing so many people flock to Bernie or Trump in the hopes that an Honest Politician could fix Washington. That baffled me—for a whole generation, the lesson of Obama was that there are gigantic and often useful veto points and that you should not see presidential candidates as white knights. You should not idolize them. You want change? You're on your own; get to work. You're scared that the new leader will 'fundamentally transform' the country? Actually, you can stop him."  That about sums it up: the creepy and failed Cult of Obama becomes the meandering Cult of Trump or the symbolic and corrupt Cult of Hillary.

Mollie Hemingway delivers several backhanded compliments.  "I will miss Obama's comity and executive restraint, the way he followed through with his promises to rein in government and manage wars better than George W. Bush did, his steadfast avoidance of killing American citizens without due process, and the way he worked so hard to keep the federal bureaucracy from persecuting people for their political and religious beliefs."

Cheer up, it could be worse.  Might as well cheer up, it is going to be worse.

NO ONE IS IN CHARGE OF IT.

Kevin Williamson makes the case for emergent order.  Civilization progresses by expanding the number of tasks people can do without thinking about them.  Why, then, do the self-styled progressives think it's all about Expertise?  "When it comes to important social concerns such as health care, affordable housing, and education, the progressives say: 'This is too important to leave to the unpredictability of the free market.' Others say: 'This is too important not to leave to the unpredictability of the free market.'"  Go, read, understand.

TODAY IS GERMAN-AMERICAN DAY.

By Presidential Proclamation.  " I encourage all Americans to learn more about the history of German Americans and reflect on the many contributions they have made to our Nation."

At Antietam.

That's a New York regimental monument.

Or perhaps, you'd rather celebrate in a more conventional way.

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit!

THE MICROFOUNDATIONS OF TRADE POLICY.

The Economist offers an instructive essay on the political economy of trade agreements.  As with anything else in economics, it's the tradeoffs.  By all means read the whole thing (before the paywall closes) but let me highlight salient passages.

China’s accession to the [World Trade Organization] caused a big shock. The country’s size, and the speed at which it conquered rich-world markets for low-cost manufacturing, makes it unique. By 2013 it had captured one-fifth of all manufacturing exports worldwide, compared with a share of only 2% in 1991.

This coincided with a fresh decline in factory jobs in America. Between 1999 and 2011 America lost almost 6m manufacturing jobs in net terms. That may not be as dramatic as it sounds, since America is a large and dynamic place where around 5m jobs come and go every month. Still, when David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), David Dorn of the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, looked into the job losses more closely, they found something worrying. At least one-fifth of the drop in factory jobs during that period was the direct result of competition from China.

Moreover, the American workers who had lost those jobs neither found new ones close by nor searched for work farther afield. They either swelled the ranks of the unemployed or, more often, left the workforce. That contradicts the widespread belief that America’s jobs market is fluid and flexible. When men lose a factory job, they often stay put. Those who managed to find new jobs were paid less than before and were working in industries that were vulnerable to competition from imports. In subsequent research, the authors found that lost factory jobs also had a depressing effect on aggregate demand (and thus non-manufacturing jobs) in the affected areas. In total, up to 2.4m jobs may have been lost, directly and indirectly, as a consequence of imports from China.

As the comparative advantage of the United States has traditionally been in knowledge-intensive, advanced technology goods, the change in manufacturing trade patterns ought come as no surprise, China being in a better place to do the routine production.  But the victory dividend after World War II left a lot of U.S. blue collar workers with less formal schooling in a bad place.

In 1964 male high-school graduates were about as likely to be in the workforce as college-educated men, but now only 83% of those with a high-school degree or less are in the workforce, against 94% of those who finished college (see chart). This mirrors a growing divergence in wages. In the mid-1960s the pay of less educated men averaged 80% of college-educated ones, but by 2014 that proportion had fallen to 60%.

It is unlikely that men are dropping out of work voluntarily. More than a third of inactive men live in poverty; less than a quarter have a working spouse. So the most obvious explanation is a fall in demand for less-skilled men. That in turn is partly linked to a long-term decline in manufacturing, whose share of the jobs market peaked in the days when almost all prime-age men worked. The CEA study found that states with a higher-than-average share of jobs in construction, mining and (to a lesser degree) manufacturing tend to have more prime-age men in the workforce. It does not help that men who lose their jobs are increasingly rooted in unemployment black spots.

For "unemployment black spots," think Rust Belt.  But trade effects and productivity effects have similar consequences for men with fewer years of school, something that in the U.S. is likely reinforced by the comparative advantage.

A steady drop in the share of prime-age men in the workforce going back half a century cannot be pinned on America signing free-trade agreements or China’s emergence as an exporter of manufactures, both of which happened fairly recently. Factory jobs peaked in the 1970s, but manufacturing output has continued to increase. Indeed, America’s share of world manufacturing output, on a value-added basis, has been fairly stable at a bit under a fifth for the past four decades. Thanks to advances in technology, fewer workers are needed to produce the same quantity of goods. But since trade with lower-cost countries and technological change have similar effects on labour-intensive production in the rich world, it is hard to disentangle their effects.

Thus doing trade policy is like doing any other trade policy in the form of a Marshallian improvement, where the movement to a larger opportunity set economy-wide leaves some people in a worse position.

Sober advocates of free trade know that over time the gains from it come from greater efficiency, not from more jobs, the number of which is largely determined by demography and the strength of aggregate demand. It is easier to spot the link between freer trade and factory closures than the more dispersed benefits trade brings to workers across other industries. Exporting firms in all countries and across a variety of industries are more productive, grow faster and pay higher wages than non-exporting firms. But a lot of the gains from trade come from the direct benefit of cheaper imports and their indirect effect on productivity.

Trade protection, however, makes the lot of the poorer people worse.  For example, think of all the cheap Chinese stuff on the shelves of Wal-Marts.  But nobody's talking about that in the current election cycle.

BILL CLINTON'S KINSLEY GAFFE.

Forget about Wikileaks or the Drudge Report or Donald Trump's tax returns or Hillary Clinton's lung function.  The real October Surprise might come to people who log on to the health insurance exchanges and discover that they can't keep their current insurance, and the replacement insurance will be worse.

ObamaCare is set to create winners like the people who now have insurance for the first time and losers like the millions that [Bill] Clinton described. Contrary to Obama’s oft-repeated broken promise, they couldn’t keep their doctor or coverage if they wanted to and are now, thanks to the collapse of the exchanges, paying far more than they used to for policies they don’t like. The middle class got it in the neck. As the prices continue to go up and as the mandates are applied to businesses, the tally of ObamaCare losers will to continue to grow.

Democrats absolutely refuse to acknowledge the basic facts Bill Clinton mentioned in his rant. While they pay lip service to the notion that Obamacare needs some fixing, their attitude to the basic contradiction at its heart is to deny that it exists. The obvious alternatives to this disaster—the market-based ideas of the House Republicans or the left’s preferred single payer option—are matters the Hillary Clinton campaign will contemplate. Which is why the only Democrat willing to say this is the man who is currently playing the role of the party’s crazy old uncle.

Resign yourself to the Conrail option?  Here's W. R. Mead's take.

[E]ven the hardiest defenders of what was once presented as the greatest Democratic policy innovation in a generation are now having to concede that it looks more and more like the inevitable failure the critics have always said it was. There is lots to chew on here, and the worried blue outlets now edgily coming to terms with one of the greatest failures in Democratic Party history still can’t quite admit the full scope of the failure. Naturally enough they are calling for more of the same: more bureaucracy, more centralization, more complex webs of cross subsidies, more ‘free’ stuff for more people.

And if you think health care is expensive now ...

Meanwhile, the exchanges are vanishing in Tennessee, coming undone in Minnesota,  and this morning on Betsy's Page there's enough gloom to fill Thomas Hardy's moors.  Plus physicians refusing to be treated like Wal-Mart's vendors.  Here's the box Reason's Peter Suderman sees Hillary Clinton in.  "Crucial elements of Obamacare are on teetering on the brink of collapse, and the only solutions that its backers have on offer involve spending more public money and giving the government even greater power over health coverage and care."

GET THE VISUAL CUES RIGHT.

Grand Forks, North Dakota, like much of the rest of the country, is not a safe place for kids to walk to school.  It's not about school district consolidation or the abolition of fitness privilege.  It's the infrastructure, stupid.

We have a few streets in town that continually need to have flashing speed limit signs and police stationed on them to deter speeders. We also have streets that don't need those measures. The difference isn't in the number of cars or the number of speed limit signs. The difference is in the design.

Show me an area where police need to continually set up to catch speeding drivers, and I'll show you a street design that encourages speeding and is unsafe for pedestrians.

For decades, cities have adopted the same safety design principles for neighborhood streets that they've used for highways. On highways, wide shoulders and buffer zones are added to wide driving lanes to help drivers take corrective action if they veer off of the road at high speed. There are no pedestrians crossing highways, so pedestrian safety is not taken into account, and rightly so.

But on neighborhood streets, wide buffer zones and wide traffic lanes encourage drivers to drive fast, lowering awareness and decreasing reaction time. This is a problem when there are pedestrians present.

Yeah, there's speeding where there are stroads. So much for intelligent design.

We can build streets that are safe for pedestrians, or we can build them so that cars can move through at a rapid pace.

A street can't do both. It simply doesn't work. In fact, trying to achieve both goals ends up accomplishing neither and puts people in danger.

If we're serious about making our streets and crosswalks safe for pedestrians, then we must accept that the only way to do so is to get cars to slow down. This also would require accepting the trade-off, which is the few seconds that would be added to our commute each day.

Fortunately, they are beginning to catch on.  "When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don't fit."  Narrow the lanes in residential areas.  Spend less money building infrastructure, there's less infrastructure to crumble.

Our lives are currently being put at risk daily by fifty state DOTs and hundreds of county road commissions who mistakenly believe that high-speed street standards make our cities and towns safer. In my most considered opinion, these agencies have blood on their hands, and more than a little. There are many standards that they need to change, but the easiest and most important is probably the 12-foot lane. Armed with the facts, we can force this change. But only if we do it together.

It's time to push this discussion to its logical conclusion. Until conflicting evidence can be mustered, the burden of proof now rests with the DOTs. Until they can document otherwise, every urban 12-foot lane that is not narrowed to 10 feet represents a form of criminal negligence; every injury and death, perhaps avoidable, not avoided—by choice.

We'll take up the matter of the 53 foot trailer plague another day.

PUSILLANIMITY PRECEDES ADJUNCTIFICATION.

Alice Dreger offers a defense of academic tenure against the yahoos.

[H]aving lived through the decline of tenure, I can see clearly that universities in which the majority of the faculty feel unsafe in terms of job security become places where no one feels safe to do anything that might risk upsetting someone.

And that’s a recipe for generally useless research as well as impoverished teaching.

When researchers get the message that they better not produce data that might offend the powerful, they end up telling us not what is true, but what we want to hear. Policy separates from reality, and we end up with waste and poor outcomes in education, healthcare, economics, and the justice system. Good policy cannot be built on comfortable fantasies.

What happens when the comfortable fantasies are the commonplaces of the common room?  Put another way, what happens if what passes for academic research is simply validation of Governance by Wise Experts?

What happens when the quest for tenure is a quest for producing methodologically correct minimal publishable units?  Who among the tenure-trackers is going to have the audacity to challenge entrenchments?

It's not the business interests, dear reader, who are making the faculty, whether tenure-track or contingent, reluctant to get students out of their comfort zones.

When teachers get the message they can’t push or challenge students, we end up with fellow citizens, neighbours, and co-workers who are inflexible, threatened by difference, and lacking in critical-thinking skills. Parents may think they want comfortable intellectual spaces for their dear college-age children, but if they really want their children to grow into strong, capable thinkers, they want professors who feel safe to host unsettling conversations, to provide unexpected lessons, and to go where students need, rather than want, to go in order to develop.

That's also the message of making accommodations for unprepared students, and calling it access, or inclusion.  Professor Dreger might be questioning the conformist corporate mindset, but she might as well be calling out the conformist snowflake mindset.  Give her credit, in her summation, for noting the role of all those destructive forces in undermining faculty.

Academic tenure, however, influences the risk profile of potential faculty.  Does the prospect of a job for life (perhaps with lower pay, perhaps with little intellectual challenge) attract the kind of person who would bet his career on a few high-profile projects, let alone the kind of person who might risk losing a billion dollars on a startup?

THIS WILL NOT END WELL.

Kurt Schlichter brings the smack against the kind of entitled clerisy that sees much of the nation as deplorables, or incorrectly understanding the social forces that render them unemployable or consign them to mommy's basement.

There’s nothing funnier than a rustic presuming to speak out as if his views matter! Then the host will make a funny face – I mean, how can anyone be so insane and stupid to think that maybe having grown men lurking around little girls as they use the potty could go wrong? – and that goofy smirk will cue the skinny-jeaned audience to go into paroxysms of laughter. Not laughter because it’s funny or clever, mind you, but laughter that demonstrates social solidarity among the kind of smug people who drink pretentious, awful craft beers and think the “P” in “IPA” stands for “pumpkin spice.”

Maybe John Oliver will do a 10 minute rant about him and how Jesus probably told him that dudes shouldn’t be alone with little girls in toilets. Maybe Samantha Bee will scrunch up her tired, sour apple doll face and point out how this guy probably didn’t even go to Yale and where did he get that jacket anyway, at Wal-Mart?

And maybe our guy will sit down and hold his tongue. And then maybe he’ll remember how he went to a Tea Party to politely register his dissent and how he was dumped on for daring to try and be heard. Then maybe he’ll vote for Donald Trump because maybe if he’s a little louder and a little ruder then perhaps someone will listen to him about not turning his little girl’s bathroom into a social experiment, about the illegal aliens like the one who ran into his truck and didn’t have insurance, and about the rumor going around that his job down at the plant may be moving to Juarez next year.

But then, those concerns apparently aren’t worthy of attention.

Read and understand the whole thing. Mr Schlichter's focus is on how the successor to Donald Trump, should the gentry prevail, is likely to stir up more anger.

Our guy and millions upon millions of others will get angry. Not merely miffed as with the Tea Party, not a bit perturbed as with Trump. Angry. Coldly furious not only that they have been exiled from their own republic but because they have been relentlessly insulted, abused, humiliated – and forced to pay for it all.

Because the elite will have made it clear that the system really is rigged against those outside their caste, and that there is no way for people like our guy to be heard merely by trying to be part of the existing political system.

That's focusing on what is notionally the Republican coalition.  Here's how Mr Schlichter explains the dynamics to a European audience.  Same thesis, fewer polemics.  Ross Douthat, token tory at New York's Times, notes that the same system-rigging might fracture the current Democrat coalition.

The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium. The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way, encouraging a sense that the professional class that dominates liberalism’s upper reaches needs to give way to a revived (and larger) version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — a “real American future” analogue to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeals.

If Trump has thrived by imitating Europe’s right-wing nationalists, a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia.

That has not ended well, either.

I CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP.

The On the Loose exercise club at the Claremont Colleges cancels a Speedo Hike because of outdoor privilege.  Seriously.

No matter what work you do, the ‘speedo hike’ will manifest itself as OTL taking out and funding a group of students that is nearly guaranteed to be almost exclusively outdoor-experienced, fit, and heavily swayed in the direction of outdoor -- and otherwise -- privilege that OTL is trying to work against.

Pajamas Media's D. C. McAllister summarizes, "No freedom, no fun."  No doubt the deanlets, deanlings, and stooges would argue that freedom of fit people to roam is slavery for couch potatoes.. Or something.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.

IMPROVING THE SUPER INTERURBAN.

The current operators of the South Shore Line are making no little plans.  The proposed double tracking between Gary and Michigan City (right of way has been available for that since the 1920s) is going to improve running times.

The project would add a second track to the commuter railroad and upgrade five stations between Gary and Michigan City in an effort to speed the trip to Chicago. The estimated cost of the project, dubbed Double Track NWI, is $210 million.

According to estimates included in a new Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority strategic plan, almost half an hour would be sliced off the ride from Michigan City, with total trip time dropping to an hour and 11 minutes compared to the current hour and 39 minutes. The ride from Miller would be cut by 18 minutes, with total trip time dropping to 49 minutes from the current hour and seven minutes.

Those are improvements.  Nominal running times, Chicago to Michigan City, in 1959 were eighty minutes, with the Evening Hot Shot getting there in 69 minutes.  Miller was a flag stop, about an hour from Chicago on trains that were allowed to stop on signal (burn a rolled-up newspaper at night.)

The operator has set up a web site for the double tracking project, which will include new right-of-way in Michigan City, and the end of the interurban tradition of boarding the train in the street.

“We’ve been gaining significant traction” in earning support from state officials, [transit district president Michael] Noland said. Keep praying to the Patron Saint of Traction.

LET THE GENTRY TREMBLE.

Sgt. Mom of Chicago Boyz analyzes the Resistance in Flyoverlandia.  There's a lot of sympathetic commentary to this resistance, or rebellion, or generalized up-yours, circulating these days, some of it referenced in her post, some of it turns up here or here or here.  But the Democrat-Media-Academic-Entertainment complex has been bringing the nasty, and Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine bring the condescension, and it's time to say Enough.

The automatic sneer, the curling-upper-lip snobbish and very public contempt on display of late in any number of arenas is honestly getting to be too much to take. It was bad enough seeing the Tea Party trashed and demonized, and an otherwise agreeable, competent female and locally popular politician like Sarah Palin savaged by the national media minions of the ruling class – all because she wasn’t a member, or the spouse/spawn of a well-established member of the bicoastal ruling party club. The usual social justice class warriors who have somewhat of a sense for history (a diminishing number, let it be noted) lament and condemn the cruel snobbery of the Victorian upper classes, but honestly, I can’t see how they can keep a straight face when doing so, unless catastrophically deprived of any sense of irony. It was bad enough being put off ever listening to Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion, when it became very, very obvious that he actually despised the people who made up real-life communities in Flyoverlandia.

But I do think that [Angelo "Ruling Class"] Codevilla has caught one aspect right; the vicious joy of insulting presumed inferiors without any thought of consequence has now overtaken a large number of people and organizations whom you would have thought would know better, both in an economic sense, and in a political sense. Hillary Clinton and her so-called “basket of deplorables” is the culmination of this kind of contempt brought to its full and nasty flowering. The brouhaha over gay weddings and the insistence on group bathrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms being open to anyone claiming identity with a gender at variance with their actual genitalia is another – and exacerbated when an individual expressing objections or even just mild reservation gets condemned as the worst sort of bigot. Then, there is apparent willingness of the NFL to go all out for demonstrations of good-think with regard to Black Lives Matter. You might think that an enterprise which depends on the goodwill of an audience to consider avoid antagonizing a large portion of that audience … but then Hollywood – by which I mean those who produce movies and broadcast entertainment – have been contemptuous of Flyoverlandia’s mainstream, socially conservative, mildly religious values for decades.

That gentry has been denying coherent beliefs of any kind, and perhaps they will yet suffocate of their own incoherence.  (And the best Hollywood can do these days is offer tendentious remakes of classic movies.  How could anyone mess up Ghostbusters or Magnificent Seven.  Guess what?)

THE SOURCES OF DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

Wisconsin state legislator John Jagler sponsored legislation requiring state universities to disaggregate, by source high school, the number and proportion of matriculants requiring a second go at high school remedial mathematics or English.  The first report under the law is now available.

Milwaukee Hamilton has changed a lot since I graduated in 1971.  It remains one of the largest high schools in the shrunken Milwaukee Public Schools, but college preparation there isn't what it once was.

Alexander Hamilton High School sent 29 new freshmen to the UW system in fall 2015. Of those 29 students, 19, or 66 percent, needed math remediation, and 12, or 41 percent, needed English remediation. Hamilton High was listed named 32nd in the state on the Washington Post's 2016 list of most challenging high schools.

Other MPS schools typically touted as high performing also sent large numbers of unprepared students to UW. Rufus King High School was named the 13th best high school in the state by the Washington Post and was ranked the 8th best by U.S. News and World Report - yet one-third of Rufus King graduates needed remediation in math.

Mr Jagler's home district, Watertown, made the report, sending 94 students to UW System campuses, with 21 matriculants requiring remedial math. For all my carping about the misplaced priorities at Hartland Arrowhead, the district sent 257 graduates into the UW System, with 28 requiring remedial math and fifteen requiring remedial English.  (That's almost as many students from Watertown or the Arrowhead District relegated to high school as there were matriculants out of Hamilton High.  What's that bit about a mediocre student of means having a better chance of finishing college than a bright kid from a poor family?)  My nephew's high school, Greendale, sent 102 students on, of which eight required remedial math.