Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University who studies families, is skeptical of the idea of paying kids on a per-chore basis. “How sustainable is it if you’re going to pay a child a dime for each time he picks up his clothes off the floor?” she says. “What are you saying—that you’re owed something for taking care of your stuff?”
Luthar is not opposed to giving allowances, but she thinks it’s important to establish that certain core chores are done not because they’ll lead to payment, but because they keep the household running. “It’s part of what you do as a family,” Luthar says. “In a family, no one’s going to pay you to tie your own shoes or to put your clothes away.”
Or, put more simply, there's stuff that has to be done, and part of growing up is pitching in, even after the novelty wears off.
Luthar’s suggested approach to allowance is compatible with the regimen that the New York Times personal-finance columnist Ron Lieber outlines in his book The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money. He advises that allowance be used as a means of showing children how to save, give, and spend on things they care about. Kids should do chores, he writes, “for the same reason we do—because the chores need to be done, and not with the expectation of compensation … Allowance ought to stand on its own, not as a wage but as a teaching tool.”
The article notes that allowances might be a middle American thing, and perhaps more common among families with means. My impression is that a lot of allowances, even adjusting for inflation, even contemplating compensation for chores, are generous these days.
It’s not unusual for first-time opponents to underestimate the lady Salam Stars.
The girls can see it — in an opponent’s glance, maybe the way she drops her shoulders — when the Stars take the court looking demure in their traditional Muslim headscarves.
Then, without fail, Captain Safiya Schaub or one of her teammates will hustle for the basket, quickly post up and nail the layup.
For now the team is respecting the old-country ways.
Salam, meaning "Peace" in Arabic, is an Islamic school that draws students and families from around the globe to its campus at South 13th Street and West Layton Avenue. The school has been expanding its athletic opportunities for girls over the last decade and now fields teams in soccer, volleyball, track and cross country, in addition to basketball.
Not all of the lady Stars wear the hijab outside school — it is a choice — but it's part of the uniform at Salam, in classes as well as athletics. And the school has had a waiver from the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association for years for girls to compete in the headscarf, sweats and long-sleeved tees.
School uniforms. Imagine that. Their contemporaries at the Catholic schools would understand.
At the same time, the players present a challenge to old-country ways.
The girls' families are for the most part supportive. But it can still be a hard sell for some in more traditional segments of the community where women are expected to be modest, not competitive or aggressive.
"My dad was kind of against it at first — it was more of a cultural thing than religious," said senior center Nadira Ali, whose parents emigrated from Somalia before she was born. "I eventually convinced him that when you go to college, it's more than just about grades. They're interested in the leadership you bring to the table."
Still, they have a strong fan base, particularly among classmates and siblings — boys and girls — teachers and a few parents.
Read the article and discover that sometimes fans at away games aren't properly mannerly. That's unfortunate.
But ask yourself, dear reader, when is the last time you saw somebody's babushka wearing a babushka to church, or to the department store?
I repeat, because repeat I must: "The task for the living is to continue to give young people, including immigrants, a country they can buy into, as well as to buy into the success of those young people."
In the United States, the investor-owned railroads have sold stations for other uses, such as taverns, restaurants, all manner of retail stores, or museums, or breweries, and sometimes, the stations are moved away from the right-of-way for other uses. The Minnesota and Northwestern depot in Sycamore, Illinois, for instance, is now a private house about a mile from where the Chicago Great Western once ran.
The article, which is in German, is in part an offer of rolling stock for sale, either to repurpose as a house, or for preservation. It does not appear to note that rolling stock is heavy, and that the person who aspires to live in a repurposed rail car has to pay as much attention to the subroadbed and the drainage thereof as a conscientious roadmaster does.
Some residents of Fergus Falls, probably with prior experience dealing with nogoodniks, offered a rebuttal. "Not only did he simply indulge in fabricating dramatic scenes and stories about Fergus Falls, but Relotius somehow spent three weeks here and managed to miss out on experiencing the real community and its many complex perspectives, which might have actually offered a helpful analyses about economic transition, politics and identity in rural America." The Deputy Minister of Propaganda Information at Der Spiegel has issued an acknowledgement, one that concurs in part with the rebuttal.
[T]he initial review we have now conducted also shows that even if the whole story had been fact-checked according to the magazine's existing guidelines and all obvious mistakes and inaccuracies removed, large parts of the text could still have been fiction. DER SPIEGEL can only apologize to the residents of Fergus Falls. We are sorry.
Mr Jagler is the Wisconsin legislator who sponsored a bill requiring state universities to identify the high schools that were sending unprepared students their way. (The resulting law, unfortunately, does not allow universities to send the high schools the bill for having to staff and offer high school courses in college.)
Wayne State University has the lowest graduation rate for public universities in Michigan, but federal data shows it's improving in that area faster than any public university in the country.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System shows that Wayne State’s graduation numbers went from 26 percent in 2011 to 47 percent in 2017.
The graduation rate for black students has tripled during this time, while the rate for first-generation students also improved rapidly.
Monica Brockmeyer, the Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success at Wayne State, says it took a lot to improve the six year graduation rate from 26 percent to 47 percent.
“The biggest single part of it was the hiring of 45 academic advisors, and so we doubled our advising capacity on campus,” Brockmeyer said.
A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results. And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings. I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?
There remains a strong constituency for economic nationalism, foreign policy realism, and a libertarian-ish social conservatism that hates political correctness and identity politics. That constituency awaits a leader who knows how to lead, whose vision extends beyond the ramparts of his own backside.
"Foreign policy realism" does not mean "conserve the current sclerotic international order," never mind all of the people who suddenly discovered a love for overseas adventures now that Our President is backing away from them.
Reason's Nick Gillespie extends. "What Trump ultimately represents or embodies is the twilight of postwar America, of a consensus forged for a very different world and very different circumstances. He too will pass from the scene, and then many, if not all, of the same problems will remain—until we reach a new consensus for a government that no longer tries to be all things to all people, both here and abroad."
The problem, dear reader, is that there are far too many Front Row Kids whose continued prestigious existence depends on government trying to be all things to all people, whether as high government officials, or as talking heads. Thus, Ross Douthat's pessimism.
A governing class that has vaulting self-confidence and dwindling credibility, locked in stalemate with populist movements that are easily grifted upon and offer more grievances than plans.
In theory the impasse can be overcome. That’s what statesmanship is for — to bridge gaps between complacent winners and angry losers, to weld populism’s motley grievances into a new agenda suited for the times, to manifest an elitism that is magnanimous instead of arrogant.
But can the system we have really produce such a statesman? The next one we find will be the first.
That's the nature of emergence. Abraham Lincoln was controversial in office, as was Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. When the old social order is fracturing, compromise, consensus, and process are of little use.
Earlier this year, the editorial board at The Independent Review invited me to review Randal O'Toole's Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. The full review will appear sometime this spring, and I'll likely be linking to it again, heck, maybe even letting my Economics colleagues know about it in case they get any brownie points for having emeritus faculty that are still active in some way.
The editors gave me permission to use excerpts from my review before it appears, with due credit. In light of the attention Mr O'Toole's work is getting in the ferroequinologist community, here we go.
My nearly 6.5 years of doctoral study have included two labs, two departments, and two universities. I have connected with graduate students from other campuses at the usual places: cohort gatherings, workshops, Twitter, conferences. We have a variety of things in common, but the one I wish we didn’t share is the negative effect of graduate school on our partnerships.
Doctoral training is hard. And relationships are hard. They’re both long-term, serious pursuits. But the quest for knowledge should not mean sacrificing your relationship.
Certainly some people have had great marriages through graduate school and beyond. I truly love to hear the success stories — specifically, how they made it work. But I know many other doctoral students — of different backgrounds and genders — whose relationships fell apart or struggled to survive as a direct result of their doctoral study. When my own marriage nearly collapsed, graduate school was a main factor. We have had to fight hard to stay together, and I have had to unapologetically realign my priorities to what works better for both of us, and not just for my work.
I'm sure associates on the partner track, members of the military, railroaders bucking the extra board, and any assistant manager in the world of rank-and-yank will be moved to tears.
"Two labs ... and two universities" suggest a voluntary transfer of some kind, not exactly a dictate from the Division Superintendent that the Memphis yards need sorting out, or a Movement Order from the Admiral. Then catch that "different backgrounds and genders." Personnel departments in higher education were on board with domestic partner benefits and no questions asked about who is doing what to whom long before legislators and courts granted sanction. Note, also, dear reader, that the dysfunctional academic couple, generally somewhere in the humanities, has been a staple of the academic novel probably longer than "White Christmas" has been a seasonal favorite.
Never mind, she's on a roll.
Marital hardships are easily traced to academe’s toxic work culture — one in which your research must be everything, you are praised for working 17 hours a day in a lab, and you are reprimanded and told you’re not dedicated enough for visiting your long-distance partner or (gasp!) taking a vacation.
For many overachievers — i.e., most graduate students — the work-is-everything environment becomes a trap that bleeds you of your emotional capacity. You stop being present in your daily personal life. You live to get through this one class, this one semester, this one grant proposal, this one field season, this one short course, this degree. Only when you get through those accomplishments can you start your life. Even then, you are encouraged to chase the next goal. It’s a never-ending cycle.
Read on, though, and you discover that the high achievers face a time crunch, no matter where they are.
My partner was a successful professional chef for several years, until we really saw what longevity in that profession looked like for marital, and family, success. We decided together that he would pursue a different path because what we knew, saw, and were told about that industry did not match with sacrifices we were willing to make. Little did we know — because nobody talked about it — that my pursuit of a Ph.D. would provide pressures and work-life imbalances similar to those in my partner’s previous career path.
As a community, we need to do better. We need to be transparent about work-life challenges in doctoral study — and not just talk about it but provide concrete support and actual suggestions. I do not have exact answers, either. I am not a marriage counselor or a marriage researcher. I am just a married graduate student who has struggled on this front.
It's really very simple. As long as there are people who are willing to out-work others, consequences be darned, there's going to be that struggle. Be grateful that you're not in a position of having to out-work everyone else to keep the wolves away from the flock at night.
Yes, I have slagged on seasonal advertisements for upscale automobiles, but give Christopher Borrelli of Chicago's Tribunehigh marks for bringing the smack. "[C]an we agree that Christmas TV commercials for cars are among the most obnoxious, borderline sociopathic cultural phenomena that operate in plain sight, patently ridiculous yet so relentlessly ubiquitous we almost welcome them, as just another patch in the everyday fabric of a perverse universe — the wallpaper of capitalism." Pedant's note: the normal state of affairs is the Hobbesian world, whilst a world in which there are upscale cards might be a blessedly perverse departure from that norm.
And who are these commercials for — people watching “Monday Night Football” and “Seinfeld” reruns and bingeing Hallmark movies? And where do they get the big red bows? Do the spouses in these ads ever wake in the dead of night sweaty, wondering where the money came from for matching $60,000 SUVs? And does the percentage of couples in these ads who divorce outpace the national divorce rate?
Way ahead of you, Mr Borrelli, on that last question. "I must confess to imagining a voice-over to the commercial with the guy looking at the bling and then noticing the Lexus cute-ute outside the jewelry store. Don't know whether I want him mulling 'will she forgive me for boinking the nanny?' or 'this should keep her pacified if she finds out.'" Was that really thirteen Christmases ago?
December. Some were gifts, some necessary purchases that conveniently doubled as gifts. Said Akshay Anand, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book: “The thing that isn’t talked about much is that the big luxury manufacturers are all competing in December to claim they were the ‘luxury brand sales leader of the year.’ ” Which is partly why Lexus, BMW and Mercedes’ Christmas ads are so frequent.
At McGrath Lexus of Chicago, “it’s our busiest time of the year,” said Heather O’Malley, the sales manager for new cars. She said McGrath sells about 120 cars each December at its dealership on Division Street. Maybe five or six are Christmas gifts. “And I have done the whole surprise car-gift thing like in the ads. A husband takes his wife to breakfast and arranges for us to leave the car in the driveway with a big red bow when they return — I love doing that.”
Lexus, Mr Borrelli notes, is no longer the most over the top: he gives full marks to GMC. So much for Chevrolet as in baseball and apple pie. Now it's matching pickup trucks for people who probably wouldn't know an acetylene torch from a branding iron.
But every holiday there is one stunner, and this season the award for most obtuse Christmas car commercial goes to GMC’s luxury truck campaign. So much to unpack here (notwithstanding 63 cubic feet of cargo space). The ad begins with a woman in a lovely sweater approaching her husband, also wearing a lovely sweater, staring blankly into the void. They seem to live inside Crate & Barrel, one awash in the soft blue tones of a December dusk. She bought an early gift, she says. She presents two watches — “one for you and one for me.” Which reminds him — he got them “a little something too.” They step outside their spotless home, and two new GMC vehicles, one black, one red, wait in the driveway (without bows, alas). She runs to the black one and before her husband can say the red is hers, she clasps hands on the black — “I love it,” she says.
By all means, read the column in full. Mr Borrelli establishes his curmudgeon credentials with this passage.
This is, in a sense, an ecosystem of fantasy.
“Very few commercials appeal to everyone,” said Derek Rucker, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Northwestern University who specializes in persuasion. “The fact that the brand might annoy some people could still be fine from a business perspective.” He said car commercials like this often create a “positive halo” around a brand even when buying a car for someone as a gift is not possible.
It can also sound insanely tone-deaf.
A remnant of the 20th century, with none of the side-eye of “Mad Men,” tacked onto something more contemporary: the idea that the fundamentals of togetherness and good cheer are just acquisitions.
We'll do the social science of positional arms races another day.
Dave Barry has released his Review of 2018, and it does not disappoint. "As you recall, we, as a nation, spent all of 2017 obsessing over 2016: the election, the Russians, the emails, the Mueller probe, the Russians, the Russians, the Russians…. That was all we heard about, day after soul-crushing day, for the entire year." That is, for 2018. But the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, for the first time since Chuck Bednarik stopped playing both ways, and that becomes the glue for the review. "In sports, the nation rejoices as, for the ninth consecutive year, some team other than the New York Yankees wins the World Series. Atlanta is evacuated when troops are unable to halt the relentless advance of jubilant Eagles fans." Enjoy. It might be wise to finish your coffee before you start reading. Happy New Year.
Salvation Army on pace to hit $90K goal. "It wasn't easy to feel festive last year, when Walmart, Walgreens and Jewel all made companywide decisions that the Salvation Army's workers and volunteers weren't allowed to ring bells before Thanksgiving."
This year, a few stores allowed the bell ringers as early as 9 November. Economic recovery or not, there is always work for the local charities. The small platoons of civil society can help, sometimes a dollar at a time.
NIU (8-4) won its fourth straight game, with Mikayla Voigt scoring 36 points and grabbing 10 rebounds to lead the way. Twenty four of her points came in the in the fourth quarter and overtime as she sparked the run that gave NIU the lead for good. After being held scoreless in the third quarter, Voigt posted nine points in the fourth, eight in the first overtime and seven in the second overtime.
Also stepping up was junior guard Myia Starks, who matched a career high with 25 points. She took only 12 shots, making seven, and was 11 of 12 on free throws.
Getting to overtime was hard enough for the Huskies, who trailed by eight in the third quarter, as the Bears continually answered NIU’s efforts with timely baskets. Brown was fervently denying Voigt the ball and was forcing other Huskies to shoot.
It got a bit more interesting, as Monday's heavy rain (had the temperatures been a little cooler, we might have been noting some heavy snow) revealed a leak in the roof of the Convocation Center. (Well, if the Oak Island Money Pit floods, why not?)
The practice court is set up for spectators, as it's also the home court for volleyball. The basketball courts barely fit the space, but then, that's how a lot of high schools roll.
The teams agreed sometime before the game that Brown would use their home whites and Northern their reds, which are one of the road uniforms. The substitute gym had the seats pretty much all filled.
Part of run-and-fun is finding the players who have the good shots.
"The reason I wasn’t able to shoot as much as was they were in a … full-deny [defense] on me, and I wasn’t able to get a lot of good looks with the basketball,” Voigt said. “But that’s when you’ve got to rely on your teammates. These guys hit wide-open shots, and that forced them to come out of of it and I think that’s kind of why you saw a bit of a turnaround.”
A team-mate, post player Ally May, noted, “Our guards just continually pushed the floor and we continually ran our lanes and we just got easy shots."
The pre-conference schedule included a visit from Yale in the opening game of the pre-season National Invitation Tournament, and this scheduled visit from Brown, which play two Illinois kids, and honored the tradition of scheduling some road games in the old neighborhood. Thus, Northern Illinois goes 2-0 against the Ivies. The extension to the academic enterprise is left as an exercise.
The Second Era of American Greatness was not yet over, though, and the Apollo 8 circumlunar voyage included a greeting to the world from out of this world.
Provide your own optimistic closure for this year.
Thank you for looking in. Cold Spring Shops will be taking a long winter's nap, until sometime in the new year.
The "Starting Five" for NCAA Women's Basketball, as identified by Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Truman, Johnson, Reagan and Nixon, for the week commencing December 11:
Illinois State, Connecticut, Brown, Northern Illinois, Tennessee: the Ivies and the mid-majors outnumber representatives of the usual suspects.
At Northern Illinois, Courtney Woods is out injured for the season. Last season, she credited Mikayla Voigt for giving up her shot when Ms Woods had a better shot. It's all a matter of finding the open player.
That was spliced together from video of a game in Carbondale. The Directional States of Illinois held a "Compass Challenge" in which Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern played each of the other three. Southern Illinois hosted the first two games, then Eastern Illinois came to Northern Illinois for the third. Southern made a few more shots down the stretch than Northern did: that was not the case for the Western playing Northern game.
It's going to be an interesting season, again, for the women's game in the Mid-American Conference. "Northern Illinois is 2-2. There is certainly talent on this roster, but I just can’t justify this particular team getting 8 votes, at least not yet. Mikayla Voigt, Janae Poisson, and Courtney Woods and company could compete for a MAC title this year, but I think these votes are a little premature." Particularly with two of those three players out injured, but count these kids out not.
Elsewhere in the conference, two of the putative favorites, and a few other teams off to a good start have a chance for securing quality wins before the new year, and the conference play, begins.
Northern Illinois? The individual achievements are good, but the Hustle Belt pundit isn't impressed. "They are capable scorers, but their run and fun style leads to some defensive problems. The Huskies are relatively deep with some talented players I expect to see more of later in the season. I expect them to be around .500 in league play, which considering the depth of this league is pretty impressive, really."
I wonder if that "run and fun" was a typo, or perhaps an attempt to be witty. I haven't gotten to that Eastern Illinois game yet. The current coach in Charleston is Matt Bollant, and he's beginning to implement the Wisconsin-Green Bay system. It's the same system Carol Hammerle and Kathi Bennett used, which means it either is scary to juniors and seniors who came in with it, or that they know how to master it, or perhaps Eastern are still learning. That noted, Eastern began the game hitting their perimeter shots and milking the shot clock and being generally annoying on defense, and had as much as a ten-point lead. Not that the Northern Illinois players got rattled. "The Huskies outscored the Panthers 30-13 in the third quarter to erase a three-point halftime deficit."
And so it went.
Yup, net change of 29 points from that early deficit. In the middle of that third quarter, doesn't a 24-2 run sound like fun?
"I was just trying to have fun," [point guard Myia] Starks said. "I thought in the beginning of the game we were a little tense. I was like 'it's basketball. It's supposed to be fun.' I just went out there and played how I usually played. The coaches put us in good spots with the offense, and we got good looks."
Maybe it's just in fun. Note the remarks of a DeKalb Daily Chronicle pundit, on the latest bowl game disaster. "Flaws or no, it is a successful program." Perhaps by Mid-American standards (and head football coach Rod Carey just got a contract extension, so there it is.) The basketball conference might be a tougher test.
That noted, Chicago State will be the guest Friday, and spectators who want to see a game can get in for free with a donation of a new, unwrapped toy. Then Brown and Ms Steeves will be in come 31 December.
Railway preservation is a challenging enterprise, with the notion of "playing with trains" in full scale in bad odor: anyone who works on other large mobile machines probably has to deal with that. The culture-vultures who are happy to contribute to other sorts of museums might not want to hold wine and cheese receptions to raise money for railway museums (although this time of year, those of that set who have kids might find a Santa Claus train to ride) or support the use of the national endowments in those purposes. In addition, you can't get replacement parts at Home Depot, and, like any other organization of people, from time to time personalities clash.
Thus, a one-time thriving museum in Noblesville, Indiana, liquidates.
One of the cars in the collection, North Shore coach 172, is now at the Illinois Railway Museum, where, after a full restoration, it will make possible a three-car train (150, 172, 714) of the older stock that protected the commuter services in later years.
You'd think people would be wise to the scam by now. "That yet another socialist government seems unable to tolerate criticism should surprise absolutely nobody. Collectivist societies emphasize the group, and those who would lead the group deeply resent those who would stand apart." I mean, when the late Robert Heilbroner, no Tory he, sees the danger.
"Because socialist society aspires to be a good society, all its decisions and opinions are inescapably invested with moral import. Every disagreement with them, every argument for alternative policies, every nay-saying voice therefore raises into question the moral validity of the existing government, not merely its competence in directing activities that have no particular moral significance," wrote widely read socialist economist Robert Heilbroner in a 1978 article in Dissent. "Dissents and disagreements thereby smack of heresy in a manner lacking from societies in which expediency and not morality rules the roost."
But consider that although Venezuelan socialism might have inherited a lot from the Roman Empire and the Iberian Catholic Church, there's a lesson from there that's germane here. "And, of course, the country's socialist government jails political opponents, beats demonstrators, and uses its legal power and economic control to stifle dissenting opinions that 'smack of heresy' in a system in which there is no 'relatively inviolable non-state employment sector' to serve as 'a condition for political freedom.'"
That's about muzzling the independent press, which is something politicians of all stripes hope to do, if they're not necessarily as up front about it as Our President.
In January of 2017, when the political controversy over Donald Trump’s perplexing win over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 national election was at its peak, my professor began his political psychology course by asking the lecture hall the following: “How many of you wish Hillary had won the election?” The question was voluntary, yet nearly every hand in the room shot up. “Okay, and how many of you supported Trump winning the election?” The room was quiet as not a single hand was raised, followed by a few chuckles. “Next, how many of you feel that liberals are safe walking across campus expressing their political views?” Every hand once again went into the air. “And how many of you feel that conservatives are safe to walk around campus expressing their political views?” The room filled with laughter as nobody raised their hand.
While most thought little of the exercise, this was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve had throughout my academic career. Here was an entire lecture hall of young adults laughing at the recognition of political suppression at a university founded on the principles of free thought and discourse.
“Free Speech,” as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. The creation of this petition at Williams cannot be separated from those dehumanizing associations. Nor can it be separated from a national pattern where certain amendments are upheld and protected at all costs and others are completely denigrated, ignored, and targeted. Take the privileging of the 2nd amendment over the 14th amendment, for example.
The good news, dear reader, is that the student petition is self-refuting.
The petition prioritizes the protection of ideas over the protection of people and fails to recognize that behind every idea is a person with a particular subjectivity.
You can argue that there are defensible markers of racism and all the other -isms and -phobias, and that public policy favors some passages in the Constitution more than others, or you can argue that each person has his own subjectivity, making his truth claims as valid as anyone else's. You can't simultaneously hold both positions.
Let's rewrite that last excerpt. "The petition prioritizes the protection of wrong ideas over the protection of our people and fails to recognize that some subjectivities are more subjective than others."
Tonight, Northern Illinois and Alabama-Birmingham will kick off in the Boca Raton Bowl.
There are several pregame evaluations of the bowl game in the scheme of things. This watchability ranking places it 22d in the lineup of 39 or 40, with a backhanded endorsement.
A couple conference champs going at it. This will be low scoring but I could see this being a competitive game that’s worth some Tuesday night viewing with no other football to compete with. Also what a sponsor for a bowl game.
First time I ever heard of Cheribundi Tart Cherry, which is some sort of energy drink.
Another ranking has it as high as thirteenth, based on the gone-to-restored status of Alabama-Birmingham football.
The full list of bowls pitting conference champions: The Orange (Alabama-Oklahoma), the Rose (Ohio State-Washington) and the Boca Raton. Not bad company. The Huskies (8-5) are a perennial Mid-American Conference power, while the work coach Bill Clark (pictured) at UAB (10-3) remains one of the more remarkable developments in the sport this decade.
Then come the skeptics. Slag the Mid-American: Western Michigan 37, Northern Illinois 38, Ohio 39.
Northern Illinois is miserable in bowl games under head coach Rod Carey. UAB was miserable in its 41-6 loss to Ohio in last year’s Bahama’s Bowl. Something has to give between one of only three bowls with conference champs going at it – the Rose and Orange the two others. It’s a Tuesday night, what else are going to do, be miserable?
Speaking of the Orange Bowl: first, that bowl losing streak began for then interim coach Rod Carey at the Orange Bowl, and Florida State is this year not in any bowl, after last year becoming bowl-eligible on the strength of a mid-season bought win; meanwhile, last year's disappointed participants, Donna Shalala North and Donna Shalala South, meet again in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl.
This wasn’t an easy matchup to get excited about last year, when they played in the Orange Bowl after both losing conference title games. The Hurricanes and Badgers both stumbled into disappointing 7-5 seasons this fall. At least Wisconsin tailback Jonathan Taylor (pictured, FBS-best 1,989 yards) wraps up his sophomore year in an environment (New York) almost as conducive to a raw late December day as Camp Randall Stadium.
That's familiar territory for Wisconsin, which at the beginning of this century came off two straight Rose Bowl wins with national title aspirations, as did their opponent UCLA. They got a participation trophy, and Wisconsin won that game.
It's semester break all over the U.S. and probably Canada, which means this is a good time to start thinking about next semester's political economy courses. We'll give the Trenchant Observation Of the New Term to Michael Munger.
Pigou, to his credit, recognized that the concepts of “market failure” and “externality” actually require an investigation of the specific institutions of state intervention. He may have been too optimistic about the prospects for improving state action, but he had no illusions about the problem states faced in acting correctly.
[Pigou] also was careful to note that what later came to be known as the market-failure paradigm should be applied with care. Usually, the logic of Pigouvians goes like this: markets fail (by externalities, asymmetric information, etc.), so the state should act. Of course, that would only be a complete prescription if one is reasonably certain that the actual actions of the state are likely to be an improvement over the actual results obtained from the market.
The main thrust of the public choice movement was to correct this naïve optimism about the state. There are two main types of problems identified in the work of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the other scholars who developed the public choice critique starting in the 1960s.
Put another way, vulgar Pigouvians ought recognize the limitations of state action, whether or not they are prepared to grant some of the harsher criticisms of state action that might follow from public choice theory. Just teach the controversies.
The joys of liquidating railroad real estate in a city rendered uninhabitable by years of Democrat rule include the paperwork being shuttled around from resting place to resting place.
Residing in knotted grass behind a machinist shop in Trenton, the trailers were leaning at all the wrong angles. Holes were ripped through the sheet metal. Because of mold and the raccoons that had nudged their way inside — leaving fecal matter and destruction in their wake — Tyvek suits and respirators were required to enter.
In short, it was sort of a disaster. Especially when considering the contents: thousands of documents, artifacts and detailed drawings that went into the construction of Detroit's iconic Michigan Central Station. Documents that were removed from the station by employees when the depot shut down in 1988, and then, over the course of nearly three decades, bounced around metro Detroit, swapping hands and locations as various guardians recognized they were holding onto something valuable, but just didn't know what to do with it.
It appears as though the diagrams are now in the hands of state archivists, although, perhaps, with Ford seeking to renovate the office tower for corporate purposes, perhaps the Henry Ford Museum will be a better home for them.
From an archivist's perspective, the finding of these documents — of which [state archivist Mark] Harvey and his colleague Mary Zimmeth were able to keep about 10 percent — has been remarkable. Working drawings, the documents serve as blueprints detailing not just the design of the station, but the specifics of how the building was put together.
In recent months, as Ford begins its multiyear process of rehabbing the celebrated building, however, the now saved documents could have increased value. They can serve as a road map for the recovery.
"What makes these different is that they’re the 'as-built' drawings, they’re the shop drawings, if you will, detailing things like the light fixtures or the architectural details," Harvey said, explaining that while presentation drawings already exist at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library, the working drawings are one of kind, detailing everything from the installation of the light fixtures to the construction of the marble facade.
"It actually has the numbering system for how to put the marble back up in the pediment. So it’s super detailed. It’s the order in which the pieces were installed," said Harvey, explaining the significance of the drawings with the current rehab project.
At least in this case, there is enough information for all of Our Ford's horses and all of his men to reclaim a symbol of the First Era of American Greatness.
"This is a whole story of what was happening in Detroit at the time," Edwards said of the documents, and how they, in many ways, pay tribute to the hundreds who helped make the magnificent building possible. While the building was designed in the early 1900s by Warren & Wetmore of New York and Reed & Stem of St. Paul, Minnesota, the documents that were preserved point to the true team effort that went into its creation.
"We always talk about the architects. But we forget about the hundreds of other people who helped to build that building. I like that part. I like to illuminate the sort of forgotten people. The craftsmen," Edwards said. "You see these drawings and you think, ‘Oh, my God. These people are amazing. That they made these things.' "
There are a lot of other amazing things that people made that have also been deconstructed over the past fifty years or so.
Wasn't it only a week or two ago that Our Progressive Betters told us the stop-action Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was evil? "Impossible to parody," notes one wag. "[P]olitically correct yahoos who never run out of reasons to be miffed," writes another, continuing, "His plight is somewhat different because, even though the song’s lyrics were written in 1939, little kids still jubliantly sing them with no regard for what poor Rudolph endured en route to becoming a Christmas icon." (Apparently, even at Huffington Post, there's a concurring opinion.)
Reason's Matt Welch pens a lament for the return of Arizona senator Jeff Flake to private life.
There is no place more despised in American politics right now than the center. Not the ideological center, necessarily, but the temperamental center. That space inhabited by people who recoil instinctively from bloody-knuckled partisanship and the collectivist demonization it requires, who lament the erosion of democratic norms and the delegitimization of mediating institutions. At a moment of intense polarization, when the time for choosing was yesterday, who has the patience for such scoldy fence-sitters?
You can find a lot of libertarians in this unhappy camp, averse as they usually are to the tribal political hysterics of the day. Flake is among the most libertarian members of the Senate; in the House, arguably the most temperamentally centrist member is the one who prefers describing himself with the (as-yet lower-case) l-word: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.). Amash's Twitter feed these days is filled with such cheery observations as, "Political discourse today is driven almost entirely by tribalism and bias and very little by principles and truth. We've come to a sad and dangerous place. Liberty cannot survive without virtue."
But you can find a lot of anti-libertarian people in the temperamental center as well. Bill Kristol. Benjamin Wittes. The late John McCain, and the D.C. establishment that mourned him (and its own receding power) for a week last month. There is a whole cadre of anti-Trump conservatives who have not yet come to grips with the way their support for war, surveillance, spending, bailouts, and wink-nudge populism helped discredit their precious establishment in the first place.
The problem Mr Welch is struggling with rests on overuse of the term "center" On one hand, he's talking about a philosophical principle, centered on such things as enumerated, separated, and limited powers, emergence, and simple rules for a complex world. On the other hand, he's talking about compromise-happy squishes. When the True Believers have taken leave of their senses, what good does splitting the difference between one form of madness and another do? He sort of gets it.
Pox-on-both-houses centrism, even with some libertarian flavoring, does not always lead to wisdom. Setting your own coordinates by the position of the other two poles is reactive, unsteady, a recipe for squishiness. (This is one of many reasons why, even though there are many of libertarians who can be found in the temperamental center, there are a lot of other, more anarchistic libertarians who positively hate that place and the people associated with it.)
Exactly. It doesn't take a lot of work to locate professed socialists and communists who will have no truck with the left wing of the Democrats, either.
It also doesn't take a lot of work to figure out that there are limits to compromise. Mr Welch praised Senator Flake for saving the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.
Commentators in the temperamental center — Timothy P. CarneyMegan McArdle, Ross Douthat — proposed variations on the same theme: Just investigate a bit longer, clear up some of the more soluble disparities, and schedule a prompt vote. The non-grandstanding Democrats on the committee (basically Klobuchar and Coons) articulated a similar bargain.
But it took a haunted-looking Flake, reportedly operating on zero sleep, normally handsome face puffed up with five extra pounds of frown, to make that reasonable and de-escalatory framework a reality. The libertarian wing of the temperamental center delivered a result that at least temporarily forestalled the worst of American smash-mouth politics.
That libertarian wing is going to have to come to grips, sooner or later, with the reality that until voters figure out that the false binary of Republican and Democrat loses its validity with enough voters making a different choice. To their credit, the true believers trading under various socialist and communist banners have been making such claims for years. Unfortunately, they've got nothing by way of a positive vision to expand their constituencies very much. Enumerated and limited powers, and emergence, have a lot more going for them.
The joke isn't suitable for telling in mixed company, although, at one time, everyone intuited it. Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green elaborates.
Back before hookup culture was a thing, responsible grownups learned and enjoyed the steps to an ancient dance. The dance even had a name: Seduction. Or as I wrote four years ago, when this first became a fake issue: "It's a cleverly told musical version of the age-old dance of seduction, where both dancers know exactly what they're doing every step of the way to an almost predetermined (and happy!) ending."
Yes, well, when both people understood that they were in fact participating in that dance. It sometimes gets more complicated, as readers of Pride and Prejudice or She Stoops to Conquer understand.
The unwritten steps of seduction allow a gentleman to pursue without being a cad or a rapist. And just as importantly, there are all those steps and pauses for the woman to make the man work his charms hard enough, to make sure he’s worthy of her. But like any dance, the steps must be learned — and at some time in the last 20 years or so, society stopped teaching them.
Interestingly, a self-styled feminist weighs in, and her message might be that the steps had to go, for a purpose.
What we are hearing is a woman’s internal struggle, as she determines that she is strong enough to face the public ridicule that will follow when she chooses to defy social norms.
This song describes a woman’s conflict over her desire to do something progressive, while anticipating certain criticism from her family and community if she does so. Fortunately, the song ends on a cheerful note, when she appears to decide to stay over for the night — or at least for a bit longer. It is a decision made for her own personal gratification.
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a song ahead of its time — released a full 20 years before the sexual revolution for women — and it celebrates a feminist taking control of her own sexual choices.
At no point does she say, “I don’t want this.” She says, with unraveling conviction, that everyone else will have a problem with this. She goes through the list, starting with mother and father, and decreasing in importance when it comes to her reputation: the neighbors, her sister, her brother and the maiden aunt.
Put another way, what we understand today as "slut-shaming" is a dishonor tax, and feminism as this author understands it is a tax cut.
In the 1940s, women condemned to single life because not enough men were returning from battle was considered a major negative consequence of troops dying in World War II. What does this mean for our heroine? Upon reflecting upon the absurdity of caring about her bitter aunt’s opinion, she asks for another cigarette. Good for her.
Virginia Slims, making the transition from questionable hidden persuader to vanguard.
As a liberal feminist professor in public health, I should never applaud someone for smoking. But it is worth mentioning that for women in the first half of the 20th century, smoking was frowned upon, not for health-related reasons, but because smoking was a luxury reserved for the men folk.
The women who defied gender stereotypes by smoking faced moralistic scorn. Their character was questioned; they were viewed as “loose” or “fast.” When women opted to smoke, especially in public, they were placing a toe in the men’s world, they were boldly challenging social norms, realizing they would face public scorn, and choosing to light up anyway.
Those norms about the acceptability of women smoking started to change around World War II, and smoking as a feminist statement has waned since. Even so, the sexual slurring that occurs when women engage in gender nonconforming behaviors is something that persists today.
It's difficult to view the populist insurgencies, or whatever they are, whether in France, or the adjacent European countries, or the United States, without contemplating the ossified grip of a clique of Allegedly Wise Experts whose wisdom is obsolete.
Let's go around the internet. (By all means, follow the links, read the posts in full, this is a roundup.) Here's Neo-Neocon.
I wonder about the permanence and meaning of all these moves to the right, or to populism, or rejections of socialism, or however one might want to characterize them. To me they seem—much like the Trump movement here—to not be deeply rooted but to instead be frustrated reactions to something else. That “something else” is loosely called “elitism,” but I actually think it’s many things: a combination of not wanting Big Government to dictate so much and take so much money from people to do things most people really don’t want it to do, a rejection of illegal immigration and open borders (a rejection that used to be a mainstream position but is now considered to be a “far right” position), and a feeling that much of life has gotten out of control in a way that feels ominous and threatening.
The impulse could go right or left, as the recent midterms in the US seem to indicate. I sense that it may be an impulse away from rather than towards, a deep frustration with the status quo.
Yes, that's likely, although the people whose continuing tenure in the Political Establishment depends on Not Seeing It will likely not see it. Some of the chroniclers of the Insurgency don't yet see it. Consider National Review's M. B. Dougherty.
Maybe it is a mood, or the harbinger of some awful collapse. Maybe it is just one generation rejecting the certainties of a previous one. The democratic peoples of the West have tired of the politics of the sensible center and are demanding change. And in France, that change usually begins in the streets.
Most of the protesters have genuine, if chaotically expressed, grievances. They consider themselves the “invisible” people treated with contempt by Parisian elites, and now they’ve made themselves very visible with their fluorescent vests. Public opinion is behind them.
One of their most eloquent members is Ingrid Levavasseur, a young nurse and single mother of two from Normandy. Last week she spoke movingly on television of her struggle to make ends meet, and of her sense of deep injustice: “Some people complain that we block roads, but they don’t complain when they’re stuck in traffic jams on their way to ski resorts, do they?” she asked softly.
First, she notes that economics researchers might be able to successfully trade quantity of publications for quality. "If one decided to arrange different (sub-)fields of research along a continuum from r-strategists (high quantity of low quality publications) to K-strategists (low quantity of high quality publications), many psych subfields would probably end up closer to the r end of the scale than econ." She also likes what she calls the "preprint culture" and the attendant job market paper. I wonder if students prepare job market papers in part because editorial turnaround, particularly at the top journals, is sometimes slow.
Second, she isn't troubled with formal modelling per se. "In contrast, many theories in the more social parts of psychology that I have encountered during my studies are soft as pudding, which means that no data could possibly shatter them. They are basically just collections of verbal statements that all more or less align with common sense." Yup.
[I]if you say systematic evidence is stronger than anecdotal evidence, perhaps you might understand how that status hierarchy emerged. An aside: political discourse (journalism, if you will) is still more about the compelling stories, the stuff immediately seen, with the stuff that's not unseen not mentioned.
She then notices where that formal modelling leads.
At the poster session during the summer school, one faculty member marched up to one of the posters, interrupted the student before he could even properly start his spiel and asked: “Yes, but what’s the causal identification strategy here?” Now this might tell you something about the brashness of economists (in this case, the identification strategy took up a significant part of the poster), but it certainly tells you that economists mean business when they think about causality. A potentially exciting causal claim is only exciting when it’s convincing.
Yes, and convincing means taking seriously the challenge, "What evidence would convince you to abandon your conclusion," something that in her experience is more frequently replaced by "Sure, this is only a correlation, but how else would you explain this pattern?"
Finally, she's not put off by that "infamous argumentativeness" of economists (read: unruly workshops.)
I was mostly positively impressed by the rigorous discussion culture. Students would ask faculty members hard questions that potentially undermined the conclusions of their talks–not after the talk, but during it. And the faculty members always seemed very willing to take these hard questions seriously. I got the overall impression that both students and faculty were much more willing to consider potentially uncomfortable alternative interpretations of their data if they seemed like a real threat to their conclusions.
That's taking the "What evidence" challenge seriously.
In more theoretical settings, economists generally don't take challenges to their first-order conditions, or their equilibrium refinements, personally. Policy World might not always work that way.
Apparently graduating from tony Davidson College with a degree in basketball doesn't produce a functioning jive detector.
NASA wants Steph Curry to know that yes, the moon landing was real, and they're even inviting him to check out some space rocks to prove it.
During an interview on the podcast "Winging It," the Golden State Warriors star revealed that he doesn't believe the United States has been to the moon.
The people running NASA would like Thirty to visit Mission Control the next time the Warriors play the Rockets. (And why, dear reader, is the Houston basketball team called Rockets?)
"We'd love for Mr. Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets," NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told the New York Times. "We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we're doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay."
Trump won, publicly willing to accept blame for shutting down the federal government if he doesn’t get a paltry $5 billion for that wall he wants.
And now Chuck and Nancy have once again allowed Democrats to become the party of no-border security. Trump, who ran and won the White House on the promise of building his wall along the Mexican border, fashions himself as America’s Hadrian.
Hadrian actually built his wall. Trump just talks about building one.
The Nancy, Chuck and Trump show will continue, although the 36-month sentence handed down to Trump’s fixer lawyer Michael Cohen may at some point in the future derail this fine drama through impeachment.
Go around the internets, and you'll find images of the once and future Speaker strutting out of the White House, and acolytes of a certain age and (political) orientation claiming that's a victory walk.
The museum make use of original interurban trackage, in their case the Aurora Elgin and Fox River. A biking and hiking trail has replaced the tracks south of the museum line.
Adaptive reuse: the old Five Islands bridge is a new structure, using the piers of the old railroad bridge.
In the same way that the dot-com bubble left the country with a lot of capital for cheap re-use, the interurban bubble left the country with a lot of opportunities to provide bike trails.
The Kane County Forest Preserve District and the museum collaborate on running the Polar Express trains. Reservations are almost mandatory, as the trains sell out, and museum and preserve staff make every effort to seat families and large parties together. The seats in the Spam Cans don't flip, but there are some facing sets of seats that help.
Yes, they encourage people to wear their jammies, including the adults, and there is hot chocolate and story telling once aboard.
In the Cold Spring Shops area, three of the seasonal trains run on former interurban rights-of-way. At South Elgin and East Troy, it's original interurban trackage. At the Illinois Railway Museum, the seasonal train is a Chicago and North Western Commuter Streamliner, with decked halls decked, running on tracks where the Elgin and Belvidere interurban once ran. The museum got that right of way by paying back property taxes on it.
The problem is to replace the simplistic conventional wisdom with this messy reality. It will be tough, because the status quo is more politically appealing. The story line is pointed: “The ultra-rich are destroying the middle class.”
Yes you could, as Mr Samuelson does, marshal points and figures.
By contrast with many advanced societies, income and wealth are indisputably more concentrated in the United States.
But to be useful, debate must reflect solid realities, not politically convenient sound bites. This is a challenge, because many Americans embrace the stagnation myth.
There are many reasons for this: (a) Wage gains in any year are so small, they don’t register — stagnation seems vindicated; (b) people don’t count employer- or government-provided health insurance — a big part of their compensation — because they rarely see the money; (c) political partisans on both sides have a vested interest in emphasizing stagnation — it’s a good campaign issue; and (d) income advances for most Americans are much slower today than in the past.
[Urban Institute economist Stephen] Rose hopes the facts will change opinions, but he is skeptical. “People are very closed-minded,” he said, “even though it’s so obvious that people have more and better things — especially with the whole computer-IT revolution.”
Perhaps, the choice of price indices and starting points for time series and all the econometric hazards that come in train is wonky, and perhaps the productivity gains of faster microprocessors are still as if revelations to the apostles.
