NO ONE IS REALLY IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING.

That doesn't stop people from going to Washington City with delusions of Doing Good.  Jonah Goldberg notes, "This is a hard lesson for people who put immense faith in government to do big, important things."  That might be a strange Trenchant Observation as we observe the sesquicentennial of the Pacific Railroad, and yet, the work that generations of railroaders have done to get the Overland Route into the state it is today does not refute him.

AN IMPLICIT ENDORSEMENT OF "FREE REIN TO 110."

A recent CNBC feature attempts to explain the absence of high-speed Passenger Rail in the United States.

Why the U.S. continues to fail with high-speed rail from CNBC.

The presentation is uneven: the oil and motor vehicle lobbies get excessive credit for their influence-peddling; the convenience of the personal motor vehicle compared with the horse or even the motor bus influencing government policy makers to direct their internal improvements accordingly receives less attention.  In addition, mainland China's ability to trample on property rights to run railroads wherever the government wants is treated simply as a fact, not the absence of moral rights for citizens that it involves.  (And those Chinese high speed trains stand on pillars of concrete, the manufacture of which produces a lot of carbon dioxide and smog.)

Toward the end of the clip, Virgin Rail's Brightline appears.  One of the project managers notes that trains running at 110 mph top speeds don't require a grade-separated right of way, and the trains are almost as fast as the 220 mph counterparts.  The math is straightforward.  You might think that if a train given a top speed of 110 mph can cover the 85 miles between Chicago and Milwaukee in 55 minutes, the 220 mph train can do it in under a half hour.  Sorry, no, because you're using more right of way getting up to speed and decelerating; and you might be blowing past the airport or Sturtevant or Chicago so as to exploit those higher cruising speeds.  You're also building a railroad from scratch, rather than exploiting the capability of an existing railroad.  The Milwaukee Road and Florida East Coast had capabilities for running fast a long time ago.

THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST?

Jonathan Last notes, "Liberals often get very upset at the suggestion that the excesses of liberalism are to blame—even in part—for the rise of the reactionary nationalist subculture."  Ed Driscoll complains that Mr Last is writing about the intersectional leftists, not Hubert Humphrey types, but that's not the history lesson today.

Rather, it's something the Hubert Humphrey types ought to understand on a gut level.  Whenever an opponent of voting rights or integrated schools labeled those causes as somehow "communistic," that simply made the rest of the communist appeal more attractive, whether to people who were being denied voting rights or to people who thought of the cause as just.

Perhaps it's not so much the "reactionary nationalist subculture" offering the most attractive message, as it is that nobody More Respectable will note the shortcomings of the New Dispensation.

MASTERING ASSIMILATION.

Scott McConnell is not persuaded that demography is destiny.

An altogether possible scenario is that a politically significant slice of new immigrants (in both Europe and the United States) would choose to identify, more or less, with the existing cultures and narratives of the societies to which they immigrate. The whole concept of whiteness could shift, as it has in the past, and generally group identity issues would become less important and less adversarial, as there would be plenty of intermarriage, producing a new kind of melting pot. The necessary precondition for this would be an immigration stream which by numbers and skills admitted people who were a pretty good match to the existing society—that is, an immigration tailored to facilitate assimilation, more middle-class than not.

Sometimes it's simpler than that.  It might be as simple as who sits next to whom in class.  The way young people date across what used to be uncrossable boundaries these days leads me to suspect that in a hundred years people will wonder what the fuss was all about.  That, too, is nothing new: my grandmother was distressed that her children were dating and marrying Catholics after generations living as Baptists under difficult circumstances in Prussia and Russia.  Moreover, public policies that shift the notion of "whiteness" (if there is such a thing) are nothing new; the "Who is an American?" campaign after September 2001 echoes those earlier efforts.

No matter how many times I tell you, there's always somebody who will screw it up.  Give new arrivals an America to buy into, and an America that buys into the new arrivals, and we'll be OK.

THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.

George Will recognizes that the government that governs most is likely to be sold to the highest bidder.

The ["progressive"] catechism does not include the truism that the way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in the allocation of money and of opportunities for making it. This would eviscerate the progressive agenda, which involves government, a.k.a politics, redistributing wealth, regulating the creation of it, and rescuing “fairness” from “market failure,” a.k.a markets producing results that progressives dislike.

That doesn't stop the self-styled progressives from relying on politics.

We’re living with the lessons of 2016, and they threaten to destroy the country.  Yet somehow, that’s not enough to convince Pelosi and the rest of the neoliberal crew to run a campaign based on values like fairness, equity, economic justice, protecting our climate, assuring that democracy isn’t co-opted by corporate cash, or constraining the wretched excesses of capitalism so that the people can get a piece of the pie.

Instead, the people within the party advocating these things are getting marginalized; the policies that might actualize them are getting labeled as a dream; proposals to get corporate money out of elections are being rejected; and tax and fiscal policies that attack the injustices of capitalism are being ignored.

The only way Trump can win is to keep turnout low.  The Davos Democrats are doing everything in their power to oblige him.

That might be, although Ayn Rand's summary of egalitarian political economy as replacing the Aristocracy of Money with the Aristocracy of Pull still seems relevant.

These days, the Aristocracy of Pull comprises the winners of the Oppression Olympics, and that is unlikely to turn out well.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

Late-Stage Capitalism Stripping Humanity of Simple Joy.

"Several factors are likely to explain the declines [in levels of sexual frequency], but one may be the sheer pace of modern life," said Kaye Wellings, the study's lead author and a professor of sexual health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a statement.

"It is interesting," Wellings added, "that those most affected are in mid-life, the group often referred to as the 'u-bend' or 'sandwich' generation. These are the cohorts of men and women who, having started their families at older ages than previous generations, are often juggling childcare, work and responsibilities to parents who are getting older."

Gosh, fifty years of smashing monogamy, nuking the nuclear family, deferring marriage and childrearing, increasing the labor force participation of women, and generally democratizing transgressiveness have sure turned out well, haven't they?  It's probably easier for two-high-income families to subcontract out some of the grunt work, just another way bourgeois convention still pays off.

A TURNAROUND ARTIST?

Here it is the middle of May, and here comes Book Review N^o. 1.  Howard Green's Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison is an approved biography, mostly finished at the time of Mr Harrison's death.

WHAT THE ALL-ADMINISTRATIVE UNIVERSITY LOOKS LIKE.

It's not pretty, notes Tulsa philosopher Jacob Howland.  "For all their talk of inclusiveness and transparency, [incoming president Gerard] Clancy, [provost Janet] Levit, and the Board of Trustees would rather burn down the university than listen to anyone else."

We've documented the degradation of Tulsa previously.  The good news is, there are some on the faculty who understand their role as stewards of the university.

After the restructuring bombshell exploded in a slick, highly orchestrated rollout on the morning of April 11, students and faculty moved to protest quickly and decisively. That evening, I wrote to about 50 faculty and 500 students and alumni inviting them to attend a meeting in the Department of Languages the following day, and I pasted into the email an unedited version of my City Journal article. When I arrived for the meeting, over 400 people were present. We moved into the old theater next door, and I found myself leading a meeting at which we formulated key strategies for resistance to the restructuring.

The alumni, recognizing that a self-immolation by a current administration might retrospectively devalue degrees already conferred, also are saying no. (Let's hope that a lot of alumni respond to fundraising letters and 'phone calls with "no money until this Charlie Foxtrot is reversed and terminated with extreme prejudice.)

Some of the administrative tactics are ham-handedly stupid.  How many times, dear reader, must I tell you that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.  Others backfire.

Last week my university email account and that of the director of the musical theater program—also a leader of the opposition to “True Commitment”—were completely and mysteriously shut down for several hours. The director of TU’s renowned cyber-security program found the excuses of our IT department highly suspicious and advised me to contact the ACLU. The administration also prevented me from speaking on KWGS, the campus NPR affiliate. They originally agreed to allow me to be interviewed, on the condition that they, too, would be interviewed. But they withdrew their interview at the last minute, and KWGS employees, fearing for their jobs, decided not to air mine.

(This proved to be a tactical mistake on the administration’s part. Instead of having 12 minutes on KWGS, I was interviewed and took calls for a whole hour on Pat Campbell’s morning talk show on KFAQ, a Tulsa AM radio station. That led to an interview on Chicago’s “Morning Answer,” a program of WIND AM 560.)

I'm sure there will be more developments, and I'll stay on them.

HYPERSPECIALIZATION BEGETS HYPEREXTENSION.

Title Nine of the 1972 Civil Rights Act made women's sports part of the business of intercollegiate athletics, and where there is business, there is an old boy's network.  Where play turns to business, there are also rewards to proper preparation, never mind the hazards.

Like their male counterparts, girls have started to specialize early in their careers, working on just one sport year-round, often as a way to capture the attention of college coaches. With more scholarship money available than ever, girls feel pressured to specialize at a young age in the hopes of winning a spot on an elite team or gaining an edge in the increasingly competitive college admissions game. Despite persistent warnings from orthopedic surgeons and trainers, young athletes bent on specialization continue to suffer from preventable overuse injuries, like stress fractures and stress reactions, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. "More than 50 percent of what we see in sports medicine are overuse injuries, which are entirely preventable," said Dr. Joel Brenner, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness.

Preventable, perhaps, but it is the American way to push the envelope and come up with better repairs when it's unavoidable.

Stability Enhancement Systems, an innovative company dedicated to reducing injury risk in athletes through targeted personalized interventions, was called on by the Northern Illinois women's basketball team last month to come to its rescue, and to help figure out why four players in the last year have suffered serious knee injuries, including leading scorer Courtney Woods last month.

Build a better mousetrap and all that.

SES was established in 2011 and has developed quite a reputation for its good work. Over the last four seasons, SES has put more than 650 athletes through its individualized matrix testing and programming and none of them, that's right, zero, has had season-ending knee injuries.

Central Michigan coach Sue Guevara sympathizes with [Northern Illinois coach Lisa] Carlsen and would much rather be facing an NIU team at full strength today. She knows how disruptive injuries can be. She hired SES a few years ago when knee injuries decimated her team.

"My heart sank when I heard about Courtney's injury," Guevara said of Woods. "I know what that's like. We went out and hired SES when we had a bunch of knee injuries and I can't say enough about them. They do a great job of evaluating each player and creating specific exercises for each player. It's not just a (blanket) approach for the whole team.

"For us, it's been money well spent. We have a kid this year who already had some knee problems (coming into the program) and she has an injury right now, but other than that, we haven't had a knee injury since we started working with SES."

Carlsen said she did her research about SES to make sure it would be a good fit for her program. She noted that Notre Dame hired SES a few years ago when a rash of knee injuries hit its women's basketball program, and that SES also works with USA Basketball.

"I feel like I'll be a doctor when all this is done," Carlsen said with a chuckle. "I've learned so much about joint stability in addition to muscle strength and how that all factors in.

"I am hoping this will help us and help our kids stay healthy. The way I see it, we owe it to our kids to do this, and to the program."

The institutional incentives are against it, though, according to Atlantic authors Linda Flanagan and Susan Greenberg.

For starters, we can strive to identify the particular conditions that make women more susceptible to catastrophic knee injuries and develop training regimens that reduce that risk. According to Dr. Levine, preventative measures to protect against A.C.L.s remain "an elusive 'holy grail'."

Eliminating the eating disorders that are so common among female athletes might be unrealistic. Female athletes have figured out that sports can provide a fast track to getting thin. Girls' and women's social value remains tied to appearance, particularly body size, and Kate Upton on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue speaks a lot louder than the athletic trainer admonishing them to eat enough protein and carbs. Short of a massive cultural realignment (and we're not holding our breath), perhaps the best we can do is take aim at the most serious eating disorders--anorexia and bulimia—and continue to educate coaches and parents to encourage healthful eating and exercising.

A big part of reducing overuse injuries for girls and boys both will involve getting the word out about the perils of early sports specialization. For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics and top professional orthopedic organizations have cautioned against kids' specializing and overtraining, to little effect. Still, imposing enforceable restrictions on playing time won't work because of the vast and complicated array of sports and teams. If a child plays basketball for his school, church, and travel teams, who imposes the rules? "Parents have to be the advocates of their children, even if that means going against what the coach recommends," Dr. Brenner says. "It's about putting the child first."

Good luck with that. Middle school competitors are committing to collegiate programs.

Sydney Supple wasn’t your average middle schooler, though.

Now a senior at Oshkosh North, Supple committed to play softball at Northwestern University when she was in eighth grade following what she called a whirlwind of emotions during her recruiting process.

It sounds like she's still a future Wildcat, although she has reservations.

Following her recruitment to Northwestern, Supple helped push for a new NCAA rule when she was 16, three years after committing, in softball where coaches are barred from contacting recruits until Sept. 1 of their junior year.

The rule took affect [c.q.] in 2018.

It wasn’t easy, either, she says.

“Don’t want to sound like a hypocrite because there’s nothing I regret about my decision,” Supple said. “I’m lucky, not everyone has a positive experience.”

Fifty years ago, John Hersey's The Child Buyer was supposed to be dystopian fiction, and it was a brainy but socially inept overweight kid getting recruited for some secret government project.  These days it's the precocious athletic kids.

Supple said athletes are also taking leaps of faith.

“Easy to say you love the game in sixth or seventh grade, but that can change as a junior when you’re juggling school and everything else,” Supple said. “You need to find out what’s important to you and sometimes that’s not until you’re older.”

That's what Boston College lacrosse recruit Sophia Gouraige found out.

Gouraige, once at college, quickly found herself dreading practices. "You always had to be on your game, study what was in your binder, know the plays, get out there and be your best, be the fastest, score the goals," she says. "It felt like a tryout at every practice."

Though she loved lacrosse, she didn't want to spend all her time playing it. She was eager to explore other things, and with a push from the coach, she left the team during her sophomore year. "When you go to college, it's all about how to win the national championship," says Gouraige, now 21. "Why can't sports just be fun?"

It can be, but as soon as you're playing for stakes, it's work. A train dispatcher is only as good as his last move. A researcher is only as good as his last paper.  A candidate is only as good as her last campaign.  And there is always somebody willing to outwork you.

IT'S A STROAD IN A DOWNSCALE NEIGHBORHOOD.

The new Obama Boulevard in Los Angeles, that is.

The ceremony capped a day-long street festival that took place where the newly-named street intersects with Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. An estimated crowd of more than 23,000 people assembled to pay tribute to Barack H. Obama, who was elected president in 2008 and served for two terms.

That choice of intersecting streets might be significant. Find a Martin Luther King avenue or boulevard or road in a major city that isn't in a poor, probably majority-minority neighborhood.  Will that be the future site of streets in Barack Obama's name as well?

Local politicians hope not.

“With this change, we are publicly documenting what Obama’s legacy as our nation’s first black President means to our city and our South Los Angeles community,” said Los Angeles City Council President Herb J. Wesson, who introduced the motion to honor Obama.

“For every child who will drive down this street and see the name of the first Black President of our country, this boulevard will serve as a physical reminder that no goal is out of reach and that no dream is too big.”

That's the hope. That was the hope when all those Martin Luther King street signs went up, too.  And get this.  "Obama Boulevard replaces a 3.5-mile stretch formerly known as Rodeo Road, not to be confused with Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills."

I wonder if all the fashionably leftist Hollywood types will put an Obama Road in their neighborhood.

RUSH LIMBAUGH CHANNELS KURT SCHLICHTER.

Complete with a wisecrack about cruises.

I was raised to believe the last thing in the world you defend is your own? That’s a manners thing that you don’t focus on yourself. You defend and protect everything but your own so that you can show you’re not selfish and into it for yourself. But he’s had a total reversal. Like you don’t defend your own, who else will? And if your own and what you believe in is under attack, you have no reason to shy away from defending it. So that’s what he means by that.

But [Norman Podhoretz's] observation, the conservative elite has allowed its sense of superiority to overcome its intellectual powers. That’s right on the money. Superiorist arrogance, condescension really aimed at Trump supporters as much, if not more, at Trump. But I think there’s jealousy. I think Trump coming along has proven the lack of need.I mean, these people for the longest time thought of themselves as the intellectual bulwark for conservatism. They were defining it. They were the locomotive. They were propelling it. They were enforcing it. They were influencing others. And in that regard, they were always asking for donations. Their hands were always out. “Here. Donate to my think tank. Donate to my magazine. Donate to my cruise. Whatever, give me money.”

Wait a minute, you’re conservative. What is this “give me money” business? “Well, we’re so important, the conservative movement, that we need our funding in nontraditional ways.” Well, if your magazine can’t make a profit, then how valuable is it, really? “Well, uh, the value is not the magazine, but the intellectual prowess that puts it together,” blah, blah, blah, blah.

Here comes Trump, somebody they have no respect for, somebody they think is an absolute birthing idiot, [c.q.] and is not asking anybody for a dime and is implementing everything they believed in to cheers and applause that they will never hear for themselves, and they’re just jealous.

Trump is demonstrating that they’ve been running maybe a little bit of a scam. What good have they been in implementing conservatism and advancing it if a guy who’s never been in politics before can come in and get elected president in less than two years, implement 90% of what they devoted their lives to. So I think that’s a factor.

But as Mr. Podhoretz says, it’s really a class thing. The superiorist, nose in the air looking down at lessers and having those lessers outperform you and demonstrate your own irrelevance got to be infuriating. And now their magazines are going belly up, so they’re starting new websites, and they can’t get subscribers for that. So it’s doubly frustrating.

Well, yes, and it amuses me that The Bulwark (that's a land fortification) uses a picture of a ship of the line as its emblem.  The Trump presidency has revealed some of the Conservative Establishment as simply bipartisanship by other means, properly understood as the Political Class protecting its perquisites against the rabble.

THE ANNUAL GATHERING OF THE RENT-SEEKERS.

It's Railroad Day on Capitol Hill.  It's not quite those thrilling days of yesteryear when the lobbyist for The Pennsylvania Railroad was an unofficial member of the Pennsylvania Senate.  It's still a big deal.  "More than 430 representatives from industry, labor, Class I’s, short lines, shippers and manufacturers who support the rail industry will visit with 350 Congressional Offices."

It's the freight side of the operation that's doing the talking.

Railroad Day provides the opportunity for our members and the industry to tell their very powerful story. Our nation’s freight rail system is the envy of the world, providing safe and efficient rail service, moving goods from small town and rural America across the country, and into the global economy. Railroad Day sets the table for substantive conversations with Congress on a variety of issues that will confront them in the back half of 2019 including infrastructure, surface transportation reauthorization, appropriations, trade and more.

Not surprisingly, the lobbying will include objections to any increases in the length and weight allowable for motor trucks.  Here is where some general equilibrium thinking might be in order.  The freight railroads tend to think in terms of losing markets to the truckers (that is, when they're not giving markets away.)  That puts the railroad lobbyists in a bad position.

Trucking companies are increasingly becoming a bigger part of railroad revenues. Individual trucking companies that oppose a weight-distance fee will lean on their railroad partners to not support such an effort, much as they did during consideration of the LCV freeze. There will be railroads that are more than uncomfortable seeking to impose greater costs on their trucking competitors/partners. Moreover, industries that propose to impose fees upon their competitors have a high hurdle to cross, as the AAR experience in the ’80s proved.

Perhaps the freight railroads have trouble making common cause with motorists, as the clutter of heavy trucks on urban roads puts Commuter Rail and Regional Rail, which is to say, government authorities, in a good light.

The American Automobile Association has been a supporter in years past, and economists support the user-pays principle. Railroad suppliers who do not supply the trucking industry would likely support the initiative, and rail labor would join the AAR in support, albeit after the pursuit of its own agenda. Beyond these groups, there are few fervent supporters. One need look no further than the few states that have weight-distance fees or taxes, and the absence of a federal weight-distance fee or tax, to conclude that—the best efforts of the AAR years ago notwithstanding—there is substantial lack of support for the concept.

Apparently, selling themselves as relatively free of taxpayer moneys is a talking point for the freight railroads.  Read this.  "And, even as the exhaust of idling cars fills our air, the efficiencies of rail provide environmental benefits everywhere trains go."  There's a lot of self-congratulation about billions of dollars in private investment in railroad infrastructure, but not a single word about getting some of those people stuck in traffic onto the scoots and dinkies.  On the other hand, "[I]f just 10% of freight moved by the largest trucks were instead moved by rail, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by more than 17 million tons." I know I'm repeating myself, but the freight railroad operators leave some of that freight on the roads. Deliberately. "[Union Pacific] executives have said the railroad was serving too many low-volume lanes, whose traffic moved in small blocks that could not efficiently be handled via steel wheel interchange in Chicago and other gateways."  That puts motorists and pedestrians at greater risk.

But getting the right mix of cooperation among the freight railroads and the Passenger Rail authorities, whether Amtrak or the state and metropolitan agencies, continues to be a challenge.

MAKING THE ARMY GREAT AGAIN.

The service equivalent of Old Look uniforms?

The United States Army wanted a spiffy new service uniform, one that would stand out in a tough recruiting environment and polish the Army’s image after a generation of grinding and divisive wars.

So it turned the clock back. Way back.

It chose a new uniform that looks almost exactly like the old green gabardine wool field coat and khaki trousers that officers wore in World War II. Probably not by coincidence, that’s what the Army was wearing the last time the nation celebrated total victory in a major war.

Perhaps it's a signal that business casual has gone too far.

Army Greens will be the military equivalent of a business suit, which the Army largely stopped using during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as civilians have been dressing more casually in professional and social settings, troops have been wearing camouflage fatigues in situations that used to call for a jacket and tie, like office work or travel between bases. Even in the Pentagon, officers spend a good deal of their time in combat boots.

Soldiers will have the option of purchasing a leather bomber jacket. I wonder if the Eisenhower jacket will also be an option.

For formal occasions, the clock is still set at 1865.

In recent years, when the Army has wanted to look sharp, troops have been wearing blue. The current dress uniform (which will be retained for ceremonial use) includes a dark blue coat with light blue trousers or skirt — colors chosen to evoke the Continentals who fought under George Washington and the Union Army of the Civil War.

If that uniform has not caught your eye, it may be because Army Blues can be hard to distinguish, not just from similar Navy and Air Force uniforms, but also from a sea of blue-clad civilians: police officers, firefighters, commercial pilots, even doormen, said Kenneth O. Preston, who served as Sergeant Major of the Army from 2004 to 2011.

“People think you’re a cop,” Mr. Preston said. “They are always stopping you and asking you for directions.”

That's less of a challenge for general officers, as those Sam Grant style shoulder stars aren't likely to be mistaken for anything else.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM?

There's at least one burger joint in Chicago's downtown college town that no longer accepts cash.  That might be a way to conserve on transaction costs (no more counting change, no more breaking open a roll of pennies or quarters, or having to beg for singles and fives after the noon rush had a lot of people straight from the ATM).  Or it might be a prudent response to life in Chicago, where the aggressive panhandlers hang out near the ATM sites, and where a cash register is a tempting target for a local miscreant, and where an armored car service to get the cash to the bank is a prudent expenditure.

Going cashless, however, is contrary to the interest of the Chicago politicians' base.  "New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco are all mulling legislation that would outlaw the practice on grounds that it unfairly discriminates against the poor and unbanked."  It's an opportunity for politicians whose re-election depends on a poor and dependent constituency to signal their virtue.

"You don't have a credit card, well you can go to 7-Eleven," said [Philadelphia] Councilman Bill Greenlee, who supported the legislation. "With all due respect to 7-Eleven, that salad might have been sitting there for two days in a carton but that's OK for you because they'll accept cash, but we don't. If it's not discrimination, its elitism and government has a place to get involved in it."

Apparently Philadelphia can enforce its regressive pop tax, but convenience store operators get to skate on fresh food labelling laws.  That's what you might expect from a politician who thinks the Federal Constitution, or the Commonwealth's Constitution, empowers government to get involved in elitism.  What's next, selling the public golf courses?

What amuses about the story is that Amazon, which operate some virtual-money-only stores, is reluctant to locate in cities that don't ban cashless stores.  It's only Tuesday, and the weird goes on.

SLOWLY THEY CATCH ON.

A dozen years ago, I noted,

As long as departmental hiring committees have the responsibility for identifying people to hire, and as long as departmental promotion committees do the initial recommendations for tenure or promotion, junior faculty recognize that their primary responsibility is to be competitive in the discipline. That means establishing a reputation as a scholar.

Perhaps the people who manage higher education might want to re-examine whether the German model or the land-grant model of scholarship is the best one to apply to higher education, but as long as the reward structure is as it is, it ought not come as any surprise that faculty members respond to the incentives it provides.

Why, then, might faculty members wish to leave? I'll concede that securing a more visible position in the academic food chain is part of it. I'll note, however, that the food chain is probably more skewed than it ought to be, and some of the responsibility for that skewedness rests with senior faculty who are indifferent or hostile to their colleagues' ambitions. There is no shame in making a promising colleague look good enough to be raided away by some other program. There is nothing but shame in thinking that the success of a colleague somehow diminishes your own work.

Some responsibility for that skewedness must rest with administrators whose mindset is "We'll never be as good as College X and there's no point in even trying," particularly when that mindset mutates into the more virulent forms of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the lowered expectations that come in train. There is nothing quite like the intellectual challenge of keeping one's mind sufficiently sharp and focused to produce the kind of research that will be rewarded in the discipline after one has spent some time attempting to reason with Rate Your Students fodder. Does it come as any surprise that the sites run by the anonymous jobseekers that set off the conversation also have a goodly number of gripes about unprepared or unmotivated students? Improve the working conditions and people will be less disposed to want to publish their way out.

That was a conjecture, some scholars were intrigued enough by the hypothesis to test it.

Past studies have shown that faculty at prestigious universities tend to be more productive and prominent than faculty at less prestigious universities. This pattern is usually attributed to a competitive job market that selects inherently productive faculty into prestigious positions. Here, we test the extent to which, instead, faculty’s work environments drive their productivity. Using comprehensive data on an entire field of research, we use a matched-pair experimental design to isolate the effects of training at, versus working in, prestigious environments. We find that faculty’s work environments, not selection effects, drive their productivity and prominence, establishing that where a researcher works serves as a mechanism for cumulative advantage, locking in past success via job placement and thereby facilitating future success.

The right kind of preparation matters for landing a more prestigious position, as commonly understood. The right kind of academic environment reinforces the preparation.

The full article is behind a paywall.  Whether any departments or deans will take "The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions" seriously, and provide an environment conducive to excellent scholarship remains for future research.

ILLINOIS IS A TAX HELL.

The current (need I specify Democrat) governor would like to introduce a graduated income tax, and his willing accomplices are buying advertising suggesting, inter alia, that higher income people are paying a smaller share of their income in taxes than are lower income people.  That is likely true, but it is not the Illinois flat tax at work.  Rather, it is all the consumption taxes, user fees, tolls (if anybody works out the incidence thereof) and property taxes that residents pay, directly every time they buy food or place a 'phone call, or indirectly through their rents.  Homeowners pay the property tax directly, in DeKalb County that comes at the beginning of June and the beginning of September.

The "Cheddar Curtain" at the Wisconsin border is metaphorical, not physical, and yet, people have been migrating out of Illinois for some time.  It's beginning to concentrate minds, even among the tax-and-spend set.

Statewide population totals also have been on the decline since July 2013, according to census data, although Illinois remains the most populous state in the Midwest with about 12.7 million people.

“The people that have talked to me about wanting to move, some of them have just lost hope in the ability of the state government to properly function,” [DeKalb county board chairman Mark] Pietrowski said Friday. “Some of that isn’t helped by two years of not being able to pass a budget.”

One factor stimulating this exodus is the state’s high property tax burden on residents.

That's kind of an awkward transition, a heavily Chicago Democrat state legislature butted heads with an intransigent Republican governor in a most unedifying way. (Thanks, Madigan!)

Although property tax relief might do something to keep some residents in the state, it's unlikely that a higher income tax rate is going to finance that.

Pietrowski said there needs to be a greater emphasis on income tax rather than property taxes.

“One of the major reasons why people are not choosing to come to Illinois is they see a house but they have to pay more property taxes,” Pietrowski said. “If we could get that lowered, our state is going to look more attractive, because we do have a lot of things going for us: access to jobs, plenty of access to neighboring cities. Illinois is still one of the No. 1 manufacturing states in the nation.”

DeKalb County is a tax cap county, which Pietrowski said can be a hindrance on local governing bodies seeking to lower property taxes.

The Property Tax Extension Limitation Law, commonly referred to as “tax caps” does not limit individual property taxes or property bills, according to the University of Illinois Extension. Instead, a tax cap is meant to limit the amount municipalities can levy when property values and assessments grow faster than the rate of inflation.

“It changes the local government’s ability to [lower property taxes] because it maximizes what you can increase,” Pietrowski said. “If you do decrease, it actually ends up penalizing you, so you can never make that money back.”

That depends on elasticities. If you decrease, you might not have to make the money back, because the tax base gets bigger. On the other hand, if you're a public official, your salary depends on all that income belonging to the government.

FINALLY, SOMEBODY SAID IT.

San Diego State freshman Jermelle McLeod suggests "toxic masculinity" has become too broad a category to be useful.  His classmates, sometimes including people who disagree in full, or in part, are not ready to march him to the scaffold.

“A lot of kids were surprised that somebody [was willing to actually say it]. I found out that mostly, even if they didn’t like what I said, they still liked that I said it anyway.”

Asked why he thinks masculinity is under attack, he said it’s an attack on individualism.

“Masculinity is the application of four traits. Courage, mastery, honor and strength,” MacLeod said. “It’s under attack because all those things are inherently individualistic, and they go against a lot of what is being preached nowadays, which is fearfulness, sensitiveness, timidity, and it’s the exact opposite of what’s being pushed right now.”

And he’s pushing back — even in class.

“The teachers usually just nod in silence, the students kind of raise their eyebrows and look at me weird,” he said.

At the end of the day, it’s a broken narrative.

“Because it’s a misunderstanding of what masculinity is,” MacLeod said. “Nowadays [masculinity] seems to be mixed with sexual assault on campus, so most people immediately assume that masculinity is the cause of all of these rapes and whatnot, even though it’s not. It’s a misunderstanding of [masculinity] that cause all of these issues.”

I wonder if they're reading their Emerson at San Diego State.

As for his decision to broach toxic masculinity in the pages of The Daily Aztec, it was a “buildup of things,” he told The Fix.

“It was a mixture of the leftist pressure on campus,” he said. “It was a mixture of the fact that the APA is pretty much saying that anything that is not feminine is toxic.”

MacLeod was referring to a decision earlier this year by the American Psychological Association to offer guidelines calling “traditional masculinity” harmful.

“And most importantly,” he added, “it was the fact that any man who goes against the grain is shamed for doing so, so they lose their sense of individuality and they’re forced to succumb to the nonsense that the left is putting out.”

MacLeod will not be shamed, even in the face of backlash, he said. His column prompted an angry letter to the editor and more.

“There was obviously that whole letter to the editor, which was a response, then there were a lot of nasty messages on Twitter and Facebook,” he said.

The non-conformist remains a moral and productive person, seeking to persuade by changing minds rather than to frighten by ending lives.

A century-plus of enlightened thinking fails to improve.

THE GLORY AND THE POWER OF THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD.

Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, was too far from the central business district to be an attractive site to redevelop with an office tower.  (The Suburban Station, which replaced downtown Broad Street Station, was another matter, it becoming an office tower as proof of concept for the subsequent vandalism of New York's Pennsylvania Station and Chicago's Union Station.)

Thus, the exterior of the station, and now the interior, merited listing as landmarks, and thus Thirtieth Street is a proper venue for boarding an Acela or a Florida train.  Trains columnist Kevin P. Keefe describes the station as "America's finest railway terminal."

In his landmark book The Railroad Station (Yale University Press, 1956), architectural historian Carroll L.V. Meeks had this to say: “The concourse encloses more cubic feet than that of the Pennsylvania Station in New York; the columns are exceptionally huge, the use of marble remarkably lavish. All that was lacking was a fresh touch to change it from the chilly graveyard it is. As in many other stations, the functionally excellent plan and the direct and simple circulation are interred in an uninspired mausoleum.”

I’m not qualified to debate Professor Meeks. He probably has a point. Thirtieth Street does tend to overwhelm, especially on first visit, but if it seems imperious, that’s just the way the PRR wanted it. And in 1933, nobody in Philadelphia dared question the PRR’s good judgment.

Meanwhile, given the whole sorry history of railroad station preservation in the U.S. over the past 50-plus years, I’ll take my familiar old mausoleum. Besides, it can be a very warm, inviting place when you curl up on one of its benches, Inquirer and cheesesteak in hand, waiting once again to feel your train rumbling beneath the floor.

The mausoleum comes with several excellent examples of secular art to go with those cheesesteaks.

It’s a testament to the thoroughness of the city’s preservation process that several specific features of the station are designated as untouchable, including the station’s travertine walls and Corinthian columns, its vast marble floor, that wonderful coffered ceiling, and its distinctive octagonal light fixtures. Also protected are two of 30th Street’s unique works of public sculpture: Walter Hancock’s 28-foot-high bronze Angel of Resurrection at the east end of the concourse, honoring PRR’s World War II dead; and Karl Bitter’s Spirit of Transportation, saved from the old Broad Street Station.

Years ago, Trains editor David P. Morgan noted that although Thirtieth Street was built after Cincinnati's Union Station (an Art Deco pile with almost no passenger trains today) it looked older, it aged better.

Now, if only Amtrak would allow passengers down to trackside before the trains rumble underneath, which would reduce the congestion in the concourse, and if the city would restore the underground passage to the Market Street rapid transit lines, that would truly be a great station.

IS ANYBODY SURPRISED?

City Observatory's Joe Cortright notes that "affordable housing" is meaningless in isolation.

There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard [like the 30% of income that is most often used as a benchmark for “affordable” housing costs] does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced appropriately, and whether households are being asked to spend too much. We’ve explored some of these issues before, but today we want to focus on one key issue: the tradeoff between cheap rents and costly transportation.

Some apologists for expansive suburban growth tout the low housing prices of cities like Houston, but invariably they leave out the fact that sprawling cities necessarily imply higher transportation costs. If you have to drive everywhere, and drive further for every trip, what you save in rent or mortgage payments, can be more than eaten up in car payments, gasoline purchases, and time wasted traveling.

Well, yes, at the margin the equilibrium resident is indifferent between a cheaper house and a more costly commute, or a more expensive house and little or no commute.

Lo and behold, observed living patterns are not inconsistent with those equilibrating tendencies.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey divides households into four quartiles according to household spending.  The lowest quartile spends the least (about $1,370 per month); the highest quartile spends about $9,300.  Within each quartile, the report divides households into three groups based on how much they spend on housing. Less than 30 percent is the group that is considered not-cost burdened by housing, 30 to 50 percent is cost-burdened by housing, and households spending more than 50 percent are severely cost burdened, according to this rubric.

What’s interesting to note here, is how, within each quartile, households that spend less on housing end up spending a great deal more on transportation.  Conversely, households that spend a larger fraction of their income on housing spend, on average much less on transportation. For example, households in the second quartile who spend less than 30 percent of their income on housing spend 12.6 percent of their income on transportation. That falls to less than 10 percent for those who are somewhat cost burdened, and less than 5 percent for those who are severely cost burdened. This pattern across income groups is consistent with the idea of a tradeoff between cheaper rents and higher transportation costs.

Its especially instructive to look at households in the highest spending quartile.  These are the 25 percent or so of most affluent households (as judged by their spending patterns), with monthly spending of about $9,300.  Households that spend less than 30 percent of their income on housing in this group spend $2,300 per month on transportation. Meanwhile, their peers with higher housing costs spend dramatically less on transportation ($400 to $600 per month).

Yes, before the 2008 housing bubble collapsed, those executive boxes in DeKalb and Rochelle were good value for money, as long as gasoline was cheap enough.

Mr Cortright concludes with a different policy conundrum.  "If your rent is low, but you have to spend a disproportionately large share of your income on transportation, then your living situation isn’t affordable."  That's a different sort of out-of-equilibrium behavior, the one that sometimes manifests itself under the rubric of "gentrification," better understood as higher value-added activities adding so much value that people participating in lower value-added activities get priced out.

DID BETTY FRIEDAN DISCOVER THE LONGEST ROAD FROM HOMEMAKING TO HOMEMAKING?

Read Suzanne Fields and ponder.

With the pill, affirmative action, college education, and careers, [ambitious women] felt free not to marry. And today, they're marrying later and marrying less. Fertility doctors increasingly treat women in their 40s who delayed having children because they wanted to establish careers first and are terrified they waited too late.

Women who married professionals like them in medicine, law, and finance find now that if they finally have children, careers will suffer. Such women with children are learning to live a lot like their pre-feminist mothers, becoming chauffeurs for the kids, taking them to the doctor, the dentist, music lessons and Little League baseball games. What's different is that such women gave up what their mothers never had, successful career with a six-figure income. They fall into a new kind of gender gap.

Thus, in the upscale precincts, an income-and-a-half household (plus some cheap immigrant labor?) becomes the new norm.

These women don't blame their "gender," but their choices affect the differences in their earnings. The enemy is not "The Man" so much as "greedy capitalism," as well as the relentlessly inflexible nature of managerial jobs in finance, law and consulting. The lean-in philosophy for them won't nurture their children or buy luxury condos and vacations. But their husbands working long and exhausting hours enable them and their children to live the pre-feminist experience of abundant time at home.

There's an irony here, as there always is. The good life, which sounds so great, runs into the reality of unintended consequences. Just as there was always a touch of elitism in second-phase feminism, where middle- and upper-class women were liberated to go to work and earn a six-figure income, these are choices not available to their impecunious, less-educated working-class sisters, so there's a new kind of elitism. Marriage to a man on the same economic trajectory enables the wife to spend more time at home.

It's really "relatively inflexible" scarcity.  I will outwork you, and advance.

EXCHANGE, SPECIALIZATION, AND COOPERATION.

Years ago, I put together a course pack for introductory economics using that title.  In part, that was my protest against overpriced and overcrowded principles texts, in part that was the better to get the message across without the technical complications.  The technical complications are for a second course.

[T]here might be reason for creating an introductory and an intermediate course: get the basics (trading for mutual gain, specialization by comparative advantage, institutions evolve to economize on transaction costs, competitive markets allocate resources efficiently) in an introductory course, and reserve the heavy graphing (isoquants, indifference curves, monopolistic competition if you must) and game theory for the intermediate course.

I push the importance of those basics (exchange, arbitrage, indifference, opportunity cost) whenever I can.

Duke's Michael Munger uses a variant on those basics as his "argument for capitalism."  Part of the problem he's confronting is that the very term "capitalism" suggests some sort of ideology (in opposition to socialism or something) when market exchange is an emergent phenomenon, not amenable to the leadership of a vanguard.  Thus, in the following passage, I'd substitute "leading to the emergence of market exchange" for "argument for capitalism," while accepting the elements so introduced.  "There are three elements to the argument for capitalism, and while they connect in crucial ways they can be separately defined. Those three elements are (a) division of labor; (b) impersonal exchange based on prices; and (3) economies of scale based on knowledge."

That's close enough to "specialization, exchange, and cooperation" for me.

The "cooperation" part probably doesn't get enough attention, in part thanks to all the attention the principles course, and the business community, pays to "competition," itself not always well understood.  In the archives is a reference to a passage in Catallarchy to make that point.

Competition is a matter of nature no matter what societal organization we have. Even the definition of economics - the study of the allocation of scarce resources - alludes to competition. Whether a society is organized as a market economy or a socialist economy, there is a competition for scarce resources. What differentiates market economies from other economies is that in market economies individuals voluntarily cooperate to increase wealth and allocate resources.

I repeat, because repeat I must, much of that voluntary cooperation is emergent.  What further differentiates market economies from planned economies is that market traders are capable of being adaptive in ways beyond the power of planners to grasp.

THE MOST CREATIVE USE OF YOUR "F.U." MONEY?

Donald Trump running for president, that is.

One way of understanding the still unbelievable hostility for Donald Trump is that he had made his fortune before entering government, and because he owes nothing to the denizens of the deep state and the swamp, they cannot control him. Thus the incessant attempts by the Democrats, and their allies in the federal bureaucracy and the mainstream media to neutralize this threat to their hegemony.

It might be that Our President does a great many cringe-worthy things. It's hard to view some of the discontent from the Permanent Government, argues Stephen B. Presser, as something other than a sitting president demonstrating the uselessness of much of that government.

The temptations of those in power to preserve that power, to make it difficult for challengers to unseat them, are almost irresistible, as we have seen over the past few decades as federal laws and regulations have multiplied, and as incumbency protection has been an unacknowledged principle of much of that legislation and regulation.

The current president is the greatest threat to the federal leviathan in at least a generation, and his program of scaling back the Code of Federal Regulation, and returning power to state and local governments by appointing judges and Justices who understand the actual meaning of the Constitution, is anathema to the Democrats and their allies who live, parasitically, on the largesse of our national behemoth.

What really excites some of us supporters of this president is that he may be our last, best chance to recapture the Constitution, and with it our right to govern ourselves. The administrative state—our permanent federal bureaucracy—and the elite class who manage, run, and profit by it, have been our real rulers for several decades.

Yes, and those rulers have too often ruled badly, which is something Donald Trump called attention to. (Was his worse offense getting elected, or getting elected pointing out how badly that Permanent Government has performed?)

As of today, none of the twenty-odd Democrats seeking the presidential nomination has given any hint of wanting to hand some of the powers of governance back to the people.

RETHINKING "GLASS HALF FULL."

A year ago, I griped about Milwaukee baseball pundits accepting "being close enough" as "good enough."  "Perhaps it's time for Milwaukee area baseball pundits to rethink their "glass-half-full" when the Brewers hit the All Star break within a game of the Cubs, after giving up first place during that trip to Miami and Pittsburgh." There's nothing quite like getting within nine outs of going to the World Series to concentrate the mind.

Milwaukee's pitching staff has been the worst in the National League through the first five weeks of the season, entering Saturday ranked 15th with a 5.07 earned run average. Considering how problematic the pitching has been in general, it was a minor miracle the team was 18-16 entering the second game against the New York Mets, particularly in light of its minus-12 run differential.

The Brewers had a good start to the season, then regressed to the mean, with a schedule that has so far been full of Dodgers and Cardinals.  It's now time for the Cubs and Cardinals to have their battle of attrition.

Better, though, to be asking questions about pitching (and runners left on base in scoring position?) from the outset, rather than treating "in the hunt" as good enough.

WINTER SPORTS, WATER SPORTS.

I doubt that ski-racer Lindsey Vonn would go ski-racing in body paint.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (in 2016, mind you) is another matter.

This year, the producers decided to lay down a marker for inclusiveness, or something.

It's too much for Ricochet's version of Dr. Bastiat.

I don’t read Sports Illustrated, so I don’t really care what they do with their publication.

But I suspect that they would be better off if they tried to be really good at being Sports Illustrated, instead of really bad at being The New York Times.

Exactly.

WHEN THE WOKE HAVE LOST JOHNNY ROTTEN.

When the Beach Boys sang about Venice Beach (or any other California beaches) it wasn't like this.

The 63-year-old punk icon says his multi-million dollar home has been vandalized and that his publishing heiress wife is 'struggling to cope' with the surge of 'vagrants' in the area.

'They moved in en masse. They're all young, they're all like 24,' Rotten ranted to Newsweek reporter Paula Froelich, the The New York Post reported.

The frontman, whose real name is John Lyndon, added: 'They're aggressive, and because there's an awful lot of them together they're gang-y.'

Rotten's comments may seem somewhat ironic given the star became a spokesman for aggressive anti-authoritarianism as the lead singer of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s.

The rocker, famed for his track Anarchy in The UK, even admitted he was forced to call the police after homeless people set up camp in front of his residence.

It was a sensitive call. "However, the star insists he's not part of the 'establishment elite' who preach liberal values of tolerance and acceptance, whilst cocooning themselves behind gates and fences."

SPELL OUT YOUR IMPROVEMENTS.

Abraham Lincoln said, "conceived in Liberty," and contemporary social critics might note, in various ways, how that conception was anything but immaculate.

He continued, "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and those critics might be able to point to that "all men," and to a number of other instances suggesting the dedication was contingent, or hedged.

In "The Illiberal Temptation," Gabriel Schoenfeld warns that throwing away the conception and the dedication, without spelling out how you would replace them or improve on them, is unlikely to end well.  "It is notable that today’s anti-liberal theorists are, for the most part, rather vague about what they envision replacing the liberal-democratic order they decry."

Perhaps that is for the good.  What we understand as the liberal order was not crafted all at once, and much of what Mr Schoenfeld documents might better be understood as adjustments possible in a time of relative calm.  That's right, relative calm.  Bet on emergence.

BEFORE GREYHOUND AND THE FLIVVER.

DeKalb Chronicle regional historian Barry Schrader writes, at the urging of a neighbor, about Lee County's dinky train.  It was also operated by Burlington, although it was not to be confused with Metra's "dinkies" on the Burlington Racetrack, so named because the commuter trains were initially one or two cars long, not to be confused with the Nebraska Zephyr let alone the Empire Builder.

This dinky was an accommodation train, daily from Rockford to Aurora in the morning, and returning in the afternoon, probably connecting with a pre-dinky commuter train at Aurora for Chicago.

Photograph from Brian Landis collection in Mike Schafer collection,

retrieved from DeKalb Daily Chronicle.

The rail motor car, this one including a baggage compartment for railway express, and a short postal compartment, made the stops the through trains didn't make.  At one time, Greater DeKalb had a number of these local trains, including a service linking DeKalb with Madison, probably with changes of train in Belvidere and Beloit, and there were a few electric interurbans in the area.

Only Burlington, though, could offer a dome car on an accommodation train.

Lee High School closed in 1946 and its students were sent to other nearby schools.

Ed Benner was one of those students from Lee and told me this story: He and schoolmates who played basketball, then played for the Waterman Wolverines. Since practice after school meant they would miss the bus that ran between the two towns, they boarded the No. 41 train to get back home. He recalls some of those classmates were Wayne Starnes, Jim Maakestad, Donald Rogde and Ron Oleson. (He was not sure of the correct spelling of their names.)

On one trip, he recalled, the “dinky train” was pulling a new Zephyr dome car up to Rockford. The boys talked the conductor into letting them ride in that car and sit up in the dome. It was a thrill and particularly exciting, he said, when they went under bridges where the dome barely slipped under the overhead structures.

Ed also told me he had two aunts from the Chicago area who often came to visit his family on the farm north of Lee. The aunts would take one train to Aurora, then board the dinky, and when it came to Lee, the engineer would not only stop at the depot, but take the the two ladies to a rural crossing north of town and drop them off on that country road.

Why Burlington was sending a dome car to Rockford escapes me. Perhaps as a marketing ploy? As far as I know, trains with dome cars only made it to Rockford on detours.

The locals made their last runs in 1949.

GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.

Here is an instructive Mahablog meditation on the meaning of "Vital Progressive Center."

In short, what gets called “centrism” these days is barely indistinguishable from Coolidge-era conservatism. what gets called “centrism” these days is barely indistinguishable from Coolidge-era conservatism. “Centrism” is a code word for the status quo opinions of the very wealthy and their elite media lapdogs. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Vital Center [historian Arthur] Schlesinger wrote about.

Let’s call our current centrism Faux Centrism, since it has nothing to do with a middle ground between extremes.

This tells us a lot about why Democrats kept losing elections by running “centrist” candidates. Faux Centrism simply doesn’t reflect the needs and concerns of most Americans. Faux Centrism is indistinguishable from moderate conservatism. They may be more liberal than most conservatives on, say, LGBTQ rights, but they are opposed to policies that would make the lives of most people any better. Faux Centrists are the same species as neoliberals, whose commitment to civil liberty for the individual ignores social reality. They’ll tell you they champion your right to live your life as you wish while they favor policies that will devastate your community and ship your job to China.

Yes, and Donald Trump ran for president by griping about those jobs going to China whilst being benignly neglectful about much of the culture wars, at least those elements that involved people who would be out of his league.

I repeat, because repeat I must, "Governance by Wise Experts has failed.  Whether the gentry will be turfed out and replaced by the yeomanry remains to be seen."  New faces offering new technocratic initiatives with new variations on "new" in their names are simply updated recipes for the same snake oil.

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

California legislators seem to think that they can have their obesity reduction and revenue too.  (By all means, read the story in full, there's enough wishful thinking being quoted to fill several Christmas lists.)  "As with all sin taxes, there's a contradiction at the heart of California's proposed soda tax: the policy is supposed to both dissuade soda purchases and raise significant revenue from taxing them. To succeed on one metric is to fail on the other."

Exactly.  Students preparing for finals in public finance and taxation get it.  Re-election campaigns apparently depend on politicians, or on sufficiently many voters, not getting it.

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED TO OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

Suzanne Venker says, act like it, ladies.

Of course, motherhood has never been easy; but compared to today our own mothers’ experience was a walk in the park. Case in point: I recall a friend who told me how her working mom friends are stressed to the max trying to get dinner on the table every night. When she brought this to her mother’s attention, her mother reminded her that in her day, mothers weren’t responsible for working a full-time job in addition to getting dinner on the table. Getting a healthy dinner on the table was the job.

All of which is to say, the ‘to-do list’ [Sarah] Friedberg described is real. And it exists, whether modern women realize it or not, because for years feminists disparaged the work of motherhood and told women to leave their homes in search of greener pastures.

Only it turns out those pastures weren’t so green after all. And now many women who want to stay home now or in the future feel stuck, for they’ve created lives that demand two incomes because that’s what they’ve been encouraged to do.

Gosh, if only there was a name for that phenomenon.

CHICAGO IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO,

Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton says, "so much winning, I'm sick of it."

While hardly anyone was paying attention, black women rose up and took charge of the most high-profile positions in our city and county government. If you throw in the African-American men also in top spots, the changing political tide is even more astounding.

I have a question, though. If our city really has become the black political mecca it appears to be, why are African-Americans leaving Chicago in droves?

"Good question," notes Craig Newmark.

Ms Glanton continues, "Obviously, something is wrong in paradise."  Yep.

Chicagoans are beyond being shocked when an African-American lands in a high position. Most of us have come to accept it as the norm. We elected Carol Moseley Braun as the nation’s first African-American female U.S. senator more than 25 years ago. The first African-American president gained his political footing in Chicago as well.

Does that really make a difference, though, to the average Joe in West Garfield Park, among the city’s communities with the highest poverty rates, highest homicide rates and lowest life expectancy rates?

It’s nice to be able to pat ourselves on the back for being a progressive city when it comes to electing diverse leaders, but it’s mostly a facade.

(Advantage, Cold Spring Shops? To wit:  "Chicago is still fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World.")  Read on:

Most people don’t have a lot of confidence in politicians, regardless of their skin color. For African-Americans on the South and West sides, areas that historically have seen more broken promises from City Hall than any other group, the apathy is unfortunate, but understandable.

Not only are black people not voting. They’re packing up and leaving by the thousands.

While all of these impressive political moves have been taking place in the upper echelon of government, black people have been pouring out of the city — and state. These alarming statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau might help explain why.

Though African-Americans represent a third of Chicago’s population, about 34 percent of African-Americans live in relative poverty, earning less than half of the minimum wage. Only about 43 percent of blacks own their homes here, compared with 72 percent of whites.

According to recent statistics, 15 percent of African-Americans in Chicago are part of the labor force, compared with 57 percent of whites. Statewide, things aren’t any better — the black unemployment rate in Illinois hovers around 9 percent, among the highest in the nation.

And how can anyone write about blacks leaving the city without mentioning the almost daily ritual of violence.

In the final analysis, it might not be about the color of the public officials' skins. It might not even be about the content (or lack thereof) of their character. It might be about the failed public policies still revered by Democrats.

What’s the point in breaking through barriers if your success isn’t going to make anybody else’s life better?

Getting re-elected?

That’s the problem with celebrating historic elections. We tend to bask in the moment of someone breaking through a glass ceiling, but we don’t stick around long enough to see how deeply others get buried in the debris.

We assume that if one woman or one African-American makes it to the top, all women and all African-Americans will soon follow. More often than not, it doesn’t happen.

More disturbing, though, is when a person’s groundbreaking achievement does nothing to further the cause of those they were put in place to help. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of that in Chicago over the years.

Too often when an African-American makes it to the top in politics, it becomes nothing more than a personal achievement.

Since when did a corrupt ward-heeler politician ever prosper by moving a dependent base closer to prosperity?  Perhaps in those prosperous people, of all races, creeds, colors, leaving Chicago is the normal course of things.

SUPERIOR EFFICIENCY IS NEVER WELL UNDERSTOOD BY POLICY-MAKERS.

Power Line's Steven Hayward notes that the Justice Department has finally closed the 1911 Standard Oil (221 U.S. 1) case.

It gives Mr Hayward the chance to spike the football, as (to this day) there are supposedly intelligent people who believe that John D. Rockefeller secured that monopoly in kerosene refining through predatory pricing.  "I remember bringing [John S. McGee's 'Predatory Price Cutting: The Standard Oil (N.J.) Case.'] to the attention of one of my liberal history professors back in my graduate student days (yes, surprise—surprise—I could be a bit of a nuisance to my professors in the classroom) and he was aghast that anyone could think something so outrageous as this. 'Oh my!,' he said."

I'd had several opportunities over the years to teach Standard Oil either in the upper-division antitrust economics course or the lower-division (plus a few seniors looking for three more credits) survey of public policy course.  The real secret to Standard wasn't in selling at a loss, it might have been in getting the railroads to sell at a loss.  With a larger or more efficient refinery in Cleveland, Standard would have been able to talk to New York Central.  "What sort of deal can you give us to move thirty tank cars each day?"  Then "We saw a tank of Whoever Oil on that train.  Will you rebate the difference between their rate and ours to us on each car of Whoever you haul?  Or do we have to talk to the Nickel Plate?"  There was a Journal of Law and Economics article about monopolizing transportation came out sometime in the 1990s that I could work in.  Vertical integration works that way.

And there lies the real challenge of antitrust policy.  Being able to ship refined kerosene in trainload lots is a benefit of consolidation.  Being able to undersell Whoever's kerosene in Buffalo or Hoboken and make Whoever help pay for the privilege deprives consumers of one benefit of competition.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department also closed a case involving restraint of trade in player-piano rolls, a primitive form of software rendered obsolete in numerous ways in the past century.

Is there no miracle President Trump can't perform?

SUPERIOR EFFICIENCY IS NEVER POPULAR WITH THOSE WHO MUST COMPETE AGAINST IT.

Don Pardo once told Charles Lane what he didn't win on Jeopardy!  And boy howdy, how he resents the new style of play.

People seemed not to care that [current champion James] Holzhauer’s streak reflects the same grim, data-driven approach to competition that has spoiled (among other sports) baseball, where it has given us the “shift,” “wins above replacement,” “swing trajectories” and other statistically valid but unholy innovations.

Like the number crunchers who now rule America’s pastime, Holzhauer substitutes cold, calculating odds-maximization for spontaneous play. His idea is to select, and respond correctly to, harder, big-dollar clues on the show’s 30-square gameboard first. Then, flush with cash, he searches the finite set of hiding places for the “Daily Double” clue, which permits players to set their own prize for a correct response – and makes a huge bet. Responding correctly, Holzhauer often builds an insurmountable lead before the show is half over.

Dazed and demoralized opponents offer weakening resistance as his winnings snowball. And, with experience gained from each new appearance on the show, Holzhauer’s personal algorithms improved and his advantage grew.

In short, this professional gambler from Las Vegas does not so much play the game as beat the system. What’s entertaining about that? And beyond a certain point, what’s admirable?

I suppose it's startling to have a player opening with the bottom row of the board, rather than with the traditional smallest prize in his strongest column, which might be what Mr Lane interprets as "spontaneous play."  It was probably once startling to have a chess-master opening with the King's Knight, or responding to the King Pawn with the Queen Bishop Pawn, and I know it was once "not sporting" to decline a gambit Pawn.  Likewise, I'm old enough to recall when, thanks to Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) dunking, college basketball banned that shot.  Dumb.

Contra Mr Lane, the way to defeat a new strategy is to defeat it, not ban it.

Holzhauer’s strategy could not work without his freaky-good knowledge of trivia, just as baseball’s shift requires a pitcher skilled at inducing batters to hit into it. The old rules, though, would have contained his talent within humane channels. As it is, he’s set a precedent for the further professionalization of “Jeopardy!,” a trend which began 15 years ago with 74-time winner Ken Jennings.

It appears as though the new strategy is occurring to other contestants.

Holzhauer was up against Adam Levin, a sports information director at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, who brought the show into Final Jeopardy! for just the second time during Holzhauer’s streak. Both Holzhauer and Levin answered the final question correctly — writing down “Chamber of Commerce” to the question, “The oldest of these business booster groups, formed in Marseille in 1599, uses ‘de’ instead of ‘of’ in the name.”

Holzhauer held a $6,517 lead heading into the final question, and escaped with just an $18 win to keep his streak alive.

That show was taped in February.  The techniques of playing the board can not possibly be a secret among Jeopardy! regulars.