THEY WILL GET OLD BEFORE THEY GET RICH.

Thomas Friedman has expressed envy for China's totalitarian state being able to circumvent process and Do Big Things quickly.  He also noted, some years previously, that they were likely to get old (meaning pension burdens and inexperienced workers) before they got rich.

May you live in interesting times.

What legitimacy the Communist Party possessed was based on the decades of economic growth inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. But growth has slowed to its lowest level in decades as the Chinese workforce ages, low-hanging investment opportunities disappear, and the trade war with the United States reduces manufacturing output and sends supply lines to Vietnam and Mexico. Capital is fleeing China at a record pace as the bourgeoisie hedge against stagnation and turmoil.

For all of the Chinese government's much publicized investments in research and development and defense, and despite the size of its economy, per capita gross domestic product is $10,000, slightly less than that of the Russia Federation ($11,000) and a fraction of that of the United States ($65,000). Recent weeks have brought an uptick in bank runs.

Meanwhile, the repression of socially dangerous elements (still relatively easy to contain as in Hong Kong and Macao, or to marginalize as ethnic minorities) tightens.

These are not the moves of a regime confident in its ability to win the allegiance of a multi-ethnic population of 1.4 billion people. They are the policies of an insular and jittery faction whose uncertainty toward a changing economic and demographic landscape has made it suspicious of and opposed to even the slightest hints of liberal democracy. The ambitions of Chairman Xi for a Eurasia integrated under the Belt and Road Initiative, where the preponderance of the latest equipment in key sectors is manufactured, are both grand and mismatched for a nation whose leaders are concerned most with the operation of the surveillance state that keeps them in power.

Meanwhile, the Great Power dynamics of the southwestern Pacific region look familiar.

The resistance to Beijing is both domestic and foreign. Lost in all the predictions of Chinese dominance were the voices of China's neighbors in the Pacific. Neither Japan, nor Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, nor Australia want to live in a Chinese lake. Most extraordinary has been the response of the United States. Within four years, the American elite has swapped its belief in China's "peaceful rise" for the recognition that it may be in the opening phase of a Second Cold War whose outcome will determine the ideological character of the 21st century. While Tariff Man wages his trade war, opposing Chinese theft of intellectual property and arguing for structural changes to China's state owned enterprises, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper speak of the political and security challenges presented by Chinese authoritarians who become more willing to lash out as they lose their grip.

It can't be reassuring to the elites, or to people who remember the 1930s, that the people who might have ridden up during the economic expansion have a lot to lose.

In the space of two generations China's professional classes went from nothing to a great deal of something. Publicly they attribute their success to talent and hard work. Privately they admit that they must share this credit with good luck.[4] But will the good luck hold? In a China dramatically dividing, a world cleft ever more clearly between haves and have-nots, will they be able to stay on the side of the haves? The problem is made all the more nerve-racking when they realize that this is not just their problem: it is their kid's problem too.

It is hard to ride the tiger; harder still to ride it while teaching your child how to hold the reins. This paranoia about the capabilities and prospects of the next generation casts an omnipresent gloom. It grips the hearts of parents from the lowest tier of the Chinese middle class all the way up to the families of billionaires. I know this through personal experience. I was disturbed by the first Chinese multi-millionaire who expressed this fear to me. "Why should he worry?" I wondered. Why should someone with all of this wealth be so stressed and worried about his children's intellectual training? Why does he worry about them not having an education good enough for "the challenges of the future?" Surely, given the wealth they will inherit, they will be ok?

Surely so.... unless you are not so sure your children will be in a position to inherit anything.

I wonder how you say "rigged system" and "drain the swamp" in Mandarin.

The Party is a racket. The guys at the top are not any different from the ones you deal with at the bottom. The Party exists to make sure their kids have a spot at the front of the line no matter how much more your kids deserve it. You are not forced to call Xi all these fancy titles because it will help him restore China to its ancestral glory: you are forced to do all of that so Xi Jinping's daughter gets into Harvard and his family racks up homes in Hong Kong. All of the taxes, the censorship, the ridiculous rules and regulations, the blustering about war, the hero-worship and the propaganda, the detention centers and the cameras—it is all a racket. You live a slave so that someone else's children can get ahead.

Or whether those homes of the nachalstvo in Hong Kong become latter-day versions of a Tulieries palace to storm.  "Sooner or later it will explode."

The footnote [4]: "I have never heard, in private or public, a Chinese person attribute their personal wealth to the Communist Party of China. Support for the Party stems from other sources."

TROLL LEVEL: TRUMP.

Our President uses his Twitter channel to circulate a satire story from The Babylon Bee.

That triggers a fact-check from Snopes.

Pajamas Media's Paula Bolyard has the response about right.

It's not just conservatives Snopes doesn't like. They hate humor and they're ideologically opposed to fun—they actually excel at sucking the fun out of literally everything. (Go ahead, make my day and fact-check that, Snopes.)

My advice to the folks at Snopes: Lighten up, laugh a little. It'll do your hearts, which are two sizes too small, good.

Addendum: Twitter had a lot of fun with this tonight. Our friends at Twitchy have recorded the hilarity for the annals of history.

No doubt, somewhere there is a wokescold frowning and muttering, "how DARE you?"

TAKE YOUR BIKE TO WORK.

A social media kerfuffle over a Peloton commercial?  Perhaps the most first-world-problem Christmas story ever.

The Christmas ad, in which a husband surprises his already-fit wife with a Peloton stationary bike began to tell its thirty-second story in between NCIS reruns. We both commented on the ridiculousness of the ad, featuring a vloggin’ young woman on her year-long journey that “changed her,” presumably from skinny to skinny-er.

The internet has had a field day with this privileged depiction of overcoming fitness “struggle” and its supposed life-changing effects. In fairness, I take a lighter perspective on this, appreciating anyone’s drive to maintain a healthy lifestyle and a desire for an all-season approach to physical activity. I will never condemn someone for doing what it takes to stay active and physically and mentally healthy.

A colleague who conducted spin classes for the university recreation center characterized Peoloton as a rather expensive way to get your exercise.  But that students keep fit by pedaling rapidly while going nowhere suggest we're a long way from the days of working out getting to work.

In a world where most people view cycling as a form of fitness, we make the more sustainable choice to attack the elements and commute through the barbs that Mother Nature throws at us.

We do this because we understand that it’s better for our planet, as every mile we drive adds nearly one pound of CO2 in the air. We do this because we know that our cities are better off when we make the choice not to drive a car. We do this because we now know the real reward lies in the greater connection we have with our surroundings when we step outside of our private boxes on wheels and experience our community without windows or walls. Finally, we do it because we don’t have $2,200 and $40 a month for something that sits in our living room and does nothing but makes you sweat for a few minutes each day.

In amazing cities all over the world, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, cycling is the #1 mode of transportation. The citizens of these cities are far healthier than we are, as are the cities themselves. In these places, exercise is part of how people commute and navigate their surroundings… healthy living isn’t a static piece of equipment in their living rooms, it’s the result of every ride to work, every trip to the store and every family outing to the park. Healthy living is embedded into their life.

For those of us who live in the U.S., where cyclists only make up about 1% of daily commuters, the rewards are still the same. Despite our car-oriented America, we ride because we know it’s a better choice for us, for our community and for our planet. And yes, we are all a lot healthier when we use our own power to get us to our destination. No spandex or bike shorts… I just wear what I have on, maybe throw on some rain or snow gear if necessary, and ride to work.

The feeling that I might be contributing in a tiny way to a better community and better planet makes me happy. The bi-product of my daily self-powered mobility ventures is, of course, better health and fitness. By no means would I call myself an athlete, but my legs are strong and my body is surely in better shape considering I bike between 2,000 and 4,000 miles each year.

Perhaps the cyclists might convince more people if they left out the virtue signalling and rhetoric about "better choices."  For my part, in the 28 years I was on faculty, I was never more than a fifteen minute bicycle ride from my office, but on snowy days I'd use the car.

I MISS RINGLING BARNUM.

In the absence of The Greatest Show on Earth, all we have is the impeachment "Hey Rube!"  Power Line's Steven Hayward watches it, so you don't have to.

The second “tell” of the week are the two articles of impeachment themselves. As Andy McCarthy notes, they are exceedingly weak: an improper use of power in his Ukraine phone call, and obstruction of the congressional investigation. That’s it? That’s all they got? Why only two?

Or, to put it more crudely, the first article accuses the president of prospectively rigging the 2020 election, something that the Democrats could laugh off, simply by nominating a sufficiently strong candidate.  The second article accuses the president of requiring Congress to make a case for requesting the documents they believe are incriminating.  I recall suffering through a year and a half of Watergate inquiries, and much of that time was taken up in Congress requesting, the president saying no, counsel for Congress going to court, Judge Sirica ruling, counsel for the president appealing, ad infinitum, or at least for two summers.

[O]ne reason for limiting impeachment to these two weak items is that it makes it more likely the Republican Senate will make quick work of the matter and perhaps even dismiss the case on Day One of the Senate trial. Chief Justice Roberts won’t even have to skip lunch that day. And this becomes a political weapon for the Democrats for the election, where they are desperate to regain control of the Senate. They will tie every Republican senator who votes to dismiss impeachment to Trump. I’ve thought all along that Senate election politics played as big a role in the calculations and timing of impeachment as any of Trump’s actual deeds.

Here, too, the Senate becomes that saucer for cooling the overheated tea from the cup of the House.  There are Republican true believers who would like to put the whole California Democrat delegation and their Deep State useful idiots in the dock, but apparently the Senate is having none of that.

If the House had included additional impeachment counts, it would put pressure on the Senate for a longer and more substantive trial. Here’s where the two weak charges become another “tell” that Democrats are bluffing and playing pure politics. Do Democrats want a longer Senate trial? Ask yourself this: if the Senate holds a three or four-week trial starting in January, requiring the silent attendance of all senators (as the Senate rules stipulate), what happens to the presidential campaigns of Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, and Sanders? You know they want to be pounding the pavement in Iowa and New Hampshire, and not sitting silently in the Senate chamber. This is one reason Cocaine Mitch ought to threaten a long, six-day a week trial starting three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, just to see how Democrats respond. And then start spreading the word that impeachment is actually a DNC plot to smooth the way for Joe Biden’s nomination, just as the DNC tilted the playing field for Hillary against Bernie in 2016. Fun times!

Lastly, there is the question of whether the Senate ought to have a trial in which they call Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff, the “anonymous” whistleblower, and others as witnesses. Trump is said to favor this, while Mitch McConnell is said to be against it in favor of getting the whole thing over with quickly. He may be right about this, but it is certainly worth deploying his own very good poker face to suggest that just maybe the Senate will call on the Bidens for an accounting of things.

Had anybody told me six years ago that I might be nostalgic for the days of wrangling over the debt ceiling, I would likely have been surprised.

PERHAPS THEY'LL LISTEN NOW.

Suzanne Venker is unsparing.  "Feminism's collateral damage is the breakdown of society."  That comes as no surprise.  It's refreshing and encouraging, though, to have a younger woman counting the ways.  "Unfortunately, women listened, and men followed. What choice did they have? And now here's what we have to show for it."  None of it good, by the way.  Read and understand.

NO CHOICE BUT TO BE CRUDE?

It was the great misfortune of the Thirteenth Generation to get to the party just after the magic bus left and the only people still there were passed out or had died of overdoses.  Jon Gabriel elaborates.

[D]efining an entire generation by their caricatures is always overbroad. Plenty of hippie-era college kids voted for Nixon, just as many Gen Xers didn’t wear three layers of flannel and listen to grunge. (I preferred shoegaze.) The mass culture these groups spawned, however, helps define them in aggregate.

In a way, that has been one of my messages for the seventeen-plus years I've been writing.

After the Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression and returned from a bloody world war, they sought a quiet sanctuary in suburbia, sparing their kids such pain. The boomers decided such a life was boring and inauthentic, and tried to replace it with a Summer of Love to usher in the Age of Aquarius. It didn’t go so well.

Gen X was sold the boomers’ failed utopia throughout our youth but never bought it. Our childhood was infused with the wreckage wrought by hippies and yuppies. Draft dodgers and dead rock stars were lifted up as idols while our kiddie shows toggled between LSD trips and eco-apocalypse.

I think no-fault divorce and second-wave feminism had something to do with the neglected upbringing the Thirteeners had.  That, and, oh, those were the babies who were a "choice."

We watched the failure of the War on Poverty, Nixon, Ford and Carter – not to mention our broken homes. It didn’t make us cynical as much as skeptical; institutions were expected to fail more than they succeeded, and we acted accordingly.

So, when these millennial and Gen-Z whippersnappers blame everything on the olds, remember that Gen X was there first. You don’t get to right all the wrongs until we’ve had our chance to fix things. Or, more likely, just screw it up in a new way.

Yes, emergence is like that.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE CONCERT.

The trustees of Northern Illinois University are attempting to bill the students for it, while not having to charge admission.

The general fee pricing recommendation, which can be found in the meeting agenda, breaks down fees by category and notes the prospective difference in rates between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2021. Fiscal year 2021 will begin July 1 and end June 30, 2021.

Contained within this recommendation is the introduction of an additional fee called the arts and culture fee, through which students would see an $0.80 charge per credit hour during the fee’s inaugural year, the recommendation says.

“We were, in this context of overall lowering the fees, able to institute a new arts and culture fee that will allow students to enjoy the wonderful productions of the School of Music and the School of Theatre and Dance without a direct cost to the students,” NIU President Lisa Freeman said at the meeting.

All other general fees would be lowered or kept flat under this proposal. With the arts and culture fee factored in, the fiscal year 2021 costs would be reduced by $3.67 per credit hour, according to the recommendation.

I think "no direct cost" means "swipe your student identification card at the door," the way it works for sporting events, where the students continue to be on the hook for a somewhat larger fee.

WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER TO ABOLISH THE PEOPLE AND APPOINT ANOTHER?

Stephen Kruiser of Pajamas Media might be hyping things with this passage in his morning briefing.  "The battle for the soul of America in 2020 is dominated on the Democratic side by a bunch of people who you wouldn’t trust to have the mental acuity to feed your goldfish without bollocksing it up, who want to micromanage almost every aspect of our lives."

I've attempted to chronicle the follies of the Permanent Establishment (and there are many) while resisting the temptation to endorse Kurt Schlichter's "leftists want you dead" assertion.  But then comes an essay, such as this by Northern Arizona's Ira Allen (whose c.v. and photograph are both about what you would suspect), in which a massive housecleaning, liquidating the kulaks as a class, is the Only Way Forward.

The bottom line there is that we need—as we have always needed—to become a more democratic demos. The fact that, as a populace, we’re only sort of committed to democracy in any strong sense is ugly and shitty, and more in-your-face than usual right now (especially if you are white and pretty privileged and hadn’t already noticed that a good portion of the demos is not much interested in democratic growth), but it’s not especially new (even if neoliberalism has made everything worse on this front).

He's not kidding, either. "Detrumpification will mean democratic rehabilitation of some public servants and removal of others. By definition, this has to be a large-scale, far-reaching process. Thus far, the need for such a process has not been much broached." Nor will constitutional niceties suffice. "Anything less than an overwhelming popular mandate for progressive, fundamental restructuring of the institutions of society along democratic lines will be insufficient to even begin the process of detrumpification."

He concludes with sort of an endorsement for the right sort of Democrat emerging from the primary and convention morass (good luck with that) and a massive electoral and popular vote margin of victory, but I suspect nothing short of Red Guards and guillotines will really satisfy him.

The good news is that the ensuing bull session is brief and superficial.

NOT THE FIRST TIME TIME MISJUDGED THE YOUNG PEOPLE.

This year's Person of the Year is overindulged autistic brat Greta Thunberg, representing the youth of the future.

Two score and fifteen years ago, the magazine chose to celebrate the Palisades High Class of 1965 as representing the youth of the future.  If you want the more perfect paradigm of being born on third base and thinking you'd hit a triple, that might be the place to look, and at that time, upscale southern California was still the Beach Boys' California, and the future looked bright.  Two years later came the Summer of Love, and that might have been California's first (of what would become many) E-T-T-S moment.  For that matter, the ten-year retrospective on the class of 1965 was kind of sad, actually, tales of opportunities lost.

Meanwhile, the real challenge to social and environmental degradation takes place elsewhere.

Ben Domenech elaborates.

In defiance of the most powerful authoritarian regime in the modern world, the protester in Hong Kong has stood against the authority of Red China with courage and dedication.

They have not bowed to the brutality of the police, who have murdered, raped, and abused them. They have not run from the tear gas or the hoses. They have refused to back down. And because of that, their message has been heard.

It is a protest that cuts across the lines of age and class. While the protesters are younger, they are supported by their parents’ generation, which feels guilt over not asserting themselves earlier. So their mantra is: Be water.

Hong Kong has enjoyed freedoms never present in mainland China. They see those freedoms slipping away. And rather than bow to that inexorable betrayal, the thuggish assertion of the murderous state, they stood, and they fight.

There is no bigger fight. And so, the Hong Kong protester is the Person of the Year.

The authority exerted by the gerontocrats in Peking is that of the paper tiger. Deconstruct that.

THE SURPRISE ANSWER TO "ARE YOU DRIVING OR FLYING?"

Sometimes, the air carriers themselves will sell you a seat on a train.  "Replacing short-haul flights with trains frees up landing and departure slots at busy airports that can be used for more lucrative long-haul services."  Those train seats, even in standard class, are roomier.

The long Thanksgiving weekend is one of Amtrak's busiest, and the carrier demonstrated that it could keep moving despite the immoderate weather.

Once again, the nation’s TV viewers were treated to a steady diet of reporters doing obligatory stand-ups during the Thanksgiving holiday that bemoaned cancelled flights and snow-clogged highways from Denver through the upper Midwest to New York and New England.

In fact, the big story that most outlets missed is that many Amtrak trains were sold out in advance on the busy travel days and generally survived otherwise paralyzing storms with modest delays but no cancellations.

In the model railroad world, the carrier also got travelers to their destinations.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I helped operate a model railroad that features the south concourse of Chicago's Union Station.  I was working the coach yard that assembles the regional trains.  The locomotive at right is gathering cars for a strengthened formation that will include a couple of the dinette cars for the table seating (collegians use those to study.)  The person who will work this yard at the next operating session is going to have some interesting rakes to break down.  The Budd Cars at center are protecting the Chicago to Dubuque service, in the model railroad world we can represent current Amtrak trains, including the twice-daily Quincy or Carbondale service, as well as trains past including the Black Hawk and the Prairie Marksman.

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

City Journal's Heather Mac Donald attempts to quantify "The Cost of America’s Cultural Revolution."  In short: welcome to Yugoslavia after Tito.  "The diversity cult is destroying the very foundations of our civilization."

The controversial stuff comes deep in the article.

What are the “white norms” and “culture” that “race talk” seeks to deconstruct? Objectivity, a strong work ethic, individualism, a respect for the written word, perfectionism, and promptness, according to legions of diversity trainers and many humanities, social sciences, and even STEM faculty. Any act of self-discipline or deferred gratification that contributes to individual and generational success is now simply a manifestation of white supremacy. The New York Times recently singled out parents who had queued up hours early to visit a sought-after public school in New York City. “Why were white parents at the front of the line for the school tour?” asked the Times headline. The article answered: their white privilege, not their dedication to their children’s schooling.

Privilege is civilization, and perhaps one of these days the people in charge of higher education will twig to that.  Not yet, though.

The social-justice diversity bureaucracy has constructed a perpetual-motion machine that guarantees it eternal life. Minority students who have been catapulted by racial preferences into schools for which they are not academically prepared frequently struggle in their classes. The cause of those struggles, according to the social-justice diversity bureaucracy, is not academic mismatch; it is the lack of a critical mass of other minority students and faculty to provide refuge from the school’s overwhelming bigotry. And so, the school admits more minority students to create such a critical mass. Rather than raising minority performance, however, this new influx of diverse students lowers it, since the school has had to dig deeper into the applicant pool. The academic struggles and alienation of minority students will increase, along with the demand for more diversity bureaucrats, more segregated safe spaces, more victimology courses, more mental health workers, more diverse faculty, more lowered standards, and of course, more diversity student admits. And the cycle will start all over again.

But anything that cannot go on forever, will not.

We are in uncharted territory. How a civilization survives with so much contempt for itself is an open question. It is not wholly fanciful to see America’s drug-addicted malaise and rising mortality rates as a consequence, in part, of the nonstop denunciation of the white-male patriarchy. White identity politics is the inevitable result of this nonstop attack, and a logical one: if every other group celebrates its racial identity, why shouldn’t whites, if only as a matter of self-defense?

I've been pessimistic, and yet that Ms Mac Donald's dissent, and other dissents, from the prevailing foolishness gain purchase is cause for good cheer.

STILL UNDOING THE LEGACY OF PENN CENTRAL?

To this day, the Amtrak map still has gaps in it where the freight railroads were most successful, late in the 1960s, in getting rid of passenger trains, and nowhere in thickly settled parts of the country is that gap more obvious than in Ohio.  There's a self-described "data nerd" living in Ohio who would like to change that.  The map is intriguing, and before you object to Ohio having a lot of agricultural land outside the big cities, note that is also true of Bavaria.  Where there are lots of day trains, as opposed to the two-and-a-half long distance trains calling overnight.

THROWING OUT ALL THE GOOD ALONG WITH THE BAD.

For years, we've noted the destructive effects of "do your own thing."  Now Rod Dreher weighs in.

What kind of pain are indulgent parents today, living out their utopian fantasies of sexual experimentation, tearing down gender, and normalizing pot and acid, inflicting on their children? We will find out. You’d have thought that the failures of the Sixties would have taught us a lesson we would never forget, but the Boomers who became the custodians of historical memories of that era were nostalgists.

I wonder if anybody is going to be nostalgic for the era of 150 genders, and destroying the human personality to liberate it. As crazy as the Sixties druggies were, they weren’t that crazy.

The good news is that the hippies and their fuzzy-headed militant co-cohorts were not the majority of Baby Boom youth, and the same rebellion by Normal boomers late in life that gave us the Tea Party and populism will likely manifest itself among whatever name the current generation goes by later in their life.

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL WHO TAKES AN UNPOPULAR STANCE.

It's long been established that productive scholars who take positions legislatures disagree with merit protection.  Productive scholars who take positions at odds with the Popular Perspective on campus, perhaps not so much.

Those who want [Indiana game theorist Eric] Rasmusen fired claim he is “unsuited for academia” because of his odd beliefs on certain issues, even though those issues aren’t the focus of his teaching and publications. But Rasmusen is a productive scholar whose publications have been found useful by both academics and scholars. Law professors, economists, and think-tank employees have cited his publications many times, in discussing economics and the law. For example, when I was a lawyer at a Washington think-tank, I cited his writings in a scholarly paper, a blog post, and a court brief, in discussing lawsuit abuse, how to make legal services more affordable, abuses of power by state attorneys general, and state regulation of the practice of law.

The usefulness of Professor Rasmusen’s writings contrasts sharply with the uselessness of the typical academic article. The typical “scholarly” article by an academic is read by only ten people, and cited by absolutely no one. Many “scholarly” articles just regurgitate left-wing talking points or even dangerous, debunked myths. Some “scholarly” articles imbue nonsensical jargon with an air of false authority through a process of “idea laundering.”

The uselessness and obscurity of most academic articles speak ill of our universities because it is not difficult to write an article that other people find interesting and useful. When I worked at a think-tank, I had less time for scholarly pursuits than the typical academic. That’s because I had to devote time to things like arguing court cases.

The wordnoise of those obscure articles with the idea-laundered terminology might well provide scholarly cover for the politically correct excesses of the deanlets and the deanlings, including those at Indiana who would just as soon be rid of that troublesome game theorists.  And yet, pointing out the logical shortcomings of those woke scholars and their gruesomely padded curriculum vitae probably doesn't change many minds.

FEWER MONOPOLY RENTS TO DISSIPATE?

In Forbes, Michael Bernick asks, "Trucking Was Once A Middle Class Job; Can It Still Be?"  Probably not, as capital requirements are relatively low, and your tax dollars and mine provide the rights-of-way.

The movie The Irishman, along with Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith’s new book on Jimmy Hoffa, is renewing interest in Hoffa, the Teamsters, and trucking. One theme of the book is that truck driving, in the decades after World War II, often served as a solid middle class job—enabling truckers to be homeowners and/or support a family on one income.

Let's leave aside the interest of (upscale?) women in participating in the labor force or the tendency of blue collar men to be OK with the wife bringing in additional money for the moment, as well as the rent-seeking implicit in the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund. Let's think about the way the Progressive State fostered those rents.

Among the most complete research on the trucking workforce across the United States has been that undertaken by University of Pennsylvania faculty member, Steve Viscelli. In the winter of 2005, Viscelli left his life as a graduate student in sociology to take a job as a long haul driver. He spent two months learning to driver a tractor-trailer, followed by months driving tens of thousands of miles across the eastern half of the United States. Over the next nine years, he interviewed other truck drivers and truck company owners, and in 2016 published the results of his research: The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.

In a number of ways, the book is a model of labor market analysis. Viscelli combines his experiences and interviews, with careful historical research on the trucking workforce, understanding of the numbers on driver longevity and wages, and ten years of thinking about the topic.

It's possible that the unionized fleets benefitted from the Victory Dividend, that surely included those Interstate Highways that at first looked like a boon for gear-jammers (and surely the freight railroads saw it that way), and that events such as the 1970s oil embargo and the misplaced 55 mph speed limits, contributed.

In Viscelli’s telling, from the post World War II period through the late 1970s, truckers were “the best-paid and most powerful segment of the US working class.” Truck driver could be a path to home ownership, and a middle class lifestyle.

This changed in the late 1970s due to two interconnected dynamics, the deregulation of the industry, and the decline of the trucking unions. Though deregulation is usually associated with President Reagan, it was developed and passed by the Carter Administration and backed by Democratic legislators. A series of administrative and legislative actions culminating in the 1980 Motor Carrier Act, led to the government cutting back on oversight and eliminating of price controls and restrictions on market entrants.

So it always is with cartels: when a trucker licensed to move goods between Boston and Albany merges with another carrier licensed to move goods between Boston and New York gets into trouble for hauling good directly between New York and Albany (this really happened, kiddies, the company had no authority to use the New York Thruway) something has to give. And the cartel rents included those lucrative pension funds.

As Viscelli sets out, deregulation did lead to heightened cost competition, new firms entering the field, and innovation. But it also set in motion a decrease in the quality of jobs for truckers. Wages and working conditions declined. Experienced truckers left the field and worker turnover rates grew. Employers developed a model of drivers as independent contractors, shifting risks and costs to the drivers—Viscelli interviews trucker independent contractors today who are barely making minimum wage and/or in debt in their attempts to be owners.

There are opportunities for both practical and scholarly research here: apparently being an owner-operator or a subcontractor doesn't work, but being an employee of a fleet operator doesn't work.

Viscelli has continued his research and writing in the trucking field, often as an advocate for improved wages and working conditions for truckers. Viscelli’s advocacy includes several elements, but at the center is a greater trucker voice in how the industry is structured. “We would all be better off if truckers had greater control over how they work and what they earn”, Viscelli has written, adding that the form of the worker voice, including unionization, “is a question truckers will have to decide and act on themselves.”

These are probably generally favorable times for such models to emerge, as the railroads continue to be bent on getting out of retail freight transportation.

GRAB THEM BY THE WALLET. THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS FOLLOW.

OK, that's an economist talking, it's a pale version of the maxim elite forces live by.  It works well enough, though, for academic issues.  Here's former Vassar president C. B. Hill, contemplating endowment taxes.

Colleges and universities subject to the new tax, and others that worry about the precedent of taxing institutions of higher education or expect they also might be subject to the tax, have lobbied hard to remove this provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Even after it was passed in 2017, efforts to amend it have continued.

Here’s a better strategy: carefully consider congressional motivation and address the underlying concerns of policy makers. Waiting for new leaders in Congress and expecting a reversal in thinking may not pay off. The tax bill passed along party lines when the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were controlled by the Republicans, so their concerns about elite higher education are noteworthy. The majority party in the House has changed and, with an election in 2020, we could see further shifts, but legislators in both parties have raised issues about higher education.

As long as the "concerns" were limited to polemical books in the vein of Closing of the American Mind and Prof Scam, business as usual worked.  Tax those hedge funds, er, endowments, and how the piggies squeal!

For example, many Republicans who supported the tax bill in 2017 continue to be concerned that colleges do not adequately protect free speech, including representation of conservative points of view in the classroom and from speakers invited to campus. Most college leaders are committed to free speech and diversity of points of view, regarding them as important to both learning and the pursuit of new knowledge. While most institutions do, in fact, welcome a variety of ideological points of view, I suspect there is also a significant political tilt in the views represented.

You suspect? You suspect?  I've only been pointing such things out for thirty or so years, seventeen on this service, and only when the power to tax becomes the power to destroy do you consider changing your ways.

A stronger effort to present ideological diversity on our campuses would go further to win back support from the right. Doing so would improve learning on campus, since wrestling with different points of view encourages students to think more critically about issues. Colleges also clearly need to protect speakers from being disrupted and prevented from speaking, even as such incidents have been few compared to the number of speakers invited to campuses across the country -- and have rarely occurred at the institutions slated to pay the endowment tax.

There's a lot of what I call Utopian Wonkery in that passage (policy x would lead to outcome y: the margin of error is important) and yet the sounds of a mugging by reality are so sweet.

Another vital move to turn the tide: do more for veterans. That could include recruiting a greater number of veterans as students and hiring more veterans as staff and faculty members. Support programs that benefit veterans would contribute to the diversity of experience and points of view on campuses, including among the faculty. Interestingly, student veteran groups have been effective at lobbying Congress on policies that affect them. If student veterans had a greater presence at the colleges and universities subjected to the endowment tax, and felt that those institutions were going all out to assist student veterans and hire returning ones, could they have helped eliminate this provision from the tax bill?

The "missing veteran" problem is the dual of the U.S. News problem: if you think of "gap year" as something a well-connected kid does to make the application look better or to find himself, rather than as a hitch in service, you've probably got some privilege to check.  You won't find the veterans at the Ivies, for the most part.

It is a public relations problem for the institutions favored in the U.S. News league table, but it's not because the public isn't well informed.

The strategy of relying on lobbying to undo the harm of the endowment tax bill was based on the assumptions that the public was misinformed and that the problem was mostly a public relations issue. That may be true in part. But the best approach that these institutions could take to win back support is to clearly demonstrate, through a set of actions, that they are listening and committed to doing a better job of serving the public good -- by bringing on more intellectual diversity, more low- and middle-income students, and more veterans.

No, we understand the situation fully. The policy of Prestige Education has been to turn out Wise Experts to Rule The World, because they alone understand what that Public Good is.

They've done a piss-poor job with that policy.  We object to business as usual.

II. ADVENT.

This week's meditation: in several parables, the tax collector comes in for opprobrium. "Render unto Caesar" implies sacred limitations on the sovereign. Does the sentiment also imply secular limitations?

HO! HO! HO! WHO WOULDN'T GO?

The Christmas trains at Wisconsin's East Troy Electric Railroad now include on-train community singing.  This year's seasonal trains have sold out, children of all ages seem to be enjoying the ride.

Railway preservation is part business, part preservation. It's unlikely that the children would be distressed that the current operators of the museum allowed a vintage wooden interurban from Green Bay to deteriorate beyond economical repair (it would have made a wonderful companion to the well-restored Sheboygan car) and lost track of an even older streetcar body from Milwaukee (that was contracted out for repair) and now I hear similar questions raised about yet another Milwaukee streetcar.

Sometimes you have to decide what part of the collection merits conservation, and what must be de-accessioned, which is museum-speak for "discarded."  During the Festive Season, dear reader, consider supporting your local, or your favorite, preservation railways.

STANLEY FISH GETS DE-PLATFORMED.

The gods of higher education are a sardonic lot, but they do have a sense of humor, such as when the author of There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and other light classics gets shut down.

In a recent editorial for The Wall Street Journal you wrote about being disinvited from a talk at Seton Hall. What happened?

I got a call from a faculty member who is also an administrator at Seton Hall, who told me that they’re about to install a new president at the university and as part of the celebration they’re going to have a lecture series about matters of importance to campus life. Would I give the first of the lectures? I said sure, but it would depend on the date. He said he’d call me back, which he did a couple of weeks later — not to tell me a day, but that the invitation was being withdrawn.

Of course I asked why. He said that a committee, which hadn’t met in person but had communicated by email, had decided that I was not who they wanted the audience at Seton Hall to hear.

Having contributed to an academic culture in which scholarship becomes an extension of activism (or is it the other way around?) the professor lives long enough to see where that goes badly wrong.

The active life leads to going out and attempting to produce results that will alter the condition of your society. Academic life stops short of the waters of politics or of direct action in the world.

When I complain about the introduction of political stances or considerations in the academy, what I’m complaining about is the failure to recognize and be faithful to the distinctiveness of the academic task. I don’t think that is necessarily in conflict with what I say about principles. I’m just making what might be thought to be a descriptive and sociological point, rather than a deep philosophical point. This is a university space; this is what is done in universities.

Better to come around too late than never, to be cited as a Deceased Expert who Anticipated What Needed To Be Done.

The house organ for Business As Usual in higher education has not yet put the full interview behind its paywall.  The conversation touches on a number of other current topics, it will reward careful study.

THE TROLL, AFTER ALL, IS A NORSE CHARACTER.

The best way to get to the trendy electric motorcar show?  Take the trolley!  "Leave it to Swedes to come up with the politely sharp repartee rail promoters often lack by taking a vintage streetcar to a cutting edge electric automobile show."

The cars calling at the nearby tram-stop have a few more spaces for passengers, and perhaps for today's bicycles.

No word on whether the transit authority also facilitates packages travelling together, say, with a postal service streetcar, or merchandise despatch service.

THE MOST LOATHSOME TYPE OF PRESIDENT.

Columnist S. E. Cupp puts it bluntly.  "He is a solutionist."  Solutionists are people who suffer from the fatal conceit, with an overweening sense of "I can do it."

Solutionists are highly successful in one area and believe their natural next step is running the whole damn country.

While anyone who believes they should be president of the United States must have an outsized sense of self, the solutionist’s arrogance is boundless. Not only they seem to think they can solve all the complex socioeconomic, structural and cultural problems that have stymied brilliant scholars and political leaders for generations, they think it won’t take them all that long either.

Unfortunately, solutionists don't necessarily have much respect for institutional constraints, let alone for the possibility that complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

[A]ny solutionism is dangerous in that it tends to ignore or reject the necessary limitations of important systems and institutions — things like basic economics, the Constitution, the law and human nature. To the solutionist, these are just nuisances a clever workaround can easily abate.

No matter the party, good governance should recognize that the best solutions often come from individual citizens, local municipal governments and the private sector, and not the magical imagination of a single powerful man who says he has all the answers.

Ms Cupp's salary depends on being a political pundit, and not surprisingly, she has another column today praying for a third presidential party, on the grounds that "Solving problems isn't as politically profitable as keeping them broken" for the existing political class.

No, let's have less reliance on Government as the way to Solve Problems.  Bet on emergence.

David Von Drehle isn't quite there yet (perhaps his masters at Washington's Post won't have it) but perhaps he'll figure it out.

Leading Democratic theorists tend to explain their loss of the working class in terms of race, gender, patriarchy and disruption — favorite frames of reference that are necessary to understand our politics but far from sufficient. What these frames fail to capture is the practicality of working people and their hard-earned allergy to egghead notions that cannot be made to work efficiently in the field. They’ve seen just enough college grads who design server racks that can’t be bolted into place to become skeptical of self-declared “smart” people in general. And they won’t be won over by politicians with grand, impractical plans.

The house organ of the Political Class in the home base of the Political Class is unlikely to turn against the Social Engineering Vice in any systematic way any time soon. And yet if there are residents of the Swamp who begin to recognize, even dimly, that governing modestly might be governing better, the lived experience of practical people, whether they buy Carhartts or not, might well improve.

LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM WISE EXPERTS.

Brown University public policy researcher Marc J. Dunkelman offers a lengthy analysis of all the ways in which New York's Pennsylvania Station was ruined and yet cannot be put back together.

Penn Station is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub in the world, trailing only Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. The station serves more daily passengers than the region’s three huge airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) combined. More people pass through Penn each weekday than live in the city of Baltimore. Anyone who has passed through Penn Station over the past half-century—or who passed through it this Thanksgiving weekend—knows that the nation’s busiest transit center is a national embarrassment, a hole in the ground where the food is ratty and the waiting rooms are sparse.

For more than a generation, New York’s most important gateway has been a grimy relic. Powerful figures in New York, Albany and Washington have plotted for more than three decades to redevelop the whole complex into a world-class facility. But time and again, their efforts have faltered. Today, after 30 years of talk, the station is poised for an upgrade, but the plans are less elaborate than the ones that were announced last decade. And even when the current work is complete, the station will require still more renovation just to be considered a modern facility.

There's a lot to digest in the article, it comes down to the absence of anyone with the vision of Alexander J. Cassatt and the drive of J. Edgar Thomson. "But Penn Station has actually languished at the hands of another simple reality: No one has the leverage to fix it. "  It's another inheritance from the truly most destructive generation of the modern era, the process-worshippers of the Silent Generation.  "Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power—to pull it away from imperious technocrats who might use government to bulldoze hapless communities. "  It's enough to make a Marxist giggle (a phrase that I lifted from Trains editor David P. Morgan, who noted the rigamarole strangling Commuter Rail service in New York in the late 1950s.)

Mr Dunkelman is still a believer in the power of Governance by Wise Experts.  "To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest."  I fear, though, that he has really made the case that the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to go away.

THEY'RE STILL ON THE INDEX.

That is, Northern Illinois University still have one policy, their "nondiscrimination and harassment policy" that rates a red light from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Several policies, including the "decorating dorm room" policies and the free speech zone, continue to rate a yellow light.  A few "freedom of expression" policies were updated in November of this year, and those pass muster as not being unduly restrictive.

Looks like another year when I write a check to the Foundation and not the university.

COMPLEXITY CONFOUNDS COORDINATION.

At first blush, it seems so simple.  Put yourself in the place of the Kaiser's shipbuilder.  It's a lot of trouble to sort out the tall timbers suitable for masts from among the wild growth of the boreal forests.  Wouldn't it be simpler, you muse (OK, in German) to set aside some land to plant and cultivate precisely the kind of tall timbers you need, and schnell, before the French or the English figure it out?  Or perhaps you are the Tsar's home secretary, and it occurs to you that the steppe is endless versts of similar glacial till, and devoting it all to grain will keep the masses sufficiently nourished that they won't rebel, or that they'll have some strength to keep the French or the Germans out.  Per corollary, mightn't there be lots of other opportunities for the man of system to organize and rationalize and otherwise improve the Human Condition?

The bad news, dear reader, is that there's always some Overlooked Element in all those grand plans.  Book Review N^o. 11 commends James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.  My opening paragraph identifies some of the foibles of Overweening Technocracy (my expression: Mr Scott uses "High Modern Authoritarianism" to refer to a similar phenomenon) that arise in his book.  Glacial till is great for growing mass quantities of staple crops, but don't try the same methods on raspberries (or arugula and kale?) or apply steppe-friendly methods to more southerly places that haven't been glaciated.  The man of system has to suppress tacit and local knowledge (see page 311 and following) and that doesn't turn out well, as we read at page 340.

What has proved to be truly dangerous to us and to our environment, I think, is the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian social planning. Such a combination has been at work in city planning, in Lenin's view of revolution (but not his practice), in collectivization in the Soviet Union, and in villagization in Tanzania.

"They all but guarantee their own practical failure."  Indeed.

In defense of the high-modernist approach, Mr Scott suggests, pages 352-353, that technocratic interventions often addressed "unjust and oppressive" existing orders (that old "good intentions" dodge?); that they often trafficked in "egalitarian, emancipatory" ideas (neglecting that the best form of emancipation might be in freedom to bet on emergence?); he notes that "dogged, day-to-day resistance" of the people subjected to the Wise Experts' schemes can cause the Experts either to be frustrated (sending in the tanks?) or to trim to local conditions.  Thus, although Mr Scott, an academic, has to make the obligatory disclaimer early on ("my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman," page 8) that disclaimer says more about his lack of understanding of Hayek or Friedman (there being no such thing as politically unfettered market coordination or anything else) than it does about his understanding of the workings of technocrats who would prefer an exemption from market tests or political fetters, although that's what turns out badly.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MODEL RAILROADING IN THE TRADITIONAL MANNER.

The Model Railroad Club of Milwaukee have been running trains in the same clubhouse, a former local passenger and express station in the Walker's Point neighborhood, since sometime in the 1930s, which is the longest tenure of any club in the same location anywhere in the world.

That previous post notes that the club's traditional third Friday of each month open day became harder to manage with the watering holes of Walker's Point growing in number and becoming more popular with casual bar-hoppers; thus the open day has become the final Sunday of each month.

That small anteroom in the rear holds a small marshalling yard that represents the Port of Milwaukee.  It's currently out of service.  The trackage is hand-laid, with old-style solenoid switch machines to direct traffic by remote control.

That yard is off the track plan to the right.  The track plan dates to around 1950, when the club rebuilt the layout for two-rail rather than outside-third-rail power distribution.  In those days, the way to provide a longer mainline run was to have what became known as the "bowl of spaghetti" track plan; here it's a continuous circuit that goes thrice around the room at left (the main entrance) and twice around the room at right (primarily yards and engine terminals) with one loop flipped to reverse direction without any annoying change of polarity.

These days, track plans provide for walk-around control, which means the second or third time around the room generally takes place at different levels.  This is more easily done with helices in the smaller scales than in O Scale.

There have been a few changes to the layout over the years; this small engine terminal is not on the plan, it's at the upper right corner of the left panel (in the front room.)  The critters are for industrial service.

Here, the flipped third loop in the front room crosses over the streetcar and interurban line.  The street trackage still works, but the interurban line to Watertown is out of service, as the trolley modellers have mostly crossed the final summit.

There are still passengers waiting for the interurban, which might be as hard to find as real Blatz, Diamond wax paper, or Burma-Shave.

Maybe that "Welcome to Cleveland" sign on a roof just north of Mitchell Field fooled this aviator.  That's an Island Airlines Tri-Motor.  The real ones still fly, but only in preservation.

Trains editor David P. Morgan referred to The Milwaukee Road as his "Christmas railroad;" that because of the longest (at the time) mainline electrification with regenerative braking and Bi-Polars (with the Trans-Siberian electrified from Moscow to Vladivostok that competition is closed for all time) and closer to home those 75 minute Hiawathas between Chicago and Milwaukee.  Amtrak might have that Hiawatha emblem on the tree, but what I want for Christmas is Free Rein to 110.

The O Scaler must improvise.  Will you look this good eighty years on?  That's the Lionel diecast Hiawatha shell from the late 1930s, with a two-rail mechanism installed.  She's still capable of rolling the passengers.

Note that the train hesitates at a few spots. Control is still by rotary block switches and rheostats with the operators sitting on control positions on the old steps to track level. There is a model board to cue the operators when they must select the next section, you'll see it illuminated in one of the still shots in the post.

There are no plans by the current membership to install command control.  Perhaps that will not be an issue in any event, as the younger members (who in some cases don't know yet that they will become members) will go directly to dead rail, which is to say, onboard batteries and radio control.

A retrospective "our neighbors at war."  Carl Zeidler's brother Frank was one of the founding members of the club (along with Al Kalmbach and William K. Walthers).  Both Zeidlers served as mayor of Milwaukee, Carl, as a Democrat and Frank as a Socialist.  Carl resigned his office to join the Navy and went missing in the Pacific.

More on the evolution of O Scale.  Walthers offered a 60 foot "utility coach" based on a Chicago and North Western prototype.  The originals are still around, sometimes (for instance, in the Cold Spring Shops project pile) in kit form, and Atlas O brought out a ready-to-run plastic version in its Trainman line.  You'll see some of those running here.

Then, it's time to run and catch a train, and, for the first time in over sixty years, it's possible to ride a streetcar to not far from the railroad station.

Granted, two stops from the Public Market (always a good place to stop for seafood) to the station isn't exactly a big deal, but this car also goes to the Grohmann Museum and into the Italian grocery district on the east side.

"RACIST!" IS THE LATTER-DAY VERSION OF "HERETIC!"

It matters not whether the person hurling the accusation has any basis for using it; it has the effect of immediately putting the accused on the defense, rather than requiring that the user offer evidence.

Once again, Indiana game theorist Eric Rasmusen is in trouble with the Holy Inquisition, er, the Diet of Provosts.  Because the professor, whose textbook I have used, is less secular (my choice of description: to my left I'm hearing "less enlightened" and to my right "less indoctrinated") than his colleagues and, likely, the student body.  Provost Lauren Robel would like the auto da fe to commence.

His expressed views are stunningly ignorant, more consistent with someone who lived in the 18th century than the 21st. Sometimes Professor Rasmusen explains his views as animated by his Christian faith, although Christ was neither a bigot nor did he use slurs; indeed, he counseled avoiding judgments. Rhetorically speaking, Professor Rasmusen has demonstrated no difficulty in casting the first, or the lethal, stone.

Sometimes, though, a church benefits from having iconoclasts.  It's an old struggle in higher education, does a faculty member's private beliefs affect his ability to do his job, made more complicated at a state institution where Constitutional protections hold, for now.

Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said that Indiana’s response to Rasmusen gets “much right.” It identifies the First Amendment limitations on the university's ability to discipline faculty members for extramural comments, he said, “distinguishing offensive speech from discriminatory conduct.” In also taking disciplinary action “off the table” in the absence of such conduct, Indiana can focus on “other, more effective methods of answering speech that members of the community find offensive.”

At the same time, many others continue to call on Indiana to terminate Rasmusen. It's inevitable that his views impact the classroom, even for those students who voluntarily take his courses, they say.

That concluding sentence reads a lot like the No Indoctrination complaints of years ago, albeit with the sides reversed.  The challenge is the same, irrespective of who might be offended.

Even while praising Indiana, Steinbaugh, of FIRE, said the dean’s statement goes too far in stating, more specifically, that it "will conduct a thorough review of the courses taught by this professor for the influence of bias."

While a university can certainly address discriminatory conduct, he said, “we should be wary of the threat to academic freedom presented when administrators announce reviews into course materials for the influence of bias.”

Indeed so; I recall when I was still on duty, how the Syllabus Project (looking for excessive Marxism, or something) turned the local leftists into First Amendment purists, at least for a little.

Unsurprisingly, the now-closed comment section at Inside Higher Ed has become a food fight.

Professor Rasmusen is not backing away from the fight, and he fisks the provost.  By all means, dear reader, follow the controversy, if you must.  He opens with a modern-day version of "If this be treason, make the most of it," or perhaps it's "pound sand."  To wit, "These insults no longer have much meaning."

It's days like this that I'm happy to not have to take sides, or deal with a memorandum from headquarters praising Gaia and reminding everyone that "we must ensure a non-threatening, fair learning environment."

AN EXAM WEEK REVIEW SESSION.

The Welfare Economics Paradigm looks pretty on a blackboard, but it doesn't implement well.  Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers the details.

The apparent science on display seems impressive. Curves are drawn on the whiteboard to portray the difference left by free markets between marginal private cost and marginal social cost, between marginal private benefit and marginal social benefit, and the resulting failure of markets to produce socially optimal quantities of outputs and to attach to these outputs socially optimal prices.

Gazing at the curves – or, if the class is especially mathematical, studying the equations – reveals the remedial action that must be taken if society’s welfare is to be optimized. Shift this curve upward, or that one downward – or in the equations modify this coefficient that way or that coefficient this way – and, voila!, society is engineered to optimality with the aid of Scientific Economics.

By all means read, understand, react, to the essay in full. The key point, though, is that in practice there's something called the margin of error. "But these curves and equations are seldom realities on which researchers can gather actual data."  (And we generally don't burden introductory or intermediate students with a survey of econometrics before we get to welfare economics.)

Let alone that philosopher-kings don't exist outside Plato's dialogues or the early theoretical work of Joseph Stiglitz.

Yet despite more than a half-century of warnings from public-choice economists, mainstream economists continue to assume, without much apparent thought, that government officials act in a way that is categorically different from the way these same persons would act were they in the private sector: private persons are assumed to act to promote their own self-interests, while government officials are assumed to act to promote the public interest.

What, however, could be more unscientific than this assumption of dual motivations? It is justified neither by science nor by common sense, but it is crucial to the “scientific” case for government action to correct market failures.

In their absence, perhaps it's not "superstition" on the part of economists that makes the apparent default setting in textbooks the Welfare Economics Paradigm: rather, it is that selling Technocratic Advice to the governing classes raises the salaries of economists.

I. ADVENT.

This week's meditation: how unequal were wealth holdings in the days when Cyrenius was governor of Syria?

IF MASS TRANSIT REDUCES TRAFFIC CONGESTION, SHOULDN'T MASS PACKAGE DELIVERY ALSO DO SO?

Perhaps not, particularly in the big cities.

An Amazon order starts with a tap of a finger. Two days later — or even in a matter of hours — the package arrives.

It seems simple enough.

But to deliver Amazon orders and countless others from businesses that sell over the internet, the very fabric of major urban areas around the world is being transformed. And New York City, where more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily, shows the impact that this push for convenience is having on gridlock, roadway safety and pollution.

Delivery trucks operated by UPS and FedEx double-park on streets and block bus and bike lanes. They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year, a 34 percent increase from 2013.

Put another way, the mass transit vehicles get reserved spaces, while the mass parcel delivery vehicles have to make do as best as they can, on roads that are not rationed by price.

While the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber has unquestionably caused more traffic, the proliferation of trucks has worsened the problem. As a result, cars in the busiest parts of Manhattan now move just above a jogger’s pace, about 7 m.p.h., roughly 23 percent slower than at the beginning of the decade.

Neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn, are being used as logistics hubs to get packages to customers faster than ever. At least two million square feet of warehouse space is being built in New York, including what will be the largest center of its kind in the country. Amazon added two warehouses in the city over the summer.

Gosh, that Manhattan traffic was moving at all of about ten or eleven m.p.h. at the beginning of the decade, which was also during that era of macroeconomic torpor we call the Obama recovery.

THE AXE RETURNS TO MADISON.

We had to give props to former Northern Illinois player and coach P. J. Fleck and his University of Minnesota eleven a year ago.

The Wisconsin Badgers again have an overall lead in the series (there's a reason, dear reader, the old version of On Wisconsin included "Run the ball 'round Minnesota," that wasn't always a given) and the Axe will occupy the vacant trophy case that was prominent in the locker room as a reminder.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photo by Mark Hoffman.

Yes, a few Wisconsin fans journeyed to the Cities, where once again both the Gophers and Vikings play outdoor football.

A long enough rivalry, though, ought to come out about even despite some teams having runs of success.  The almost six score and ten meetings between Wisconsin and Minnesota currently is there, and in the century of the Bears and Packers playing, the number of wins is about equal, as are the total points scored by each team.