SUCCESSOR TO THE TGV? Alex at Marginal Revolution is unimpressed with the Shanghai Maglev test train. Hasn't a French TGV gone nearly 300 mph on a test? And all that is, is a glorified Electroliner running on two rails, just as Frank J. Sprague and Henry Cordell intended.

INCENTIVES MATTER.

The state under Gov. Blagojevich has levied about $1 billion of new taxes on businesses. Mays estimates that with additional fees, an increase in the minimum wage, family leave requirements and related regulations, the cost to business has increased more than $2 billion.

That's the Illinois Leader's take on fiscal policy in Illinois. Illini Girl adds,

That'll make the jobs stick around! Top this off with some of the worst malpratice-happy counties in the nation, an over-reliance on manufacturing jobs, and high insurance costs for businesses, and is it any wonder that jobs aren't flocking to this region? Something has to be done. As Illinois residents concerned about future opportunities in our state, we need to be alarmed about these developments and expressing this to our lawmakers,

and links to some policy analysis that seems to be on point.

GET INVOLVED. The Spirit of America fund-raiser for the troops is up and running, until April 29.

NEW SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. From Knowledge Problem (who is soon to be among the select few energy economists with working knowledge of wiring codes) comes news of a new economics weblog, Cafe Hayek, with all sorts of good stuff, including a reminder to people who get into the outsourcing fad that comparative advantages matter, and a comment on the job losses from improved public health that The American Mind characterizes as "Bastiat-like."

MORE SKIRMISHING OVER PROMOTION OPPORTUNITIES.

The Chronicle recently had two contradictory articles dealing with the pressures in academia on those with kids and those without,

notes Laura at Apartment 11-D, who goes on to observe,

This war reveals some real problems. Lonliness, alienation, hyper-individualism, and work exhaustion to name a few. These issues might be bubbling up in the pages of the academic paper, but they must be certainly affecting everyone. Solutions anyone?

In a later post she points to others who have weighed in. Moment, Linger On reminds readers that retirees ultimately depend on the productivity of younger people; this is as true if the pensions are confiscated from current workers in the form of social security taxes as if the pensions are dividends and interest, where the productivity of people currently working with current assets provides the income stream. I believe there's something called an overlapping generations model at work here.

Behind the productivity, however, is another phenomenon at work. I have recently finished reading Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (details or compare prices) and intend to offer more comments on that book, time permitting, over the next two weeks. For now let me restrict my observations to the phenomenon of front-loading one's career, which Professor Florida characterizes as laying the foundation for future prosperity early in one's working life (no start as telegrapher and work up to president on this track). Such front-loading is typical of the tenure track; the most effective among us will have commenced sufficient work to make professor in the first five or six years out of graduate school, and the person who is willing to put social pursuits aside will have an advantage in such a competition. (Something similar is likely at work for some entrepreneurs.) Whether that advantage is socially desirable is another matter: a few years ago the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine did a feature on the Economics Department at the University of Chicago (motto: we build bombs beneath our bleachers) that included a telling anecdote ... a faculty meeting was running long, and a new faculty member wondered if his colleagues could wrap it up as his wife was waiting in their car and he didn't want her to divorce him. An old head is supposed to have noted, "You would fit in better here if she did." On the other hand (this is part of the Economics B.C.S. after all) as long as people are free to choose to work harder, whether at their research, their businesses, or their webzines (No, nobody would do THAT), those that choose not to take on the responsibilities of family or to stay out of the swamp called contemporary mating are able to outshine their competitors who do. No easy way to make the people who want to apply themselves NOT apply themselves. Similarly, no easy way to make the people who want to apply themselves accomodate co-workers who would like a different mix of burdens.

My sense, reading many of the posts, is that the greater tension is between less driven workers with family responsibilities, who seek some easing of their workplace burdens, and less driven workers without family responsibilities, who perceive their burdens as being augmented by the workplace accommodations (some now mandated) for people with family responsibilities.

I would note also that it is difficult to do any careful analysis of the balance between work and play (which is being blurred to some extent anyway if Creative Class is accurate) on the basis of anecdotal evidence. Chris at Signifying Nothing dissents in part, and Chutry Experiment suggests some additional confounding factors any systematic researcher would have to consider.

SWIFT OF FOOT WAS HIAWATHA

And he left that happy party.
Neither did he leave them slowly,
With the calm deliberation,
The intense deliberation
Which photographers aspire to:
But he left them in a hurry,
Left them in a mighty hurry
Vowing that he would not stand it.
Hurriedly he packed his boxes;
Hurriedly the porter trundled
On a barrow all his boxes;
Hurriedly he took his ticket;
Hurriedly the train received him;
Thus departed Hiawatha.

I was under the impression that Hiawatha was the train. The above, however, is from a Lewis Carroll send-up of Song of Hiawatha that Milt's File pointed to, as part of a generally whimsical collection of posts.

Something there is about those tom-tom rhythm epics that inspires parody, I've seen another one that begins

Once I read the Kalevala
Read the ancient Finnish epic
And a mighty wasted time that all was ...

JUST SUCK IT UP. The latest flight of fancy from Duke University is the end of the 8 am class. The first class of the morning will start at 8.30 am.

Pikers. Once upon a time, the first class of the morning at Wisconsin started at 7.45 am.

Duke University is eliminating 8 a.m. classes and trying to come up with other ways help its sleep-deprived students, who too often are struggling to survive on a mix of caffeine, adrenaline and ambition.

Number 2 Pencil is made of sterner stuff.

I have an idea - stop admitting students who don't know that sleep is essential for regular functioning. Oh, you say Duke's students are smart? Then why is Duke assuming that incoming freshmen just don't know that they're supposed to, you know, sleep every once in a while?

She has also provided a link to a Fark forum that includes today's Quote of the Day:

Learn to drink coffee, it's what college is for.

Joanne Jacobs is somewhat more accepting, with some advice for night owls.

The editorial staff at The Northern Star weigh in, and once again get it right.

To make college that much easier for students, Duke University has decided to cut its 8 a.m. classes.

But wait, college isn’t supposed to be easy, is it? If it were, there would be low tuition rates and low academic standards, right? Well, all college students know that definitely isn’t the case.

People decide to go to college to further their education — that’s right, they decide to go — and students should go to classes no matter when they are offered.

Duke’s rationale for cutting the university’s early-bird classes was backed up by surveys that state college students are getting less sleep — an average of six to seven hours a night, which is down from 7.5 hours a night in the 1980s. Officials say sleep deprivation causes lower academic performance and an increase in stress levels.

Well, before an entire university decides to cut its 8 a.m. classes, which probably have been around since the school’s inception, it should do a study on student life.

If the majority of students are staying up late with friends, partying or drinking, then there’s no reason the school should cater to those students. School should be a student’s top priority.

Maybe, just maybe, if the majority of students are staying up late doing homework (and they started their homework early in the evening), then there might be reason to consider cutting the early classes.

However, 8 a.m. classes actually do have benefits that students might not consider. An average worker works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and most people are required to be up before 8 a.m. to get ready for and travel to work.

The editorial writers were kind enough not to suggest that the clustering of classes in the 10 am to 3 pm time blocks, which contributes to a space crunch at many universities, reflects in part a revelation of preferences on the part of the faculty. Northern Illinois University wants at least one third of each department's class offerings outside prime time. That, too, is not as big a problem for a night owl, or for a morning person. One colleague, now retired, would choose the 8 am classes, be in by 5 or 6 in the morning, and gone by 2 or 3 pm.

Crowe Bar is showing promise as an economist, considering the further as well as the immediate consequence of the policy change.

8AM classes provide the service of weeding out the kids that are too lazy to drag their hungover asses to class...

but this is really a superb idea....the real world is sure to be equally flexible to the slackers... I'm positive of it.

But what's the point? I feel as though an 8AM class following your after hours party builds character...

blah blah blah..."I can't get the classes I need to graduate...they're never offered...well I guess they're offered, but they've always met at 8AM...so I've just been waiting semester after semester for them to meet at noon....I guess I ran outta time."

Truth be told...I've postponed taking a class or two because of the meeting time...but when it comes down to it...you just gotta suck it up...spending 15 hours a week in class? Yeah, I can see how that would be physically taxing.

So instead, let's provide caffeine pills to the students...drugs fix everything...wicked.

C'mon people...next you'll be nixing 830AM classes 'cause you've got the same problemos....and there you have it...I suppose its been made abundantly clear who should be in charge....damn classes...they always get in the way of my REAL schedule.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.

You'd think tenure would make it possible for professors to stand up to their students, but I guess the squeaky wheel gets the A. It's gotten worse in the last 12 to 15 years, says the prof, who's been teaching for 20 years.

That's Joanne Jacobs's reaction to a gripe lodged by an experienced professor who wishes to remain anonymous. Working conditions at universities are not likely to improve until more tenured faculty members stand up for what they believe in. That is, if they believe in anything in the first place.

MANDATORY DIVERSITY TRAINING?

When we entered the church, the usher asked us if we were with the bride or the groom. On the bride’s side of the church were good solid German-Swedish Midwestern farmers. They were blond and cheerful and broad shouldered. On the groom’s side were the Irish. Morose, sarcastic, laconic, under achieving, with a genetic predisposition for alcoholism and mental illness and depression. Bride or groom? I thought it should be fairly obvious.

As Laura in Apartment 11-D is an academician from an academic family, the choice may not be that obvious. Go read the rest, including the Chicago report. East Coasters: did you know there is a Circle Tour that goes all the way around Chicago on the water? It takes seven hours.

ELEPHANT AND? Going Underground has some fun with technical glitches on the Tube.

NEITHER CHICAGO NOR MILWAUKEE WAS AVAILABLE:

Take the quiz:

"Which American City Are You?"


Cleveland
You are blue collar and Rock n Roll. You Work hard and party harder.

(Via Atlantic Blog, who comments on some of the choices. The quiz offered "amusement parks" as one option I bet Bill wouldn't take.)

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS visits Knowledge Problem.

DID THE FOOTBALL COACH GET A RAISE? Professor Adams (via Betsy's Page) catalogs the expense-preference behavior at UNC-Wilmington.

In the midst of recent criticism that a) the university has been spending too much money on speakers, and b) the speakers always seem to be Democrats; the university hired George Mitchell (D-Maine) to speak for about an hour for the sum of $40,000. Mitchell’s fee shows that he really cares about hire education. I mean, higher education. It also serves as a reminder that the Democrats are the party of the people.

Given the billion-dollar state budget deficit, many are questioning the wisdom of funding such a ceremony, which will cost around $100,000, after all is said and done. Instead of all of the pomp and circumstance, many believe that our budget crisis calls for an administration that is less pompous and more circumspect in its use of public funds.

Yup. The pomp and circumstance is an indicator of the low esteem in which these administrators hold themselves. (We wouldn't have responsibility for the undergraduate library at Wisconsin, and the Union Pacific wouldn't trust us with a switch engine, but we can sure make a big splash in this pond.)

The students are particularly angry because news of the expense of the installation came shortly after news that their tuition will be increasing several hundred dollars per semester, effective next year. Several students have come by my office recently to borrow paper because the computer labs are out. Some of the labs are also out of toner. And, sadly, other labs have reduced their hours of operation because the university can no longer pay the salaries of those who run them.

All the while the university continues to spend money on forums centered on “diversity” issues. Of course, these “forums” feature university-funded speakers who just happen to share the political perspective of the liberal administrators. The speakers are paid to parrot the political views of these administrators while students’ basic educational needs are being neglected. Some students would like to write a letter to complain but they can’t because the university is running out of paper.

There's a bit more to the story, isn't there? On the one hand, the state-located universities continue to be a subsidy to the upper-middle class, and some increases in tuitions and some tightening of the admission standards would bring budgets in balance. On the other hand, the Diversity Boondoggle would have to find real jobs, but the French diplomatic corps does a better job of sugarcoating reality.

Many faculty members are upset about the administration’s fiscal irresponsibility, although most lack the courage to complain publicly. While the professors haven’t had raises in four years, the salary for the chancellor continues to skyrocket in the midst of the state’s deep budget crisis. In 1993, the chancellor of UNCW made less than $100,000. Ten years later, DePaolo was given a starting salary of $205,000. Thus, the position has seen a pay increase of over 100% in just a decade.

The preceding says something about the mindset of many tenure-seeking people: not willing to take risks, despite having great protection against the consequences of taking risks. But the dirty little secret of tenure is that taking risks in one's research is a hazardous way to earn it in the first place, and continuing safe research projects afterward continues to earn rewards.

There is potential for things to change in Wilmington, however. Professor Adams contrasts deferred maintenance in the classrooms with administrative nest-feathering.

I didn’t bother calling a maintenance man because I know that those guys are overworked. In fact, last summer one of them had to make a house call to the chancellor’s home in the gated community I mentioned earlier. But before he did, he placed a magnetic cover over the UNCW logo on the side of the maintenance van he was driving. Someone understood that the taxpayers wouldn’t like the idea of such a house call in the midst of a severe budget crisis. Fortunately, a reporter caught wind of the incident and wrote it up in the local newspaper.

Here is an opportunity to make some noise. A president at Northern Illinois University was hounded from office over a similarly small misappropriation of state property.

WELCOME TO GREATER DEKALB. Laura at Apartment 11-D discovers genuine Mexican food and the tony and tacky side of Oak Brook. She promises more.

CALYPSO ROSSINI. One of the highlights of the end of the spring semester is the annual concert by the Northern Illinois University Steel Band. (Where can a musician who wants to do a Master's in pan study? Julliard? Fuhgeddaboudit. Oberlin? Ew, gross, that looks like the set of Civil Action. Harvard? Where did Harvard's string quartet study?) The program featured an arrangement of La Scala di Seta and some excerpts from Semiramide as one of two encores, as well as some of the latest calypsos from the islands. (The conductor thanked the band for putting up with a rushed rehearsal schedule on one such number called War 2004, which was not your usual academic-tenure wine-and-cheese afterwards dirge, believe me.)

Among the guests at this year's concert were Trinidad and Tobago's Ambassador to the United States and Mexico, Her Excellency Marina Annette Valere, who has an economics degree from Manchester, and some participants in Maryland's Cultural Academy for Excellence, who get extra support with their reading and arithmetic, encouragement to stay in school, and opportunities to play chess and study pan and music theory. One graduate of the program is a pan major at Northern Illinois.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Two more from Victor Davis Hanson. The first (via Atlantic Blog) considers the possible consequences of reacting to the original provocation, rather than attempting to work things out.

Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran’s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran’s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979—and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.

The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants.

The second article continues the theme.

Out of all the recent chaos emerges one lesson: Appeasement of fundamentalists is not appreciated as magnanimity, but ridiculed as weakness — and, in fact, encourages further killing. A shaken Spain elected a new government that promised to exit Iraq. In return, the terrorists planted more bombs, issued more demands, and then staged a fiery exit for themselves. France, as is its historical wont, triangulated with the Muslim world and then found its fundamentalist plotters all over Paris. The Saudi royals thought that they of all people could continue to blackmail the fundamentalists — until the suicide-murderers turned their explosives on their benefactors and began to blow up Arab Muslims as well. General Musharraf once did all he could to appease Islamists — and got assassination plots as thanks.

Following the Iranian hostage takeover in 1979, the United States had embraced a quarter-century of appeasement that had resulted in far more American deaths than all those lost during the present war against terrorists abroad — flaming ships, embassies, planes, skyscrapers, and people the wages of its mollifying. And every time in Iraq we have tried to offer conciliation before complete military victory — low profiles, tolerance for looters and militias, allowance for vicious mullahs — we have seen more, not fewer, killed.

The sad truth is that civilization itself is engaged in a worldwide struggle against the barbarism of Islamic fundamentalism. Just this past month the killers and their plots have been uncovered in London, Paris, Madrid, Pakistan, and North Africa — the same tired rhetoric of their hatred echoing from Iraq to the West Bank. While Western elites quibble over exact ties between the various terrorist ganglia, the global viewer turns on the television to see the same suicide bombing, the same infantile threats, the same hatred of the West, the same chants, the same Koranic promises of death to the unbeliever, and the same street demonstrations across the world.

Looking for exact professed cooperation between an Islamic fascist and the rogue regime that finds such anti-Western violence useful is like proving that Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler all coordinated their attacks and worked in some conspiratorial fashion — when in fact Japan had no knowledge of the invasion of Russia, and Hitler had no warning of Pearl Harbor or Mussolini's invasion of Greece.

In fact, it didn't matter that they were united only by a loose and shared hatred of Western liberalism and emboldened by a decade of democratic appeasement. And our fathers, perhaps better men than we, didn't care too much for beating their breasts about the exact nature of collective Axis strategy or blaming each other for past lapses, but instead went to pretty terrible places like Bastogne, Anzio, and Okinawa to put an end to their enemies all.

And thus, the calculus that disturbs the people who object to the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns: does the sure knowledge that some of our best young people will die in battle against individuals who, absent the campaign, might have harbored no animus toward the United States, prevent randomly chosen civilians from dying at the hands of individuals who do harbor that animus?

We did not ask for this war, but it came. In our time and according to our station, it is now our duty to end it. And that resolution will not come from recrimination in time of war, nor promises to let fundamentalists and their autocratic sponsors alone, but only through the military defeat and subsequent humiliation of their cause. So let us cease the hysterics, make the needed sacrifices, and allow our military the resources, money, and support with which it most surely will destroy the guilty and give hope at last to the innocent.

Mr Hanson's summation notwithstanding, the question about that calculus will not go away.

REACTIONARY CROLYISM. Professor Krugman:

I'm a conservative. I want to preserve these programs we have and that unfortunately requires more revenue than we're collecting after the Bush tax cuts.

(From a debate with Robert Barro, via Marginal Revolution.)

GAMING THE ADMISSIONS SYSTEM. The latest escalation in the positional arms race called "My kid got into Harvard and your didn't" is college admissions camp. (At about $2500-$3000 for a week or two of preparation, is it a better investment than geting your grades up at a community college or state university extension for a year or two and transferring as a sophomore or junior?)

Joanne Jacobs, who headlines the story "Camp Compulsive," notes

It's true that grade inflation has made it hard to tell one A student from another, but the number of students with great SATs isn't rising dramatically. The problem is that increasing numbers of students are applying to the same list of elite colleges, which have limited spaces.

Where, once they arrive, they will be cossetted and counselled to deal with their perfectionism. Tyler at Marginal Revolution has picked up Joanne Jacobs's Fox News column, which highlights this and other stories.

Back at her site, Ms. Jacobs concludes,

We didn't think we could game the admissions system, so agonized a lot less about it. In particular, we thought our SAT scores couldn't be improved by studying or repeating the test. There were no essay-polishing services, much less marketers promising to craft our applications. We just applied, made sure to include a safety school and left it to the fates. It's a sign of how things have changed that my safety school was Middlebury, which is now very selective.

Ultimately, the gaming of the admission system is unproductive. Washington Post college columnist Jay Mathews reported, long ago on the nonexistent difference in lifetime achievements of similarly capable graduates of the name colleges and the mid-majors. If anything, the pampering of students admitted to Jacuzzi U. puts them at a disadvantage relative to those less favored.

RUNNING EXTRA. The investments the Jacuzzi Universities are making on spas and stress-free zones might prove to be unproductive, anyway. Why? Beanbags. There is a popular beanbag game that looks like the same idea as horseshoes, and some of the local students have made their game sets out of what looks like old plywood rearranged with a saber saw. It's the kind of do-it-yourself entertainment these students might have been deprived of at the age of eight, when they had only organized school and organized practices and lessons to fill their days.

WHAT DID BASHAR ASSAD KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? Cold Spring Shops generally leaves the war commentary to others. News Max and the BBC have been reporting Jordanian claims to have disrupted an al Qaeda plot to attack either U.S. or Jordanian government interests with chemical weapons. Power Line notes,

The obvious question is whether the chemical weapons originated in Iraq and, as many suspect, were shipped to Syria before the war began. If so, the next question is whether Saddam (or perhaps his henchmen) intended from the beginning to get the weapons into al Qaeda's hands.

Command Post is also following the story.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Both Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil commend Kay Hymowitz on the evolution of generational attitudes. She concludes,

With their genius for problem solving and compromise, pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise.

Perhaps, but there is still work to be done.

Think about how much more child-centered Americans have become compared with 15 or 20 years ago—the era of the latchkey kid, when the Nickelodeon children’s network touted itself as a “parent-free zone,” and Home Alone was the signature kids’ movie. But by the nineties, soccer moms had the keys to the house and the minivan, which was mounting up thousands of miles on trips to soccer matches, violin lessons, and swim meets. Studies showed a big drop in children’s unstructured time. Even older kids came under their parents’ hothouse scrutiny: “helicopter parents,” in Neil Howe and William Strauss’s term, hover over their children even after they leave for college, talking on the phone every day, visiting frequently, and helping them with their papers via e-mail.

Erm, is that why the big-name colleges are attempting to transform themselves into stress-free zones (see also this.)

The article provides one useful paragraph cautioning people in the interpretation of numbers.

And in fact, the incredible shrinking married-couple-with-children statistic cited by [author Laura] Kipnis is a statistical mirage, an artifact of two demographic trends, unconnected with American attitudes toward knot tying. First, young people are marrying later; the average age is 25 for women, 27 for men, up from 20 and 23 three decades ago. That means there are a lot more young singles out there than there were in 1970. Further swelling the ranks of these un–Ozzies and Harriets is the vastly increased number of empty nesters, retirees, and widows, beneficiaries of major health-care improvements over the past decades. There are 34 million Americans over 65, and it’s a safe bet that only those few living with their adult kids would be counted as part of a married-couple household with children. What it comes down to is that a smaller proportion of married couples with children is no more evidence of the decline of the family than more cars on the road is evidence of a decline in trucks.

The times, they are a-changing, and some of the change reflects different experiences of different birth cohorts. But there are still windmills to tilt against. More later.