FIREWORKS. If the offense scores the first time it snaps the ball, doesn't that mean the defense has more work to do? Never mind that, there's another win for the Northern Huskies, this time by 59-38 over Western Michigan. At halftime, the score was 42-17; reserves saw a lot of action in the second half. To the North, Wisconsin's Badgers avoided the letdown against Northwestern, prevailing 24-12.

A QUOTE FOR THE CENTURY.

Sources of individual or social decay are sometimes most dangerous, when they are associated with great achievements, and rich benefits.

That's Alfred Marshall, in Industry and Trade (which is still in print). A book review I am working on made reference to this work, and as several other related books also made reference to it, I took it with me on a quick Hiawatha ride (one can never take too many train rides) and started reading through it. It is astonishing how many things haven't changed in the 80 years since this book was written, and there will be more observations on it to follow.

The train? Ten minutes early northbound, close to time southbound despite an unexplained stop near Pleasant Prairie, and the Milwaukee airport station is going to be a fairly substantial structure set well back from the tracks in the contemporary fashion.

MARGINALIZING THE DISSENTING VOICES? The Illinois League of Women Voters will present a debate between Senatorial candidates Barack Obama and Alan Keyes, to air on WLS-TV, Chicago's channel 7 and on several other television and radio stations. Libertarian candidate Jerry Kohn, a member of the Illinois Association of School Economics Teachers, was expecting to participate earlier this week, but he has since circulated an email (I received it by virtue of my membership in the Association) noting that he has been disinvited. The fine print in the League's debate announcement (also in the current Google cached version) suggests that he, and Green Party candidate Albert Franzen, did not qualify.

Representatives of all of the campaigns met with the League and ABC 7 in September to discuss the date, format, and participation guidelines for the debate. At that time, the candidates' representatives agreed, in writing, to the League's Candidate Participation Policy. This policy included a requirement of demonstrated voter interest "as evidenced by receipt to ten percent (10%) of support in one or more statewide nonpartisan public opinion polls conducted not more than thirty days prior to the election (October 3, 2004) and at least five days prior to the debate." Mr. Keyes and Mr. Obama have met the requirements set out by the policy and will participate in the Thursday debate.

Mr Kohn is claiming that Ambassador Keyes favored his and Mr Franzen's participation. As Drudge would write, Developing ....

A GREAT AFTERNOON FOR A WALK AROUND CAMPUS. A colleague who is relatively new to the university got a good look at the west campus. I don't have one of those fancy digital cameras, but University Media Services have kindly provided the images.

We didn't walk quite this far west.

The leaves are about at this stage of turning.

Sorry, we don't offer degrees in wizardry.

PREPARING FOR YOUR ECONOMICS EXAM? Everything you need to know to understand what's going on, on one poster.

CALLING FOR MORE ECONOMIC LITERACY. Russell at Cafe Hayek is unimpressed with a recent Washington Post article purporting to explain why there are "only" two domestic manufacturers of flu vaccines. One gets the sense that the article is a complete waste of time:

We're now a little over halfway through the article and we have four reasons for why so many producers have exited the market. But all of these reasons were there five years ago when there were four producers and I'd guess that most or all of them were there 30 years ago when there were over a dozen producers. None of the reasons given have anything to do with anything that's changed recently that has made vaccine production increasingly less attractive.

And his conclusion is depressing.

The bottom line: the vaccine business is less attractive than it used to be. If we want to make it more attractive, either prices have to rise or regulations have to relax. My guess is we're going to end up with more government involvement not less.

A market-based economy is hard to sustain unless people understand how it works.

Kevin at Truck and Barter has been looking at Canadian drug production, and Canadian purchases from U.S. manufacturers at reduced prices, which U.S. patients are now attempting to exploit.

Why politicians think a country of 31 million people that has price controls on pharmaceuticals has enough excess drugs just sitting around that the US can start shopping like Paris Hilton on a bender is beyond me. I'd consider this a smart move on the part of these pharmacies. On the other hand, of course, this just means that those pharmacies that will sell to the US are going to be able to demand higher prices. If enough places adopt the no sales policy (to swing once again the other direction), the prices for those drugs that are available may rise to near-US levels, eroding the benefit. (Does anyone know if the price controls in Canada apply to international sales? I couldn't find anything in a quick search.)

It occurs to me that we might be seeing a variant of the peak load pricing phenomenon (there is a wonderful article by Oliver Williamson that appeared in the American Economic Review in 1966, and it's still worth reading and understanding. Sorry, I didn't turn up an online presentation of the argument. If one exists, please advise.) U.S. drug consumers are paying a price that reflects the costs of expanding capacity, while Canada's health ministry is able to negotiate a price that covers only the incremental cost of the drugs, by playing one producer against another. But if sufficiently many U.S. consumers start buying drugs from Canada, that has the effect of shifting the peak.

There are several posts at Truck and Barter on vaccine shortages and drug prices. Head over and have a look.

PRESERVED AS IF IN AMBER. Now that I have brought up the queries of my colleague, perhaps this is a good time to address another one. Once again, debunking a popular myth takes a lot of work, much of it simply to demonstrate the untruths that have become commonplace. Then there's the little matter of false analogies. The question, first. We are offered an example of a government program that my correspondent views as a success.

THE SALK VACCINE: The Salk vaccine was developed to deal with the growing number of cases of Polio in the 1950s. Development of the vaccine, I believe, was majorly if not entirely supported by the federal government. Dissemination of the vaccine once developed involved public institutions * e.g., the schools * in a government coordinated/government funded program. The result? The specter of Polio disappeared from the experience of America's subsequent younger generations.

Where is the equivalent program today that would wipe out childhood hunger? Or, is there evidence to the contrary that "there is no need for such a program; the private sector will produce those same results without government interference" as conservatives claim?

Let's start with a few salient facts. First, the development of the Salk vaccine involved private philanthropies, most significantly the March of Dimes. There is a reason President Franklin Roosevelt's head is on the current dime and that the current fundraising campaign against birth defects (the survival of the organization being more important than the cause) starts on January 30 of each year. And although schools participated in the immunization of kids, both with Dr Salk's shots and Dr Sabin's later sugar cubes, many kids got their shots from their family pediatricians. But that's nitpicking over facts.

Second, let's look at that loose talk about "equivalent" [government?] programs. What you are seeing, dear readers, is an example of the false analogy I call the "going to the moon" argument. The argument runs something like this. The Apollo program spent about $24 billion in 1969 dollars to land two men on the moon and safely return them to earth. So ... pick any other problem that looks like it could be fixed if the national government threw, say, $24 billion at it, and assert, "If we can put a man on the moon, we certainly can achieve these results." Compelling, huh? Here's the rub: a moon shot is a straightforward optimal control program. There is so much mass to be accelerated to a known escape velocity, steered to the proper path, decelerated to a safe landing velocity on the Moon, accelerated to a lower escape velocity (the savvy reader will note the use of expendable boosters and orbital velocity achieved first, then a translunar or transterran injection, that gets rid of a lot of mass and burns off a lot of fuel) and then decelerated to a safe splashdown velocity. The polio vaccine problem had much in common with a moon shot, as one vaccine worked reasonably well (although not without some tragedies and false starts) against polio.

On the other hand, flu vaccines, which Dr Salk also worked on, must be tweaked every year to deal with the latest mutation of the most dangerous influenza virus, and there is a bit of guesswork involved in manufacturing sufficient vaccine to treat that strain. And there is some legal fallout from the development of the polio vaccine that influences the production and distribution of the influenza vaccine. Here are some excerpts from a William Tucker article that Craig Newmark recommended.

With vaccines, there will be allergic reactions and a tiny but predictable percentage of people will suffer some kind of permanent damage or even die. Because of liability without fault and the generosity of the tort system, the result is huge damage awards.

The first instance of this came in 1955 with polio vaccinations. Cutter Laboratories, the California company that now distributes Cutter's Insect Repellent, made an early batch of vaccines, some of which had live viruses in them. Almost all the children in Idaho were administered the vaccine and several dozen contracted polio. In 1957, the parents of Anne Gottsdanker, an 8-year-old girl whose legs had become paralyzed, sued Cutter, with famed personal injury lawyer Melvin Belli representing them.

The jury found Cutter's actions were not negligent--the orders had been rushed, standards had not been clear, and safety precautions were still rudimentary at the time. But, using the new doctrine of liability without fault, the jury held Cutter accountable anyway and awarded $147,300. "That decision made Ralph Nader possible," Belli later claimed.

"It was a turning point," says Dr. Offit, whose book The Cutter Incident will be published next year. "Because of the Cutter decision, vaccines became one of the first medical products to be eliminated by lawsuits."

That this would be the outcome wasn't immediately clear. Soon after the trial, the Yale Law Journal published an article arguing that insurance against adverse reactions was the solution. The public wouldn't buy policies because it would be too complicated and expensive, but vaccine makers could. Insurance would cover the cost of bad outcomes and the manufacturers would pass these costs on to their customers. Those few who were harmed by a vaccine would be covered by those who benefited. Everything would work out. Unfortunately, this thesis failed to anticipate how high damage awards would go.

WHEN AN UNUSUAL EPIDEMIC occurred at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1976, for example, the federal government decided to vaccinate the whole country against the new "swine flu." To the astonishment of Congress, the insurance companies refused to participate. Senator Ted Kennedy charged "cupidity" and "lack of social obligation." The Congressional Budget Office predicted that with 45 million Americans inoculated, there would be 4,500 injury claims and 90 damage awards, totaling $2 million. Congress decided to provide the insurance.

As Peter Huber recounts in his book Liability, the CBO's first estimate proved uncannily accurate. A total of 4,169 damage claims were filed. However, not 90 but more than 700 suits were successful and the total bill to Congress came to over $100 million, 50 times what the CBO had predicted. The insurance companies knew their business well.

Looks like in this second case the private sector assessed the risks better than Senator Kennedy did. Did the government-sponsored swine flu shots (I passed on that one, as I have on all the other ones since then, there's a theory of public finance story to tell in another post ...) crowd out an insurance effort. Or, did the immunization program produce inefficiently many immunizations? (The efficient immunization rate is less than 100% even in the case of shots without side effects.)

I put it to you: if a government sponsored immunization program is not an easy technocratic fix, by what leap of logic can you look for an "equivalent" program to address childhood poverty, where the root cause might be a teenager who couldn't keep her pants, on or a mother widowed because her husband died in a UN peacekeeping operation somewhere, or a father was deserted by a wife who decided to explore a different sexual identity, springing the Two Income Trap, or a host of other stories? It has less to do with some ideologized free market alternative than it does with the lack of an easy technocratic fix.

EDIFICE COMPLEXES. The editorial board at the Northern Star puts the cost shifting problem into perspective.

Among every college student’s essentials are books, pens and, of course, paper. Somehow, a building dedicated to graduates just doesn’t make the list.

Information Technology Services’ inconvenient new card-swiping system, designed to regulate the amount of paper used in the computer labs, would not be needed if NIU got its priorities straight.

If this university’s budget doesn’t have room to expand the funds it spends on paper, perhaps NIU administrators should be encouraging NIU alumni, such as Dennis Barsema, to make donations for paper - an education must - rather than $2.5 million toward an alumni center that students won’t step foot in until years down the line, when they are alumni.

Students pay about $10,000 a year to attend school here. Nowhere in the tuition bill does it state that the price of attending NIU does not include paper.

Their proposals become anticlimactic, although the students do have a point. The problem, however, is that there are no naming opportunities for paper bins. Buildings and rooms are another matter.

AND ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

(Hat tip: Shot in the Dark. The title Mitch gave to the .jpg is priceless itself.)

GOING LIKE A TRAIN AFIRE? Passengers on the 20.06 Bristol TM - Weston had to evacuate a burning train near Blackwell Common (hat tip: Transport Blog.) Passengers also had to evacuate the 19.20 Chicago - Boston and New York near Gypsum, Ohio around 2 am when the dormitory car caught on fire.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? Instapundit has turned up an antitrust law professor's weblog.

HEARING THOSE JACKBOOTS. Edgy art student creates a painting that has the f-word in it. Somebody scratches out the word with crayon or charcoal, damaging the work beyond repair. Excessively earnest faculty member gets, well, excessively earnest.

NIU assistant art professor Karen Brown said the vandalism was a shameful act.

“It speaks to an incredibly regrettable immaturity on the ability of other people to tolerate ideas on which they do not agree,” Brown said. “That’s what the rise of fascism looks like, with the utter inability to tolerate the expressions of other people.”

Brown called Dudko “one of our very best students” and said her works were validly provocative.

“Her work is incredibly beautiful,” Brown said. “It’s the direct experience of her own life.”

I'll withhold judgement on the aesthetics. As long as the art faculty do not judge derivations for their elegance or their provocativeness, we have a proper division of labor. But let me remind readers that there is a non-discrimination and harassment policy at Northern Illinois University that specifically prohibits "discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, [my emphasis] physical or mental disability, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or any other factor unrelated to professional qualifications. Consistent with the importance of these objectives, the university maintains an accessible, diligent, and responsive complaint resolution system." Perhaps the miscreant who censored the painting was not aware of channels for official redress. But the painting appears to be actionable under the harassment provision of the policy, which reads prohibits

Harassment in the workplace that is based upon the employee's/student's protected characteristic and;

Creates or is intended to create an intimidating, hostile, offensive working environment;

Unreasonably interferes with work performance.

And edgy art is occasionally deliberately hostile or offensive.

On the other hand, perhaps the tramp of jackboots is in this harassment policy itself ...

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA HAS SPOKEN. OR NOT.

Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things. And I'm older, and my validation of what I do and what I believe and my experience is a little bit bigger — because I'm older, and I've had different experiences. And it's not a criticism of her. It's just, you know, what life is about.

But the Empress got caught out.

I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a school teacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children. As someone who has been both a full time mom and full time in workforce, I know we all have valuable experiences that shape who we are. I appreciate and honor Mrs. Bush's service to the country as First Lady, and am sincerely sorry I had not remembered her important work in the past.

Can you say "elitist liberal?" Next she'll say baking cookies is for the little people. (Hat tip: Charlie Sykes, who was on a roll this morning comparing the Kerry campaign with some second-guessing of embattled Packer coach and general manager Mike Sherman. Paraphrasing: "Mr Sherman should have known that Ahman Green had a tendency to fumble. It was a mistake to give him the ball on the Chicago one. I would have called a different play. And scheduling the Bears at Lambeau in September was the wrong game in the wrong place at the wrong time." A caller noted that any contender for Mr Sherman's job could vote for funding the renovation of "Lambert" field. Before he voted against it, of course.)

RENDER UNTO CAESAR. Skip at The Sports Economist finds parallels between medieval cathedral building and postmodern stadium building.

We are wealthier these days, and can afford some degree of state-sponsored extravagance when it comes to building stadiums. But I find the cathedral cost story compelling. And the principle remains the same centuries down the road -- the opportunity costs to resource mis-allocation are real, and potentially quite large.

But who is to be the Martin Luther to challenge the selling of indulgences -- or is it overpriced braaaats -- for the renovation of Lambert Lambeau Field

DEBUNKING THOSE CANARDS. Arnold at Econ Log invites readers to identify the myth about Social Security that poses "the largest barrier to a reasonable discussion of policy." That's a difficult question to answer, as I have two. The first is the paternalistic canard that individuals will mismanage or tap into their private accounts. Brad DeLong is among the recent purveyors of this canard.

There is a bigger, unmentioned reason to be against private accounts. Ten years down the road or so, there will be pressure on Congress to allow people to borrow against their private accounts, or to withdraw them to buy a house, or to use them to meet unexpected medical expenses. Congress will bow to that pressure--it's their money, after all. And in the end a lot of people will hit 70 having drained their Social Security private account dry. The rest of us will then have to decide whether to let them starve on the street, or tax ourselves a second time to give them Social Security benefits. As Dick Schmalensee says, "You have to ask yourself not just, 'Is this good policy?' but 'Will this still be good policy after Congress does its worst to it?'" The Medicare drug benefit and the corporate tax boondoggle are powerful evidence that the Bush administration holds no leashes to use to control what this Congress does to policy proposals, while lobbyists can make this Congress roll over and beg.

The problem, Professor DeLong, is that a lot of people are going to hit 70 only to discover that multiple Congresses have drained the so-called trust fund dry. (For years, the excess of Social Security tax revenues over current expenditures have masked the total operating deficit of the national government. And to invest those excess revenues in government bonds does nothing to change the story. There have to be sufficient general tax revenues coming in to redeem the bonds to provide the transfer payments to the retirees who put their trust in the house that Franklin built.) Tyler at Marginal Revolution has thought through the laws of conservation at work in changing the retirement plan.

But the canard that does more to poison debate than any other, now that I think about it, is the canard that Social Security and its later cousin Medicare have alleviated poverty among the old. A colleague sent an email around to several people asking them to comment on his defense of several of the New Deal - Great Society programs.

I've been harping on the need to be specific in political debates so we can test our assertions and learn from each other. As one might guess, I've been challenged (off-line) to put-up-or-shut-up; specifically, to specify some "liberal" government programs that have worked rather than simply react to others' perceived vagaries about the ineffectiveness of government. I will do so citing three programs: the G.I. Bill, development and dissemination of the Salk vaccine, and Medicare.

[I have cut out the material on the G.I. Bill and the polio vaccines to conserve space. These are different canards. The problem with a lot of policy analysis is the existence of things people believe to be true that after further review turn out not to be quite that true]

MEDICARE: Enacted in the 1960s, Medicare has been credited with changing the demographics of poverty in America. In the 1950s, the segment of the population most disproportionately poor were older Americans, much of their lack of resources being due to the impact of hospital and other medical expenses. Today that segment of the population is among the disproportionately richest, having been replaced in poverty by children.

Where is the equivalent program today that would ameliorate childhood poverty to a similar extent? Or, is there evidence to the contrary that "there is no need for such a program; the private sector will produce those same results without government interference" as conservatives claim?

Perhaps there is yet another answer: there is more childhood poverty today because Social Security and Medicare have reduced economic growth compared to what it would have been with a different tax regime. Martin Feldstein has worked on this topic for years. There is also a paper by Alan J. Auerbach, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff called "Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy" (requires J-STOR privileges) in the Winter 1994 Journal of Economic Perspectives that illustrates the extent to which the current crop of elders are stealing from future generations. (I am being a bit polemical but it's late and Blogger hasn't been working well, so I have to take out my wrath on something.

Here is a table of net tax rates by their reckoning, broken out by year of birth, from page 86 of the article.

1900.....21.5
1910.....24.7
1920.....26.3
1930.....28.1
1940.....29.3
1950.....30.6
1960.....32.1
1970.....33.2
1980.....33.8
1990.....33.6

Their estimates suggest future generations will face a net tax rate of 71.1 percent.

A companion article, by Robert Haveman, argues that identifying only taxes and transfers, without allocating the benefits of other government services (does that include liberating Iraq, or edgy National Endowment projects?) is incomplete accounting. True enough, but the evidence with respect to taxes and transfers alone suggests that the retirement safety net has been a massive transfer from future young people to current old people, and it has reduced economic growth compared to what it might have been.

RUNNING EXTRA. More, much more, around the Internet this morning. Start with Alex at Marginal Revolution, looking at the microeconomics of Social Security privatization. Consider this:

Social security privatization has a little-discussed benefit, done properly it is equivalent to a cut in marginal tax rates. A problem with the current system is that there is little relationship on the margin between taxes paid and benefits received.

That's what makes Social Security so popular with the current crop of elders. They've made out like bandits starting with that Vermont pensioner who received the first check. But I use the term "banditry" deliberately: they have stolen their grandchildrens' futures. There will eventually be no more future to steal. We can do better:

To see why this is important consider the difference between social security and an IRA. If a worker works an additional hour, earns $10 and puts $1 into the IRA he knows the $1 will produce a benefit 30 years down the line when he retires. The $1 contribution to the IRA is not a tax, it's consumption, a benefit of working extra hours. On the other hand if a worker earns $10 and $1 is taken and paid into social security there is no clear connection to retirement benefits. Social security payments, therefore, are taxes - and like other taxes they deter work effort and create a dead weight loss.

Privatizing social security, or in some other way creating personal accounts, would reestablish a link between marginal payments and marginal benefits and thus would be equivalent to a cut in tax rates.

Efficiency with prosperity. I like the idea. Victor at the Dead Parrot Society has an observation that is neither deceased nor defunct.

By funding the transition costs with debt today, you are working the time-consistency problem in reverse; you are acknowledging that future, implicit, debt obligations are real, today. That is a good thing that helps to work toward fiscal sanity rather than away from it. The time-consistency problem arises from fear that such an acknowledgment would *not* ever take place. Lastly, the spending record from FY1999-2002 was reasonably terrible, and it is no coincidence that budget surpluses were on the books for those years. PAYGO was born in a period of massive deficits; it was essentially eviscerated when those deficits went away (and explicitly dropped without substantial concern just when surpluses were falling into deficits). Now that large and explicit current deficits are being incurred again, there is considerable movement in the Congress to reinstate PAYGO or other similarly tight spending caps and arrangements.

To repeat, there is no more effective "lockbox" than a real trust fund account with a real name on it, not something that Congress might deal with or not. And there is time to work on the problem, particularly with generous immigration policies to expand the pool of workers, producing both more income and lowered per capita transition costs. Note this observation from Factcheck.org (via Charlie Sykes.)

There are a host of unanswered questions about Bush's intentions regarding Social Security, and the campaign so far hasn't shed much light on any of them. Bush has said he wouldn't increase payroll taxes, but maintaining benefits for current retirees while allowing some portion of current payroll taxes to go into privately owned accounts will cost at least $1 trillion and perhaps much more, depending on what estimates are used. Bush hasn't said where the money would come from.

Kerry, on the other hand, hasn't said how he would preserve the current system. Social Security's finances are unstable, and its trustees stated in the most recent annual report that by the year 2078 it will require a payroll tax increase of nearly 50% to maintain the currently scheduled rise in benefit levels. If taxes are not increased and no other changes are made, benefits would have to be cut 32% that year.

Perhaps there are other economies for the national government to consider (where is that Pig Book when you need it?) And now might be the time to contemplate that. Michael Barone has laid out the options in the upcoming election.

Bush can be justly criticized for not laying out his plans with much specificity. As on Medicare-prescription drugs, he seems content to raise the issue and let Congress -- especially House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas -- work out the details. Nor is it clear that any significant number of Democrats would support Bush on health savings accounts or Social Security. A re-elected George W. Bush may or may not be able to deliver on his promises.

But he has at least set out a vision of an "ownership society" that is a vivid contrast to what John Kerry proposes. Kerry, like most Democrats since the 1970s, aims to move this country some distance toward a Western European style welfare state. (His proposals would result in government spending an ever larger percentage of gross domestic product far into the future. Leave aside the question of whether his tax increase on the highest incomes would pay for this.)

The (larger) question is whether the United States wants to become a society with the problems of Western European welfare states -- zero job growth, stagnant economies, ever-increasing shares of GDP spent by government.

Industrial economies, with their huge firms and masses of low-skill workers, had a natural tendency toward centralization and government redistribution of income: hence the New Deal, the Great Society, the Western European welfare states. Post-industrial economies, with their burgeoning small firms and churning technological innovation, have a natural tendency toward decentralization and market distribution of resources.

The vision Kerry presented in the second and third debates, of further centralization and growing government, seems more in line with the industrial era. The vision Bush presented, more effectively than he has before, is more in line with our post-industrial times.

Perhaps so. But perhaps Daniel Henninger is correct: not everybody is ready to go there yet.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. That's how Charlie Sykes sees the upcoming election.

It is said that America's WWII generation is its "greatest generation." But my greatest fear is that it will become known as America's "last generation." Born in the bleakness of the Great Depression and hardened in the fire of WWII, they may be the last American generation that understands the meaning of duty, honor, and sacrifice. It is difficult to admit, but I know these terms are spoken with only hollow detachment by many (but not all) in my generation. Too many citizens today mistake "living in America" as "being an American." But America has always been more of an idea than a place. When you sign on, you do more than buy real estate. You accept a set of values and responsibilities. This November, my generation, which has been absent too long, must grasp that 100 years from now historians will look back at the election of 2004 and see it as the decisive election of our century. Depending on the outcome, they will describe it as the moment America joined the ranks of ordinary nations; or they will describe it as the moment the prodigal sons and daughters of the greatest generation accepted their burden as caretakers of the City on the Hill."

The weakening actually began with the next-elders to the Baby Boomers, who remembered the winning years of the Second World War and came of age at a time to capitalize on the prosperity. Now they are overrepresented in the ranks of the smug pacifists (hat tip: Atlantic Blog) as the first commenter to the post noted. And they vote in sufficient numbers to keep any administration from coming to grips with the chain-letter known as Social "Security."

On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is in the position of contemplating which of the two major presidential contenders is the lesser evil, while King at SCSU Scholars argues it is crucial for voters to recognize which contender is more alert to the greater evil.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. Northern Star columnist Kimberly Marion has some suggestions for store clerks.

What I want is a little respect. Do not place the blame on me because you are at a job you dislike.

What’s even worse is when there is a line of people waiting to order and the person behind the counter holds an entire conversation about what he or she did on the weekend. I am not asking you to fan me and put peeled grapes in my mouth, and I am also not asking you to you to cut my meat and dab the corners of my mouth. All I want is the order I politely asked for.

I do recognize that there are some customers who have the tendency to be rude, but there still must be some type of polite customer service. You could think about it in a different manner and ponder where you would be without the job you have. I know where you would be: You would be broke, just like me.

There's probably a whole 'nother column on the antics of what radio talker Clark Howard calls the "customer no-service representative" at the credit card companies. But not tonight. I scored a minor victory over the telephone companies. I think there is a previous post to follow up on, but the archives aren't working properly at the moment.

THERE IS STILL WORK TO BE DONE. Northern Illinois University President John Peters referred extensively to something called P-20 in his recent State of the University Address.

But we have gone further – so much further, in fact, that five of our deans were called to Boston last month to tell educators from across the country how NIU has managed to create a national model for school-university partnerships. Under the umbrella of our highly-successful P-20 (or preschool through graduate school) program, five different colleges are working together to improve teacher training, raise student achievement, and smooth transitions across the public education system at every level. Can you imagine? A program so important that five deans came together to work across college boundaries on a singularly-focused initiative? Don’t look now, but I think I just saw some of the plaster heads smiling!

Here are just a few examples of what P-20 has accomplished so far. They’ve planned, opened and are helping operate an innovative new elementary school where the fine arts and technology are integrated into every subject. They developed an interactive school report card to help parents and school administrators make sense of voluminous standardized testing data. This is a product, by the way, that’s now available to 4,000 public schools in Illinois! The P-20 team obtained a five million dollar federal grant to work with struggling schools in Rockford.

The list goes on and on. In all, NIU’s P-20 program has obtained more than $7.5 million worth of federal support in less than a year-and-a-half, and they have another $15 million in the development pipeline right now.

Nor are they laboring in obscurity on these programs. NIU’s P-20 initiative is making headlines across the state and around the nation – so much so that P-20 faculty and staff are fielding calls for help from school districts around the state, each and every day! In fact, on the strength of our growing reputation for P-20 leadership, I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in Washington – at the invitation of U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige – to discuss with a small group of university presidents how to improve math and science education in our public schools. It is no coincidence that, in looking around the country for leaders in teacher preparation and school-university partnerships, Secretary Paige would choose NIU to help advise him on national education policy.

That's interesting. The more salient statistic might be the absence of any preparation for university in the P-12.

Joanne Jacobs has the money quote.

Nearly half of high school students don't take the academic courses necessary to prepare for college.

That lack of preparation also takes its toll on our graduate assistants.

If more people are going to college than ever before....shouldn't we expect the marginal ones to be glue sniffers? But I think we know that we're not talking about a marginal one or two people here. At least that's the way it seems.

There are several links to main press coverage of the college scene at that post. Check it out.

ONE ABANDONED, ONE SUSPENDED. The Milwaukee - Muskegon catamaran ferry exceeded expectations for the summer, but will begin its winter break in November.

But even after shortening its first season from seven months to five, the Lake Express has still exceeded its 2004 ridership projections, spokesman Jeff Fleming said. He wouldn't release those projections or a precise passenger count but repeated earlier statements that the ferry has carried more than 100,000 passengers between Milwaukee and Muskegon, Mich.

Meanwhile, the Rochester-Toronto service (a public-private partnership gone wrong?) is done. Live from the Third Rail wonders if the boat will go to a route with passengers? The Superintendent has some transport gossip from the Milwaukee area to that effect...

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

We are worthy of survival only if our ideals and courage are passed to our children, if we bother have them. If all we pass on to the next generation is an estate of expectation, they will be privileged but undeserving. And civilization will perish under their deadweight.

That's Cicero at Winds of Change. Go read the whole thing.