JUST RING UP THE SALE. Some time ago, I invoked Mike Royko's singlehanded victory over Radio Shack's practice of asking customers for contact information. (The column, from the late 1980s or early 1990s, wasn't archived then and it isn't archived now.) Perhaps what the company did was wait Mr Royko out. He's dead, and the last time I made a purchase at Radio Shack, the clerk asked me for an e-mail address. (You don't need to know that.) And Farm and Fleet, not, as far as I know, a business serving tourists, has its clerks asking customers for zip codes. (You don't need to know that.)

I have neither Mr Royko's writing style nor his readership, but in a small way I want to continue his tradition of businesses engaging in practices not directly related to serving consumers.

PERHAPS THEY CAN'T EXPLAIN IT EITHER. Jack Bauer gets a Presidential pardon, sort of, if he is able to hide from the GRU and from rogue elements in the U.S. government or whoever those shadowy ruling class types that suborned his father and his brother and had compromising evidence on President Logan. Rick Moran has a retrospective on the series.

PRODUCTIVITY FOLLIES. A senior professor writes an Inside Higher Ed column in which he sees the injustice in higher education's increased reliance on cheap and contingent labor, particularly for the core courses.

As everyone in academe now knows, the professoriate has experienced a radical transformation over the past few decades. These enormous changes have occurred so gradually, however, that they are only now beginning to receive attention. The general public has remained largely unaware of the staffing crisis in higher education. As contingent colleagues around the country came to outnumber the tenured faculty and as they were assigned an ever larger share of the curriculum, they became an inescapable fact of academic departmental life.

An elaboration of great length turns into a call for action. What's missing in his call is an analysis of the competitive conditions in the academic market.

It is time that more tenured faculty woke up to the fact that their entire professional existence, replete with their comfortable incomes, their fascinating research, their coveted sabbaticals, their agreeable teaching loads of less labor-intensive and more satisfying courses — all this is made possible by the indispensable efforts of a million ad-cons doing so much more for so much less. Equitable compensation, health and retirement benefits, opportunities for advancement and professional development: all these should be available for everyone in higher education and are long overdue. Since teachers’ working conditions equal students’ learning conditions, it is a truly deplorable message we are sending our students! With more than 70 percent of our college teachers lacking any kind of job security, academic freedom has largely disappeared from our colleges, drastically lowering the overall educational quality.

What lowers overall educational quality is the failure of the institutions perceived as second- or third-tier to systematically work on improving their competitive positions. Administrators and far too many faculty members accept that their institution will never be as well regarded as Harvard or Wisconsin or what have you and simply surrender, never mind that the willingness of those highly regarded institutions to reject lots of students in order to appear more selective creates a ready pool of students who deserve to be challenged by their second-choice, or their safety, universities. There's a Crooked Timber post (via 11-D, also worth a look) that raises the possibility the status quo in higher education leaves all sorts of inefficiencies.

[T]here is more market pressure these days than there used to be on institutions which are non-elite and non-selective: they increasingly have to compete with providers (like the University of Phoenix) which have low costs, high quality control, and are concerned with meeting the demands of workers who have particular learning needs (and, as they don’t point out, while this might have good effects on the quality of teaching it might have not so good effects on exactly what gets taught). But selective, elite institutions (especially the 140 or so colleges and Universities that are most selective) are really selling a credential, not the learning that comes along with it.

The lost opportunity: the competition for the non-elite and non-selective ought not be with Phoenix and the like, the competition ought to be to provide a respectable alternative to the allegedly selective schools, with better working conditions for faculty to boot.

KITBASHING ON A LARGE SCALE. The past several months of Railway have featured a protracted investigation into whether the last steam locomotive built by British Railways, 9F Decapod 92220 Evening Star, actually is using the chassis of 92203 (known now as Black Prince and resident on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway, excellent reuse of some sacred initials). The owner of 92203 has informed the magazine that some components of his locomotive are stamped 92220. A sidebar at page 37 of the April 27 issue includes a claim that the running gear under alleged steam speed champion Mallard is also a substitution, as Mallard was discovered upon retirement to have a frame crack.

I learned that the British version of the Vermont grandfather's axe is "Irishmen's axe" (original, but on its second head and third handle). Part swapping among steam locomotives is common in practice (and the British will be hard pressed to get some of their steam restorations up and running without it.) But preservationists -- the article involves listed buildings -- have standards that, if taken seriously, would render any preserved steam locomotive as a replica.

A guiding concept of cultural resource management throughout the Western world is that the retention of original or early material is essential to the integrity and significance of the resource. "Is this Grandfather's axe?". We may ask the question? Not if it has had two new blades and three new handles since his lifetime! It may look like Grandfather's axe. It may work like Grandfather's axe. It may be an exact replication of Grandfathers axe. But it is not the genuine article.

Strictly speaking, any steam locomotive that has had its tires and flues renewed would not be the genuine article by that standard. By the same token, any interurban or streetcar that has been reupholstered or had its motors rewound would not be the genuine article.

THE CASE FOR SOCIAL DISTANCE. An Inside Higher Ed column on college profanity policies, or not, gets to the heart of the matter.

"If you stand in a financial aid office and scream and scream and scream, that's not a First Amendment issue, that disrupts the office," said W. Scott Lewis, associate general counsel of Saint Mary's College, in Indiana, and president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration.

Lewis gives seminars for many colleges through the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, and he said that a consistently popular topic is how to train faculty members to manage their classrooms in ways that enable them to be respected by students. "We don't train faculty members on that," he said. "They are trained to be great physicists and political scientists, not on how to manage a
classroom."

Several societal trends appear to be related to an increase in student rudeness, Lewis said. Many students these days "have a sense of entitlement, backed at times by their parents," many more have mental health issues, and many feel significant stress over the economy. Adding to these factors, he said, many professors say that they don't feel they are even "allowed" to challenge rude behavior.

While Lewis doesn't want them to challenge the behavior through the student disciplinary system, he said that faculty members can promote civility. He said that they should talk about expectations on the first day of class and in the syllabus, making expectations clear. "You need to talk about rights and responsibilities," he said.

Some professors go too far, Lewis said, in removing the distance between themselves and their students, and this is part of the problem. "You need to establish your role as a professor, and that means not having students use your first name, but calling you Professor or Dr.," he said.

Similarly, attire sends a message, he said. "If you show up for class in cargo shorts and a ratty polo shirt, you may feel that you are being one of the students. Well, you may accomplish that and become a peer" who doesn't get the same respect as a professor, he said. (Lewis, who still teaches, said that in front of a class, "I would be, at worst, in business casual.")

Not everyone agrees, although the bull session is civil enough.

TRACTOR WATCH. Recent grandfather Brett Favre promises the Southern Mississippi baseball team that he will return to the Vikings if the team makes the College World Series.

RULE BRITANNIA. Britain's Freightliner now has some C37ACWWs from General Electric (that's the American locution, the manufacturer's label is PH37ACmi -- why they couldn't just use U37C escapes me) shoehorned into the British loading gauge. The diesels do have GE's distinctive radiator wings, and these look more like Flying Nuns than some of the U-boats that first earned that nickname. Or perhaps somebody will recall the veranda appellation from an earlier generation of General Electric super-freight locomotives.

Uncredited Freightliner photo, December 2009.

Freightliner reported that the first run featured 70001 pulling "30 wagons" with 60 containers from the Port of Felixstowe. It's possible that some of those Maersk containers have ripped across Illinois at 70 mph on a 100 platform rake topped and tailed by multiple C44ACWs (again, why not call them U44Cs?)

The numbering of these diesels is intriguing. According to Railway, a first digit of 7 or 8 indicates an electric locomotive, and, indeed, there was a class of electric locomotives (O. V. S. Bulleid experimentals, apparently) that went to scrap before any of them could be painted into Class 70. The U-boats were originally to be Class 68. There was, if you will, an earlier British Seventy series, the 7P Britannia Pacifics.

The nomenclature might be moot in any event, as Railway also reports that some European Union directive will require standard 11 digit numbers for all railroad rolling stock, where the first six digits indicate type of stock and type of service. Feh. BM 75026 XM or RPRX 208 RS, let alone MILW 105 F7 or UP 844 FEF are exactly as transparent and don't involve more number combinations than those required to keep track of all the stars that are known to Jodrell Bank. But perhaps the European Union will go the way of the euro, or perhaps the European Union will find a designated operator. Union Pacific comes to mind: they've resurrected CMO for a series of grain hoppers and they could resurrect LBSC for bulk cement containers.

WHAT WE'VE LOST. A Classic Trains article featuring the work of longtime railroad publicist Wallace W. Abbey includes a sidebar on photographic technique. When he won the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society photography award in 2003, his statement included this.

Ask Wally about his cameras and he'll neglect to mention the early box and primitive 35-millimeter types. Believing as he does that the photographer makes the picture, not the camera, he's likely to recall his favorite tools as the Automatic Genuflex and the Iambic Pentameter.

Author John Gruber comments, "Those educated before the 1960s will recognize the wit that devised these puns."

NO LONGER ENDANGERED. The Erie Island snake is no longer endangered, thanks in part to the efforts of Kristin Stanford, who had a segment on Dirty Jobs, and her advisor Rich King.

They are among the recipients of this year's Recovery Champion awards from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The snakes have an appetite for round gobies, one of the less welcome transients in the lakes. Now if they had an appetite for Asian carp fingerlings and could be introduced to the I&M canal...

CROOKED NUMBERS. I was doing yard work and kept hearing loudspeaker announcements from the baseball field. It was a rematch of last week's UWM game, with the same result, only more lopsided and without a roof to retract.

BADGERBALL IN THE CONVOCATION CENTER? Kathi Bennett, onetime Indiana head coach and until recently a Wisconsin assistant, will take over for Carol Owens.

HAS IT REALLY BEEN THIRTY YEARS?

18 May 1980. Off to Madison to pick up a large diploma folder.

To find the material that earned the diploma that goes in the folder, see The Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Regional Science.

A MACROECONOMICS PRIMER. Paul Krugman writes an instructive column to the effect that These United States are not Greece.

Both nations have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P. Markets, however, treat them very differently: The interest rate on Greek government bonds is more than twice the rate on U.S. bonds, because investors see a high risk that Greece will eventually default on its debt, while seeing virtually no risk that America will do the same. Why?

One answer is that we have a much lower level of debt – the amount we already owe, as opposed to new borrowing – relative to G.D.P. True, our debt should have been even lower. We’d be better positioned to deal with the current emergency if so much money hadn’t been squandered on tax cuts for the rich and an unfunded war. But we still entered the crisis in much better shape than the Greeks.

Some day, someone will provide a convincing investigation of the relationship between tax rate cuts and government revenues. The Bush Administration, however, did miss an opportunity to sell war bonds after September 11.

Even more important, however, is the fact that we have a clear path to economic recovery, while Greece doesn’t.

The U.S. economy has been growing since last summer, thanks to fiscal stimulus and expansionary policies by the Federal Reserve. I wish that growth were faster; still, it’s finally producing job gains – and it’s also showing up in revenues. Right now we’re on track to match Congressional Budget Office projections of a substantial rise in tax receipts. Put those projections together with the Obama administration’s policies, and they imply a sharp fall in the budget deficit over the next few years.

That's a testable hypothesis. No doubt some of Professor Krugman's political adversaries will call him out should that sharp fall not materialize. Materialize or not, some good macroeconomics dissertations should be forthcoming around 2015, if there are any universities left.

Greece, on the other hand, is caught in a trap. During the good years, when capital was flooding in, Greek costs and prices got far out of line with the rest of Europe. If Greece still had its own currency, it could restore competitiveness through devaluation. But since it doesn’t, and since leaving the euro is still considered unthinkable, Greece faces years of grinding deflation and low or zero economic growth. So the only way to reduce deficits is through savage budget cuts, and investors are skeptical about whether those cuts will actually happen.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Britain – which is in worse fiscal shape than we are, but which, unlike Greece, hasn’t adopted the euro – remains able to borrow at fairly low interest rates. Having your own currency, it seems, makes a big difference.

That argument, by the way, is the basis for a Jane Jacobs proposal to have regional currencies rather than one U.S. dollar. Michigan or Illinois or California can't devalue relative to Texas or North Dakota under the customs and currency union called The United States. The transactions costs inherent in exchange rates, however, must be weighed against the rigidities of a common currency union.

Professor Krugman concludes with some policy proposals that, while internally consistent, leave aside the possibility of further marketization of health and retirement accounts as an alternative to the economies claimed by advocates of government-managed reform.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. A collection of Advanced Placement bloopers has been nailed to Newmark's Door. "Transcendentalists wanted to control the intercontinental railroad industry." Chortle.

Meanwhile, the Highland Park school board does not have the Arizona basketball tournament controversy on tonight's agenda, because converting the athletic fields from grass to artificial turf is more urgent than, oh, the message sent when spending resources on artificial turf or trips to holiday basketball tournaments is more important than preparing advanced placement students for advanced placement examinations.

Disclosure: the school of origin of the advanced placement bloopers is confidential.

UNION PATHETIC. The Superintendent has not been impressed with Union Pacific's hostility to passenger trains, repeatedly calling readers' attention to the existence of a railroad currently capable of handling 80 mph intermodal trains and 110 mph passenger trains (with a few revisions in the rules, which is cheaper than revising the signalling) west from Chicago toward Cedar Rapids and Omaha. Now comes a story out of California (via Destination: Freedom) in which Union Pacific objects to sharing its right of way with California's bullet trains.

In the April 23 letter, officials of Omaha-based Union Pacific reportedly said the high-speed passenger trains would interfere with their freight business and could lead to unsafe conditions. They also said they would resist efforts by the state to obtain the land through power of eminent domain.

Union Pacific's problem might be that there will be a track running along its right of way that its freight trains can't use. The carrier has been cooperative with Passenger Rail authorities that are willing to build additional tracks for them, and sometimes those additional tracks lead to improved on-time performance for passenger trains. But it took some wrangling between Union Pacific and Metra until the carrier stopped treating the third main to Elburn as additional capacity to hold freight trains out of the yard. Now imagine a track or two dedicated to fast passenger trains with no connecting crossovers. The anxiety level is already rising in Omaha.

STONEWALL IT, PLEAD COVER UP, [inaudible]. President Clinton Taylor is regretting allowing former President Nixon Logan the opportunity to rebuild his image by brokering a peace treaty Suvorov's biggest debacle. She's managed to violate the Constitutional rights of a Fox News reporter (tonight's Democratic wishful thinking) in order to get her hands on what she hopes is the only record of GRU complicity in sabotaging the peace process (as if a peace process isn't per se self-sabotaging). With a five-star hotel turned into a killing field for Soviet agents, a traffic jam in the Fourth Avenue tunnel that's backed up to Jackson Heights with a rumble that has broken out in dead and wounded Secret Service agents, and the Fox newsroom occupied by jackbooted government thugs just before Sean Hannity's radio show is about to start, good luck with that!

DISCOURAGING JOB-HOPPING. New University of Illinois president Michael Hogan has a Termination by Employee clause in his contract.

Hogan, the son of a meatpacker and the first in his family to graduate from college, will take over July 1 at a salary of $620,000. Hogan is expected to sign a 5-year contract pending approval by trustees next week. After five years, he will be eligible for $225,000 in retention pay.

This bonus differs from the provision in Northern Illinois football coach Jerry Kill's contract, in which the payment he receives upon voluntary separation (whether reflecting a better offer or a parting of the ways) diminishes with time.

There has to be a research project in here someplace.

COLLEGE PREPARATION. The dean at Anonymous Community seeks advice on teaching financial literacy to collegians. His request is of more than academic interest as we, too, are under some kind of unfunded state mandate to assess or develop financial literacy in our students. (The unfunded mandate reference is a high university official's characterization.) The time to begin equipping youngsters to handle money is before they start playing with money for keeps, as in when they whelp kids or get into the workforce or take out student loans. Financial Fitness for Life proposes to get the youngsters started in kindergarten.

Now that today's public service announcement is posted, on to matters of economic substance in the dean's message.

I'm consistently struck at the disconnect between "what's supposed to be true" and "the real world."

For example, if you use the 'retirement planners' online, you'll routinely see statements like "assuming an 8 percent return..." Over the past ten years, the average return on the IRA I opened in 1998 has been...wait for it...negative. Not just after inflation, either; literally (or 'nominally') negative. One could argue that twelve years is a small sample, but it's a significant fraction of the average adult's working life, and I would have been better off putting the money in a coffee can. So telling young people that stocks always pay off over the long term just seems very...twentieth century. Assuming an 8 percent annual return, I'd have at least twice as much as I actually have. That must be a lovely world.

Why would somebody use an online retirement planning site? But the underlying analysis is not unsound: that 8 percent annual return even works for people who entered the work force just before the Great Depression and stayed in the work force and in the market for ... wait for it ... thirty years. The harder lessons to learn are those involving balancing risk and impatience. An investor, for example, can take profits out of stocks near a secular high, convert the cash into less risky assets, and preserve capital relative to the stock market as it corrects, to reinvest near a secular low. But nobody knows how to recognize highs or lows. And identifying reliable companies to invest in is work.

I grew up hearing that renting was throwing your money away. That position was sustainable until about 2003.

What rendered that position unsustainable was the foolishness of lenders offering interest-only mortgages they expected to back out of house price appreciation, and borrowers expecting to refinance into a 15 year fixed once the house appreciated enough.

Again, that takes work. And the financial pros appreciate the point. I recently helped judge the finals of the Illinois Personal Finance Challenge, which involved team competitions and a quiz bowl, all hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. One guest speaker at lunch was a young man from Goldman Sachs who got his start in investing in high school. I had a chance to talk with him briefly, and he was gracious when I noted one of my objectives was to equip high schoolers to ask difficult questions about some of his company's more notorious financial products.

I've heard and read that you should "pay yourself first" and set aside, say, ten percent of income in savings. But what does that actually mean? Is that ten percent after the retirement deduction? (If so, we're really talking twenty percent.) And when you're just starting out and making next to nothing, just how realistic is that? Do you know what young men are charged for car insurance?

Some time ago, the dean scoffed at the idea of salting away the latte money each day, as it isn't really a lot of money. It is, however, money salted away, and it might be salted away to help meet the car insurance premium, although putting it in a place that's harder to get at such as an individual retirement account is wiser. And when you're just starting out and making next to nothing, should you be buying the state's lottery tickets? Perhaps I should not rest until state lottery outlets are not disproportionately in poor neighborhoods (at one time, something like half of Michigan's lottery terminals were in Detroit.)

PERKS. Metra executive director Phil Pagano cashed out vacation days to advance himself nearly half a million dollars, for reasons that may never come to light. Metra's procedures for responding to suicide by train were on his body. Mr Pagano chose to walk in front of a McHenry branch train. There are three round trips weekdays on this branch; perhaps he was making a statement about Metra's procedures, which I have discovered delay passengers for hours, by choosing to delay relatively few passengers. Or perhaps there are still trains on the McHenry branch (the truncated end of the Williams Bay line) because they call closest to the executive director's mansion. That's not unknown in railroading: the Flying Yankee streamliner ran as the Cheshire to Bellows Falls and White River Junction in part to get Boston and Maine president Edward S. French to his Vermont home at weekends.

THIS FASCINATING SPORTS BUSINESS. Nicholls State's administration spent a lot of money channeling their inner Trotsky purging their inner Rebel redesigning their logo. A mascot is redesigned, a point is made. For all the good it did their sports program. University Diaries reports that Nicholls finished last (.pdf) in the country in men's basketball attendance. The sports editor at the Daily Comet (the mascot is a colonel, what's up with the comet) uses the news as an opportunity to chastise his classmates for their apathy.

One of the biggest joys of being a college student is to support your
university’s athletic teams.

Nicholls employees should also experience that joy by supporting the student-athletes they teach. If a student-athlete does well in your class, return the favor by helping cheer them onto victory in football, volleyball, basketball or whatever sport they play.

It seems students, faculty, staff, alumni and sports fans around the area would rather do anything put support the student-athletes at Nicholls.

I'm well familiar with columns of this sort. Despite the occasional BCS run and a series of bowl appearances and the odd bid to the basketball tournament, seats at Northern Illinois games are easy to come by right up to game time, and Northern Star columnists have essayed similar guilt trips on students.

University Diaries, however, proposes that universities run their athletic business like ... a business.

Do you know how often UD has read people making the argument that coaches should be paid the way they’re paid because after all, and it’s really too bad because after all we’re a university and all, but after all you’re just not gonna get large numbers of people to show up for a chemistry lecture, are you?… Seems only fair to reverse the argument. If you’re not going to get large numbers of people to show up for your games, maybe you should consider changing the funding flow.

Sometimes, evidence of the bubble deflating comes from obscure places. The payment argument is incomplete, as star chemistry professors can supplement their income by writing textbooks or consulting or working on grants, but the value-of-marginal-product argument is spot on.