RETHINKING REGRESSIVE TRANSFERS.

I have long subscribed to the view that there's an element of regressive transfer in state subsidies to universities, particularly the flagship campuses.  Perhaps, though, as stingy legislatures give admissions offices reasons to chase out-of-state students who pay full freight, the regressive element diminishes.  Two researchers, writing under the imprimatur of Brookings, offer confirmation.  The regressive element, ceteris paribus, ought emerge at the state flagship universities.

The basic argument [American Enterprise's Jason] Delisle and [New America's Kim] Dancy sought to test starts with the idea that states shell out larger appropriations to their top public universities than they do to their less competitive institutions that enroll higher levels of low-income students. Those universities in turn enroll more students from high-income families, and they spend more per student. At the same time, less selective schools draw a higher percentage of their students from lower-income backgrounds while receiving less in appropriations and spending less per student.

The value proposition the flagships have offered out-of-state students, a price break compared to the Ivies, appears to be working to the benefit of lower-income, in-state students.

High-income students are much more likely to attend out-of-state institutions, the report said. In doing so, many forgo government subsidies. Students from the wealthiest backgrounds actually averaged a negative subsidy, meaning on average they paid more tuition than universities spent on education services, even after factoring in scholarships and aid.

“What you have is essentially rich students opting to pay three times as much as the in-state rate,” Delisle said. “That frees up a bunch of resources for universities to keep tuition low for in-state students.”

Three times the in-state rate might still be less than the private university rate. The onus remains, however, on the flagship universities to offer comparable intellectual challenges in order for the employers to come to the job fairs and the graduate and professional schools, to the extend that such things matter any more, to accept their graduates.

EVOLUTIONARY STABLE BUNIONS.

Ana Swanson of Washington Post's Wonkblog meditates on the diffusion of high heels.  Perhaps the well-off neighborhoods totter around on stiletto heels, or perhaps the norm is the sensible.  Whatever the favored style is, when in Rome ...

People conformed much more when they moved to a place with higher socioeconomic status, as the chart [click the link] shows. It didn't matter whether heels were higher or lower in the higher-class destination — in fact, they were about evenly split on that measure.

Duh.  What possible evolutionary advantage is there in emulating the coarse?

This isn’t always true of course — sometimes street style filters up, as in the case of grunge or hip-hop fashions. But for the most part, people ascribe to the fashions of those above them on the socioeconomic ladder.

Yeah, and as the current crop of tweens sees the Thirteenth Generation hit old age, and the ink fades and the colors run and the muscle tone goes, well, that might take some of the cachet away from the body art and the bolt-holes everywhere.

WHAT COMES NEXT WILL BE WORSE.

Donald Trump is no Martin Luther.  But there is a corrupt system that deserves to be reformed.  Perhaps he's an imperfect herald of the reform, although his movement is enough for Daily Pundit.   Thus his version of the elite keep getting the basics wrong. "They don’t want to Make America Great Again, because they are terrified (rightly so) that in a Great America their iron gravy bowls would be greatly at risk, and their Donor Class owners equally fear a loosening of their iron grip on the Ruling Party."  Don't expect the Ruling Party to do anything other than those things on which their continued salaries depend.

Should he fail, next will come his smarter, scarier successor.  Here's where things currently stand.

Trump has gotten where he is by combining that base with a new movement of voters he stumbled upon, almost by accident. It is this cadre of disaffected conservatives who crave a candidate who says “screw you” to the establishment, both Democratic and Republican. The establishment has left them behind and they want no part of it. These voters also know Trump is an unqualified buffoon, but that doesn’t matter — he gives them a chance to say “screw you” and they need it. The global trends are leaving them behind, and we intellectuals don’t see that very well. Alone, neither group is large enough for victory, but together they might be. The outsider group was enough to get Trump the nomination, and now they have combined their voting power with a large fraction of the base. This has overcome the unease and defection of some establishment Republicans upset over Trump’s buffoonery.

But one must get beyond "screw you" to explaining why here is where you stand and you can do no other.

What if a more calculating candidate, now that this new body of voters has been discovered, knew better what to say and what not to say? What if there were a candidate who applied advanced political techniques, testing and polling new positions, rather than just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks and depending on an imagined invulnerability to get away with it?

If Clinton continues her lead and wins, then this candidate is coming in 2024 or even 2020. If the trend described above that works against the incumbent party continues, that candidate will have a head start against Clinton or her Democratic successor and a strong chance at victory.

Particularly because whether Mrs Clinton continues from Mr Obama or Mr Clinton, we will still be seeing the elites getting it wrong.

I repeat, because repeat I must.  "It is a corrupt system, and it stinketh, and there is discontent, perhaps, not yet with a reformer of the stature of Martin Luther before us."

WHY INCOME INEQUALITY PERSISTS.

In an economic expansion, even an anemic one, deficiencies in human capital surface.  Then employers who seek competent people must offer better pay packets or more attractive working conditions.  Perhaps the less capable can rejoin the labor force, but they will not do as well.

"Entry-level candidates cannot read or follow instructions. Most cannot do simple math problems. What is wrong with the educational system?" one respondent in chemical manufacturing said.

"The ability to find qualified employees is our largest problem at this time," a respondent in fabricated metal product manufacturing said. A respondent in textile product mills expressed a similar sentiment.

Theoretically speaking, the idea of labor quality becoming a pressing issue for employers suggests that economic concerns are shifting from weak demand to tight supply. And that — again, theoretically — points to higher wages for workers. The basic thinking here is that when employers have a hard time finding quality workers, they end up having to shell out more money to attract them.

Via Newmark's Door.

THE PASSENGER EXTRA IS USEFUL.

This past weekend featured a number of events in Chicago, including Lollapalooza, the Tall Ships at Navy Pier, a home stand by the Cubs, and good weather for hitting the beaches (fortunately, no big thunderstorms overwhelming the Deep Tunnel) or for bringing the kids to the museums (the aquarium continuing to be a particular favorite of the younger set.)

I let Amtrak do the driving, went to Milwaukee on the Saturday for German Fest.

It's just past noon in Milwaukee. So what, it's after five in Hamburg or Willenberg.  Probably should have stopped at two of these.  But Amtrak and Metra were doing the driving.

At weekends, the Metra pass is good Saturday and Sunday.  Metra also sold a four-day pass for Lollapalooza enthusiasts, of which there were plenty on the trains.  (The kids are alright, from what I saw.  More on that in a subsequent post.)

There were so many people heading in on Sunday that the 10.25 ex-Elburn was effectively full at College Avenue on the east side of Wheaton.  Somebody was paying attention, as Metra had made up a relief train to turn at the Lombard crossovers (new in the past five years) to pick up the Lombard, Glen Ellyn, and inward points passengers, and my fellow riders and I had an express ride from Lombard to Oak Park.

Here's the departure board at North Western Station at midday.  The Ravinia train is a regular Sunday extra during the summer.  Some late evening runs were offered, including 11.40 departures, all stops except Kedzie to La Fox on the Elburn line, and a paired train service, with the leader running express part way out the Northwest Line and the follower making all stops.  Sometimes traffic warrants a similar pairing on the Elburn line.  At Union Station, the Burlington line had an extra carded, first stop Downers Grove, with a scheduled departure time and the notification "will leave earlier if full."

It was eight car trains all day on the South Shore Line.  To conserve on collectors, the conductors loaded all South Bend passengers into the head three cars, which is all that will fit on the platform at South Bend.

But thanks to new Federal Railroad Administration regulations that require a walking inspection of the brakes after any add or cut of cars, the entire rake of eight cars ran through to South Bend.  Some rules are foolish.  We've known how to dock and un-dock space vehicles since the mid-1960s, and adding and cutting electric multiple unit cars has been the state of the art since around 1900.  Heck, that's what "multiple unit car" is all about, and the South Shore used to do adds westbound or drops eastbound at Michigan City and Gary, with one of the trains combining at Gary comprising a local from Michigan City becoming the head end of a limited from South Bend.  Without the walking inspection, that took about a minute.  Come off it, Federal Railroad Administration.

Back to Chicago in time for a leisurely supper and an earlier train back to Elburn.  The crowds as Lollapalooza closed down turned out to be YUUUUGE.

ANTICIPATING A REFORMATION?

Where is the secular Martin Luther?  It's interesting, just from a day looking at some of my usual sources, to see a theme of elite decay emerging.  Start with an observation from Matt Reed.  His column is notionally about the scholarship-funding potential of Stanford's endowment, but toward the end is an observation that generalizes.  "Stanford is beautiful, preposterously well-funded, and entirely separate from the realities that the community college people live. To the extent that elite policymakers hail from there and places like it, I can see why they keep getting the basics wrong." I want to take that observation in a different direction.  Dean Dad and I are in accord on the importance of the community colleges and the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors doing their job as well as the institutions that buy rankings in U.S. News, and on the irrelevance of the virtue-signallers at the ranked institutions to what goes on in the lives of most collegians.

But it is to the antics of the virtue-signallers that I will ultimately turn.  Those antics, dear reader, are evidence that our universities are being run by stupid people.

ARE HUMANS MORE FINICKY THAN TIGERS?

Effective tiger training is all about observing the things tigers like to do and providing inducements for them to do those things on your schedule.  At the time I noted that story, I added, "The highest form of teaching people, by contrast, is in equipping people with a larger set of activities they can do of their own volition, and withdrawing your inducements."  That is not, however, the direction education is heading.  There's more fretting about apathetic students.  (At least apathetic tigers can be given the incentive to sit on their haunches on their stools.)

In classrooms all over the country, the teacher cares more about her students’ grades, learning and futures than they do.

Teachers are expected to combat apathy by continually finding new and innovative ways to reach students – through multimedia lessons, group work, games, alternative assessments or whatever it takes. To ensure student engagement and skill acquisition, we must teach to the individual learning styles, interests and abilities of each of our students. If a student can’t learn the way we teach, we must teach the way he learns – times infinity.

To some extent, that is the same approach the competent tiger trainer use, observing the things the tigers wish to do and designing a training routine and an act around it.  But nobody expects a tiger to chart a course to Mars or find a cure for the common cold.  Some humans aspire to more, and the article suggests there are depressingly many students who aspire to very little.

The real danger is that this way of thinking has shifted the responsibility of learning, and of caring about learning, from the student to the teacher. Because it isn’t just administrators and parents who believe that it is a teacher’s job to make learning fun. Kids believe it, too. As a result we have a generation of students who think that if a lesson or an assignment or a class is not interesting, if it isn’t engaging and fun and inspiring, then it simply isn’t worth caring about. They are not obligated to care about it. It’s a teacher’s job to make all learning exciting. If the teacher hasn’t lived up to her responsibility, why should the child?

In a workshop I recently attended, teachers were told that kids are so attracted to video games because of the constant feedback – the progress, praise and prizes. We were encouraged to design our instruction more like a video game. How else can we expect to hold their attention?

That is a frightening mentality because it has created a generation of consumer learners. Many students don’t see education as a privilege. They see it as a product. And if they don’t like the salesperson, if they aren’t impressed with how it’s packaged, they aren’t buying. But our kids have to learn to be self-motivated because at some point in every person’s life, either at school or in a job or in a marriage, he or she will have to buck up and say, “This is hard. This is boring. I don’t want to do this. But I’m doing it anyway. And I’ll do my best.”

Apparently, working with disengaged humans is, at first, a lot like working with finicky tigers.  But the secret (no surprise, dear reader) is that instilling discipline and persistence, a little bit at a time, gets the job done, where the faddish methods and video game envy do not.

Unfortunately in a consumer-oriented educational system, words such as habit and discipline have all but gone by the wayside. We emphasize concepts like differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning and data-driven instruction over student responsibilities like organization, perseverance and hard work.

The good news (at least for kids) is that the best hope for developing any habit is to start small – especially when good habits need to replace bad ones.

The rest is a matter of technique.

LET'S JUST END THE CORPORATE WELFARE.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn talks some sense about letting 53 foot trailers go everywhere.

Efficiency is one of the core values of our economic system. We don’t care if we’re doing the right thing or not – or, more precisely, our economists assume we are – so long as we do it more and more efficiently. Hauling one big load of merchandise is far more efficient than hauling multiple, smaller loads. Thus whoever can configure their operation to take advantage of this efficiency should win, right?

I'm indulging my theoretical bent here, or perhaps being more Jesuit than the pope, but there are two concepts of efficiency in play here.  Hauling one big load of merchandise might appear to be productively efficient (the vulgar form of which is "doing more with less") albeit such a use of resources might not be allocatively efficient, which is the more restrictive condition that there be no further gains from trade to exploit.

RAILROAD PRESERVATION AT ITS BEST.

Last weekend, the Illinois Railway Museum showcased its diesel collection.  Here's one of the highlights.

Three E units and approximately 7200 hp are excessive power for a nine-car train (including a dynamometer car, sleeper-lounge, dining car, five coaches and a combine) and the trailing unit (Milwaukee 37A) is in better shape mechanically than cosmetically.  But the sound, and the acceleration!  The lead unit is from Burlington Northern's executive train stable, and the B unit might be returning to Wisconsin and Southern.

JUST BECAUSE IT'S NEW, THAT IT IS IMPROVED DOTH NOT FOLLOW.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds advocates a return to paper ballots for elections, rather than using information technologies to vote and count more rapidly.  Here's part of his argument.

Paper ballots may seem old-fashioned, but an emphasis on computers just for technology’s sake reminds me of stories about housewives in the 1950s who preferred canned vegetables to fresh ones because canned food seemed more modern. Just because a technology is newer doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better.

In the matter of ballots, perhaps optical scanning devices, as we use in DeKalb, can help with the counting once the polls close, and it should be possible to design stand-alone scanners that connect only to an electric outlet, not to the internet or anything else, and the party observers can jointly compile the tally in a few minutes of the evening.

We have the scanning devices because our earlier punch-card technology proved to be unreliable.  Those Florida hanging chads of 2000?  Secondhand Illinois voting stations.

As far as misplaced technophilia, let us recall that the TV dinner was not intended to be eaten whilst watching TV; rather because the partitioned tray looked to the inventor like a TV screen.  It also looked like a government issue serving tray for dishing up government issue food to the troops, who had any number of caustic things to say about the food so dished up.  Not such a good marketing strategy.  But the idea of eating dinner on a tray that looked like a screen whilst sitting in front of a screen caught on.  As did the idea of portion-controlled microwaveable food, never mind the gastric disaster that it has brought to the rails.

Let us recall that the idiots in faculty development have been all about the online university, never mind the deleterious effects of laptops and smart 'phones on learning.

Let us recall that it is easier to wire a railroad signalling system to clear one route at a time, rather than to override the signals.

Technological advances, desirable if applied correctly.

Technological advances, making it easier for GRU to get secrets, not so much.

ANTICIPATING A FOURTH TURNING.

In The Atlantic, Ron Fournier sees all h__l breaking loose, first at the scripted Democrat convention, then more generally in the body politic.  His essay is in the form of thirty theses, perhaps to be nailed to a state-house door someplace.  A sampling:

26. The American public has lost trust in virtually every social institution—schools, churches, businesses, charities, police, courts, and the media—because those entities have been slow to adapt to sweeping economic, demographic, and technological changes.

I'm not persuaded; if anything there has been too much talk about "it's the 21st century" and "disruption" and too much mindless following of fads. And yet, as we had it in the sixties, the times are out of joint.

27. People have witnessed disruption in the retail, entertainment, and financial industries—in virtually every institution except for government and politics. In an era of choice and technological efficiency, the American voter is given a binary choice and gridlocked government.

That's internally inconsistent: you can't have sclerotic business and entertainment and disrupted business and entertainment. But yes, the political class still clings to its process worship and its talking points.

28. Most Americans want something better than what the Democratic-Republican duopoly crams down their throats.

We've been hearing this for years. But Donald Trump has taken over the top of the Republican ticket (conservatives and the establishment stand strong elsewhere) whilst Our President sounded a lot more like Ronald Reagan than Bill Ayers last night (I do want to elaborate, perhaps another rainy day) and yet the Donk base is more resigned than receptive to Hillary.

29. They’re mad as hell and, as evidenced in Cleveland and Philadelphia, they’re just starting to realize how powerful they are. They don’t need to take it anymore.

Yes, but emergence is messy. Here's an additional thesis, nailed to Newmark's Door.

Refutable hypothesis: cut back Big Government--especially federal government--and trust will recover.

The getting there will not be part of the fun.

THIS TIME, WITHOUT ASSISTANCE FROM THE VOLGA GERMANS AND THE EAST PRUSSIANS.

Once I learned some of the details of my great-grandparents' wanderings from East Prussia by way of Volhynia to northern Wisconsin, I took to quipping (later augmented with wonky stuff) that agricultural failures in the old Soviet Union predated Stalin and collectivization and Khrushchev and virgin lands.  The Volga Germans, in fact, were prior invitees, brought in by Catherine the Great.

Now, notes W. R. Mead, all that matters are the right incentives.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union, which then included the ‘breadbasket’ of Ukraine, could never feed itself, and frequently had to import wheat from the West. Today, even without Ukraine, Russia has become the world’s leading wheat exporter.

Economics: sometimes the policy prescriptions sound simple, but to really foul things up takes a technocrat.

BALTIMORE IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO. BADLY, AT THAT.

Overzealous Baltimore state's attorney Marilyn Mosby fails to railroad any of the six police officers she charged with various crimes against a detainee.  But it's all the system's fault, she asserts, not her lack of professionalism.  It's too much even for the city's ward-heeler mayor, last seen shouting about hope and change at some Democrat gathering in Philadelphia.  "Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she supported Mosby but questioned whether she had gone too far in her criticisms of the criminal justice system."

Perhaps in her failure, there might be a boost to police morale, and a modicum of additional safety for the residents of that petri dish of Democrat failures.

TOM BRADY DEFLATES BALLS. GWU INFLATES THEM.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan has a serious E-T-T-S moment.  "Witty abusive coaches?"  As my dad would have it, why compare yourself with the worst?  But:

And all of this is taking place in the typical university context of interim provosts and ever-rotating deans and presidents who have just announced they’re leaving. Yet you need one strong singular voice in crises like these. It’s gonna take a bit of work.

Right, although the athletics directors and coaches also have their separation bonuses.  Higher education might teach Voltaire, although if somebody took pour encourager les autres seriously, that might be the end of the separation bonuses.

College sports bubble, anyone?

WHY LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION FALLS.

Here's one from the archives, about the state of the labor market in May 2012.

"It is well-documented that this recovery is atypically slow, but there is a noticeable positive trend," said Jeff Joerres, ManpowerGroup's chairman and chief executive.

The bad news: Unemployment is coming down, but there's no reason to think that any time in the next three years the unemployment rate will be under 6%.

One of the problems ManpowerGroup has found is that although the unemployment rate remains high, there are jobs that go unfilled because of a skills mismatch. Its most-recent annual talent shortage survey of 65,000 employers in 41 countries showed that one-third of employers can't fill "mission-critical" positions.

Equally alarming, said Joerres, is that the same jobs keep topping the hard-to-fill list - skilled trades workers, engineers and sales representatives.

The latest, not yet seasonally adjusted, official unemployment rate is 4.9%, and workers discouraged but still attached to the labor force are fewer than they were last year.  Whether the recovery is despite or because of hope and change will likely be litigated during campaign season.  But close to a million people have left the labor force between last year and this, and the dynamics might have been at work four years ago.

"If you take a salesperson job, for example, and look at the skills needed now vs. the skills needed in the past, there is a huge difference," Joerres said. "A good salesperson needs excellent communication skills, a consultative, problem-solving approach and perseverance in order to fuel revenue growth at a time when margins remain slim. A firm handshake and a good golf game is no longer enough."

ManpowerGroup said some companies are having a very hard time finding exact matches for jobs they'd like to fill.

"Where employers are unable to find an exact match, they are holding off on hiring because it keeps their expenses down, and meantime they are able to meet the demand they are experiencing by doing more with less and squeezing more productivity out of their existing workers," Joerres said. "The difficulty with that approach is that many workforces have been stretched to the limit, and you end up with disgruntled workers who leave as soon as the economy improves."

Yes, there are limits to downsizing, and with a lot of older workers, taking even an etiolated pension might look better than staying on the 24/7 treadmill.

Meanwhile, the opportunities for blue-collar aristocrats were apparent back then.

Joerres said positions such as plumbers, welders and electricians are other jobs employers are having a difficult time filling, in part because young people don't see themselves in those types of careers.

"There are some harmful myths that need to be debunked - that skilled trades work is for those people who do not excel academically, that the jobs are dirty and dangerous, etc.," Joerres said. "Employers, trade groups and educators must partner to create a societal mind-set shift that brings honor back to the skilled trades. Similarly, a better job needs to be done of promoting the career and compensation potential of skilled trades work."

Joerres said students and their parents need to know that there are "potentially lucrative alternatives" to traditional four-year university degrees.

"They could earn an excellent living as plumbers with the possibility of owning their own business and having three or four employees working for them within a few years," he said.

We did hear a lot from members of the Trump Organization valorizing the building trades in prime-time.  Perhaps, though, some information about the pay packets, compared, especially, with paying off those student loans on a bartender's tips, is important.  Incentives matter and all that.

TIME TO GET STEAMED UP.

We've been following, for some time, the efforts of the Coalition for Sustainable Rail to demonstrate the use of torreified biomass (a way of recapturing carbon for use in coal that doesn't require geologic time) in a steam locomotive capable of matching diesel Hiawatha or Metroliner speeds in a carbon-neutral way.  In the course of following their progress, I alluded to the project in a story about the Wisconsin Dells-based manufacturer of steam locomotives for zoo and amusement park railroads.

"[P]erhaps visitors to the Dells will have an opportunity to witness 261's passage again, or perhaps a passage by the Coalition for Sustainable Rail's test engine."

Better yet, one of the steamers at the Milwaukee County Zoo, a relatively large Pacific built by Sandley at the Dells, has served as a test-bed.

From June 10-12, CSR teamed up with the Milwaukee County Zoo, the Natural Resources Research Institute, and Solvay Biomass Energy to undertake the first test of torrefied biomass on a steam locomotive. The tests are a key step in ensuring that the fuel can be used in steam locomotives of all sizes in the face of shuttering coal mines.

The reference to "shuttering of coal mines" is not a dig at the environmental activism of the Obama administration or the Clinton campaign.  Rather, steam locomotives are fussy about their diet, and a coal industry whose principal customers are power plants and a few coke works that purchase black diamonds by the trainload is an industry less interested in providing a truckload or carload of coal for a preservation railroad.  (No, I don't know if that figures into Union Pacific's plans to rebuild Big Boy 4014 as an oil burner.)

Here's how the test bed worked out.

CSR worked hand-in-hand with Zoo staff to instrument 4-6-2 steam locomotive number 1924 and undertake the tests [see diagram below]. Torrefied biomass fuel was graciously donated by Solvay Biomass Energy for use during research. The small fuel pellets were burned on a modified stainless steel grate installed by CSR on-site.

Who would have thought that.

Retrieved from Coalition for Sustainable Rail.

And you have to love the way academicians stake out opportunities for future research.  When they break out a full dynamometer car, we'll know they're serious.

More information, including additional videos of the tests and a detailed White Paper, will be made available later this summer. CSR plans to undertake a second set of tests with the Milwaukee County Zoo with larger torrefied biomass pellets created by NRRI at its Coleraine Minerals Research Laboratory later this year. The organization has also been in discussions with standard-gauge operators about undertaking full scale tests in the future.

There are two standard-gauge steam preservation efforts within easy driving distance of Cold Spring Shops. Perhaps one of them will participate.

RACHEL MADDOW'S STRING BIKINI.

Some things might be better left to the imagination, but in light of the frequency within which the following chart has appeared on MSNBC, here goes.

It appeared most recently in a Common Dreams post, in which Dave Johnson of Campaign for America's Future (arguably, "Make America Work Again" is also a campaign for America's future) suggests that, but for Republican obstruction, the continuing economic recovery would have been more robust.  Republican operative Ed Rogers offers the predictable counter-argument.

[The Obama administration] has stifled small businesses with excessive taxation, perpetuated a punitive regulatory regime enhanced by a pointless passion for global warming initiatives and acted with an anti-business bias that has all amalgamated to slow growth and spread discontent across the country.

A bad economy has political consequences. Donald Trump is just one of them, but unfortunately, we won’t know the price we will ultimately pay for Obama’s destructive and reckless economic policies for years to come.

Reality might be more complicated, and the old "secular stagnation" idea is back.  But deleveraging, the predictable consequence of a financial crash, takes a long time.  Fiscal cutbacks post-stimulus might be precisely what Mr Johnson has in mind: think of how much more borrowing the Obama administration might have engaged in with a more sympathetic House or Senate.  And the continuing retirement of Baby Boomers is affecting labor force participation in ways that will occupy several cohorts of reg monkeys, er, future doctoral students.  But the current recovery, if that's what it is, whether the jobs added chart is more like a string bikini than a beach volleyball bottom, has been going on for a long time, and adjustments within the adjustments are likely to follow.

SOME UNUSUAL SUPPORT FOR DONALD TRUMP.

I doubt that the author of this Working Class Perspectives post intended it, but there it is.

[Mrs] Clinton needs the support of working-class Ohioans – the very people who have been hurt the most by trade policy. To do that, she needs to stop insisting that trade is good. Her current stance is similar to wooing West Virginia coal miners by touting the benefits of non-carbon fuels. Similarly, she should stop talking about retraining and promising high-tech jobs, which only reminds voters of how hollow such programs have been in the past.

Instead, Clinton should acknowledge that we have lost the trade war and pledge to use every legal means at her disposal to protect American workers and industries from the continued onslaught of imports. This would include initiating trade cases against countries that target American industries by subsidizing their exports, exploiting workers, manipulating their currencies, and polluting the environment.

She should threaten to impose tariffs on every imported product from countries that refuse to implement the same U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations and federal, state and local tax requirements that are imposed on American businesses.

That concluding paragraph is a standard response to regulatory arbitrage, but the paragraphs preceding it are not that far from "Trump digs coal" and "renegotiate bad trade deals."

I note, by way of being more Jesuit than the Pope, that there is no such thing as losing a trade war, although there might be policy errors that fritter away the traditional U.S. comparative advantage in knowledge-intensive advanced technology goods, or treat a temporary peace dividend as the new normal.

And thus might Donald Trump carry Ohio.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Summer is for swimming, and catching up with one's reading late into the evening on the deck.

On hot days, of which there have been a few, or rainy days, of which there haven't been enough, there's opportunity to work on the railroad.

This pokemon is hanging around the work zone through Zudnokhovsk, western USSR.  It has been detained by NKVD as imperialist spy.

SELF-MADE PURGATORIES.

I had made reference previously to Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber's The Slow Professor, which appears to suggest that faculty work more deliberately and mindfully, to use a buzzword in a different context.  At the recommendation of a colleague, I read the work.  The subtitle is Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, and the authors suggest that this culture of speed is an alien intrusion, introduced from elsewhere by the Babbitts who have hijacked the administration.

The book jacket opens, "If there is one sector of society that should be cultivating deep thought in itself and others, it is academia.  Yet the corporatization of the contemporary university has sped up the clock, demanding increased speed and efficiency regardless of the consequences of for education and scholarship.  The authors expand in their preface.  "We have been influenced by the literature on the corporatization of higher education, empirical studies which document the harmful effects of stress and loneliness on physiological and psychological health, popular self-help discourse which emphasizes the importance of work-life balance, and, of course, the key texts of the Slow movement."

I'm tempted to let it all go with a suggestion that some literature students buy their advisor a train set.  Yes, even -- especially -- if the advisors are female!  The gender bending!  The subversion of the dominant paradigm!  Or to suggest that stressed or slow professors alike are underemployed compared to their forebears.

But let me devote Book Review N^o. 17, at least briefly, to explaining my choice of a title.

I'll break it down by chapter.  First comes "Time Management and Timelessness."  At page 17, the authors note, "Academic work is never done; while flexibility of hours is one of the privileges of our work; it can easily translate into working all the time or feeling that one should."  Yes, when that idea is rattling around in your brain, best to sketch some ideas on paper or noodle around with Maple or run a regression, and one of the risks of becoming involved with an academic is precisely that those ideas take over way more disruptively than a hobby or a mistress ever can.

But that has always been the case.  Canadian higher education policy (which plays a major part in Slow Professor's narrative) or corporatization or neo-liberalism are late to the game: there's Archimedes in the sand or Beethoven walking in the country or Einstein riding that light beam or you, dear colleague, awake late at night mulling the idea.

Next comes "Pedagogy and Pleasure."  And yes, there is much to be dissatisfied about the intrusion of business software and information technology into teaching, which fits into the corporate hell model.  Nowhere, though, does the chapter address the stresses faculty face when headquarters, whether out of a misplaced sense of social justice or out of an understandable desire for revenue, fills classes with disengaged and unprepared students, then tacks on a support bureaucracy to keep the Distressed Material around.

"Research and Understanding" opens with the epigraph, "Not everything that counts can be counted."  The gripe, summarized in one sentence on page 54, is "The changes to academic labour have increased the expectations of what it means to be a productive scholar, while simultaneously increasing class sizes and expanding our job descriptions."  Yes, and turning us into our own tech support.  But there's Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, which might be a parody of the Prestige Quest, and it long predates Total Quality Management and all the other management fads.

I'd note, further, that the quest for public funding, or for sponsored research more generally, is unlikely to end well for universities that follow the market too slavishly.  A few years ago, I didn't make myself popular with a dean for suggesting that I could do better consulting than seeking grants.  The best he could do was note that summer money on grants counted toward retirement.  Well, here I am retired relatively young.  You do the math.  And the opportunities in finance, in engineering, in biochemistry, in parts of physics have to be more remunerative than they are in energy economics.  For that matter, why should talented people in the humanities grub for grants from MacArthur or the Canada Council or the national endowments, when they might be able to become the next Tom Clancy?

That brings us to the breakdown of "Collegiality and Community."  In which, I suggest, there's still nothing new, as a quick reading of any of the academic novels will suggest (why, dear reader, are the psychos always in the English Department?)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)