A CLOCK THAT OUGHT BE TURNED BACK?

Virginia Postrel (via Insta Pundit) contemplates ways to Make the Greatest Stores Great Again.  They might have been dinosaurs, of a piece with the elegant ocean liners, the Pump Room, all-Pullman streamliners.  "People would want to shop in small stores with focused inventories, where they could find what they wanted on a quick lunch break, or, like me, they’d order from catalogs."  True in part, not true in part, and catalog ordering is no longer tied to the annual wish-book, thick enough to hang on a nail for reuse and recycling.  But now, in place of the shops around the public square, you have the shops under General Growth's roof.

Eating out is buying stuff along with a positive experience -- while saving time on chores such as grocery shopping and doing dishes.

Contrary to what you might suppose, shopping-center vacancy rates have been steadily falling since 2008, thanks in large part to food. Restaurant expansions account for increasing amounts of space, and malls have begun turning to food halls as anchor tenants. These are large spaces where customers can eat varied, high-quality meals or take-home grocery items such as artisanal bread, fresh produce, or gourmet meats and cheeses.

These days, it's emergent, with the likes of General Growth taking care of the logistics.  But that's what Marshall Field or Gimbel used to do.

Department stores weren’t always dull places to buy things less efficiently than you can online. In the early days, their wonders included elegant tearooms, suitable for ladies who’d never frequent saloons. Stores held concerts and fashion shows. They provided playgrounds and nurseries. They gave all sorts of lessons, from bicycle riding in the 1890s to bridge and mah-jongg decades later. They displayed original artworks. In many and varied ways, they wrapped their goods, many of them themselves new and exotic, in experiences. “One came now less to purchase a particular article than simply to visit, buying in the process because it was part of the excitement, part of an experience that added another dimension to life,” writes the historian Michael B. Miller in Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920.

Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant.  (What contemporary Milwaukeeans miss ... there still is a Boston Store, making do with part of the bottom two floors of the original store.)  And you could look at the gadgets on the Lionel train displays, way fancier and beyond the budgets of most of the shoppers.  (I blame the cult of the MBA for the end of the train displays.  Some genius noted that there were trains left over after the end of the Christmas season, decided that the stock would be made available to Arlan's and Atlantic Mills, where it was stocked on shelves at everyday low prices.  Families went to the department stores to look at the displays, found the stuff available at lower prices off the shelf at the discounters, bought it there.  Then, inevitably, something broke.  What happens next is not amusing.)

There is, still, a social experience to going shopping, which operators of today's emergent, distributed-network department stores might be discovering.

For retailers and their landlords, the future lies in giving customers a place to socialize and learn. Spending time with friends, meeting new people, and acquiring hands-on skills aren’t as enjoyable online. The challenge today is to recreate the old excitement for a new era, selling not exotic merchandise and unfamiliar culture but the pleasures of human contact and physical presence.

There's another component, though. People, particularly the upscale high achievers Ms Postrel runs amid, have to figure out how to get their work done in thirty hours a week, rather than striving, striving, striving, and racking up those sixty hour weeks and rushed meals.

TAKING STOCK

Right Wisconsin's James Wigderson bids adieu to the Obama Presidency.  Not the worst, not even close to the worst.

President James Buchanan surely ranks as the worst. Buchanan allowed the South to secede, allowing those states to take military assets that would later be used in the Civil War. Congress even refused to pay for Buchanan's presidential portrait.

Woodrow Wilson inflicted upon the country the income tax and widespread repression at the end of his second term. Rutherford B. Hayes took office after the infamous Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the South in exchange for control of the White House. Andrew Jackson agreed to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which caused the Trail of Tears for the Cherokee Indians. Richard Nixon was nearly impeached for misconduct in office, and we're still paying for his domestic policies today.

Yes, and James Buchanan had all that experience, both as a Representative and a Senator from a large state, and as Ambassador to the Court of St. James and Secretary of State.  Plus he farmed out the First Lady duties.  And if you think Richard Nixon helped create a swamp in Washington, what do you suppose preceded Reconstruction and Jim Crow and affirmative action?  Like Mr Buchanan, Mr Obama took office toward the end of a saecular Unraveling, and yet, his effects might be more easily reversed.

Obama didn't preside over a civil war, although race relations actually got worse during his time in office and police departments feel besieged by liberal politics. He didn't get impeached, although his administration was hardly scandal-free. Obama is not the "worst president ever."

But his domestic policies can be graded a failure on the Obama standard. Instead of the transformative figure he hoped to become, Obama's policies should be swept away by a Republican congress that achieved success when it ran against the Obama agenda.

That is, if that Congress and the incoming President can get down to business.  We should have some clues as to that eventuality in twelve hours or so.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Facebook reminded me this morning about the state of the railroad, five years ago.

Progress as of 17 January, 2012.  Furring strips in, wall insulation going in, extra lighting in, no grid yet for the drop ceiling.

Much of the work over the next four years was to build from the northwest corner to the east and to the south.  By 12 January, 2016, the benchwork for staging and the trackage down to staging and up to the Gloucester Branch was in place, and spline for the upper level was going in through western Russian town of Zudnokhovsk.

Main line, station siding, and spur to corrective labor camp in place at Zudnokhovsk now.  Stalin never had beer delivery like this!  Passenger train headed off the Eastern Route Main Line into staging for Ipswich, Portsmouth, and points north.

THE IRREGULAR RHYMES OF HISTORY.

Dave "Voluntary Xchange" Tufte picks up a Nation interview with Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek looking for regularities in the Black Swan event we call the Trumpening.  We'll start with the political economy of cycles, particularly cycles that are long relative to the frame of reference.

As soon as you see long cycles in a discussion, you should be very suspicious. Think about two points. How do we know there are cycles? Because we return back to where we started. How do we know there are long cycles? Because we have a huge amount of data. Skowronek’s theory is based on observing 2, maybe 3, long cycles. At the absolute limit, possibly six. Solid scientists are exceptionally skeptical of that sort of argument.

Yes, that's the fundamental flaw with cycles-of-history arguments, including those involving Fourth Turnings.  Wherever there is a pattern, there are opportunities to exploit the pattern and throw the cycle off.

What's interesting, though, is Professor Skowronek's indictment of the Cult of the Presidency.

Look, the 20th-century Progressives really screwed up the presidency in the sense that they envisioned every president as a transformative leader. So they instituted primary elections, which gave us these idiosyncratic presidential parties not beholden to any collective. Instead, they are personal organizations which feed this idea of transformational leadership. But at the same time, the Progressives rebuilt the government to create this enormous management apparatus we call the executive office of the president. So now we also expect the president to be a rational coordinator of institutions and actions throughout this massive federal government.

The problem is that those two functions don’t necessarily go together very well. How can you promise to shake the system up, to extricate the special interests and transform politics, while also being a responsible manager of the state? In the 2016 election, we saw a choice between candidates who were essentially caricatures of those two views. Hillary Clinton was all about competence and management and rational decision-making, while Trump was all about popular mobilization and disruption.

Put not excessive faith in Chief Magistrates.

SOME DAYS JUST GET WORSE.

Ringling Barnum's Blue Unit train reported terminal delay in Miami account a derailment.  "According to local sources, a Florida East Coast local was assembling the train in preparation for its departure from Miami when a switching locomotive and one of the company’s generator cars derailed. There was only minor damage reported, but the equipment remained derailed as of 2:45 p.m. local time." The first jump will be to Birmingham, Alabama, for a Thursday opening.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

Harvard's Larry Summers and Ed Glaeser go around on infrastructure.  There are several good points covered therein.  I wish to highlight one.

I was struck many years ago by the young teacher who approached me in Oakland after as Secretary of the Treasury I gave a speech about the importance of education. She said “Secretary Summers—that was a great speech.  But the paint is chipping off the walls of this school, not off the walls at McDonald’s or the movie theatre. So why should the kids believe this society thinks their education is the most important thing”  I had no good answer.

As with potentially collapsing bridges, prevention is cheaper than cure and in many cases the return on “un-derferring” maintenance far exceeds government borrowing rates.  Borrowing to finance maintenance should not be viewed as incurring a new cost but as shifting from the fast compounding liability of maintenance to the slowly compounding liability of explicit debt.  It should also be noted that inevitably one maintains what has been used, so maintenance investment is much less likely to turn out a white elephant than new infrastructure investment.

There's more to his argument than ribbon cuttings are newsworthy, painting and patching are not.  Sometimes the pressure to bring a project in "under budget" leads to corner-cutting, and that can be as subtle as a cheaper grade of paint or as serious as thinner insulation.

PRESERVING THE HIGHER EDUCATION CIRCUS.

Inside Higher Ed's Joshua Kim attempts to study the demise of Ringling Barnum.

The circus, it turns out, is afflicted with the same cost disease as is higher education.

The circus can only scale so much before the circus tent gets too big, making it impossible to see the clowns.

When discussing why the circus was closing, the billionaire owner and CEO Ringling cited the show’s 12-minute tiger act:

“Try getting a 3- or 4-year-old today to sit for 12 minutes..”

Substitute “19 year old” for “3 year old”, and “lectures” for “tigers”, you can see that our higher ed challenges are not all that different from that of the circus.

How can we in higher ed avoid the fate of ‘The Greatest Show on Earth”?

First, we should definitely avoid using exotic live animals in our teaching or residential activities.  The cost of transporting lions, tigers, camels, donkeys, alpacas, kangaroos and llamas between shows proved too expensive for Ringling Brothers.  We should learn from their experience.

It was the elephants they didn't transport that hurt retention, not the camels they did transport.

I leave it to others to address the "cost disease" or nonexistent attention spans or the false economies of student-credit-hours-per-faculty, or dumbing down the curriculum.

WIN AND KEEP PLAYING.

The Green Bay Packers last won a playoff game in Dallas at the end of 1966.

Like yesterday's game, that game started with the Packers establishing a big lead, only to have to make plays at the end to secure the win.

Conference championship game, Sunday afternoon, Atlanta.

A PROPER CIRCUS HAS A TRAIN AND ELEPHANTS.

Trains Magazine correspondents offer their tributes to the end of Ringling Barnum.

Hayley Enoch captures the magic of Circus Day, even if the train simply passes through.

For generations past, especially those before internet and television and movies became common,  the sight of the circus train meant a break from everyday monotony, the most elaborate entertainment and the most visceral representation of the wonders of the world beyond their doorstep they were likely to see. For modern people, it meant the continuation of a 146-year-old tradition, a welcome chance to photograph something beyond the ordinary autoracks and coal hoppers.

Alas, it's all too much given today's prices, and today's attention spans.

Anyone who has ever lent a hand in tourist railroad operations or private car ownership can attest that maintaining even a small fleet can be prohibitively expensive. Feld Entertainment did cite a combination of operating costs and falling attendance as the reasons behind the closure, though it did not offer any information on what specific costs involved with operating the circus had become the most untenable.

Still others voiced what was perhaps the most accurate and the least well received opinion on the reasons behind the RBB&B’s closure: Travelling circuses are just one more relic of bygone eras that have overstayed their place in our modern, digital world. Their demise was inevitable: Modern audiences are too worldly, too cynical, inundated with too many other entertainment options to appreciate the kind of entertainment that the circus offers.

The truth, as it usually is, is likely some combination of all of these factors. Whatever the exact reasons, though, the end of the circus and its two trains bring an era of entertainment and era of railroading to a close. The loss is palpable. There are jobs lost, talents and years of experience that may not find a place in other industries, an entire experience that can now only be described in the pages of history.

My social media feed filled up, over the weekend, with hopes that some or all of the circus train stock could be preserved.  It's unlikely that much will find its way into preservation, considering circumstances at Circus World and at the Illinois Railway Museum, two places that have a good deal of their collection under roof.

Editor Jim Wrinn went to Circus World, where he was not alone among media seeking the back story.

As news spread Sunday that the vaunted Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus will end its more than 130 year run in May, there was only one place for me to go, the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis., about 2 hours west of Trains’ world headquarters. This place is hallowed ground for circus history -- the town of 12,000 today where five brothers in 1884 came up with the idea for the show that would go worldwide, the place that was once Ringling’s circus headquarters, and since 1959, the museum’s home. It is dotted with historic buildings where performers practiced and animals trained.

But the entertainment and educational functions of the itinerant circus now have substitutes.

The museum is about all American circuses, and Wisconsin is prominent in that story as the launching point of Ringling in Baraboo, P.T. Barnum in Delavan, and almost 100 other circuses across the state. Railroading, of course, plays a major role, [museum director Scott] O’Donnell said. Railroads replaced wagons and buggies in hauling the Ringling circus about 1890, and it made it possible for circuses to cover greater distances between shows. Circuses brought the world to cities from coast to coast – everything from giraffes and cotton candy, to performers from as far away as China and Hungary, and much more. America responded: businesses closed and schools shut their doors when the circus arrived. “It was like live Google search came to your town,” O’Donnell said. As many as 16,000 watched a circus show in a single day.

The animals in the menagerie might participate in the circus itself, but many (consider the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the walrus, and the badgers and wolverines) were along to show the locals what sort of exotica roamed the world.

Circus World would be happy to add some Ringling Barnum cars to their collection, but there are limits.

The Mabies -- shirt-tail relations -- also set up their circus in Delavan.

Chase Gunnoe meditates on What It All Means.

As people’s lives revolve around technology – so do the businesses in which employ them.  There is a mentality that everything we do can be improved upon if we introduce some form of technology to help execute the task. Hands-on trades skills are replaced with microchips the same as acrobats are replaced with mobile apps.

I doubt that. And yet the day may come when nobody knows how to set the valves on a steam locomotive, or how to catch the triple somersault.

THE COMMUTER TRAIN SAILS THE LIFTED TACK.

The Netherlanders are known for their windmills, and now the windmills power the trains.

All of the electric passenger trains running in the Netherlands are now powered entirely by wind. One year ahead of schedule, Dutch railway company NS announced its entire electric train fleet is running on 100-percent wind power as of January 1, 2017, ushering in a new era of green transportation. Renewable energy advocates hope the early success will inspire planners to incorporate wind-powered trains in other high-speed rail projects around the world, including some proposed in the United States.

The windiest parts of the States are also in prairie country, perhaps the best applications still remain in electrifying the Powder River and Bakken coal and oil routes.

THE BIG TOP BLOWN DOWN BY A GALE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION?

That appears to be Tyler Cowen, this time at his Marginal Revolution winter quarters, assessing the end of Ringling Barnum.  (But not, mind you, all itinerant circus!  Expect me to be giving the surviving truck shows free plugs once summer nears.)  He links a Chattanooga Times Free Press story about life on the road with the Ringling Barnum gold unit, a truck show.  The star of the Globe of Death (a popular show-ending motorcycle act) also worked with the pachyderms.

Alex Petrov is a Ringling Brothers star given his rare talent for racing a motorcycle across a thin, high wire. He can hold his own in the Globe of Steel, which looks like a Thunderdome death trap where three motorcyclists zoom past each other, often upside down inside the cage.

Despite his skill, Petrov has the humble, smelly task of shoveling elephant poop out of the two semi-trailers where Asia and April dwell. Petrov trains the two elephants, which requires him to park the RV he calls home next to their trailer in case they want his reassuring company in the middle of the night.

When April and Asia retire to Florida in 2018, Petrov will miss them, but he shrugs off any worry that their departure will dent circus attendance. Despite the controversy over the ethics of circus animal acts, Ringling seems able to coax a lot of people off the couch and into the tent.

The expression "doubles in brass" is a circus expression for a trouper, sometimes a laborer, with musical ability, who fills in on the sideshow band-wagon.  Not sure what role the musicians' union played in changing that.  To this day, though, you'll find the acrobats also serving as animal trainers or climbing the Spanish Web or juggling.

OBAMA FAREWELL.

The New York Times gives Peter Wehner a forum.  Go, read, and understand.

Barack Obama is among the most talented campaigners we have ever seen. But as president, he failed in a manner and on a scale that damaged his party, undermined faith in the institutions of government and left the nation more riven than he found it. For most Americans, the economy has been listless. All this helped create the conditions that allowed a cynical demagogue to rise up and succeed him, one who will undo the achievements he most prizes.

In many ways Barack Obama and Donald Trump could not be more different. Mr. Obama is equable and graceful; Mr. Trump is erratic and graceless. Yet one cannot make sense of the incoming presidency without understanding the failures of the outgoing one.

Put not your faith in chief magistrates.

EXPERTS SHOULD BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD.

Last week, I suggested that, in a provocative way.

Now comes Bloomberg's Tyler Cowen, clarifying the provocation.  "Sometimes the People Need to Call the Experts."  (Yes.  If there's an invisible man on the stairs, call Ghostbusters, not Jimmy John.  Bases loaded in the last of the ninth with a one-run lead, call Rollie Fingers.)

That "sometimes," though, is highly contingent on the complexity of the challenge.  We have, for instance, a constitutional republic in part because emergence is messy, and distributed knowledge more likely to get things right.

I prefer the citizens for broad questions of policy and society. The citizens are more likely to be in touch with the concerns of everyday life, and less likely to embrace utopian schemes. They are more likely to be politically and culturally diverse. Overall, they are more conservative in both the "small c" sense of that word and the more political sense.

Expertise, on the other hand, has its value, once the problem to be worked is well-defined.

The faculty would also underestimate the backlash from the American public for their social engineering. It’s a good rule of governance that policy cannot race too far ahead of the citizenry, and I don’t view faculty as a class of people well-suited for that kind of humility.

Nonetheless, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governance, typically I would prefer to be ruled by the Harvard faculty, even recognizing the biases of experts. They understand the importance of applying expertise to complex problems, and they realize many issues do not respond well to common-sense fixes. The citizenry usually cannot make good decisions, or for that matter expert appointments, when technocracy is required.

The "faculty" reference is to an old William Buckley quip about preferring to be ruled by Bostonians randomly selected from the 'phone book rather than by the Harvard faculty.  Given the Best and the Brightest and Vietnam and the Great Society and the health insurance reforms, that has stood up pretty well.  At root, Mr Cowen is making a case for the experts being put into well-defined boxes, and to the public watching the boxes carefully.  That appears to be Arnold Kling's point.

Joe Citizen may have less knowledge than Professor Jones, but Professor Jones could be more dangerous. That is because Professor Jones may over-estimate his suitability for telling other people what to do.

Compared with academics, business executives and military leaders have more experience with the challenge of implementing ideas. A good business executive would not take it for granted that a web site is going to work. A good general would emphasize all of the difficulties and risks of trying to shape the Middle East.

Perhaps I wasn't being so polemical after all. "The true expert might be the person who knows when it's best to leave well enough alone, rather than to intervene, to tweak, to anticipate every nuance and complexity."

HOW TO ARGUE WITH A LIBERAL, IF YOU MUST.

Dean Dad's Firemen and Closers focuses on process worship, in baseball, and elsewhere.

But he gets off the Trenchant Observation for Today, perhaps for the Season, perhaps as an example of "natural stupidity" (itself a well-chosen phrase.)  "It’s all there -- unrepresentative small sample, high emotion, pathos, and ad hominem. Everything except an actual reason."

Kind of like the attempts to preserve the so-called Affordable Care Act.

THAT SHIP SAILED LONG AGO.

I've used this title enough recently that perhaps the harbor is empty ...

This time, it's Slate's Michelle Goldberg, suggesting that more Democrats question Mr Trump's legitimacy.  She crosses the line from dissent into moonbattery.

Trump lost the popular vote; he is president-elect only because the country values fidelity to the democratic process over popular democracy itself. (The Constitution, it turns out, may in fact be a suicide pact.) If the process itself was crooked—if Trump’s campaign colluded in any way with Russia—his legitimacy disappears. If he scorns the Constitution by, say, violating the Emoluments Clause, it disappears as well. A president who lost the popular vote, who may have cheated to win the Electoral College, and who will be contravening the Constitution the second he’s sworn in is due neither respect nor deference.

There's plenty of social-media-mockworthy material in there, and no doubt, the usual suspects will be swapping the usual banter.  It's her peroration, though, that interests me.

Nobody knows where this is all going. Democrats particularly are in a difficult position, because they want to uphold basic political norms, but doing so alone, while the other side shamelessly flouts them, puts them at a constant disadvantage. The peaceful transition of power is a cherished value of our democracy. But it’s not the only value, or the highest one. It should not require us to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. If the price for preserving our democracy is pretending that our would-be god-king-emperor has clothes, then it’s already rotted beyond repair.

Democrats becoming defenders of Social Norms and Rules of Procedure?  Democrats going cold turkey on the Cult of the Presidency, which has been their thing perhaps since Woodrow Wilson and surely since Franklin Roosevelt?  Democrats engaging in a close reading of the Federal Constitution?  Seriously?  Are you kidding me?

WHY SHOULD THE INVESTIGATION TAKE SO LONG?

When it's a tie at the railroad crossing, you lose.  Then comes the Coroner, and the investigation: Crossing Accident = Four-Hour Delay.  That's my experience, too, although Metra will sometimes transfer passengers to another train, or if the fatality occurs close enough to a station that the Powers That Be consider it safe for the passengers to walk to that station and catch the next train (which will likely be in the queue behind the stopped train) there.

Is it really necessary for the train, and its passengers, to be on the scene until the first responders decide they've gathered all the information?

NO ELEPHANTS, NO CIRCUS.

Last year, Ringling Barnum put their elephants out to pasture, probably in the face of ever-more-intrusive regulatory measures in the big cities, and despite peer-reviewed evidence that circuses are not inherently detrimental to the welfare of elephants.

This year, Ringling Barnum itself will be headed to the grassy lot.

The owner of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus told The Associated Press that the show will close forever in May.

The iconic American spectacle was felled by a variety of factors, company executives say. Declining attendance combined with high operating costs, along with changing public tastes and prolonged battles with animal rights groups all contributed to its demise.

“There isn’t any one thing,” said Kenneth Feld, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment. “This has been a very difficult decision for me and for the entire family.”

Feld Entertainment's other itinerant shows will continue. For how much longer? Read this about contemporary attention spans, and be very afraid.

“The competitor in many ways is time,” said Feld, adding that transporting the show by rail and other circus quirks — such as providing a traveling school for performers’ children— are throwbacks to another era. “It’s a different model that we can’t see how it works in today’s world to justify and maintain an affordable ticket price. So you’ve got all these things working against it.”

The Feld family bought the Ringling circus in 1967. The show was just under 3 hours then. Today, the show is 2 hours and 7 minutes, with the longest segment — a tiger act — clocking in at 12 minutes.

“Try getting a 3- or 4-year-old today to sit for 12 minutes,” he said.

There are other itinerant circuses, dear reader, and come summer, one will likely be pitching a Big Top on a fairgrounds or school practice field near you.  And some will have elephants.

But I never imagined that the Karlson Brothers Circus train would be running while Ringling Barnum's is not.

As long as there is a Karlson Brothers Circus, it will travel by rail.

There will be lions (and tigers)

And bears (oh, my!)

And a prodigious parade of powerful pachyderms, plenty of work for the man with the scoop shovel, and Huskies on guard.

Children of all ages are as interested in the motion of the steam locomotive as they might be about the animals, or the sight gags scattered about the lot!

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

THAT SHIP SAILED LONG AGO.

Deadspin's Hamilton Nolan takes the occasion of Mr Trump's press conference of last week to note, This Is Why You Don't Kiss The Ring.

Ethical guidelines exist for a reason. Norms exist for a reason.

The reason is not “Jerks who think they’re smarter than us trying to control our lives from on high.” The reason is that human history is long, and all of the mistakes that could possibly be made have been made, and at a certain point people figured out that following some common sense rules could prevent us from making the same dire mistakes over and over again. Mistakes that come from human nature. Mistakes like: allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to make money for themselves, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to squelch legitimate dissent, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to flout the very ethical guidelines and norms that prior people in powerful positions established to keep people in powerful positions in check.

Perhaps "Make America Great Again" will be in the rediscovery of the Constitutional separation of powers, in a new birth of dissent, and, shall we hope, in the restoration of bourgeois conventions.

We are all coming to realize that our civil society institutions may not be strong enough to protect the flawed but fundamentally solid democracy that we thought we had. We are witnessing the rise to power of a leader who does not care about norms. Since these norms were created to prevent political, social, economic, and cultural disasters, we do not need to wonder how this will end. It will end poorly.

Mr Nolan might be eight years late to the realization, or perhaps a quarter-century late, but let us recognize what has dawned on him.

Our society and our institutions are simply not set up to deal with someone who is fully prepared to flout all of our norms of good behavior. Our system, to a large degree, relies on social sanction rather than laws to prevent powerful people from getting too far out of line. When our most powerful person is willing to ignore all of that, there is not much in place to stop him. The normalization process is well underway. The pomp and circumstance and deference will only increase after the inauguration. The press and the Congress are the only two institutions standing between a dangerous man and total power. They must both realize this is not the time to salute and grovel. This is not the time to fall into familiar patterns of default respect for someone who does not himself respect the responsibility to the public that he has been given. This is the time for them to rise to the occasion. And the occasion is a fight for civil society.

Let us be grateful that he didn't put "norms of good behavior" in sneer quotes.

Let us be grateful that he wrote "not set up to deal" rather than "constructed."

Let us hope that he recognizes the ways in which "social sanction" is emergent, and, rightly understood, confers evolutionary advantage on people who interact under its formal and informal procedures.

If, at the same time, a Trump presidency is occasion to "scrub off some of the ridiculous luster" that has accompanied the Cult of the Presidency, let it be so.

POP IS A LIQUID ASSET.

The New York Times interprets a government report on where the taxpayers' food stamp money goes.

The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. The category of ‘sweetened beverages,’ which includes fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas, accounted for almost 10 percent of the dollars they spent on food. “In this sense, SNAP is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the soda industry,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “It’s pretty shocking.”

For years, dozens of cities, states and medical groups have urged changes to SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to help improve nutrition among the 43 million poorest Americans who receive food stamps. Specifically, they have called for restrictions so that food stamps cannot be used to buy junk food or sugary soft drinks.

But the food and beverage industries have spent millions opposing such measures, and the U.S.D.A. has denied every request, saying that selectively banning certain foods would be unfair to food stamp users and create too much red tape.

Read the entire article, and note the Wise Experts Being Fretful about the People in Their Charge spending their money foolishly on pop rather than on More Nutritious Things.  Ah, the technocratic impulse, and the continued conceit that somehow there is an Order of People Born Booted And Spurred to Ride the Rest of Humanity.  (And it's For Your Own Good, so Do as I Say.)

THOSE SECOND THOUGHTS.

There's accumulating evidence that the do-your-own-thing Sixties didn't turn out so well, first for the scrupulous and mannerly, later for the players who thought it a better dispensation.

I'd rather frame it as "deconstruct emerged institutions of long standing at your own risk."  If you'd prefer something harsher, consider "Society made accommodations for men and women to invest in the next generation rather than living lives of pointless and empty hedonism. This model worked for literally thousands of years. In the traditional world, a man would willingly give his entire life to take advantage of this decade or so of a woman’s life."

There's got to be some high concept stuff about wasting assets and credible commitments, but I'll leave that work to the next generation of price theorists.