THE PELTZMAN EFFECT, AT ONE REMOVE.

Automobiles go faster because they have brakes.  "Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences, particularly where a safety appliance changes the incentives to live more dangerously."

What happens, though, when the person using the safety appliance is not the person living more dangerously?  "Motorists Punish Helmet-Wearing Cyclists With Close Passes, Confirms Data Recrunch."  A University of Bath psychologist called Ian Walker apparently made himself a human subject, and took notes.

Half the time he wore a bicycle helmet and half the time he didn’t. The results showed motorists tended to pass him more closely when he rode wearing a helmet. Such “punishment passes” can also lead to collisions, collisions which can result in injury and death – and not to those guilty of the dangerous overtakes.

Walker suggested that drivers believe cyclists who wear helmets are more serious, experienced and predictable than those who ride without, and motorists, therefore, overtake them with less care. Drivers may also wrongly assume that cycle helmets – usually made from expanded-polystyrene – are forms of armor that will protect cyclists in any impact from motor vehicles. Cycle helmets are not designed for such collisions (they do not even protect against concussions.)

Jake Olivier and Scott Walter of the University of New South Wales took Walker’s original data and recrunched it, claiming in 2013 that “bicycle helmet wearing is not associated with close motor vehicle passing.”

The things people will do for Minimal Publishable Units.  I suspect the now somewhat old article got another mention on infrastructure Twitter was for the opportunity to deplorable-shame those "punishment passers" (if they even exist).  It's worth reminding people that the point of doing research is to get some sort of handle both on the truth and on the margin of error.  "Whether or not bicycle helmets offer whole-population safety benefits is a surprisingly fractious debate among academics – there is no settled science on the matter."

SHUT UP AND SING.

The Annoying Left, perhaps because it's a coalition of the unemployable, always manages to have prepared posters and rhyming chants, and, generally, all the good songs.  That phenomenon even gets people who should know better noting the return of the old chestnuts such as We Shall Overcome or We Shall Not Be Moved as harbingers of Something Gone Wrong.  Yes, something might have gone wrong, but look for Government Overreach or Expert Failure, and get to work.

Who knew, though, that when I asked, "Are there any good wokie songs these days, or is their repertoire limited to chanting and REEEEE-ing?" that I hadn't stumbled on an E-T-T-S moment, elaborated on by a Soy Trotsky called Paul Engler.  "Music is making a comeback in movement spaces, as organizers rediscover how song culture strengthens the capacity to create social change."  Well, yes, the repertoire has worn thin, but is it really necessary to publish a post only slightly shorter than an article on Soviet inventions of things that reads like culture studies?

Once we began incorporating singing into our work, we discovered that there was a great appetite among activists for reviving song culture. But it did take some work to create an environment where people feel comfortable embracing music-making.

One key step was conditioning people to be creators—not passive consumers—of song.

We live in a consumer-capitalist society that trains us to be purchasers and observers, rather than active participants, with regard to the production of art, music and other forms of culture. This is a departure from the norms of almost all ancient cultures, which relied on people to produce their own music and art. The shift has negative effects on social movements, and on democratic society as a whole.

Keep reading, there's probably a "commodification" or two in there.  But is that even necessary?  I mean, if you believe that borrowing the rhyming abilities of rappers to improvise something better than "hey-hey, ho-ho, [something that bugs us] has gotta go" or "What do we want? [Something foolish!] When do we want it? NOW!" or the unironic mob yelling "Show me what democracy looks like!  THIS is what democracy looks like!"  by all means go for it.

When we speak, and even more when we sing, our bodies emit vibrations. By singing we can express and channel the emotions of the moment more profoundly and lastingly than we can through speech alone. By producing the same sounds and vibrations at the same time, groups of people literally can get on the same wavelength with one another, creating a profound collective experience.

People who have studied the way that music works in religious communities have observed that activities such as chanting magnify a group's power by concentrating its voice into one chord and one breath.

So, too, might trashing a liquor store create a profound collective experience.  Protest, the opiate of the Annoying Left.

II. ADVENT.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train winter food drive resumes operation, after two years of social distancing, with one train each for the United States and Canada.

Three years of corona tyranny, and, Stateside, two years of promiscuous money printing, have left the food pantries in a precarious place, with fewer donations, and more clients, including, in many cases, clients who used to be contributors.

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

What it's about ... the train called at a crossing hard by the high school and one of the elementary schools, at lunchtime, and the kindergarteners walking to trackside behind had a successful food drive, if the hampers their teachers were carrying was any indication. The local food bank left with a fully-loaded pickup truck. The preschoolers got their fresh air, and more than a few of them brought canned goods.

If you have the means, and the train is not coming to jog your memory, consider contributing generously to your local food banks this Festive Season.

THE EXTRA BOARD ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

The Cold Spring Shops locution, "marking off" that signals a pause in posting, comes from a practice in railroading whereby a railroader, upon reaching his home terminal, takes himself out of the rotation of crews to tend to errands, or perhaps to mark back up in the hopes of landing a more favorable assignment upon rising again to the top of the rotation.  That latter practice used to be called "playing the board," and it could engender ill will among the people who discovered that their ascension of a spot or two got them on the Dead Freight or dogcatching the train that broke down, or (until Amtrak created its own pool of crews) having to run the late-running window train.  The practice had been codified so far that even yard crews, who have a better chance of being home on a regular basis, might have this sort of contractual protection.

An extra Engineer who is granted permission to xxxx off or to be out of place will retain his position on the extra board if he reports back for duty before his turn is called. Failing to report for duty before he is called for a yard assignment or for a run out of the terminal, his turn will be removed from the board and he will remain off for a minimum of twelve (12) hours and then be marked up last out upon reporting.

Not bad: something comes up, railroader marks off, takes care of whatever has come up, marks back up, no harm, no foul.  That, predictably, does not sit well with bean counters who wonder whether the extra board is too large, if people can take some personal time without disrupting the rotation of crews.  If train crews get paid only by the trip, the size of the extra board might not look like a big deal, but when each person on the payroll is eligible for fringe benefits irrespective of trips taken, there's an incentive to reduce the number of people drawing fringe benefits, which means turning over the extra board more quickly.  That's the same incentive that the unionized automobile makers face to rely more on overtime, rather than expand their work forces.

UNDEFENDABLE IN NEW ORLEANS.

Years ago, Loyola of New Orleans economist Walter Block published Defending the Undefendable: The Pimp, Prostitute, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue's Gallery of American Society.  That Goodreads page provides the expected range of reactions to the deliberately provocative title.  The book might be an example of being outrageous to make a point.  There is evidently a sequel.

Professor Block is still teaching at Loyola, and the call-out crowd has come for his version of outrageousness.

Loyola University New Orleans has spent the last two and a half years subjecting professor Walter Block to investigations and sanctions for his protected speech. The university has targeted Block for everything from his teaching of particular economic theories to his classroom discussion of Gandhi and Hitler. Yet all of the speech in question is squarely protected by Loyola’s strong promises of free speech and academic freedom.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is on the Cold Spring Shops "nice" list for charitable giving, is giving the Diversity Weenies grief for their undefendable, or is it indefensible, assaults on academic inquiry, which have been going on for a while.

Block’s trouble began in June 2020 when students created and circulated a change.org petition calling for his termination. The students accused Block of holding “racist and sexist” beliefs, exemplified, they claimed, by some of Block’s alleged statements on slavery, the gender wage gap, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A group of students sent a letter to then-university president Tania Tetlow calling for action against Block, citing a New York Times article that quoted Block as saying slavery was “not so bad.” (The accusations ignored that Block received a settlement in a defamation suit against the Times in which he claimed the paper had taken his words out of context.) Tetlow acknowledged the students’ concerns, but admirably stood by the university’s promises of academic freedom in explaining the decision not to punish Block.

However, the administration would not have Block’s back for very long. In April 2021, Loyola determined various comments Block made in his Intermediate Microeconomics course — including his use of the word “Oriental,” his teaching of the “marital asymmetry hypothesis” as an explanation for the gender wage gap, and his reference to slave owners in a discussion about authoritarianism — had created a hostile learning environment. The university required Block to complete diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

And Block continued to face sanctions and investigations throughout 2021. In July he was sanctioned for discussing wages and productivity in his Principles of Microeconomics class after he used a hypothetical premise in which he and two students — one of whom was a student of color — picked cotton at different speeds to explain that employers pay the highest wage to the most productive workers. A student also complained about another of Block’s illustrations of worker productivity, asserting that he invoked stereotypes about Asians and Harvard graduates not being good at basketball to explain why the New York Knicks did not accurately estimate the ability of Taiwanese-American player Jeremy Lin. Loyola forced Block to apologize to the student and imposed a mandatory review of his syllabus before each semester.

I bet that "out of context" reference involving slavery is a reference to Time on the Cross, a much-misunderstood, particularly in passing use, economic history of slavery, and I suppose we should be grateful that the professor, who is in his ninth decade, is not being offered the Socrates choice of ostracism or a cup of hemlock.

Next, in October, Vice Provost Uriel Quesada emailed Block to inform him of a complaint concerning comments and readings from his Law and Economics course. The allegations included Block’s use of the terms “Oriental” and “atta girl,” although Block used them in the context of explaining he had “just turned 80, and my language skills are sort of embedded in me based on past experience, so if I say something that is problematic, just let me know, and I will apologize for it and we will go on and I’ll try not to.”

That's apparently no longer good enough, although the Foundation staff are still on the case.  Those latter-day inquisitors at the Loyola that is not a basketball school have to be disciplined, or perhaps persuaded to step out of line and pursue their hobbies, if they have any.

THEORY, WITHOUT TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS.

Put in Normal English, the difficulty of calling a line of inquiry that is devoid of testable implications theory is this.

Filtered through an economics lens, it's loosely this. Authors have private information. Readers have private information. Authors of letters to family or friends of long standing have private information that includes the reader's likely response to the author's choice of words. Authors can push readers' buttons, or not, accordingly. Authors of letters to a newspaper, let alone of essays or books, cannot be sure what readers' buttons will be pushed, or in what way. That, alone, makes the construction of any formal system of understanding texts sufficiently rigorous and replicable to be referred to as a theory, let alone as Theory, difficult. Ad hoc is more like it.

It's not possible to conceal the absence of a formal system with wordnoise.

This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus.

George Harbison is being too kind when he describes that as a statement of fact. "Note that this is a statement of fact, rather than a reference to a topic that is to be discussed in class. In fact, it is the basis of the class, and it reveals its true agenda: indoctrinating students in cultural Marxism." It's more like a testament of faith. It's not Marxism.

If you're still "conceptualizing" theories you're still a long way from "taxonomizing" anything. You can conceive of unicorns and dragons, but without any actual unicorns or dragons, any assignment of unicorns to the mammals or dragons to the reptiles can never be validated against evidence.

It only gets more amusing from there.

And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced.

It's not enough to conceptualize potential taxonomies, now they're searching for genealogies and epistemologies, and "constellate" sounds even weirder than the obligatory "interrogate".  Don't say I didn't give you a guide to uncovering the rot.

Here's how Ms Shaw puts it:  "But let’s make it our job as a society to encourage each other to find replicable and falsifiable evidence to support our views, and to logically argue our positions."  Note: logically argue.  Dressing it up in word-noise and pretending to be a sophisticate?  No.

And the doddering ficus keeps wanting taxpayers to pick up the bad debts victim studies majors racked up learning this stuff. Sad!  And depressingly too common.  "Fifty years ago, history departments did history and English departments did English; today, both disciplines muddle their missions by indulging in half-baked progressive politics."  Yes, and their graduates fail the market tests, and at best, the students are picking up a potted version of political economy.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Our freedom is not yet restored.  "Remember when we were initially told the medical community needed two weeks to flatten the curve and get a handle on overcrowded hospitals? Then that turned into indefinite lockdowns and mandates. Before we knew it, we were living in an authoritarian country, not living as free Americans."  An authoritarian country with a new sort of monopoly capitalist, to boot.  "[O]ne of the character tokens [Parker Brothers] made sure to retain was the top hat, representing the top-hatted banker – a recognisable cipher for greed and indifference in Depression-era America. Perhaps the ‘crypto slob’ – a mop-headed millennial burnishing his climate-change credentials – ought to be this century’s equivalent."  It could all have been avoided.  "From the very beginning of the pandemic, in fact, there were legions of pedigreed epidemiologists and other scientists—many of whom later signed the Great Barrington Declaration—who correctly held that viruses cannot be extinguished via draconian quarantines and other clumsy one-size-fits-all public health interventions; and that when it came to coronaviruses in particular, it was doubtful whether even vaccines—which had never been successful with coronaviruses—could defeat the latter’s natural propensity to mutate and spread."

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THERE ARE MARKET TESTS FOR CITY GOVERNMENTS.

A recent Strong Towns post opens by acknowledging that reality.

At Strong Towns, we’ve never been opposed to taxation or to governments that charge fees for services like water, sewer, or electricity. To function over the long term, local governments must have revenues that exceed their expenses (in accounting terms, this is called “profit”). Local government is the way we collaborate in a place but, just because the role of local government is to serve the community, that does not remove the constraint of needing to have profit. They must run a surplus.

Ignore that constraint, and bad things happen. Places fall apart. Calls for help are unanswered. People suffer.

What follows, though, is a scary manifestation of the extent to which local governments go to maintain the grand fiction that somebody else is paying for the services.

If we are going to build a mile of new road, extend a pipe to a new subdivision, or annex property into the city, what are the real financial implications of that transaction? And not just the money we get, but what is the cost of the liability we take on?

Cities don’t answer these questions, and standard accounting practices don’t prompt them to, and so local leaders routinely find themselves over-committed and under-resourced, especially a couple of decades after they’ve experienced a growth spurt and those liabilities—all those miles of road, street, sidewalk, and pipe—are now in need of maintenance. When this happens, cities frequently turn to the assessment process.

Illegally assessing for routine maintenance is the most common way that residents experience a lack of transparent local accounting. A property owner will pay taxes and fees for decades, believing that they are paying, in part, for the maintenance of the community’s essential infrastructure. They have the impression that, when the street in front of their home needs repairs, the city will fix it. This is a reasonable expectation because this is how things are supposed to happen.

Here I was, treating that Monopoly hazard as business as usual. "I wonder if there's a way to sell more widespread road tolling as a way to provide property tax relief, since in much of the country that old Monopoly hazard, being assessed for street repairs, is still part of the town budget."

It's annoying enough to draw that Chance card.

It's got to be more annoying to get it in real life, for street repairs, or, as is now the case, for upgrading the streetlights.  Now put yourself in the position of a property owner getting hit with an improper assessment.

A direct assessment is a charge the municipality levies on a specific property as part of a project. To be legal, the project must increase the value of the property by at least as much as the amount being assessed. If you’d like to know more, I wrote an article earlier this year about a judge’s decision declaring that St. Paul’s direct assessment program is illegal. That article explains a lot of the nuances of direct assessments that I won’t repeat here.

Somewhere, Bastiat is nodding in understanding.

Some property owners even report having prior assessments on the same property they are still paying off. If a group of these property owners got together and hired the same attorney, they would kill this project.

Of course, then their road will fall apart, and that’s the underlying problem. Even though tax rates are relatively high, the properties don’t generate revenue to pay for the maintenance of their own road, let along all the collector and arterials roads the city has obsessively built over the years (including my favorite stroad to nowhere, which I think it approaching 15 years in place without any development).

And this is where the city is stuck. They have an insolvent development model, and their residents expect more services than they are willing to pay for—more than their tax base can support. Instead of reckoning with that fact, instead of changing their approach, they convince themselves that they can do something illegal (direct assess for maintenance), because that is more responsible than letting their roads fall apart.

If you buy a home, you should know that you will have to eventually pay an assessment for road maintenance, or so city officials tell themselves. They tell themselves this because they know it; they know that they are screwed without illegal assessments. They know it because they live it day in and day out, but their residents don’t.

The alternative to assessing the residents for street repairs is hoping that there will be another transportation porkulus and that your Member of Congress has enough juice to put your broken road into the list of projects.  "All that the periodic porkulus bills do is prolong the fiction that somehow we can rob from Peoria to fix Pittsburgh, while we rob Pittsburgh to fix Peoria."

And yet, local congestion tolls or parking rates that reflect the opportunity cost of that street space are somehow Not to be Raised in Polite Society.

PONTIFEX MAXIMUS? NARKOM?

Before Thanksgiving, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed asked his readers for suggestions to a person granted plenipotentiary powers to rule over higher education.  That plenipotentiary had the hypothetical title of "Grand Poobah for a Day."  That rank arose out of youthful recollections of Howard Cunningham's lodge, beating out "Head Honcho" (which no doubt somebody would problematize) or "Big Kahuna" (cultural appropriation, you know.)

The suggestions, themselves, are instructive, although, since it is not possible for even the Most Exalted Grand Poobah to implement them all at once, there is still reason to think of institutions of higher education as in competition with each other, and subject to some sort of market test.

Today, though, we focus on the choice of a proper honorific for that plenipotentiary.

The pop culture reference to a Grand Poobah appeared during the American High, as the elected leader of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes., at least a decade before Happy Days. The Bedrock Lodge figured in several Flintstones episodes, although the only one I recall was one devoted to the efforts of Wilma and Betty to be able to attend Lodge meetings.  That episode even featured a cross-dressing Wilma in full Water Buffalo rig, crashing the meeting.  Hanna and Barbera were out in front of women's liberation, while Gloria Steinem was still waiting tables at a Playboy club.

PASS THE POPCORN.

The gerontocracy that is the Democrat House leadership passes the torch.  The communist on corporatist fratricide continues.  "Congressman Hakeem Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but that affiliation for the heir apparent to the current House Speaker should not be taken at face value."  There's enough gridlock now that the United States will not turn into Venezuela all at once, or in the next two years.  It's not that there aren't people who would welcome such a transition.

When Nancy Pelosi announced two weeks ago that she will no longer lead House Democrats, she said: “The hour has come for a new generation to lead.” But in what direction?

Pelosi quickly endorsed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to replace her as leader. NBC News offered the common media frame: “Pelosi made history as the first female speaker of the House, while Jeffries, the current Democratic Caucus chairman, would become the first Black leader of a congressional caucus and highest-ranking Black lawmaker on Capitol Hill.”

You can count on much of the mass media to shower the 52-year-old Jeffries with accolades, largely supplied by fellow Democrats. But, overall, a closer look reveals a problematic record.

Early on, before becoming a New York state legislator, Jeffries worked for years as a corporate lawyer. In Congress—while he has taken a few progressive positions like cosponsoring Medicare for All and voting to cut 10 percent of the military budget—his emphasis has been in sync with the party establishment.

That party establishment is still soft on crime and beholden to technocratic overreach. But that's not becoming Venezuela fast enough if you write for Common Dreams.

“I’m a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now,” Jeffries told The Atlantic in August 2021. But during the same interview, Jeffries added: “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” (Ironically, Jeffries was echoing the “fierce urgency of now” phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., who was a democratic socialist.)

Jeffries likes to jab leftward. In 2016, he called Bernie Sanders a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign-policy experience.” A 2018 profile in The Economist—titled “High Hopes for Hakeem Jeffries” – concluded that he “is nearly as moderate as a safe-seat Democrat gets.” The article pointed out: "Though he supports the principle of universal healthcare coverage, he speaks of ‘the importance of market forces and getting things done in a responsible fashion.’ Quoting Ronald Reagan approvingly, he suggests this means promoting a flourishing private sector outside the ‘legitimate functions’ of government."

That's unfair to Crazy Bernie, who, recall, did honeymoon in Soviet Moscow.  To hear a Democrat conceding "legitimate functions" suggests there's still room to make the case for enumerated and limited powers.  Last time I checked, though, the so-called Progressive Caucus was not yet a majority among House Donks; and the more those kids cut up, the fewer safe seats there will be.

WELCOME TO THE CLUB.

Diesel trains cruising at 100 mph or better are one of Cold Spring Shops's favorite things.

Afternoon Hiawatha at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, summer 1964.

Kent Kobersteen photograph scanned from Scribbins, The Hiawatha Story,  page 120.

Similar signs are now being posted in south Florida, although I fear that impatient motorists will pay them little heed.

In California. your tax dollars are at work, slowly providing viaducts and fills for the demonstration bullet train that might connect Merced to Tracy by the mid-2030s.

That tax dollars are involved guarantees that the fool's errand will continue. At least when private investors in the Chicago - New York Electric Air Line saw all their money spent on a big fill over a small creek, they stopped subscribing.

LIFE SUCKS. THEN YOU DIE.

That's the title of a send-up of the canonical country music song originating in Britain in 1988 with a thrash metal band, whatever that means, and later picked up by a Massachusetts group called The Fools.  (If I'm referring to two different songs, please let me know.)  Here are the opening verses, as I recalled them, from that Fools page.

My house burned down in a flash of thunder
My wife ran off with a one-legged plumber
My crops fell dead when the riverbed went dry
My dog got squashed by a pickup truck
My son ran away and got hooked on drugs
My daughter's knocked up by the class of '85

People say that life is good
It don't seem good to me
I'm lost without a paddle
And I'm headed up shit creek
People say that life is fun
But I don't know why
As far as I can tell
Life sucks then you die

That might be a Profound Meditation on the Empty Lives of Flyover People.  On the other hand, you might be familiar with E. A. Robinson's "Richard Cory."  Here's the town squire who seemingly has everything, while the townfolk are struggling.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The bank panics of the transition from Gilded Age to the so-called Progressive Era will do that to people.

PERFORMANCE TESTS. HIGHER EDUCATION ADMINISTRATORS OUGHT TRY THEM.

Northern Illinois University's athletic director recently released long time volleyball coach and disk jockey Ray Gooden.  Ticking the diversity boxes is still a good thing in the athletic department, but you're only as good as your last tournament appearance.

“We appreciate Ray’s years of service and his dedication to NIU Athletics, the volleyball program and his student-athletes,” [athletics director Sean] Frazier said. “His record and accolades speak for themselves. He has made a huge impact on this department, the university, the volleyball community and beyond. Unfortunately, over the last six seasons, we have not seen the program take enough steps forward to compete for MAC Championships and NCAA Tournament appearances, which is the standard we have set.”

Just once, I'd like to see the academic administrators be held to similar standards.  For example, the standard for department heads might include hiring and retaining faculty whose publications are in major journals, and cited by researchers at peer and aspirational departments.  Northern Illinois currently expects all aspirants to tenure to submit grant applications: there might be a criterion for successfully obtaining competitive grants from the national institutes or endowments or the National Science Foundation.  Those departments that grant doctorates ought be evaluated for their success at placing graduates in peer or aspirational departments, particularly in tenure track jobs.

The "hiring and retaining" part is more complicated than it looks.  Is a department providing the sort of academic environment that makes the new arrivals look so good that they get hired away?  Alternatively, is the department beset with professional jealousies in such a way that the high achievers have a current curriculum vitae circulating at all times, which is to say one foot out the door?  How fares the honors program?

Thus, there are obligations for the deans and the university-level academic administrators.  Are deans engaging in the sort of leadership that fosters collegiality and limits the corrosive effects of professional jealousy in departments?  Are promotions and pay raises available to successful faculty as a matter of course, rather than as a desperate response to an outside offer?  Is the net effect one of raising the institution's profile among the sort of striving students who might read the U.S. News rankings? I recall, thirty years ago, a university president expressing fears that his institution was "becoming too selective."  That might play well with the egalitarians, but apparently there are limits.  For example, a trip to the Orange Bowl did raise student interest in Northern Illinois, but apparently even an institution with reservations about becoming too selective has standards.  Why not make performance goals in recruiting stronger students and a faculty worthy of them be the standards for the college and university administrators?

In athletics, the powers that be are certainly not standing still and waiting for the aspirants to catch up.  Take Wisconsin football.  I'd say, "please?" but for the way the athletic director is making changes.  The football team struck the director as stagnating under Paul Chryst, with appearances in the conference title game, let alone that expanded playoff format, seeming unlikely.  Thus, at mid-season, he made defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard the acting head coach.  There was a lot of talk about Mr Leonhard having a good chance at becoming head coach.  But that acting tag had to be chopped away with the Axe, and when that didn't happen, Cincinnati head coach Luke Fickell got the gig.  I lose track of the conference alignments these days, although I recall that Cincinnati as one of the mid-majors inspired Ron Dayne to play a lot better at the end of the last century, and more recently Cincinnati made that expanded playoff.  Presumably, that is the standard at 1440 Monroe Street.  Performance tests, don't you see?

I. ADVENT

The temperate weather of Thanksgiving weekend was conducive near Cold Spring Shops headquarters, and the street will again be blinged out almost like Candy Cane Lane.

With the widespread abandonment of coronavirus restrictions, despite continued protestation from the remaining corona tyrants and Democrat operatives, but I repeat myself, the seasonal trains are out and about again.

We start with a look at Chicago Transit Authority's holiday train, which will again be accepting passengers as it makes the rounds of the L system.

Shutterstock image retrieved from Secret Chicago.

Last year's meditation on solar-powered blinged-out houses is relevant this year as well.

THE RETURN OF THE MEDIEVAL.

Higher education as we understand it originated in the seminary, and many of the trappings of the academic vocation have an ecclesiastical look to it.  Now, it appears that fidelity to the One True Faith is back as well.  Statistical illiteracy, for example, is not a flaw, it is a feature, as its presence makes claims of "disparate impact" easier to make.

No rigorous and fair-minded researcher with any understanding of statistics, experimental design, or the irreproducibility crisis would take this study seriously. Indeed, the fact that it passed peer review is yet more evidence that peer review now functions to credential and accelerate groupthink rather than to deter it.

Such shoddy research is far too common in the sciences and social sciences. This is a grave enough problem in its own right, but it has more serious consequences for America as a whole. We have delegated policymaking authority to professionals who claim expertise in wide swathes of administrative policy, judicial decisionmaking, and legislation. Those experts who claim the mantle of “Science” are foremost among these would-be professional experts. Such men and women far too frequently subordinate the search for truth to the search to impose a preferred policy. Their shoddy research methods are part and parcel of their desire to forward a political agenda—although it should be emphasized that even researchers without a political agenda now use statistical and experimental methods guaranteed to produce a mass of false results.

It's supposed to be the role of the university to weigh those conflicting claims in the most objective way practicable.

Universities themselves should be viewed as places where members of an academic community gather to discuss ideas of the day. They should generally not take stands on issues. The opinion of the president of XYZ University should not be construed as representing the policy position of the institution, since universities are comprised of many individuals with diverse viewpoints, each of which should be heard. University presidents and deans should keep quiet as a rule on public policy matters.

To be sure, if Russia ordered a successful nuclear missile strike on New York City, it probably would be appropriate for university presidents to condemn the event. But it is better to err in the direction of remaining neutral than to make institutional policy pronouncements on behalf of a diverse campus community. In short, universities should be true “marketplaces of ideas,” not moral or political arbiters on issues of the day.

That might be the ideal. These days, though, skepticism about any sort of truth being knowable, combined with some faculty members holding priors so tight you'd be hard-pressed to sodomize them with a jack-hammer, and academic life is an exercise in the bullies constructing their truths out of untruths.

Typical academic disciplines work by seeking truth, and then using the facts that have been established to attempt to build true theories which explain how the world works. The result of that is each development in disciplines like physics, math, logic, engineering, technology, philosophy, and biology proceeds by studying the world and attempting to describe it accurately. Then, using the facts which can be established intellectuals seek to correct past errors and create better and better explanations of how the world works. It’s a lot like building a building, there is a foundation that is built on the enlightenment liberal tradition of rationality, and each generation adds to the work that has been done by the previous generations. Using reason, logic, and evidence careful academics go about correcting mistakes, eliminating past errors, and developing knowledge so that each generation gets a picture of the world which is more detailed and higher resolution then the previous generation. The process is not perfect, nor is it linear; there are starts and stops as old errors are discovered and need to be corrected, but that is the general shape of what is going on.

There is no end to this sort of adding on. Continental drift or not? Big bang or not? Quantity theory of money or not?  You don't get to say "Now that the results make me comfortable with my priors we stop looking."

As such these academic activist scholars are not like builder building a building, attempting to build true theories on a strong foundation of truth. They are like activists cooks in an intellectual kitchen cooking up theories that help them achieve their political aims. You can imagine a chef of wokeness saying “take a cup of Marx, add two cups Frankfurt School, A gallon of Foucault, add 10 ounces of Derrida, a pinch of Gramsci, bake in the universities for two decades and then you get a delicious stew of wokeness! Yum Yum!” This is how wokeness developed.

Now, the question remains “how do these academic activists resolve all the apparent contradictions?” This is a question that deserves it’s own essay. However, a brief answer is twofold. First, the ideas are repeatedly re-theorised in a way that allows them to be put together so they can be used to achieve their political aims. The second is that because wokeness makes heavy use of a postmodern view of the world, judge their ideas with postmodern standards. Since their main standard is “is this idea useful in our struggle to achieve our vision of social justice?” they will often judge the validity of an idea by how useful it is for them to achieve their aims, rather then by the traditional standards of reason, logic, and evidence. As such they tend not to concern themselves with meeting the standards of the enlightenment liberal tradition of rationality which they reject.

In practice this often appears to the average person as different standards in different situations and appeals to different theories depending on what is useful at the time, refusal to engage on fair terms, changing the rules of debate, and making use of language games and shifting definitions. As frustrating as this may be, it is important to remember that from within their own system this all makes perfect sense and there is a logic to what they are doing.

As a purely academic exercise, inventing theories for the sake of inventing theories might be fine. Using intellectually constructed realities as organizing principles for reality realities will not end well.

THE INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

The heirs to Leon Trotsky continue to wish for a possible freight railroad strike becoming the opening act in the long-postponed Final Crisis of Capitalism.

Under the guise of being the “most union-friendly president in American history,” the Biden administration has pursued a deliberate policy of using the services of the corrupt union apparatus to prevent the outbreak of strikes and curb wage growth by enforcing substandard contracts. On the railroads, Biden sought to replicate the “successes” that he scored earlier this year in the refinery industry, as well as on the West Coast docks, where 20,000 workers have been kept on the job since July without a contract.

However, railroaders are challenging more than just the policy of the current administration. They are combatting the entire structure of “labor relations” as it has evolved over the past 40 years, the central feature of which has been the complete integration of the unions with the state and the corporations. The job of the union bureaucrats, which they have dutifully and ruthlessly carried out and for which they have been handsomely rewarded with billions of dollars in corporate stock, has been to help force through massive cuts and suppress all working class opposition.

Under this framework, the living standards of the working class were thrown back by a century, while inequality reached its highest levels on record. Now it is buckling under the stress of decades’ worth of pent-up social anger which can no longer be postponed.

I don't know, the continuation of that essay suggests that the only place there is an industrial reserve army is in the evergreen disciplines.  (As an aside, remind me again, how the absence of television or polio vaccines or instant replay translated into higher living standards for the working class of the Coolidge era.)

During the last week of voting on the railroads, 50,000 graduate students in California and New York City went out on strike to demand massive pay increases to cover skyrocketing rent and cost of living. They are members of the United Auto Workers, where Will Lehman, a socialist and Mack Trucks worker, is running for union president on a platform of abolishing the bureaucracy and establishing rank-and-file control.

Since the rail contract was first proposed in September, tens of thousands of pilots and other airline workers have voted to reject contracts and authorize strikes. Like railroaders, they are under the jurisdiction of the anti-worker Railway Labor Act. While the corporate press and the union bureaucracy present this as a “disaster” that would hurt “the economy,” tens of millions of workers would welcome and support a rail strike and would take it as the signal to push for their own demands.

Perhaps so, although from the perspective of a retired railroader, not so much.

I quickly discovered from an angry old conductor that every minute counts when you are being paid by the hour—especially when you’re on overtime. We had a “toe to toe” confrontation over our release time once when our watches disagreed by a few seconds. “That was ninety-five cents you were about to throw away. And don’t forget to put in for the eighty-five cents arbitrary we’re owed for coupling an air hose.”

These men of the Greatest Generation—who scavenged for food during the Great Depression—scoured their weekly statement of earnings, checking it line-by-line for any minuscule errors or omissions. Certain that they were purposely being cheated, they immediately ran to their union rep, upon finding any discrepancy. One brakeman even insisted there was a conspiracy afoot: “Think of how much money they [the railroad] saves if they short every employee out of a single minute. It adds up to a fortune.”

Most accepted the fact, that with their level of education, even after having served in the military during World War II, they were reasonably well compensated. They coveted the free healthcare that railroad employment (at the time) provided them. To that end, their families simply had to understand that the privilege of “marking off” amounted to a voluntarily pay cut since they weren’t compensated whenever they didn’t work. Holidays were observed only when they happened to fit into a railroader’s work schedule. Neighbors had to accept that any social plans were temporary, and subject to sudden unannounced cancelation. When able to attend a high school play or sporting event, the railroader was excitedly introduced to his children’s friends as the dad they’d alluded to from time to time, just to prove that he actually existed. When the coal miners went on vacation, or the Florida tourist season ended during the summer, a drop in business meant that railroaders were furloughed—cut off. Thus, the rule of thumb for the older generation of railroaders was to make as much as they could while they could.

Those older heads might have trouble understanding why what looks like a generous increase in pay packets with no change in terms of service doesn't sell. The newer railroaders see things differently.

I began to notice the hastening evolution in the grand scheme of things as my career progressed. The old heads retired and were replaced by younger men with high school or college educations. While some were likely management candidates, most soon realized that the pay and benefits they earned as union-represented agreement-covered workers greatly exceeded what they could expect to make sitting behind a desk, Monday through Friday, nine to five. The difference was that because of seniority, the better paying jobs and preferred days off belonged to senior railroaders. It always seemed unfair to me that the time when a wife and family needed the railroader the most was when he could schedule his vacation the least. So, he marked off without pay, if he could afford to.

As women began to enter the railroad workplace in the operating crafts as well as many clerical positions from which they had previously been excluded, the dynamics of the industry changed dramatically. Time off became even more important.

Less senior railroaders mark off and deal with it. Tenure trackers whine in Inside Higher Ed about their lack of work-life balance.  Meanwhile, the brass hats continue to argue the previous sort of contract.

By contrast, contract negotiations remained pretty much standard. The old management playbook appeared to be, “Open the cage, throw in a little meat, and watch them fight each other over it.” To the older men, who grasped every penny as if it was their last, getting a few cents more per hour was a huge victory. When the enhanced contract was finally agreed upon, the increased wages were factored in and calculated, and a long awaited back-paycheck was issued. Once in the bank, it usually meant a new car, a family vacation, or paying accrued debts. No one seemed to care that paid vacation or sick leave never remained on the table long after initial Section 6 notices were introduced. It was all about wages. Those old fellows were grateful for a job that put food on the table and a roof over their family’s head, even if it meant that they seldom got to sleep there, and most of their meals were enjoyed conversing with the waiter at some corner hash house in the middle of the night. A raise was a raise.

That seems to be the attitude of the Jarrett regency, that is, if the Jarrett regency is still paying attention to the possible railroad strike in another week.  The new hires, on the other hand, have an understanding of labor markets that's beyond Karl Marx or any other minor post-Ricardian.

The most prominent change has been the expectation of the new breed of employees who now work for the railroad—airline pilots, teachers, servicemen and other educated professionals. Management can’t just callously toss money on the table and expect their workers to go away with a smile on their face counting their blessings, as they did in the old days. There are so many other options for workers or job candidates, with or without higher education levels. Railroads refuse to recognize that they can’t rely on past practice to guarantee future performance.

As to the current national quagmire: Quality of life is not just a passing fad. It’s a core concern. You’re going to have to deal with it. It’s not going away.

Failure to offer some program of paid sick leave is not only unconscionable, but patently unsafe. I often went to work so sick I could hardly keep my head raised to observe the signals ahead—but I had to. For most other people, even those employed in entry level occupations elsewhere, an allotment of annual sick leave is customary. It only makes sense that most successful companies do not want sick employees in the workplace risking infection and further absenteeism to others. Not so the railroads.

I repeat, because repeat I must: we are all underemployed compared with our ancestors.  Now it might be that two-plus years of printed money being handed out to encourage people not to work is contributing to the current impasse in transportation, but I don't carry on about income and substitution effects in labor supply simply to tease the have-it-all feminists, do I?  Nor about the false economy of running more trains with fewer workers, when that becomes, predictably, the absurdity of a dog-catch crew being called to a train, which subsequently doesn't move, and twelve hours later another dog-catch crew shows up at the same train.

Trimming the workforce to the bare bone in order to cut costs has simply exacerbated the dilemma. Thanks to maximization of human resources (by whatever name you wish to call it), there no longer is ample manpower to fill vacancies, even when assigned workers are ill. Predicated on yo-yo force reductions of the past, it was assumed that after months of payless paydays, due to the pandemic, workers would be flooding sign-up locations in droves, and climbing aboard their trains. Not so. With attractive alternative options, new hires didn’t come back, and long-time workers who were qualified resigned and claimed the Railroad Retirement benefits they had earned. People are voting with their feet.

Railroad management can publicly deny that a toxic atmosphere of threats and retribution exists. The pressure to produce more has become even greater, but you can’t extract blood from a turnip. As if to add insult to injury, railroads boastfully assert that employees really add nothing to their bottom line. The unions have picked up the gauntlet that management has thrown down and has answered, “We’ll see.” They’ve done a masterful job of educating the public this time, especially the press.

There might be battle lines drawn, but this time the sound track isn't Buffalo Springfield's.  Labor markets serve to reallocate resources, and railroad managers are getting a hard lesson on that point about now.

THANKSGIVING IS AN OCCASION TO GIVE THANKS.

There will be no Friday short takes this week.  Let us contemplate a global short take, and give thanks.

Inequality has declined in many ways. But when thinking about inequality, it is essential to remember that humanity was once almost universally poor, hungry, and miserable. In a state of widespread deprivation, any progress can create inequality. But equality of misery isn’t desirable, making [vice president Kamala] Harris’s claim about a rise in global inequality highly misleading.

The prospect of a railroaders' strike, combined with the staffing challenges the trucking companies and air carriers are dealing with, is reason for me to emphasize, again, our traditional Thanksgiving message.

Spare a few moments thanks for the young people in harm's way around the world, for the people in emergency services who deserve to sit down to the turkey without the alarm ringing, for the people in transportation, tourism, and entertainment passing on their family gatherings to enhance yours.

I give thanks for your readership and your comments.  Cold Spring Shops will be taking a long weekend off.

NO MORE BOMBASTIC RHETORIC.

Fifty years ago, I successfully campaigned for student government using the post title as a slogan.  Yes, that was the university of Wisconsin, and yes, a constituent or two noted that the slogan was bombastic itself.

Those were interesting years for student government, which was in transition from being dominated by hardcore pro-Khmer Rouge types to the Pail and Shovel Party, whose platform was to convert the student government fees to pennies and scatter them for students to scoop up with beach toys.  They kinda-sorta-delivered on that promise, as well as another one to bring the Statue of Liberty to Madison.  There was a precursor slate calling itself the PIMP Party, for People Indignant about Most Parties Party and one or two of theirs were also in the student senate at the time.  Steve Brist and Gerry Kassalow and I moved on to other things.

IT'S ON.

The maintenance, signal, and shop craft brotherhoods have rejected the proposed new railroad contract, and now the conductors have said no.

By the slimmest of margins, conductors represented by the SMART-TD union rejected the deal, fueling the prospects of a nationwide strike that could begin as soon as Dec. 9. Some 50.87% of voting members rejected the agreement.

Yet the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen ratified their agreement, as did yardmasters represented by SMART-TD. Some 53.5% of engineers backed the deal, along with 62.4% of yardmasters.

Turnout was a record for both unions, reflecting the contentious relationship between railroads and the rank and file.

Sorry, I can't help you with that acronym.

Under the provisions governing railroad labor relations, there is a cooling-off period through December 8, although if the continuing negotiations appear to be at an impasse, railroads can impose embargoes on freight as early as next week Monday, November 28.

SOMETIMES IT SUCKS EVERYWHERE.

Arnold Kling characterizes elite academia as a cuckoo's nest.

I think that one reason the problem is difficult is that the parents who want their children to attend elite schools are so screwed up. At least in K-12 education, there are parents who are actively fighting against Woke indoctrination. Maybe this is only taking place sporadically, and perhaps the cause is hopeless. But at least not every parent is taking this lying down.

When it comes to college, as far as I can tell, parents are desperate to send their children to Ivy League U, regardless of how insanely Woke it might be. Even ten years ago, before the Woke stuff hit, when I was teaching at a high school, the intensity of parents’ desires to see their children get into top universities saddened me.

I have yet to meet a parent who says, “Don’t worry about getting top grades in high school—it’s ok if you don’t get into Harvard. And choose extracurricular activities based on how well you enjoy them, not on how they will look on your transcript.” Much less a parent who says, “Don’t you dare go to Princeton! Not even if you get a full ride! Instead, find a school that’s halfway sane.”

I wonder how wide-ranging that sample is. It's likely that there are still families that, thanks to budget constraints and geographic location, are not obsessing over whether or not their spawn get that thick envelope from the Ivies.  It's also likely that there are families where the desperation over getting their spawn into the Ivies is out of recognition how far the regional comprehensives, land-grants, and state flagships have strayed from challenging their students, and the choice is between bundles offering woke indoctrination with better networking opportunities as opposed to woke indoctrination with game day.

A number of commenters on the post are making similar points.  Good.