SAD NEWS. The Northern Star leads its first issue of the new semester with a report of the death, from leukemia, of business graduate student Ben Peters, who earned an A in the public policy class I teach. He finished the class on time despite having to travel to hospital to begin chemotherapy. My condolences to the family and Mr Peters's friends, some of whom might also have passed through my classroom.

TAKE THE TRAIN TO THE PLANES. Chicago-area residents now have one-seat service from Union Station, Glenview, or Sturtevant, Wisconsin, to Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport. The Chicago Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch notes,

The 74-minute train ride from Union Station to the Milwaukee airport (52 minutes from the Glenview station) will likely tempt many airline passengers weary of the travel hassles at congested O'Hare International Airport but who haven't discovered the convenience of Mitchell.

Some days you're hard pressed to get from downtown to the state line in 74 minutes, let alone north to Milwaukee, on the alleged expressways. Now if Amtrak and the state departments of transportation could get their act together on those 65 minute trains ...

CHORNIY NEG, BELIY SNEG, VETER, VETER. Does the weather forecast sound any better in Russian?

RUNNING EXTRA. Oops ... misremembered that first line. Chorniy vecher ... no wonder I couldn't find it on Google. (English translation) As penance, I will refrain from being a yob by not going to the mat over this!

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson moved from Freux to Jenneville, Belgium. But that proved not to be his unit's direction of advance.

Then turned around and headed through Luxembourg, Luxembourg City and arrived in the town of Berborg, Lux., just south of the City. Had a nice room here and six hour radio shifts. Snowy and cold. Stayed in the former home for the blind so there was plenty of room. Stayed 10 days here and fought the Nazis all the time. Shortly before the end of January, headed back to Belgium, spending one-night stops in uncomfortable spots chasing the Wehrmacht which was retreating rapidly. Heavy fighting through January, and returning to Belgium, following the Germans.

A different letter notes that the Wehrmacht was "rolling pretty fast just then -- in reverse!"

TONE DEAF? Word reaches the Superintendent's office of a new BMW coupe called the 645Ci. The name is a losing proposition, with none of the associations of speed and power of the A-4 or the old 4-4-2. Does an association with the 645E3 V-20 diesel powering a glamorized freight locomotive compensate for a lack of aesthetics?

KEEPING THOSE TRACKS OPEN. Union Pacific is having trouble moving goods out of California account mudslides assisting the deterioration of former Southern Pacific tracks in the Los Angeles area. Brian at Hit and Run has been hosting a discussion that invokes Atlas Shrugged. (In some ways Union Pacific resembles Taggart Transportation, although it has its moments of excellence.)

It's no help to west-coast importers, but the old Chippewa-Hiawatha line will remain open from Saukville to Kiel, in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin and Southern Railroad (their website is today suggesting that weather does not bother them) will take over operation from Canadian National, who took over for Wisconsin Central, who took over for Soo Line, who took over for the Milwaukee Road, who took over for the Milwaukee and Northern, potentially the inventor of the Milwaukee's parallelogram herald.)

DID PRINCE HARRY SPILL THE BEANS? Julian at Hit and Run notes London Underground's efforts to discourage youthful misbehavior in the Tube by playing unfamiliar music.

Tube bosses intend to use recordings of Pavarotti recitals, Vivaldi and Mozart in a battle against anti-social behaviour at 35 stations on the District, East London, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines.

He has just one fear.

Just hope they don't accidentally get anything from Siegfried in the mix; I assume Tony Blair doesn't want to have to explain why a bunch of soccer hooligans just annexed the Sudetenland.

Or sought Anschluss with Brittany?

DC-9, FINIS. (That's the model later known as the MD-80 and after the merger, perhaps with some modifications, as the Boeing 717.) Insufficient market for a small flying bus, apparently.

RUNNING EXTRA: The closing hits Matt Welch right in the old neighborhood.

RESTRUCTURING IN GREEN BAY. Packer general manager Bob Harlan is announcing the appointment of Ted Thompson as general manager, with Mike Sherman holding the titles of vice president and head coach. We knew that was coming, although Mr Harlan has been contemplating this move since early in October.

No mention in this statement of any changes in the defensive coaching or personnel, as noted here, or of an extension of Coach Sherman's contract. The second-guessing and recriminations are not yet over.

It is difficult to combine the jobs of coach and general manager in one person, complexities of the salary cap or consequences of injuries or no. The coach has to motivate people. The general manager has to tell them they haven't earned a pay raise.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CLEAR SKIES. (But it's so cold outside.) No matter. There's a new barely naked-eye comet, Machholz, that's easily picked up in binoculars, and Sky and Telescope has the details. (There is a good picture, but it's protected. Click and study.)

That got me thinking about NASA's space station sighting site. It has been improved. But the news releases on new orbiting objects are sadly old.

OPEN YOUR MOUTH, TELL ME WHO YOU ARE. Christopher Orlet provides the Quote of the Day in an American Spectator column.

Often there is good reason to be skeptical of change, particularly when it comes about out of laziness and the dumbing-down of grammar rules. Again, compare Fowler's inflexible 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage to current grammars like Woe is I, in which rules that are troublesome or too difficult to remember are pronounced outdated or dead. (Rats, if I had known this was possible in my college days I would have pronounced Algebra outdated and dead and gotten on with my binge drinking.)

What the conservative sees as threats to the mother tongue are dismissed by the linguist as the natural progression of language, and nature trumps civilization (here represented by long-established rules) every time. These threats include the politicization of language, as in politically correct speech; threats from bureaucrats, businessmen, and politicians who use language to obfuscate, confuse and deceive, or in the case of academics to disguise a dearth of ideas; and, finally, threats from linguists who promote a laissez-faire approach to language.

The punchline, misuse of "prove" excused:

A slovenly, anarchic language reflects poorly on us. The language liberals may have abandoned their duty to preserve the language, but the recent popularity of "why oh why" books such as Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary Of Disagreeable English prove that the public is serious about its upkeep.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FISH WANTS A BICYCLE? Maureen Dowd of the alleged newspaper of record discovers she's been had.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

Villainous Company is, shall we say, unimpressed.

Ms. Dowd might also contemplate the difference between masculine fantasies and what they decide in real life. I think we can all agree that, if asked by an 'unbiased researcher', most men would say they "prefer" to hook up with [insert mindless, sex-starved starlet with surgically enhanced breasts and serious dependency issues here].

Um, not necessarily. Mark Kleiman (via Unfogged, where a lively discussion of the Dowd column is in progress) has gone public with his objective function. (Reword it to include "ability to re-rig your own sailboat is a plus" and it could be mine.)

But there's more serious stuff in the Villainous Company post, including a link to something resembling real research. Money quote:

Mary Balfour, director of Drawing Down the Moon, an executive dating agency based in London, says that college-educated and professional men in their 20s and 30s now want women who match their intellect and earning abilities. "It is only those in their 50s and 60s who tend to take a deep breath when introduced to powerful women," she says.

No surprise. The older cohort came of age as the times they were a-changin', and those changes were disruptive to everybody, as the men had to confront at the time and the women are now discovering. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I recall in the early 1970s a number of policy changes that the activist types had long advocated taking effect in rapid succession, without observing much of an increase in the happiness of the activist types.) There is also a quote about money.

Most couples require two paychecks to stay in the middle class, a math lesson that is not lost on men.

Just can't get away from that Say Aggregation Principle, can we? There's more.

A 1999 nationally representative sample--meaning it mirrors the population as a whole--of 4,405 couples found that divorce was more likely when a woman has no earnings than when she brings home a paycheck. In particular, the marriage of a woman with no earnings was more than twice as likely to dissolve as that of a woman who had a paycheck.

Having no income can be risky for a woman, and not just in the stability of her marriage. A wife who drops out of the work force and stays out for a long time will never make up that lost economic ground, even if she returns to the work force. Worse, if her husband's income starts to slip--an all too common event these days--the couple can be in trouble, both financially and emotionally.

Here we go again, what is the effect of no-fault divorce on the labor force participation rates of married women? Villainous Company summarizes the lesson.

And so once again, we're back to economics and tradeoffs and maximizing utility after all. Men and women don't behave all that differently - it's just a question of what we value. And the answers (at least in the real world) are more easily divined by looking at the decisions we make than about what we say we value.

Actions speak louder than words.

Laura at 11-D (if you want to keep busy, go to the top and start reading; she's been doing a lot of thinking and linking) is hosting a discussion based on this observation.

Whenever Maureen Dowd goes after the flaws in the male character, I get a little uncomfortable, which is odd, because I really have no problem with male bashing. But when Maureen does it, I start shifting around in my seat and tapping my feet. I feel like she's showing too much of her cards. Maureen has a full set of Samsonite baggage. ...

Maureen's baggage aside, does she make a good point? Do men really want to jump a non-English speaking maid in a uniform over an award winning columnist?

An award winning columnist who has made repeated disclosure of her baggage? (Don't you just love the words people use to speak of human interaction. Issues. Baggage. Co-dependency. Bleah.) And what do all of her references to nannies and maids say about the men she's observing?

ONE YEAR AND COUNTING: Professor Althouse:

It's been pretty cool. I remember starting off in utter obscurity, thinking I'd better take care what I write, because I've got to assume that, eventually, some people who know me are going to find this. And now the Sitemeter is up over 900,000.

Reminder to the Superintendent's younger readers: it's not who you know, it's who knows you. One of the people who knows Professor Althouse is Professor Reynolds at the farm team for Northern Illinois administrators.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Here comes Book Review No. 2: Michael Crichton's State of Fear (details or compare prices) which I disposed of overnight. I won't give away too much, although the basic plot (catastrophic weather events staged by overwrought environmentalists) is in common knowledge and I found the fate of one famous primitive-celebrating naif particularly appetizing. Mr Crichton has apparently had enough of academic fads (the postlude includes a riff on eugenics that is worth your attention) including one retired academician holding forth as follows. (pp. 458-459).

"What happened," [the retired professor] continued, "is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry [dubious premise, but I digress -- Ed.], formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the [political-legal-media complex.] Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can't say. Thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't sweat, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.

"The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that -- so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I am telling you."

That's all I'm going to tell you, but you've just received more substance from me than you'll get from Dwight Garner at the alleged paper of record. (via Russell at Cafe Hayek.)

INVESTING YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY "CONTRIBUTIONS." Deinonychus antirrhopus links to a proposal by recent Nobelist Edward Prescott for the creation of a savings fund rather than the current (mislabeled, in the Superintendent's view) trust fund.

Prescott favors augmenting Social Security with forced savings plan that would put the savings into something like the Federal Thrift Savings Plan. The plan would institute graduated payroll taxes with the money going into these private accounts.

Advantages:

The benefits is that since the workers taxes really aren't taxes, but forced savings the negative impact of higher taxes is minimized or even eliminated. In fact, labor force participation might increase and savings should increase as well, according to Prescott.

My only issue, is that a forced savings plan might be offset savings by people who are currently saving via 401ks. However, those workers who do not have access to such retirement accounts would now be saving. So on the whole I'd say that savings would probably increase.

Also, the increased savings would mean higher investment and capital, which could very well translate into higher wages. Also, more productive capital will mean a more productive economy, which is also good for the current Social Security system.

Nathan Newman has given some thought to the management of such a fund as well, and proposes that it be managed directly by the government. Why?(these are the points, go to Mr Newman's site for the details.)

(1) Greater efficiency: Administering personal accounts that function like 401(k)s for 150 million social security beneficiars would be an administrative nightmare.

(2) Risks are distributed through collective investments: The point of any insurance system is to distribute risk.

At the heart of these proposals are two basic policy ideas: horizontal equity and natural monopoly. The horizontal equity argument cuts two ways. All participants in a single public program will be equally exposed to risks in a single National Retirement Mutual Fund would do; as participants might differ in their risk preferences, however, all participants will be exposed to the risk preferences of the fund managers, who might, or might not (but I'm getting ahead of my story) reflect the preferences of the median voter (or will it be the marginal voter, or the most vociferous voter?) The natural monopoly argument suggests that the cost of administering and partitioning a larger pool of money imposes a smaller burden on each account holder than would be true of smaller pools of money with fewer account holders and more reallocations by each account holder. But is that true of mutual funds? An investor has a choice among mutual funds that have similar investment objectives if different managers. Mightn't it be simpler to obtain a break for the small investors that won't come up with a big grubstake out of 4% of a minimum wage part time job by holding a Demsetz auction for the right to manage one of four to ten approved mutual funds?

There is a third point Mr Newman offers in favor of a government-managed trust fund.

(3) Government investments could be directed to investments that strengthen wage growth: The idea that the government might actually use all this capital in the social security trust fund in a pro-active manner gives rightwing economists hives, but it makes a lot of sense.

One does not have to invoke the specter of socialism to raise questions about this proposal.

While social security investments would not give the government control of existing industrial production, the government could strategically direct those investments to companies and industries that strengthen job growth and the wage base of the american economy, which in turn would expand the payroll taxes being paid into the social security system. Such Economically Targetted Investments (ETIs) are used by state and city pensions funds to strengthen their local economies on the same principle. See here, here and here for examples of such programs in pension funds around the country.

That sounds a lot like industrial policy, or perhaps like the so-called socially responsible investment funds that act on the aesthetics, or perhaps the prejudices, of some investors. We are, however, talking about investment managers that serve at the pleasure of the President, or who might be subject to vetting by the Senate (much as Federal Trade Commissioners?) The administrative costs that are saved in pooling all the moneys might be dissipated in rent-seeking over who shall be appointed as commissioners and what investments are in the national interest in addition to offering lower returns than mutual funds less constrained. The suggestion is interesting, but leaves open future criticism of the national investment monopoly for robbing poorer workers of returns they could have under a competition for the right to invest their forced savings in several funds.

It might be wise for Mr Newman to rethink income accounting. Consider this.

Privatizers want to talk about "returns on investment" from social security, while ignoring the fact that social insurance systems are not like regular investments. Individuals start out with a fixed amount of capital and the only returns that matter are from annual investment returns. But governments investing their capital have two sources of economic returns from those investments -- conventional returns from equity or bond markets PLUS the taxes derived from the domestic economic growth fueled by those government investments.

Given that the strength of the social security system is going to be heavily influenced by domestic growth rates over the next 75 years, to ignore the second part of that equation in developing an investment policy for social security would be completely irrational.

The concluding operation is correct: any public project that relies on taxing gains from trade (that, kiddies, is what any consumption or income tax, including a payroll tax does, and a head tax relies indirectly on gains from trade) is only as effective as the ability of the economy to generate gains from trade. A tax is a wedge between productivity and return, and to suggest that there is somehow a free lunch to taxing returns, or to using tax revenue to support local but less productive activities, weakens some of the observations that precede it.

Alex at Marginal Revolution has some clarifying thoughts on the distinction between investments and insurance that are worth your perusal.

RUNNING EXTRA: Nathan Newman has responses to this post, as well as responses to View from a Height and Deinonychus antirrhopus.

YOUR HELP MAKES US LOOK BAD. Via Betsy's Page, news that the Indonesian government would like the U.S. military to be less helpful.

[Indonesian Vice President Jusuf] Kalla's government also forced the Abraham Lincoln, from which Navy pilots have flown dozens of food supply missions to the hard-hit Aceh Province, to steam out of Indonesian waters because they refused to let U.S. pilots fly training missions in their air space.

The Indonesians also refused to let the Marines coming ashore rebuild roads, establish a base camp or carry arms.

The opposition is also afraid of looking bad.

A spokesman for Abu Bakar Bashir said the Indonesian cleric, who is on trial for terrorism, regarded the relief operations by Australian and US military personnel as a dangerous development, overshadowing the role of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI).

"We are suspicious of the presence of foreign soldiers and their show of force and the minimum publicity given to assistance from Arab states," said Fauzan Al Anshari, a spokesman for Bashir's militant Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia group.

"It's dangerous, this idea by Acehnese that US and Australian forces are their guardian angels - more popular than the TNI."

Tough. You have to have a functioning civil society, and neither the Indonesian government nor the mullahs get that yet. Captain Ed is pleased with the consequences.

I'm happy to see that I underestimated the impact of the aid. While I still don't think that the gratitude will be permanent, especially at this level, it helps in the short run. It also serves to discredit much of the propaganda of the Islamofascists in the region, a development that Bashir laments in his statement. That also indicates how little of the Islamofascist energy really goes to helping Muslims, as groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Hamas (and countries like Saudi Arabia) have had slow to non-existent responses to the humanitarian need of their own within in the ummah.

The Indonesians may now understand that these groups offer nothing but human sacrifice and blood-drinking murder to appease their conception of Allah, unrecognizable by any others. And the Islamofascists might now have to confront their own emptiness before ever gaining back any credibility outside of the serial-killer lunatic fringe among them.

Find me the sura that reads God Helps Thofe Who Help Themfelves.

ARE FIRST IMPRESSIONS LASTING? The Eclectic Econoclast (making a slight name change to avoid confusion with a consultant trading as Econoclast) discovers something about course evaluations.

If students can, in five seconds(!!!), provide instructor evaluations that are the same as the ones we get from students who have actually been in the course for an entire semester, there is a very good chance that the standard evaluations conducted near the end of each term are not measuring much more than presentability, performance, and atmosphere.

Does that mean course evaluations are a waste of time?

My skepticism does not, however, mean I would favour abolishing student evaluations of instructors. As I said at the outset, evaluations are probably important for measuring consumer satisfaction with the product universities provide.

But the consumers are not the students. Students participate in a process called learning. The ability to make connections and not be fooled makes them somewhat more valuable to employers (to get a good job, get a good education and all that.) Are people sufficiently intuitive to see that potential in five seconds?

ANOTHER GIANT PASSES. King at SCSU Scholars notes the passing of Robert Heilbroner.

He wrote The Worldly Philosophers, which during my generation in undergraduate economics programs was fairly required of all econ majors. As I've mentioned, through most of my undergraduate program I waffled between business/economics and philosophy as majors, ending up with a minor in the latter. I have to say I liked Heilbroner's book, even though it was far too praising of command and control economic policies. It was an exposure to how much economics touched political philosophy and vice versa., which during my generation in undergraduate economics programs was fairly required of all econ majors. As I've mentioned, through most of my undergraduate program I waffled between business/economics and philosophy as majors, ending up with a minor in the latter. I have to say I liked Heilbroner's book, even though it was far too praising of command and control economic policies. It was an exposure to how much economics touched political philosophy and vice versa.

I'm a bit older than King, and my first exposure to economics was three weeks of history of thought at the beginning of an introductory macroeconomics course required of all business majors. Lucky me. I learned only later that my course was one of the last to be structured that way: most begin with production possibilities or income-expenditure and no context on Why This Matters.

Professor Heilbroner was in touch with the Zeitgeist in Worldly Philosophers. Guest lecturers at Wisconsin in those days addressed such topics as fine-tuning the economy.

REDISCOVERING INFORMATION CASCADES. Do you stop at the truck stop where all the trucks are because that's a signal the food is better? Newmark's Door links to a column that rediscovers the information cascade. (The parking lot is full because the first trucker made a choice, the second trucker matched the first choice, repeat as necessary.) The article, which has a fun information cascade simulator, and links to others, explains,

So, just because one restaurant is crowded and its neighbors have few customers doesn't necessarily mean that the packed bistro is the place to be. By a fluke, it may have attracted the first few customers in the area, and the rest just followed the crowd.

Professor Newmark calls the columnist out.

Mr. Peterson doesn't seem to realize that, far from being a surprise, his story is an example of a phenomenon that has been well studied by economists. We call it a negative network externality and it is unlikely to persist in the real world. Is there no word-of-mouth about restaurants and are there no restaurant reviewers? Can't the better restaurants find ways to convince potential customers of their quality? Would people continue to eat at a restaurant solely because they had eaten there before by chance?

And herein rests an interesting economics problem. The information cascade generating the network externality is an illustration of a potentially suboptimal pattern of imitation. It might have been present in the adoption of basic oxygen steel furnaces and the jury on diesel locomotives is still out. But there is another phenomenon in economics, particularly where commitments are not easily reversed, called "economic hysteresis," a potentially suboptimal pattern of delayed action. But modeling the flow of information about desirable and undesirable restaurants, given initial choices, is not easy, although I hope to have something more intelligent to say about it by semester's end.

MORE ON THE CALCULATION PROBLEM. David at Catallarchy has weighed in on Marginal Revolution's calculation debate questions. This answer to the first question is a more succinct version of mine.

How does rational calculation take place within a firm? In some ways it doesn’t. Fortunately for the firms, there are enough other market factors and external prices available that managers are not totally blind. Many decisions can be determined to be good or bad by the reaction of the relevant stakeholders. Bad decisions are punished by employees quiting or demanding higher wages, customers going elsewhere, vendors giving stricter terms, and owners dumping the stock.

(Note that all of these rely on markets to resolve disagreements over the best use of a resource.)