LET'S MAKE A PROPER CASE FOR TRAIN SERVICE. Amtrak's Sunset Limited, the United States's only truly transcontinental passenger train, will not operate east of New Orleans for at least the next six months.

The Sunset is a canonical example of what my grandfather called the "try-weakly" train. It goes to Jacksonville and tries weakly to get back. Its advocates are going to have to do better than this.

The stop in Tallahassee was added in 1993 and now accounts for as many as 3,000 passengers a year.

The Floridians spoil more than 3000 presidential ballots per election. To put those loadings in perspective, Metra's Zephyr Corridor (Burlington Northern Santa Fe, if you will) loads as many as 3,000 passengers an hour at Naperville each workday morning and returns them that evening. Timekeeping tends to be better, too.

PRICELESS. Doxagora is not impressed with the New York Times's pay site. It's worth going over there, to see inter alia the public Paul Krugman characterized as "Atrios with a John Bates Clark medal."

LOOKING FOR THOSE MARKET TESTS? Easily Distracted reflects on tenure, alternatives thereto, and the difficulties of offering the higher education.

The problem in a way is that American universities and colleges don’t, can’t, think in any centralized way about what allows them to function well, what maximizes their internal productivity and generativity.

Some of it is the result of very deep-seated internal contradictions about what kinds of productivity is meant: productivity of knowledge, of engagement with the world, of numbers of “student units” churned out, of reputation?

More of the problem is that the consumers of higher education and its products (whether students, employers or the public sphere) don’t really know how to evaluate the relationship between external reputation and internal process (something that some of the discussion of Drezner’s case illustrates). They don’t know what goes on inside a university, or what it is that faculty do.

For some of these things, there are market tests. Consider the performance of equally capable graduates twenty years hence. The usual metrics for prestige have no effect on their salaries or occupational status, ceteris paribus. For other dimensions, it's harder to evaluate. Consider the time spent by faculty testifying before legislative bodies or acting as expert witnesses? Does that detract in any way from their research? Or are they making more productive use of their research.

Consider, further, that there are enormous common and joint costs. A professor does some reading. That turns into a course revision and an article. To what cost center shall we charge the reading? Or does it matter? The article attracts the attention of someone at another institution. That turns into a job offer, or an opportunity to participate in a seminar, or perhaps into a public service opportunity. Again, to what extent does that reflect well on the internal organization of the university?

AUTHORITY AND AUTONOMY. Photon Courier has advice for managers.

One could simply say "for best results, combine individual entrepreneurship with a high degree of teamwork." But I think de Grandallana says it much better.

That's a rule written in blood, in this instance the blood of French and Spanish sailors prior to Trafalgar.

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

Accordingly, both he and his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief's signals ...

More Trafalgar posts to come. This upcoming Friday is the bicentennial of that battle. (Was that the last major fleet engagement before the Steam Era?)

R. A. N. E. S. T. K. S. Game theory older than law and economics? Consider Robert Aumann and Michael Mashler, "Game Theoretic Analysis of a Bankruptcy Problem from the Talmud," 36 J. Econ. Theory 195 (1985). Here's what one observer has to say.

The Babylonian Talmud is the compilation of ancient law and tradition set down during the first five centuries A.D. which serves as the basis of Jewish religious, criminal and civil law. One problem discussed in the Talmud is the socalled marriage contract problem: a man has three wives whose marriage contracts specify that in the case of this death they receive 100, 200 and 300 respectively. The Talmud gives apparently contradictory recommendations. Where the man dies leaving an estate of only 100, the Talmud recommends equal division. However, if the estate is worth 300 it recommends proportional division (50,100,150), while for an estate of 200, its recommendation of (50,75,75) is a complete mystery. This particular Mishna has baffled Talmudic scholars for two millennia. In 1985, it was recognised that the Talmud anticipates the modern theory of cooperative games. Each solution corresponds to the nucleolus of an appropriately defined game.

The article puts into perspective the famous Solomonic divide-the-baby solution (1 Kings 3:16) that many economists refer to as an early manifestation of incentive compatibility (the true mother prefers to give the baby to the false claimant rather than have him killed.) Apparently the rules of division predate Solomon. Somebody who pays closer attention to this than I notes,

[Solomon] even pretended to apply the well-known law of dividing disputed property. If two people come to court holding on to the ends of a piece of clothing, and each claims it to be his, the court divides it and gives each one half. King Solomon seemed to pretend to be ignorant of the many complicated details of this law, and to think that it applied to babies as well, which would have been ridiculously simpleminded. No judge would ever make such a foolish mistake. Yet, he succeeded in convincing the two women that he was serious.

Nonetheless, he was careful not to let the trick go too far. He specifically commanded his servants to bring the sword to him, not to give it to one of the guards.

Presumably the guards hadn't figured out incentive compatibility. The complications the commentator refers to, however, are complications that can be cracked using game theory. There are three conflicting principles to resolve. First, if the smallest complaint exceeds the property to be divided, it is divided equally. Second, only the disputed part of the property is to be divided (thus, if one person claim the whole cloth and the other half, one shall be given 3/4 and the other 1/4; Solomon's baby follows immediately.) Third, some disputed properties can be divided in proportion to the claims. Equal division comes into conflict with proportional division. The contribution of the cited paper is to suggest a theoretically consistent basis for allocating a property among contested claims in such a way that (loosely) no coalition of claimants is capable of obtaining a more favorable division.

JUMPING ON THAT TENURE TRACK? Bryan at Econ Log suggests a Ph.D. in Economics has a lot of upside potential. Read it, read the comments, draw your own conclusions.

BLOCK THE PUNT 'ROUND MINNESOTA. TOUCHDOWN? SURE, THIS TIME. It's been a wild weekend for college football. I made sure to spend some time grading and mowing the yard, but managed to catch some of the action. The highlight, at least for a displaced Cheesehead, was Wisconsin's theft of a win from Minnesota, a team that committed far too many special team mistakes to win, starting with a punt-'n-fumble (that old "Little Eight" standby) on their first series nullified by a false start on the punt. Minnesota put on a Badger-style clock-killing drive, scoring for a 10 point lead with just over 3 minutes to play. Wisconsin got a touchdown. A Minnesota defender tackled the receiver in the end zone and got the face mask and 15 yards. Wisconsin on-side kicks. Minnesota recovers close to their goal, and punts on fourth-and-one. Bad snap from center. Blocked punt. Three white jerseys on the ball before it rolls out of the end zone. Minnesota still not out of bad special-team plays. A Wisconsin cover man strips the return man on the kickoff. Badger ball. Take a knee. Game over. Axe stays in Madison.

Elsewhere, Michigan and Penn State put on their best imitation of a Mid-American second half, with the lead changing hands, each team running up consecutive scores, Penn State grabbing a lead with just under two minutes to go, and Michigan scoring on fourth-and-four with 0:01.xx on the clock to win. That ended just after Eastern Michigan and Northern Illinois put on their best imitation of the Big Ten, with Northern Illinois (the place that pioneered homecoming) winning homecoming, 24-8.

Other webloggers had eventful football weekends. Irish Trojan has live shots of Southern California stealing one from Notre Dame. The game was played at the east end of the South Shore. Blogs for Industry surveys a number of eventful games from around the country. I like his characterization of some normally big games being overtaken by events.

STORED SERVICEABLE. Public Brewery announces an embargo on posting for the present.

The past nine months of blogging have been fun, but it's time for me to take a break. Now that I'm directing a graduate program and trying to write a book, I find that I don't have the energy to keep up with the blog.

That terminology does not suggest a service ready for the Scrap Line, hence I use a different category from the valuation reports.

It's been a bit quiet around the Shops this weekend, as I decided to procrastinate from grading by doing some modeling and enjoying some college football. The grading is now done.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of Education returns to Jenny D.'s lot.

AYUP. Tom McMahon produces a series called "Four Block World." Today's is particularly apt.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. Fruits and Votes now has a URL that matches its name.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of the Capitalists returns to Business Pundit. I'll attempt not to invoke the "terrible twos ..."

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. The Superintendent commends two articles on the nature of scholarly publishing. One, at The Valve, continues the reaction to Chicago's thumbs-down to Professor Drezner. There's a lot to recommend in this article. Read it. I'll be here. There is an excerpt I wish to expand upon.

A less obvious issue is the way the existing tenure system may negatively affect diversity and liveliness of academic thought. To some degree, the charge that tenure is mainly a system of credentialism that rewards the expression of acceptable opinion is an old one. What’s new in the humanities and many of the social sciences is the vast oversupply of academic labor. Departments hiring from overstocked pools find it easy to replicate themselves, making it more likely that they’ll grow more intellectually and politically homogeneous over time. The tenure system potentially worsens this situation. Tenure battles are notoriously unpleasant and time consuming. (Indeed, the whole system of review and evaluation diverts considerable resources away from teaching and scholarship.)

Focus on that topic sentence. Now consider the boiler-plate in any department's formal statement of its tenure policy. Such things exist. Sometimes they're easily gotten to; other times they're safeguarded by laity who will pull them from the relevant file should the archbishop be called before a legislative inquisition. The statement will likely include language about "establishing a reputation" or "established a reputation" as a qualification for tenure. The criterion for promotion to professor will further define the nature of that reputation.

Pull out the catechism.

How does one establish a reputation?

Publish in reputable journals?

What makes a journal reputable?

Other people read and cite the articles in them.

Any other people?

People in leading departments.

Can you quantify that?

Yes.

Here comes the problem. Newmark's Door recommends an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (this may be embargoed to the paid side shortly) on the consequences of researching to the quantification. It's easy enough to note who is citing whom (compare and contrast with the Blog Ecosystem) and count which articles and which journals are more frequently cited. In the world of scholarly journals, the Higher Mammals have higher impact factors.

Impact-factor fever is spreading, threatening to skew the course of scientific research, say critics. Investigators are now more likely to chase after fashionable topics — the kind that get into high-impact journals — than to follow important avenues that may not be the flavor of the year, says Yu-Li Wang, a professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "It influences a lot of people's research direction."

That influence has also led to a creeping sense of cynicism about the business of science publications. Journal editors have learned how to manipulate the system, sometimes through legitimate editorial choices and other times through deceptive practices that artificially inflate their own rankings. Several ecology journals, for example, routinely ask authors to add citations to previous articles from that same journal, a policy that pushes up its impact factor. Authors who have received such requests say that the practice veers toward extortion and represents a violation of scientific ethics.

But landing a paper in a high-impact journal is not per se evidence of a high-impact paper.

The measurement is just an average of all the papers in a journal over a year; it doesn't apply to any single paper, let alone to any author. For example, a quarter of the articles in Nature last year drew 89 percent of the citations to that journal, so a vast majority of the articles received far fewer than the average of 32 citations reflected in the most recent impact factor.

So what is an academic, particularly one starting out, to do? Consider this:

"You're a better scientist if you're a happy scientist."

Interpret it this way. If we really knew what the answers were, we wouldn't have to do research. Therefore, we can choose to research something that appears to be fashionable even if it makes us miserable. The top journals might not take it anyway, and a lesser journal that takes it with the hope of raising its impact factor might be disappointed. Or we can research what interests us and enjoy the work. The top journals might not take it anyway, and there are sufficient lesser journals that a few iterations of shopping it will publish it. There is no guarantee that your work will become a hot topic in the future. But do you really want to be in the position of the woodpusher who is attempting to stay one move ahead of Kasparov in the King's Indian rather than enjoy the game? Or would you rather be cheerful, and quite likely more productive than you would be chasing the current high-impact topics? (That quest, by the way, is likely to be futile if you're not at one of the forty departments claiming to be in the top 25. By the time the high-impact stuff is released as a .pdf or published out of such a place, the folks there have had two years worth of seminars and coffee chats to push it beyond what you're starting on.)

THERE ARE LIMITS. Phil at The Sports Economist notes efforts by the race committee at NASCAR to limit the size of any racing team's stable. That sounds like a variant on the rule the America's Cup Challenge Committee adopted, limiting the number of boats any syndicate could build (and I think limiting the money that any syndicate could spend, but that may be incorrect.) That after Bill Koch built five boats for America³'s successful 1992 defense and Prada bought five boats for their unsuccessful 2000 challenge.

DESTOOLING THE CHIEFS. University Diaries reports that American University's Benjamin Ladner will no longer be indulging himself like a medieval archbishop on American's tithes. As part of her research she discovers another destooled chief, Towson's Mark Perkins. The news report suggests something more disturbing at work.

It is easy to lampoon such scandals as bizarre sagas of individual excess, the acts of latter-day Louis XIVs who have figured out how to game the system. But there is a common thread that suggests another dynamic is also at work. All four presidents were employed by workmanlike institutions striving to raise their reputation, and all four were encouraged by trustees to lead a life of luxury, in hopes that this would help project a positive image for the institution. If the presidents crossed the line, their trustees acted as enablers in nudging them near it.

One wonders how effective such a strategy is, or whether it's confirmation of a remark Paul Fussell made years ago about universities serving as the modern version of salons and courts. I think of the early Nucor Steel. For years, this company rented headquarters somewhere in North Carolina. They may still be there for all I know. Their in-house engineering staff kept working away at a thin-slab caster, with which the company hoped to recycle high-grade scrap into sheet steel suitable for appliances and automobile brackets without having to build a two-mile long rolling mill complete with walking-beam reheat furnaces and sufficient stands to mash a slab as thick as a mattress suitable for a medieval archbishop. Bethlehem Steel, a company that indulged its ranking managers in a manner the Upwardly Mobile universities seek to emulate, gave their in-house engineering staff a project. Evaluate the thin-slab caster. The engineers came back with a 1 1/2" thick report, replete with bullet points and executive summary and heavy-grade paper suitable for an illuminated manuscript ... detailing why the thin-slab caster wouldn't work.

Anybody seen Bethlehem Steel lately?

Where is the university president who will ask the trustees not to spend the money on additional janissaries and space grabs for the deans and other trappings of Bethlehem Steel?

This observation defies parody.

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, says there is something to Ladner's defense. College presidents today are expected to spend so much of their time fundraising that universities are justified in picking up many of their expenses, and in paying for the kind of luxury that will impress a potential donor. This is especially true in Washington, he said, where the bar for entertaining is very high.

"Prospecting for donors is an expensive venture. An institution has to invest money to get money," he said. "It's an attempt [by schools] to break through whatever academic ceiling they have by raising more money. By having a larger endowment you can have more financial aid, so you can get better students and you can get better faculty."

If memory serves, part of the difficulties the academic units face is the reluctance of the universities that have endowments to dig into them.

What is the university's equivalent of the thin slab caster?

THE POLISH POST OFFICE COMES TO MINNESOTA. King at SCSU Scholars compares, unfavorably, the sale of now required to be behind-the-counter but non-prescription cold remedies with the routine sale of cheese, assuming there was cheese, in the old Soviet Bloc. Office Max does something similar with printer cartridges, but the cartridges are in a bin behind the checkout counter, which means one exchanges the ticket for the cartridge, if it is in stock, and pays for it.

He asks, Is that socialism? More likely, it's the consequence of failure to socialize. Cheese, assuming there was cheese, in the old Soviet Bloc was likely out the door to go unpaid. (How's that for an East German construction?) Office Max may have discovered that cartridges are similarly mobile. What's the deal with the cold remedies? Have Minnesota pols decided that letting cold remedies be sold off the rack as feedstock for party drugs is contrary to the public interest?

DIG DOWN. The season of giving comes early this year. California Yankee has suggestions for where to send money for earthquake relief in Southwest Asia.

IS A WEBLOG HAZARDOUS TO AN ACADEMIC CAREER? Chris at Signifying Nothing has been following the reaction to Chicago's decision not to put Dan Drezner forward for tenure. Lots of links. His reaction to the hypothesis that the weblog sank the case:

I probably need not point out that plenty of tenured faculty take advantage of the security of tenure to spend more time with their families, stagnate scholastically, dodge professional responsibilities, and/or bed undergraduate and graduate students. Somehow the idea of Dan potentially doing research on blogs post-tenure seems like a de minimis concern compared to the other possibilities.

Jim at Blogs for Industry takes a more balanced position.

My reaction is that the fact that he was genuinely surprised suggests that the quality of the junior faculty mentoring at the U of C was piss-poor. Maybe I'm wrong, but everything in Dan's blogging is inconsistent with someone who would be in denial about the warning hints that he should have been getting if his senior colleagues - and especially his department head - had concerns about his tenure case.

Some faculty don't share my views about the need to mentor our junior colleagues. I think it's wasteful to hire talented people and then not help them succeed. I also think it's unfair to lead people on. Others take the view that if you need the help figuring out what to do or where you stand, then you don't deserve to succeed.

That last might be the case at Chicago. Some years ago, before the Internet, the Chicago Tribune did a feature on life in the economics department, this during that department's run of Nobels. Two anecdotes stand out. One related the ability of one economist to email another economist with a question and get a response within 10 minutes ... at 0100. The other described an untenured faculty member who asked whether a department meeting might be winding up soon as his wife was waiting in the car and he didn't want her to contemplate divorce. One of the older heads said "You'd fit in better if she did." Apocryphal? I don't know. The mentality at the most famous research departments is one in which people put aside other interests to wrestle to some sort of resolution challenging problems, because those challenging problems are of greater interest than, oh, having any kind of outside interests. Some people are more suited to that work than others. It's also the case that tenure decisions are among the more political decisions departments at any level make. A strong publication record is necessary but not sufficient. I've been at institutions that have had the opportunity to pick up good people simply because a department or a dean had a vision that did not involve the skills of the person under consideration.

The mentality also comes out in a Boston Globe article recommended by 11-D that reports on flexible tenure-track options available to academic moms.

Schools have to confront bias ingrained in the academic culture against people who don't put in grueling hours. They have to consider what to do about people who can't afford a half-time salary because they are divorced or live in an expensive real estate market such as Boston. And they must wrestle with the delicate question of whether it's possible to do groundbreaking work, especially in the sciences, without working long hours.

Is it bias, is it tradition, or is it a positional arms race among the most ambitious researchers? Believe me, I could make lots more progress on the railroad by putting the numerical analysis away, switching to machine-graded exams with fewer assignments, and blowing off all the committees. I won't be that irresponsible. Perhaps that dynamic is at work among tenure-trackers with the flexible-track option.

In a 2003 survey of Ohio State assistant professors, one in three women and one in five men said they would be interested in reducing their work hours to have more time for family and personal needs. And yet, by May, only 23 of the university's 3,000 faculty members were taking advantage of the part-time option, on the books since 1996. Of those 23, Irwin was one of only two who worked part time before tenure, suggesting that some professors did not view it as a viable option.

And note this.

"My experience in science is that great work is done by people who are pretty much over-the-top committed to it," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yes, that's the biologist who took umbrage at Harvard President Larry Summers's hypothesis about the relatively few female science professors. But she's right. The best in their fields are at it all the time, because they enjoy doing it.

Note also the time commitment of a flexible tenure track.

But [an Ohio State flex-tracker] had to work 35 to 40 hours a week, part time by the standards of academia, for half her former salary and full benefits. She recently started working 70 percent of full time and said she and her husband, a professor in the same department, are lucky to be able to afford her reduced salary.

That's about right. What's that Mungowitz End line about academic leisure means picking the 70-80 hours of the week you're on task?

RECOGNIZING ECONOMISTS. This year's Nobel Memorial Prize winners are Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling, for their work on coordination. Props to my chairman, who was suggesting Professor Aumann as a possibility. Years ago, he had received intelligence that the committee had been considering a four-way award to Nash, Aumann, Selten, and Harsanyi (note the acronym) but there's apparently a tradition of recognizing no more than three people.

Kieran at Crooked Timber makes this observation.

From an outsider’s perspective, and speculating a bit on the politics of it all, the result seems like an interestingly balanced way to mark the rise of game theory in economics. While Schelling’s work is analytically acute (and the man himself is famously sharp in discussion), it is not presented in a technical mode. You can sit down and read the essays. Aumann, on the other hand, represents a much more mathematized wing of the field, proving theorems and developing new conceptual tools with precise formal properties. So, for instance, while Schelling can write essays like “Strategic Relationships in Dying” and “The Mind as a Consuming Organ”, Aumann’s papers have titles like “The Bargaining Set for Cooperative Games” and “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.”

Yes, but Aumann also worked on a rather strange mishna involving the division of property. The title is "A Game Theoretic Analysis of ... Talmud ..." (it's in one of my stacks of stuff but I'm not sure where.) That's in addition to his pioneering work modeling an economy with a continuum of agents, such that each agent, whether producer or consumer, is truly infinitesimal and unable to affect the price. Price-taking is a convenient assumption, but modeling it in a meaningful way is not easy. Tyler at Marginal Revolution studied with Professor Schelling and has numerous posts. Just scroll. If memory serves, the "I'll meet you under the clock at noon" New York coordination equilibrium originated with Schelling. Hit the trackbacks to this post for more commentary.

WILL YOU LOOK THIS GOOD AT 97? The East Troy Railroad put Sheboygan Interurban 26 into demonstration service over the weekend.


That cheap digital camera does not work real well with large subjects and bright lights. Here is the same car a year ago, before the motors and control equipment were installed.

The car makes all the proper traction noises as well as the creaking you'd expect of a wooden-bodied car. On the other hand, if it's the arks you prefer, the railroad had the two-car South Shore train out running.


The featured car is South Shore No. 30, now running as East Troy Electric 30, having regained its original number rather than the 1130 it ran as for some years. It's a Pullman box smoker with the original leather-covered bucket seats and wood-panelled locker and toilet doors.