QUOTE OF THE DAY.

I hate that phrase, "sorry I'm late." I have to go to so many meetings. And I can tell you in advance who is going to be late.

Read the rest.

BACKWARD BENDS THE SUPPLY CURVE? Bill at Atlantic Blog quotes the abstract of a recent Boston Fed working paper, "Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades." Key point:

We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases.

There's something perplexing about the last sentence, in that the income effect leading to the backward-bending supply curve takes effect at higher incomes. The .pdf is a bit slow to load at the moment. Perhaps more next week.

SECOND SECTION. Got the paper to open. The authors note the same perplexity early on. Paper runs 61 pages. Definitely for next week.

THE IDEAL SECTION. The spirit of Samuel Insull and Charles Coffin lives on at the South Shore Line. Live from the Third Rail picks up a Chicago Tribune story about a test installation of wireless communication the transit district will make available in April.

The service will be tested for 60 days, from April through June, on a seven-mile stretch from Dune Park to Ogden Dunes.

But how will this service alert users WIRELESS ENDS 300 FEET?

PUBLIC CHOICE SCHOLARS WILL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. Michael Barone:

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to argue that pork barrel spending was politically benign because it was one way for an administration or for the congressional leadership to hold together a majority that could act decisively on other, more important issues.

If memory serves, that's the first lesson chief of staff Arnie van Damm gives recently-promoted President John Patrick Ryan in Executive Orders.

InstaPundit demurs.

Such unwritten-constitution arrangements, however, require self-discipline to function properly. That seems to be in exceptionally short supply among our political class today.

Dissertation topics on "The Welfare Losses of the Transportation Bill" will therefore be in long supply.

SPECIAL PLEADING? Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education interviews two Kates from Wisconsin, retired president Katharine C. Lyall and senior lecturer Kathleen R. Sell, who are shopping their new book, The True Genius of America at Risk: Are We Losing Our Public Universities to De Facto Privatization? (Maybe for the summer reading. There's a little problem in optimal intermodal competition I want to solve first. Stay tuned.)

Read the interview and make your own judgements.

One wishes, however, that university administrators would choose their analogies carefully. Here's a defense of the corporate-style salaries and golden parachutes senior administrators receive.

This means we need to recalibrate both faculty and administrative compensation against the markets in which they must compete for talent. We cannot expect public institutions to succeed in a competitive environment while continuing to treat them like wholly owned state agencies. States that cling to this outmoded state-agency model, will soon find their world-class public universities becoming as distinctive as their state departments of transportation.

Is this comparing Colorado's Betsy Hoffman to Amtrak's David Gunn?

On the other hand, Wisconsin's department of transportation provides money for the Hiawatha. Last time I checked, you can expect to complete your trip in 89 minutes or less about 90% of the time. Are there any degree programs in the Wisconsin system as reliable?

PRACTICAL HOUSEHOLD TIP. Keep the vodka in the freezer. Mmmmm, pertsovka. Works for the akavit also.

I BELIEVE THAT'S WHAT KINDERGARTEN IS FOR. University Diaries attends the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics conference, so you don't have to. Onetime Carter Administration courtier Hodding Carter gets off the silliest line so far.

We don't have enough dialogues...all universities should have mandatory life skills courses for all students, not just athletes... these guys need to learn what it means to be a man...

It strikes me that after 12 years give or take in elementary and secondary schools that on one hand might be more interested in feminizing the boys and on the other hand bend the rules to keep the boys with the best shot at leading the team to State eligible, the life skills the athletes are being reinforced in are called "sliding by and hoping for the fixer," talents easily imitated by others.

Professor Soltan also mentions the Bad Jocks site, another enterprise of radio's Karlson and McKenzie. The first mentioned host is not related, at least within four generations.

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS. Richard at Unlocked Wordhoard will be providing the public affairs people at Troy University an interview about professors with weblogs.

He gives good reasons for not using his site to dish about his university, or to hype it.

My purposes are somewhat different. I take faculty governance seriously. Sometimes, this site has to carry the minority reports.

MORE PRODUCTIVITY FOLLIES.

Playing School, Irreverently, begins a fisking of yet another proposal, this time from within the university, to turn the undergraduate degree into something else. (I'm using the Academic Universe feature from the Northern Illinois University library to get the article.) Profgrrrrl objects, first, to the assertion that it's faculty salaries that are somehow responsible for the university's difficulties.

Let's see. So the university is in the business of educating, we're the ones who do the educating, we're paid far less than we would be in the private sector (for those of us who have that as an option), we work all kinds of crazy hours, we pay for a lot of things on our own that private sector employees never do (how much did you out of pocket for books, travel, home office supplies last year?) ... but our salaries and support, meager as they are (at least at public institutions) are too much for the system to bear?

She's also got some thoughts about the outsourcing the proposal introduces. Here are the specifics from the proposal.

Outsource some courses and programs. Many training firms sell their services to businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Why not make those services available to college students? Although some of the training is technical and highly specific, much of it is not. Colleges could save money, offer a more diverse education, and increase quality by hiring some of those vendors. Students could also save money if colleges were willing to award academic credit for some of those programs.For example, Dale Carnegie Training, founded in 1912, operates in over 65 countries and has about six million graduates. Each of its programs is carefully developed, frequently evaluated and updated, and survives because of its commercial success. Relatively few colleges waive students' tuition or give academic credit for its courses. Yet I recently completed the introductory course, which presents Carnegie's theories of human relations, and saw a remarkable transformation in those who attended. People who mumbled during their first speech won speaking awards by the end.

And our forensics departments can't do this? Oh, and maybe stimulate some higher-order thinking skills about rhetorical devices at the same time. The business interest in winning friends and influencing people is in selling the product. Perhaps the higher-order skills include "seeing through the spin," something that affects commercial success with a time lag. (Are you listening, General Motors?) Profgrrrrl sees where this proposal is going.

This is all an argument for being a technical institute rather than offering a liberal arts education. Coplin's other suggestions follow suit: offer credit for life experience; let students teach themselves via school activities and service projects (and use their free/cheap labor, too!); give certificates rather than degrees.

Not to mention that the service learning can easily be captured by the Welfare State to get some cheap labor for public programs that would otherwise have negative benefit-cost ratios.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Charles at The Torch discovers what might be some inconsistent thinking at Wisconsin-Eau Claire. On the one hand, the university stands by its policy of prohibiting resident assistants (we used to call 'em housefellows) from conducting Bible study groups out of their rooms. On the other hand the university is encouraging faculty to participate in or nominate students for recognition in the upcoming Vagina Monologues season. (In New Orleans February is for Mardi Gras, high water be d***ed. On campus, February is for Eve Ensler. Bleah.)

If you recall, that ban came about because an administrator feared students might feel “judged” if they knew their RAs were Christians (or Muslims). But if students are really so delicate that they cannot deal with knowing that a minor authority figure like an RA calls himself a follower of Jesus or Mohammed, how can they be expected to bear knowing a professor (certainly someone with much more power over their lives than a mere RA) fancies himself a “Vagina Warrior?”

Quite so. Power systems are only supposed to be questioned if they give the wrong sort of people power. Read all about "liberating tolerance" here. (Begin at the beginning. Road rage isn't something from the 1990s.)

A ROUGH WINTER IN MITTELEUROPA. Heavy snow loads cause the collapse of an exhibition hall roof in Katowice, Poland, with at least twelve fatalities. A skating rink roof collapsed in Bad Reichenhall earlier in the month, also with fatalities. Engineering, unfortunately, includes a reckoning of worst-case scenarios. (I think there's a book review under development here ...)

REVEALED PREFERENCES. We're turning students away from classes because the Fire Marshal would object to any further crowding of the rooms. At the same time, there are some state-of-the-art computer stations frequently unused.

The orange and white warning signs on the door state the computer lab is not open to the general student public."It's not a general access lab," said Charles Schumann, manager of lab operations. "It was never intended to be one." Instead, the lab is used for events such as faculty development, one-day seminars and academic programs, according to Elizabeth Leake, associate director of ITS customer support services."

Altgeld 100 is the largest classroom lab on campus. It features 48 computers and was designed to facilitate large groups as a classroom lab," Leake said. "ITS maintains this facility, on behalf of our provost, by reservation for large groups."

The article goes on to note that the maintainers would like to see it used more frequently. I have seen it in use a few times, sometimes for training with the general accounting software and sometimes for Blackboard. (With the accumulating evidence of the power of active learning techniques, the reliance on passive technologies such as Blackboard and Powerpoint troubles me. Spending more and more and producing less?)

TWENTY YEARS AGO. Despite weather-related delays that prompted some observers to mock the effort, Space Shuttle launches were so routine by January 1986 as to be all but ignored by the broadcast networks. The Detroit-area classical radio station I ordinarily listened to made one of its rare broadcast interruptions for a bulletin that Challenger had exploded.

William Polley offers the recollections of a somewhat younger space enthusiast.

Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo family members gathered at the Kennedy Space Center to remember.

THE MELTING POT IN MICROCOSM. Thirty-some years ago, Milwaukee Hamilton was a conference power in football, baseball, and basketball. Today, is it time for "One-nil, one nil, who in the heck needs East?"

There's a little chatter among the players on this crisp autumn afternoon. Over there, a Laotian player speaks Hmong to an attentive teammate, then turns and says the same thing in English to a white teammate. Across the circle, a Hispanic kid says something in Spanish and two teammates nod their heads. Only one is also Hispanic.

Then a kid talks in Serbian, loud enough for everyone to hear, and they all laugh, all of them together, including head coach Dave Shadlen and his assistant, Kelly Cannon.

They laugh the laugh of a united team. A united championship team. A team made up of kids who came to the South side from all over the world. Kids with last names of Yang, Bangura, Pacheco and Milosavljevic, of Baker, Espinoza, Malusic and Terzic, of Perez, Vujanic, Patrowsky and Malusic, and of Jovicic, Vukovic, Villegas and Baric.

The Wildcats (12-5-1 overall) won their first City Conference championship on Monday, beating Milwaukee Riverside, 3-2, on a late, tie-breaking goal. It came in the closing minutes when a Laotian sent a long ball to a Hispanic teammate, who hit a crossing pass to a Serbian teammate on the right side for the goal.

Sometimes it pays to honor small beginnings.

The cross-cultural teamwork and friendships cultivated through soccer at Hamilton could serve as an example in schools, neighborhoods and workplaces everywhere.

"I can get along with anybody, because when I came over here (from Serbia), I was accepted by the people here. So I know how important that is," said senior Goran Milosavljevic. "Whether I'm talking to Latino people or Asian people, it's not a problem at all. A lot of them even know Serbian words and a lot of us know some of their language. We can even use that to our advantage on the field sometimes."

"On the soccer field, we're all one team," said senior Chue-Yee Yang, who has a near-perfect grade-point average and has applied to five Ivy League colleges. "I knew that working together as a team was going to be all right."

It also pays to encourage membership in the common culture.

To bring the team together, Shadlen orders his players to speak English to coaches and each other during play, so no one is left out or wondering about a comment. And he has worked to take the best parts of each ethnic group's style of play and cross-pollinate it with everyone on the team.

"Each ethnicity has its own style, whether it's a faster attack or more short, quick passes or working it down a side of the field or up the middle," Shadlen said. "The thing we focus on from the start of the season is how to meld it all together."

"We all have our different ways of playing, but on the field we're just one team," senior Alejandro Pacheco said. "So we don't have a Serbian style or Hispanic style or Asian style, just a Hamilton style.

At the same time, it pays the native-born players to pick up a few Serbian phrases.

"The language barrier my freshman year was really strong. Everybody was speaking Serbian or Hmong or Spanish, and all I know is English. So I would only talk to the other guys who spoke English," junior Tom Patrowsky said. "But as the season progressed, we got to know each other and learned about each other. Now our team is so closely knit, we have no language barrier at all."

Glory, glory, Ham United!

NO CONTEST.

Perhaps it's as futile as "boxers or briefs?" or "Ginger or Mary Ann?" USA Today brings us another round of "Chicago or New York?" Herewith some omitted variables. I stopped at a northwest side hobby shop to exchange some merchandise and then rode the Northwest Line downtown rather than grapple with the downtown traffic. The train I rode flips at North Western Station to become a North Line turn to Winnetka. The screen that shows the next 20 or so departures could only show the departures between 5.01 and 5.40 pm. At Union Station, there was a bit of turmoil on the Burlington side. Union Station shows its limitations when passengers clog the departure gates awaiting the departure track for delayed incoming equipment to be posted. Normally, people rush down the escalators and head straight to their trains. In New York, the departure platform lottery is a regular event. And once those trains leave, they don't have to be threaded amongst transcontinental passenger flyers, time-sensitive intermodal trains, and coal loads as does the Burlington's Dinky Parade on the triple track one authority called the world's most impressive stretch of railroad. (There is nothing in Moscow, let alone London or Tokyo or Berlin to come close.)

But I didn't go to Union Station for a night of trainspotting. There's a Robinson's Ribs in the food court. Admittedly, there's nothing in any of the Chicago termini with the cachet of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. On the other hand, there's nothing that says you only have to eat ribs in months that have an "r" in their names. Biological appetite satisfied, it's time to satisfy the intellectual appetite at the Central Electric Railfans' Association with a presentation on the electric boat trains of Western Michigan. (These did surprisingly well until the roads were paved with service from Grand Rapids to Michigan's west coast run, and connections to the lake steamers to Chicago and Wisconsin locations.)

At the CIVIC OPERA HOVSE, sometimes referred to as "Insull's Armchair," although that controversial power company baron was not so crass as today's noveau riche in insisting on naming rights, the gentlemen in black-tie and the ladies with ankle-length furs were arriving at the Lyric for Rigoletto. No displacing several blocks Uptown for a meaningless-mod Lincoln Center here. My path did not take me past Orchestra Hall, but I recall that the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti well might have set the standard for the world in those days.

On the lighter side, where else can you get a salad on your hot dog?

No contest.

WE'RE WASTING MONEY, BUT GIVE US MORE OF IT. That's the kind of tone-deafness that gives the academy a bad reputation. The Newsalert Weblog recommends a Detroit Free Press story about the performance (look for "Universities and Colleges) of Michigan's public universities. Ouch. To wit:

At three other schools, administrators did not address students' repeated complaints about professors' poor language or teaching skills.

I suppose one could tell the state that it's getting what it's paying for. On the other hand, shared governance implies some responsibility for who is getting hired, whether on the tenure-track or not. (Wayne State's economics department would sometimes not rehire an adjunct.)

At Michigan Technological University, for example, some professors were granted new sabbaticals without documenting how they spent past ones, a violation of university policy.

Cranky observers view sabbaticals as paid vacations. That might not be all bad, but if the point is to have additional thinking time, that thinking ought be committed to paper.

In spot checks at six universities, auditors found more than 3,800 instances of students taking the same course three or more times. More than 1,500 Wayne State University students did so, mainly to replace poor or incomplete grades, a practice auditors suggested was an inefficient use of taxpayer money.

I don't know what the situation is today. Twenty years ago Wayne State allowed students to drop classes to nearly the end of the semester, with the professor's permission. I put in a drop deadline about midway through the semester and the whining I got from people who didn't wise up after the first exam ...

But the tone-deafness!

The biggest problem on campus is not inefficiency, said a lobbyist for Michigan's university system, but dramatic cuts in state funding.

"These are times of shrinking public responsibility to higher education," said Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan. "Overall, these institutions are well-run."

There's a flaming non-sequitur. I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that the benefits of higher education are private benefits, easily appropriated by the students. But well-run?

On the other hand, the Ann Arbor campus hasn't been audited since 1984 ... because the state thinks that's too costly a project???

THE FIRST GLOBAL SUPERPOWER? Not the United States. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes writes about China's large fourteenth-century sailing ships, and speculates.

Suppose the Chinese had not given up on trade and exploration, suppose the Portuguese had arrived in the Indian Ocean to find those huge Chinese ships ruling the seas? Or even more, suppose the Chinese had not stopped somewhere around the Mozambique channel but had gone around the Cape [of Good Hope] into the Atlantic, thereby opening maritime links to West Africa and Europe?

The thesis of Gavin Menzies's 1421: The Year China Discovered America is that the Chinese rounded Good Hope and Horn, accurately mapped the coasts of the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica, and left settlements behind from which the descendants later intermarried with native peoples. I have previously promised a review of this book, and here it is, as this year's Book Review No. 5. Mr Menzies has a site that summarizes many of his hypotheses. There is also a debunking site.

What do we have? On the one hand, there do appear to be Chinese maps that antedate the Iberian expeditions of the late fifteenth century, and, as Mr Menzies notes, a terrestrial attribution to those maps is more parsimonious than an attribution to ancient astronauts. He makes reference to what might be Chinese survey benchmarks in eastern Massachusetts, structures in Rock Lake, Wisconsin, the lake in Lake Mills, that might be connected to the Aztlan site just east of there (curiously, the Mexican revanchists who covet California and other Sun Belt locations have not pursued claims to Wisconsin or the Copper Country) and to obscure logs of conquistadores that suggest Chinese influence on the cities that may or may not have been the lost Seven Cities of Cibola. Lake Mills is not far from here, and I have a trip to eastern Massachusetts laid on for the summer. I'll observe and decide, then report.

On the other hand, if all of Mr Menzies's allegations of Chinese chicken DNA in North American chickens are as reliable as his assertion that the Rhode Island Red is a Chinese chicken, there's a problem. It's not too hard to cross-breed a Chinese chicken brought back in a Yankee Clipper with an American chicken, circa 1840, which is apparently what one Captain Richard Wheatland did. Then there's his invocation of the Ming clans (Ming-ho, Wyo Ming, and Lyco Ming, scroll down to point 5) that migrated to the Americas. That passage didn't ring true to me. Model railroaders are notorious for inventing corny place names, and those names sounded very much like they'd be on an obscure branch of John Armstrong's Canandaigua Southern that went via Gasmeterszag across the Alleghanies at Aikenbach thence by way of Llan Mawr and a connection with the Pennsy at Mingo Junction, ultimately fading into the sunset as it serves the coal mine at the Sino-Cornish hamlet of Glo Ming. I submit my Google search.

TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF? John at EclectEcon is pleased that it might be easier to have an article accepted by American Economic Review than to land a job in a Chicago-area Wal-Mart. Paul at Electric Commentary has Schadenfreude at Chicago residents heading just across city limits to seek jobs at a store the Chicago City Council essentially banned from the city.

Sure they lost a bunch of tax revenue, and jobs within the city limits, and the store opened just a few blocks away anyway, but it was worth it to stick it to that evil corporation.

But consider the implications of this.

Of 25,000 job applicants, all but 500 listed Chicago addresses, said John Bisio, regional manager of public affairs for Wal-Mart.

"In our typical hiring process, you're pretty successful if you have 3,000 applicants," he said. "They were really crowing about 11,000 in Oakland, Calif., last year. So to get 25,000-plus applications and counting, I think is astonishing."

Magdoff and Magdoff would not be astonished.

However, the presence of a large pool of workers living a precarious existence is nothing new. It is one of the basic characteristics of capitalism, referred to by Marx as the reserve army of labor. More than an underlying attribute of capitalism, the reserve army helps to keep costs down—permitting the market system to function profitably—and serves as a constant and effective weapon against workers.

More on the industrial reserve army here. And go here for a hypothesis.

Ford’s suppliers will no doubt be forced to follow through with their own job cuts and cost reductions. It is estimated that a single job at an auto factory supports seven jobs in the wider economy, which will produce a devastating impact on those areas where plants are shut down. These are working class communities that have already suffered from the general stagnation and decline of wages over the past several years and the attack on social programs and benefits.

Oakland, Chicago, both historically sites of heavy industry. Is it the capitalist quest for surplus value or the politicos quest for the right kind of development, or something else that leads to the large pool of applicants at that Evergreen Park Wal-Mart?

AN OPPORTUNITY TO GRIPE. The campus newspaper discovers Rate My Professors.

As some students go on a hunt for that certain professor dishing out the poor grades, others look for revenge online and turn the tables.

We do have a proper system of course evaluation.

"I don't take the information from these Web sites seriously compared to the evaluations completed by students in the class at the end of the semester," said sociology professor Fred Markowitz. "The most important thing to realize about the Web sites is that they are not a representative sample of the opinions of students. The opinions expressed at those sites are only a small portion of who are inclined to spend time going to these sites."

Concurring Opinions concurs in part and dissents in part.

AREA 51. I usually count the Carnivals of Education in base eight, but this was too much to resist. Don't resist the temptation to check out this week's bannerline at Education Wonks.