FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Bill Quick.

In order to win a war, you first have to have the will and intention to wage a war. Nobody, [Victor Davis] Hanson included, has demonstrated anything like the will needed to defeat our Islamist enemies. Instead, to a lesser or greater degree, none of these people - from the Hansons to the Bushes - are talking about actually waging a war.

And what has been going on offers depressing confirmation of Candidate Bush's doubts, in the October 2000 presidential debates, about the usefulness of U.S. involvement in nation-building, or of the utility of using the military for that job.

JUST TELL THE STORY. The first rule of military writing ought to be, wherever possible, to let the action reports do the talking, and the second rule, if there is call for a second rule, is to keep the prose spare. In Bitter Ocean, author David Fairbank White disregards these rules in such a way as to render Book Review No. 44 not particularly favorable. The book tackles, in approximately 300 pages, the Battle of the Atlantic. The topic is one that easily requires two volumes, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, to describe in some depth. There is also a book-length treatment of the turning point of the battle in Black May : The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943. The narrative in Bitter Ocean will be of necessity less detailed, but I wish the author had toned down the elegant variation or hired a Scathing Online Schoolmarm to do some editing. Consider this passage from page 102.

Night had fallen. The black shroud of evening had slipped over the ships and as dark had settled, they had plodded along like a caravan of camels, one shuffling beast following the one before it. Now they lumbered along, hulking giants, hooded in the night, rolling slowly east.

Plodding, shuffling, lumbering, rolling: we're not in the sixth grade writing picturesque sentences for Miss Weidemann. Convoy SC-26 is about to get clobbered. What happens to the submariners, sailors, and merchant mariners, and what the survivors recall, is more important than the fog of elegant variation.

It's no less painful when Convoy SC-100 gets clobbered, at page 171.

Elsewhere, eight other ships not with the main body of the convoy were scattered like hay, blown across a vast area of the sea. Some ships were out ahead, far in front of SC 100; some were behind, straggling, dispersed by the three day blow to a flurry of points on the field.

A submarine attack and a North Atlantic storm foul up the station keeping and there are going to be plenty of stragglers for the follow-on submarines. Let the participants tell the story. It requires no embellishment.

Several times, for reasons not always evident, the author sees fit to mention a sunken ship's radio call signal being permanently silenced. But (see p. 106) in the Battle of the Atlantic, it was not OSCAR NOVEMBER JULIET ALPHA, it was OBOE NAN JIG ABLE. Do the research.

The trials of the crew of San Demetrio in an early convoy qualify as a classic sea story, as in "no s***, this really happened," without need for embellishment, and German submarine ace Otto Kretschmer carried out his responsibilities as a prisoner of war to attempt escape almost as well as he carried out his duties as submariner. He also served ably in the German Navy in NATO, retiring as an admiral.

Mr White suggests that the convoy escorts, which he refers to as corvettes, have been neglected in the construction of World War II monuments. Perhaps the confusing nomenclature for escort ships, including destroyer escorts and frigates (not here referring to a ship of war with three masts) impedes the effort to get such a memorial together.

In the absence of a formal monument, consider renting The Enemy Below or watching for its rebroadcast on one of the cable channels. The plot, a destroyer escort (U.S. Navy terminology) tangling with a U-boat, is true to several of the battle reports noted in Bitter Ocean and the other sources I've referenced. The Battle of the Atlantic was about submarines and escorts, particularly after Germany converted its capital ships into floating forts.

HAPPY BEETHOVEN'S BIRTHDAY. Milt Rosenberg recommends the Op. 16 Quintet in E-flat.

MOVING ON UP. Badgers knock off No. 2 Panthers.

In beating second-ranked Pittsburgh, 89-75, in front of a raucous crowd of 17,190 at the Kohl Center, the Badgers proved that they can not only play with the best teams in the nation but also beat them handily.

The three-headed monster of seniors Alando Tucker and Kammron Taylor and junior Brian Butch did the heavy lifting as seventh-ranked Wisconsin improved to 11-1. It was Wisconsin's highest victory over a ranked opponent since it beat No. 2 Minnesota, 66-65, March, 8, 1997.

That March 8 win came under very different circumstances, as the tournament pairings were settled by then.

CONTEMPLATING METHOD. At Blogs for Industry, a useful clinic on the use and abuse of "moral relativism" as a category.

The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

That stance is useful for the observer who wishes to understand why people do the things they do: note that it does not validate, let alone excuse, those practices.

CHEAP LABOR SUBSIDIES ... HERE??? Border Fence Firm Snared for Hiring Illegal Workers.

A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company's work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico.

Via Marginal Revolution.

The article goes on to note,

It is exceptionally rare for those who employ illegal immigrants to face any kind of criminal prosecution, let alone jail time. Earlier this week, for example, immigration raids on six meat-packing plants netted almost 1,300 suspected illegal workers. But no charges were leveled against the company that runs the plants: Swift.

More on that story tomorrow.

THE JOYS OF SERIES. Years ago, strings of Christmas tree lights came wired in series, with house current powering a string of usually twenty low-voltage bulbs, each of which received 1/20 of the voltage and thereby burned cool enough so as to not set the tree on fire. Although the lights were a tremendous improvement over candles, when one bulb failed, that would disrupt current through the entire string and one faced the ritual of replacing bulbs one-by-one until the string again worked. If more than one bulb was bad, the frustration could be great. (The simplest fix would be to have a battery handy and some short pieces of wire to test each bulb. Those that lit could be returned to the string.)

After the Second World War, scaled-down, cooler-burning bulbs that could be wired in parallel became available. These strings pose a bit of a shock hazard as the full voltage is delivered to each socket, but when one bulb failed, it could easily be identified and replaced. At your store, these are the No. 7 colored bulbs.

The miniature lights that became available in the early 1970s were again wired in series, but with a circuit in each socket to shunt power around a bulb that failed, which would enable the owner to identify and replace a failed bulb. (I suspect that if too many bulbs failed at once, the shunts would not be able to protect the remaining bulbs from being fried by the higher voltage.)

To make maintenance easier, there is a gadget that enables the owner to work around a fried shunt. Voluntary Xchange marvels over this gadget.

There are other options. The small tree at the center of my train display has a string of 20 light emitting diodes powered by four batteries. There appear to be two circuits each of 10 diodes, wired in parallel. Service life of the diodes, 15,000 hours.

WHERE THE STREETCAR BENDS THE CORNER AROUND. In a recent European Tribune post, DoDo shows readers around the tram network of Budapest. The article opens with a picture of a new high-capacity six-section Siemens unit the locals call "giant caterpillar."


The unit is demonstrating the behavior I refer to in the post title. In Milwaukee, the expression, which may be an adaptation of a German phrase, originated in a radio comedy act. It could refer simply to the act of a streetcar going around a corner, although Milwaukee did have streetcars capable of bending the corner around.

This site, titled guess what? illustrates one such unit. Milwaukee Electric took a large fleet of turn-of-the-twentieth century streetcars and rebuilt them -- at their Cold Spring Shops -- into three-truck articulated cars, doubling the productivity of a two-man crew.

Robert Genack photograph
West Allis Station, 8 January 1932.

By the Depression, more productive cars would be hauling more empty seats around and using more electricity. These units were placed in storage and subsequently scrapped.

Milwaukee Electric also bought some duplex streetcars new from St. Louis Car. These were originally intended for the South Milwaukee suburban service (a very long tram route from downtown Milwaukee via Kinnickinnic Avenue and Packard Avenue practically to the Racine County line) but they did most of their work during the war. Afterwards they were reconfigured for rapid transit service to Waukesha and Hales Corners.

The Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society image.

Budapest also operates trackless trolleys (known elsewhere as "trolley coaches" and colloquially in Milwaukee as "trolley buses.") There is some discussion of them here, and regular readers are familiar with the St. Petersburg Tram Collection's trolley bus models.



Budapest, however, still has its streetcars and trolleybuses. The best I can offer for Milwaukee, apart from the well-known collections at East Troy and Union, are some old work of mine using a railroad-network simulation called Bahn. The program is shareware and free downloads will time out once the grace period expires. But an owner can look at other peoples' networks or build his or her own. The Milwaukee network, based on the fall 1929 timetable, is available as a free download here. (Download the Bahn program first, unzip it, then save the network files to the Bahn network subdirectory.)

(Cross-posted at European Tribune.)

THE GRANDMASTER DOES NOT SEE BAD MOVES. Malcom Gladwell generalizes that (not always true) observation about abilities to spot what looks right or what looks wrong in a situation very quickly in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. For Book Review No. 43 I suggest that the subtitle misleads. The book argues that we are capable of sizing up a situation and reaching the correct conclusion with relatively little information, and that it is possible to overanalyze and get things wrong. In chess, that's called "developing sight of the board," and the frustration of overanalyzing is summed up in the Law of the Too Solid Goof and its corollaries. But that ability, which Mr Gladwell characterizes as "thin-slicing", is something that must be encouraged and cultivated. We're all capable of it, but we require practice at developing it, at observing slices that look right so as to be able to conclude that a slice doesn't look right.

There are cautionary tales for the reader to consider, including the risk of making the wrong thin slices (try classifying something as either "male" or "domestic" as in one famous psychology experiment) or of inferring that because someone looks presidential, he ought to be presidential (Warren G. Harding, meet Barack H. Obama?) or of assuming that disrupting an enemy's command-and-control infrastructure means the enemy can't fight back. (You mean Pentagon planners suffer from "victory disease?" I thought they'd learned from the rigged Japanese war games preceding Operation MI.) No spoilers to follow: check the book out from your library. I got through it in about two hours.

NOT QUITE A FISKING. At Economist's View, an extended response to an essay titled "The Autistic Economist." It's not quite a fisking as the concluding paragraph qualifies for the Quote of the Day.

Please don't confuse being annoyed with the way the message is delivered with a refusal to consider alternative viewpoints. I'm more than willing to listen, but it would be easier if the criticism showed more comprehension of our models and methods and how they've evolved through time, and a little more respect for those who do their very best to approach economic problems in the most scientific way possible. Their intent is to add to our knowledge, not push an agenda. I'll leave it at that for now.

NO __________ NEED APPLY? At Inside Higher Ed, news of a spat in the American Economic Association.

When professors at the University of Vermont sent information about a job opening to the American Economic Association this fall about a tenure-track opening, they didn’t think their notice was unusual. After describing the position, the notice said that the university “welcomes applications from women and underrepresented ethnic, racial and cultural groups and from people with disabilities.”

That final sentence is standard affirmative-action boilerplate, although good luck claiming "bowling-shirt factory rat" or "non-quiche-eating Real Guy" deserve protected status as an "underrepresented cultural group" in the academy.

It's also contrary to the American Economic Association's policies on job announcements.

Those words never made it into the economics group’s job notice list because they were deemed discriminatory by the association. That view has angered enough economists that the association’s board will be meeting next month to consider changing its policies on job listings, but for now economists are trading charges of discrimination, censorship and insensitivity.

And quite the spat has broken out.

The International Association for Feminist Economics has written to the AEA questioning the group’s policy and saying that it has the potential to hurt recruiting efforts. “Economics has been described as a discipline with a particularly hostile climate for women and members of underrepresented ethnic minorities,” the letter said. ” We urge the AEA to do everything it can to dispel this image.”

Adding to the controversy is anger among some non-traditional economists who believe the association is squeezing them out of its annual meeting. The AEA meeting had in recent years featured more sessions from various groups of economists with specialties and areas of interest than from the AEA as a whole, and the larger association has begun taking back more meeting slots. While AEA officials insist that groups are having meeting sessions eliminated based on attendance and not on politics, some left-leaning groups — particularly the Union for Radical Political Economics — charge that their ideas are being set aside. Some professors see the conference and job notice disputes pointing to larger problems with the association.

The annual conference is in Chicago. I'm going to be pretty busy with recruiting but if I see any fights breaking out in the hotel lobby, I'll report on those upon my return to active posting.

(On the lighter side, is there any interest in an economics webloggers' meetup on Thursday or Friday of the conference?)

SOME CLEAR THINKING ABOUT PRICE DISCRIMINATION. The topic of rising college tuitions came up in Professor Mankiw's class.

The student wonders whether the article's claim that college popularity rises with tuition is related to our study of Giffen goods and perversely sloped demand curves. I don't think so. The phenomenon about college popularity, to the extent it exists, does not rely on an odd combination of income and substitution effects but, instead, imperfect information. Consumers may use price to judge quality. Would you choose a surgeon that advertised having the cheapest rates in town?

That presupposes competitive models in which prices reflect marginal costs and consumers are able to infer quality from price. It's somewhat less convincing in the presence of a status system that a college can game by encouraging via a lower price more applications than it will admit, so as to look selective.

This I'll agree with.

Colleges have gotten increasingly good at price discriminating. (Recall the discussion of price discrimination in chapter 15 of my favorite economics textbook.) The list price is set high, and then many customers are offered a discount called "financial aid" based on their ability to pay. Here's the secret plan: In the future, Harvard will cost $1 billion a year, and only Bill Gates's children will pay full price. When anyone else walks through the door, the message will be "Special price, just for you."

The balance of the post and the comments are worth your time, and there are links to related posts to follow.

LEAVE IRAQ VIA TRIPOLI. American Thinker's Patrick Poole reacts to the Iraq Study Group report.

The Iraq Study Group has recommended that we engage the other powers in the region, namely Syria and Iran. Well, how about we engage the Syrians with several US Army and Marine divisions? The Baathist regime in Damascus would undoubtedly soil their trousers at such a sight. If President Bush is truly serious about taking out the dictatorships in the region, why don't we go after the only remaining Baathist regime? And the simple truth is that we wouldn't have to stay in Syria for any length of time, and there would certainly be no need to chase Bashar Assad around the Syrian countryside like we did Saddam Hussein. These Middle East dictatorships exist solely on the presence of their armies to subdue their people; once the Syrian army and air force is dispatched, let the Syrians sort their political situation out themselves. Any subsequent regime that would arise, even an Islamist one, would be severely weakened for the foreseeable future without a military.

Then we could keep rolling into Lebanon, where we have a blood debt to settle with Hezb'allah (recall the 1983 suicide bombings of the US Marine barracks and the US Embassy in Beirut). Having severed the Syrian and Iranian military hardware pipeline into Lebanon, a joint assault against Hezb'allah by the Americans from the east and the Israelis from the south could squeeze the life out of the terrorist organization, perhaps permanently. And as our troops loaded up in the port of Beirut to return home, we can pass along to Israel the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for them to engage Iran as they see fit.

Admittedly, the scenario I've just painted for Bush's Great American March to the Mediterranean Sea is laughably naïve and fraught with all kinds of logistical problems and diplomatic consequences. But the simple fact of the matter is that biggest obstacle to pulling such an operation off is the will of our leaders to do it. Not only could the American military win such an operation, but they would win decisively on both counts. Such a plan plays to the strengths of our military. And the eviction of the Baathist regime in Syria and placing a stranglehold on Hezb'allah in Lebanon would undeniably be in the long-term interests of the United States in the region. It is a reasonable to assume that Jordan and Turkey would not be eager to throw their lot with the Syrians, and no other power in the Middle East would be in a position to stop us if we chose to do so.

The full article offers additional cautions, demurrals, and qualifications.

I offer one quibble with this.

The only reason Americans care about a civil war is if our military gets caught in the middle of it and more Americans are killed. Once we are out of Iraq, very few Americans are going to lose sleep over a Sunni-Shi'a civil war. The hard reality is that such a civil war is in our best national interests, not unlike the Iran-Iraq War was in the 1980s. Such a conflict keeps Iran occupied and depletes their energies and resources.

It did not, however, secure the early release of the diplomats held captive in Tehran, nor did it go on without let or hindrance to oil exports by other countries in the neighborhood. The proposal also strikes me as somewhat optimistic: there's nothing to prevent terrorist organizations from going about their business in the middle of a civil war, much like burglars and muggers in urban turf contested by drug gangs.

CAN'T WIN FOR WINNING. The Missouri Tigers join other football programs that will not cover the incremental costs of playing a bowl game. But some of the burden falls on the conference.

Athletic department and football officials are right to be concerned. The lack of fans affects bowl bids in future years. I don't blame them for cutting prices. But it's easier when you're being subsidized...

Repeat with me: Amateur sport. It has nothing to do with money. Amateur sport. It has nothing to do with money.

PRIMEVAL GENSETS. Somebody was doing some research on Baldwin Centipedes and came across my work, including the post on early genset locomotives. That research also turned up an instructive report (.pdf) Michael Iden of Union Pacific presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. There is a great deal of content on North American diesel locomotive practice. The report also includes a number of historic genset locomotives, including the Centipede, and predecessor hybrid locomotives including the North Shore's trolley-battery motor and New York Central's diesel - third rail - battery electric switchers for the West Side of Manhattan. A careful reader will also discover that the genset concept is not yet a good idea for a road locomotive.

CHECKPOINT CHEDDAR?

Remember this sermon?

Midwestern politicians cannot get their brains around the idea that graduates of Big Ten universities competing in the global economy by relocating elsewhere on the globe attest to the strength of those universities.

Charlie Sykes characterizes a proposal to keep Wisconsin's in-state students in-state as "indentured servitude." It is difficult to disagree with that characterization.

As the theory goes, a captive work force of college graduates would attract new industry to Wisconsin, along with higher-paying jobs. Those workers, in turn, would pay more income taxes and sales taxes, providing the state with the millions of dollars needed to offer free tuition.

That worked real well in East Germany, didn't it? Fence in all those engineers and stitch engineering symbols on your flag and produce the world's greatest motorcar, nicht wahr?

Owen Robinson at Boots and Sabers has more.

If the graduates are forced to stay in Wisconsin and there still aren’t enough jobs for them, what happens? We will either end up with a bunch of unemployed college graduates living at home or a bunch of underemployed college graduates working as dealers at the casinos. Meanwhile, their peers from other states will be racking up experience in their fields and leaving Wisconsin’s kids a decade behind.

I can also imagine strategies Northern Illinois could use to capture more of that State Line trade. (Wisconsin does not bear quite the same commercial relationship to Illinois that Canada does to the United States; however a large share of Wisconsin's population lives within 50 miles of the Cheddar Curtain, and there are a number of the state's universities in that border zone.)

STAY IN THE SAME MODEL. If you're going to argue that universities engage in first-degree price-discrimination to bring in more revenues, and in rationing by queue rather than by price so as to game a "selectivity" ranking, argue consistently.

Here's Richard Vedder using a Veblen effect argument to make sense of some journalists looking at college tuitions.

Jonathan Glater and Alan Finder suggest in today’s (and tomorrow's) New York Times that the tuition explosion may partly be a consequence of a snob effect in higher education: higher tuition charges are perceived to mean higher quality, and with higher quality comes greater numbers of applications. The authors give examples (e.g., Ursinus College in Pennsylvania), that seemingly fit that description.

But he goes on to note that the Veblen effect is irrelevant.

Two factors might help explain the results reported by the Times. First, massive amounts of third party payments, including institutional aid financed by the universities themselves by charging the very affluent through the nose, has reduced the sensitivity of customers to price. Usually, we think that means customers go from being highly sensitive (elastic demand) to becoming insensitive (inelastic demand), but it might even go further --customers become "snobs", wanting to buy "the best" and equating price with quality.

A second factor is that elite colleges are social networks, sort of academic country clubs, and that jobs often come from contacts developed at the university. The more expensive the school, the more elite the student body is likely to be, the more "pull" their parents have, and the greater the probability that graduates will get good jobs through university-developed social connections. Universities that jack up their sticker prices a lot can sock it to the rich legacy candidates for admission who have indifferent test scores, without overtly accepting bribes (which, however, if enough money is on the table, they will do via "development admits", as Dan Golden has so vividly shown us).

The irony in all of this is that perceptions about quality may in fact be way off. It is
interesting that the very best schools as perceived by the public -- the Princeton’s and Harvard’s --charge little or no more than the merely "pretty good" schools like, say, Notre Dame, George Washington University or the University of Southern California. They (the top schools) use a relatively low price (relative to demand conditions) to turn down a huge proportion of applicants, allowing them to cherry pick amongst the rest, taking a majority of students on merit considerations and the rest for other reasons, including their ability to increase already obscenely large endowments via tax deductible gifts.

That last sentence, however, suggests that tuitions at the top schools are inefficiently low, not "jacked up."

NOT QUITE GALLERY CARS. The Occasional Train Blogging by DoDo has resumed at the European Tribune, with among other goodies a two parter on double deck push-pull trains. The first part was inspired by the visit of a German demonstration train (in Rock Island coloration) to Hungary. It notes that the contemporary practice originated in Chicago, with a fine shot of a Commuter Streamliner at Davis Street, Evanston, after the center track had been lifted. (I wonder if restoration of that track might come with the creation of the Kenosha-Milwaukee service.) The first gallery cars were Burlington's, and theirs and the Chicago and North Western's ran behind steam. (Some of the early C&NW cars went as far as Madison or Wyeville or Ashland to strengthen the intercity trains.) The second part focuses on double-deck electric multiple units, with some interesting historical photographs.

See also the Budapest trams: I see reason to assemble some material on primeval duplex trams and trackless trolleys.

WHAT IF THE CONCLUSIONS AREN'T FAVORABLE? At Durham-in-Wonderland, some clear thinking about the genuine tradeoffs that hiring for "diversity" entail.

“Diversity” is a prized commodity on contemporary college campuses. In recent years, some institutions have used the concept to mask redefining quality away from standard measurements and toward ideological conformity—of the type that we saw from the Duke faculty last spring.

Take, for example, a program for “diversity” cluster hiring at the University of Arizona. A campus “diversity committee” proposed “recruiting not just one or even two diverse faculty members as isolated ‘targets of opportunity,’ but rather a critical mass of diverse professors who have shared intellectual interests.” “Diversity,” therefore, became little more than a mask to ensure ideological conformity among the new faculty.

The plan, part of a broader emphasis on diversity in hiring at Arizona, envisions a university in which “diversity” rather than academic quality becomes the primary motive for hiring, promotion, and tenure. According to the campus diversity plan, in faculty personnel matters, “In order to make significant progress in creating a more diverse faculty and a campus that truly embraces diversity, the advancement of diversity must be established as a primary indicator of quality.” Until diversity, the report concludes, “is included in the institutional family of primary indicators of quality, other indicators will continue to trump it – especially in the hiring of new faculty.” The U of A contends that “this does not mean lessening our commitment to excellence in research and teaching,” but such a claim is absurd: research and teaching, according to the “diversity” plan, will have to meet an ideological litmus test before being judged on their quality. Indeed, the plan argues, “Depending upon the discipline,” new faculty should be required to “conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity.”

Let's take that last sentence seriously. If "valuing diversity," whatever that means, makes universities that "value" diversity more productive, then administrators and hiring committees that fail to do so are leaving money on the table. On the other hand, if the research quantifies the opportunity costs (perhaps measured as lost output or reduced rates of productivity growth) of hiring for diversity rather than for teaching effectiveness or grant-getting or dissertation directing, do those negative findings invalidate the research.

The post goes on to note,

The U of A is one of three major universities (Virginia Tech and Kansas State are the others; the University of Oregon is considering the move) to implement the diversity theories of Harvard Education School researcher Cathy Trower. In a talk at Chicago summarizing her findings, Trower listed a variety of subtle developments in the academy that she contends undercut efforts at diversity, including the “single-minded devotion to professional pursuits” and excessive value placed on research. “To compound the problem,” she continued, “some members of the majority, for reasons of self-interest or self-defined notions of ‘quality,’ are reluctant to grant newcomers a toehold.” Arguing that “merit is socially constructed by the dominant coalition,” Trower has recommended requiring white male (and only white male) job candidates to demonstrate a commitment to diversity before being hired.

Trower’s proposals are extreme—but they illustrate how standard notions of quality have been displaced in the academy in recent years. Her analysis envisions a radically different type of university, one based on the promotion of a specific ideological agenda, and designed to train a generation of social activists rather than teach students knowledge from traditional academic disciplines.

Perhaps it's time for some guerrilla theater. Each spring, there's a day on which people are encouraged to wear pink triangles to show their support for the sexual underground. Per corollary, why not yellow elephants during diversity week?

And as far as that "reluctance to grant newcomers a toehold," come off it. Responsible and reliable people are too busy cleaning up after the shirkers and malingerers to spend a lot of time making life difficult for newcomers that are willing to pitch in. On the other hand, come in with a belly full of grievances and no initiative, and don't be surprised when you get lumped with the other shirkers and malingerers.

THE FRUSTRATION LEVEL RISES. Must be exam week.

At Rate Your Students, a gripe about the obligatory legal content of course outlines.

The syllabus has morphed into a document more closely resembling a contract than a source of information on the course and a part of my time and is spent checking for loopholes when I compose a new one. I'm spending a disproportional amount of energy for a small percent of students. The insult to injury is that most students don't even read their syllabus.

That's despite the poster (because these posts are anonymous, there is no way to document the claim) giving a for-credit syllabus quiz.

Arnold Kling is supposed to be thinking about income inequality, but he gets off some gripes.

I think I understand what is going on at the top of the income distribution. I see stable, affluent families acting like machines for cranking out wealthy, assortively-mating kids.

I think I understand what is going on at the bottom of the income distribution. I see very dysfunctional people having very dysfunctional kids, out of wedlock.

In between? Not so clear. What is going to happen to my writing-challenged students at George Mason? Are they headed for middle-class jobs in nursing or social work, or for something worse?