TEACHING YOUR OPPONENT HOW TO WIN. For background entertainment, I have the Illinois State at Indiana State game on one of the Chicago cable channels. Illinois State currently leads by double-digits. That's the same team that Northern Illinois beat rather badly in November, and the same team that beat current Mid-American West leader Ball State.

THE MORES OF THE HIPPIE COMMUNE, WITHOUT THE HIPPIES? First Things editor Joseph Bottum (via Stephen Bainbridge) has some scathing comments about Duke University, particularly the default position of much of its faculty when allegations of a lacrosse team party gone bad arose.

Sex and radical politics are supposed to fit together easily, but the Duke lacrosse case suggests that the casual hedonism of the nation’s campuses and a radicalized professoriate with real power cannot, in fact, live together. I’d just as soon lose them both. But one or the other has to change. It’s a good bet that most schools will see that protecting their students requires stripping power from the professors. A good start, but only half the lesson.

A Duke student working at First Things (via Hootsbuddy) takes a more measured tone. He agrees that some faculty members rushed to judgement.

In any reckoning of Duke’s actions during the lacrosse scandal, the actions of the Group of 88 must rank as particularly egregious. Rather than wait for the evidence, these professors took their all-purpose epistemology of racism, classism, and sexism and turned on their own students. Most of them defend themselves even now. Insofar as criticisms of Duke are directed at these faculty members, they are perfectly legitimate.

He goes on to note that not all professors still live their lives as if Bull Connor is Director of Public Safety and LBJ is sending your boy home in a box.

Thankfully, the Group of 88 does not represent the majority of professors at Duke. And as is the case in many universities, the loopy left at Duke represented by the statement was heavily concentrated in a few humanities departments. Recently, 26 members of the economics department signed a public letter in support of the lacrosse team, expressing regret for the actions of the Group of 88. Duke law professor James Coleman has publicly and frequently criticized Nifong and defended the lacrosse players. Any criticisms of Duke faculty members should be limited to the Group of 88 rather than the other 1,500 Duke professors who likely care very much about the students whom they teach daily.

And he makes a broader point about the collegiate rabbit culture.

Duke has in the past few years become something of a symbol for the libidinous, drunken social life that is supposed to characterize American universities. Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (which takes placed at “Dupont University,” by which he obviously meant Duke) had much to do with this. A graphic Rolling Stone article followed, and the Duke lacrosse scandal of course fit nicely into the narrative. From what I’ve learned of Duke’s social scene, both from reading reports and from talking to students, it’s obvious that some of these criticisms are true. Many students abuse alcohol, much of it takes place in the context of fraternities, and the sexual libertinism that Wolfe so lasciviously chronicled in his novel does indeed have some resemblance to the truth.

And yes, the Rolling Stone survey is lurid. Long-term readers will recall that the Chicago Sun-Times did a series on the rabbit culture at Illinois, and once we get more daylight and more warmth, an enterprising reporter could probably find similar goings-on in DeKalb.

CONTEMPLATING SCARCITY. Michael Mandel suggests the concept unnecessarily restricts economics.

My justification for a different definition is that there are big chunks of the economy where scarcity is not important, in any but a formal sense. If anything we seem to have an abundance of food and manufactured goods, and the cost of moving and manipulating information has fallen very very sharply. I'd also like to get in the sense that economics has a purpose.

Ralph Nader sees some of the same facts, with a completely different interpretation.

With tens of millions of Americans lacking the adequate necessities of food, fuel, shelter, health care and a sustaining job, this project is part of a 25 year trend by the economy, moving away from necessities and over to wants and whims. Among the fastest growing businesses for three decades in America are theme parks, gambling casinos and prisons.

Arnold Kling proposes that economists think more about the sources of prosperity.

I am two-handed on this issue. On the one hand, just because food, say, has become more abundant does not mean that we can ignore scarcity. At any moment in time, for a given state of know-how, the conventional definition of economics as dealing with the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends applies.

On the other hand, some of the most interesting economic observations concern relative abundance. Look at our standard of living compared to 100 years ago. Look at South Korea compared with North Korea. Robert Lucas famously said that "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them it is hard to think of anything else."

William Polley argues that there's still a lot of life in standard-issue economics.

My definition has three parts. Individual choice is the heart of all economics--even parts of economics that don't fit neatly into areas related to markets or government (e.g. game theory and bargaining). One could, I suppose, put a full stop right here and call it a day. It is beneficial, however, to single out the role of markets and the role of government as two identifiable arenas in which those choices play out. They are not the only such arenas, but they are the ones about which the body of knowledge in economics has the most to say. When I deliver this lecture in class, this is the context that I try to give my definition.

Let those of us who teach economics never forget that individual choices are the building blocks and that the manner in which an economy aggregates those decisions matters.

In a subsequent post, he notes that the problem of scarcity manifests itself in a different way.

But it's not the Malthusian, diminishing returns sort of scarcity that most people associate with the word (and with economics in general). So, in that sense, I understand why he would want to downplay it. Indeed, as I said in the previous post, I do not include the word "scarcity" in my one sentence definition even though I thoroughly address it in my classes.

And since the story can be told quite well by applying the old tools in new ways, I don't see any reason to radically change the definition of economics. However, I do hope that textbooks can catch up and tell the story of innovation and pricing with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. (There are some specialized texts that are starting to, but it hasn't filtered down all the way.) That would be an improvement.

I'll not be lacking for work: learning curves, network externalities, natural monopolies, and scarcity on the buyer's side. What's that argument about people having more trouble choosing from a surfeit of choices (28 varieties of jam rather than six?)

THE MOTHER OF ALL BATTLES. With echoes to this day.

Still, the outcome of the battle at Hamoukar in 3,500 B.C. helped change the trajectory of the region, with southern Mesopotamia becoming the dominant force, home to ancient kingdoms such as Babylonia.

CAN YOU CARRY WATER FOR A PATTERNMAKER?

In Opinion Journal, Charles Murray argues "Too many Americans are going to college."

A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

The content of the essay suggests that the college that remains will not be organized on the access-assessment-remediation-retention model.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DO PRETTY MUCH WHAT THEY PLEASE. The dean at Anonymous Community is taking stick for things that go wrong.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, it became clear that some of the crabbiness out there results from a faulty assumption: if something bad is happening, it's because someone bad is making it happen. There must be a villain somewhere, and he must be defeated; once that happens, all will be well.

Reality, however, is, well, more complex.

To me, one of the great intellectual contributions of the social sciences in particular has been to shift attention from a search for villains to understanding larger underlying structures. If you want to understand changes in, say, the distribution of wealth, you don't just look at a few plutocrats or the personal attitudes of selected elites. You look at the processes for the production of wealth, changes in taxation, shifts in technology, rising and declining industries, union membership, and so on. Individuals count, obviously, but they make their decisions in the context of shifting constraints that they themselves often don't understand and certainly don't control.

Donald Boudreaux writes a newspaper column that approaches the same phenomenon slightly differently.

Asked differently, doesn't human weakness and irrationality make the invisible hand of Adam Smith at least a bit palsied? And, if so, doesn't a palsied hand need some conscious guidance from caring attendants?

The case for the market doesn't require that each of us behave in textbook rational fashion. One of the great benefits of free markets is that they both reduce the frequency of irrational behavior and temper the ill consequences that would otherwise occur when people do behave irrationally.

Finding that people sometimes behave irrationally says nothing about the frequency of such behavior. By imposing costs for mistaken behavior on the individuals who behave mistakenly (and by rewarding people who behave prudently with personal benefits), markets reduce the frequency of irrational behavior.

(The column also notes, somewhat amusingly, that a company called AMP Netconnect has resurrected AT&T's pre-divestiture "The System is the Solution" slogan.)

Some of higher education's troubles might reflect the weakness, in a subsidized and cartelized environment, of market tests.

The case for free markets rests chiefly upon the recognition that the competition and feedback within markets tend to weed out firms and practices that do not satisfy human desires. No one acting within markets needs to aim at generating beneficial system-wide outcomes.

Such outcomes emerge "spontaneously" (as the late Nobel economist F.A. Hayek put it). They emerge through the interactions of millions of people, each with his own limited knowledge and personal weaknesses.

The market system feeds and magnifies those practices that people find useful and starves and shrinks those practices that people find to be useless or harmful.

It will simply take trustees, deans, and faculty committees a little longer to discover that there is an excess demand for rigorous higher education (or at least the perception thereof) and an excess supply of access-assessment-remediation-retention McDegrees.

William Polley, in the midst of posting on an idea that will be a topic of a post later this week, gives some thought to the interplay of organizations other than for-profit businesses in the emergence of order.

Sometimes individual decisions are aggregated in markets. That implies certain outcomes. Other times, individual decisions are aggregated through direct voting or a representative form of government. That often implies different outcomes. Decisions made by firms are really the result of an aggregation process within the firm itself. Institutions matter. The "rules of the game" matter. (Here again, my thinking has been influenced by Heyne, et al.) What some might call society's choice is a particular combination of individual choices coordinated by markets and influenced though the law by government as well as the weight given to market and to government in the process. How much is market and how much is government is determined by many factors. Most of them are outside the scope of your average economics course, but are still worth thinking about.

In this more involved setting, there is still scope for the odd bad administrative decision, whether as a consequence of ordinary frailty or of malice.

THE INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY ISN'T NECESSARILY UNEMPLOYED. Panic at the Economics Department: an instructor who hired out to teach a section of principles gave notice just before classes started. The chairman, assistant chairman, and office staff have managed to re-book 50 of the 80 students affected and we will take care of the other 30. But on top of ramping up for hiring and all the other joys of startup, that's one challenge we'd prefer not to rise to too frequently.

BUYING THE RAILFAN VOTE? Good news from the Quincy Herald Whig.

U.S. Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., are expected to introduce legislation today that would, among other things, encourage more state investment in Amtrak by making federal matching funds available.

The sweeping bill, similar to one that passed in the Senate 93-6 last year but was never voted on in the House, calls for $12 billion in federal funding over the next six years. Many Amtrak supporters believe it has a better chance this year with Democrats in control of Congress.

But one aspect of the bill is relatively uncontroversial. The idea of matching funds for state investment in Amtrak is one that both supporters and critics of the railroad have embraced — and something states such as California believe is long overdue.

Existing money appears to be producing benefits, notes Madison's Capital Times.

Amtrak's Hiawatha Service, which runs trains between Milwaukee and Chicago, had more riders in 2006 than ever before.

An estimated 588,036 boarded the train at one of the five stations along the Hiawatha Service's route last year, up 8.2 percent from the 544,358 trips made during 2005, according to Amtrak.

"This is outstanding news, and it shows that the public wants, and will support, passenger rail service," state Department of Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi said. "With 26 straight months of record-breaking ridership, while maintaining among the best on-time performance records, the Hiawatha Service is the envy of Amtrak managers nationwide."

Now, about that Class Six track ...

DID POTEMKIN HOUSES HAVE PRETTY FRONT PORCHES? I have long taken issue with our director of athletics describing his operation as the "front porch" for a university. What goes on in the reading room and the kitchen also matters. At Northern Illinois, the students seem to understand this.

Elsewhere, evidence of deferred maintenance in the reading rooms and kitchens accumulates. University Diaries has been following developments at several campuses.

At Oregon, a number of professors have gone public with their objections to the administration's revealed preferences.

As professors at the university, we find it increasingly hard to tell whether the University of Oregon is an academic research and teaching institution devoted to the education of our state's students, or a minor league training ground for elite athletes. Academic departments struggle to make ends meet because of repeated budget cuts, but the president allows lavish spending by the athletic department. These actions have consequences for our students and faculty, and the university's academic stature.

This is the same Oregon administration that a few years ago decided the faculty needed more reeducation in cultural competence. But while the front porch gets a new rocking chair and the administrators establish their multi-cult bona fides, what goes on in the classroom sounds familiar.

Students are affected by poor resource allocation in other ways. Class sizes have grown since 2000 because of a 20 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment, without an equivalent increase in full-time faculty. Students are closed out of classes because there are not enough faculty to teach them. Graduate students, the life-blood of a research university, have dropped by 10 percent since 1970. Instead of hiring new faculty and attracting new graduate students, the university has devoted scarce resources to boosting the number of athletic coaches and staff by 25 percent since 1994. What's more important at the university, better education or better games?

(We continue to manage with half the faculty we had in the late 1980s, and I have now counted 10 or 11 requests to get into my closed classes, which sold out during November early registration. If there were some way I could run my classes as an independent contractor ...)

In Minnesota, Star-Tribune columnist Jay Weiner thinks about the previously unthinkable.

Chicago is ranked ninth among all universities in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report; Minnesota is ranked 67th. Chicago, a private school, has an endowment of more than $4 billion, 13th largest in the nation. Alums still seem to be giving.

Long term, [Robert Maynard] Hutchins' university has thrived without big-time football. Can [Minnesota president Robert] Bruininks learn from that?

There might be some Nobel-class economists on the Minnesota faculty.

There's also discontent at traditional football school Alabama.

Such a very big payout also sends a very wrong signal regarding the priorities of the university. It now becomes very apparent that education is no longer the No. 1 priority in the campus. It is also now clear that boosters run the university, instead of academic minds.

It is also perplexing that the university is pleading for more money from the state educational trust funds, but at the same time has the audacity to squander annually $4 million of university funds to gain football prestige. UA is an educational institution, not an NFL franchise.

Tougher question: suppose Alabama allocated $4 million to attract world-class professors (perhaps to strengthen one or two already strong departments.) Would that be money well spent?

SECOND SECTION: Oregon's president (via University Diaries) demonstrates his staggering ignorance of opportunity costs.

In my 12 years as president of the University of Oregon, I have watched debates that pit the various elements of higher education against one another.

These debates assume that the success of one comes at the expense of the other - research or teaching, undergraduate education or graduate, in-state students or out of state.

Ask a professor to meet more classes or larger classes, see if he hits the top journals as frequently. Hire adjuncts to meet multiple sections of introductory classes: the remaining tenured faculty who were hired to direct dissertations will get the message. Devote some of your capacity to chasing the excess demand for prestige degrees, listen to the discontent from in-state parents and students.


Seventh graders grasp this concept. What is David Frohnmayer's excuse?

QUESTION OF THE DAY. (This day won't end until May.) From Rick Moran's initial 24 summary.

How do we keep the homeland safe while maintaining our freedom? Anyone who says that this is simple question or that one side or the other is either unpatriotic or in favor of establishing a dictatorship isn’t helping matters any.

The 007 show is off to a fast start, with special agent Jack Bauer ransomed from the Chinese to be sacrificed to the real bad guys who are attempting to elicit U.S. help in rooting out a former bad guy. Bauer gets away. A small nuclear bomb has already been set off somewhere in Los Angeles. There are other plot complications.

Again, the bad guys have better operational security than the good guys, with at least one Army guy working with the real bad guys, the shadowy Capitalist Cabal pulling strings somewhere, and the Counter-Terrorist Unit compromised. New analyst Nadia Yassir probably isn't the mole. I'm betting on Milo, with a Serbian connection (anybody remember the only power to shoot down a Stealth aircraft, during one of President Clinton's adventures?)

PICTURE OF THE WEEK. GDP Density (via Econ Log.)

FOR THE START OF THE NEW TERM. Observations from Rate Your Students.

Crap profs will always hide behind the argument that their students don’t know their ear from their elbow and have no right to evaluate their performance as an academic. But until these people wise up and treat their students with respect, show passion for their discipline, and take the time to create classes they are challenging, worthwhile and on task, they’ll get the derisive evals they deserve.

Read the rest.

HEARING THAT ECHO. Now it's Michael Barone running with the metaphor.

This sounds like a threat that we will withdraw unless the Maliki government gives us carte blanche to go after Shiite militias, including the Sadr militia. That threat was reinforced by Sen. Dick Durbin's response, in which he said that our commitment was not only "not open-minded" but that as far as the Democrats were concerned it should be ended pretty soon. That will probably be reinforced by the votes on the nonbinding resolutions on Bush's policy that the Democratic leaders have said they will hold. Opponents will presumably prevail.

That won't doom Bush's policy; remember when Speaker Dennis Hastert failed to get a majority vote supporting Bill Clinton's policy in the Balkans? But it should alert the Iraqis to the real possibility that some time in the 2007–08 cycle this Democratic Congress might move to shut off or limit funds for our forces in Iraq.

What we're seeing is a version of the good cop, bad cop routine. Bush is the good cop to Maliki, promising him support but reminding him it's contingent on his own behavior. Durbin, representing the congressional leadership, is the bad cop, telling him he'd like to cut off support very soon and suggesting he may well do it later.

(Via Betsy's Page.)

Sean Hackbarth's American Mind has a few more links (and it appears his buddies are using the old Wauwatosa Mama Mia's for a monthly gathering.)

SK-N-X-X-X. I had occasion to listen to Air America on Chicago's WCPT this afternoon. The programming I heard is unlikely to change many minds. The show was founder Al Franken himself, with guest Joe Conason. One would think that, with the widespread discontent with President Bush's continuation of the counterinsurgency in Iraq, there would be lots of things the founder and his guest could do to get people excited about inconsistencies in the Administration's position, or potential howlers by Administration officials in Senate hearings, or about making the case that the conditions of the Iraq Liberation Act (as if one government has the authority to pass such a law!) were met long ago, with perhaps the humor and liveliness of Rush Limbaugh, who, in much of the country, airs in the same time slot as Mr Franken.

No such luck. Imagine Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" in low gear. Fortunately I had a decent night's sleep and a medium mocha in the cup-holder. I've had yellow-dog Democrat Silent Generation colleagues who could find more humor in the situation than this lot did.

SHOT AT WITHOUT EFFECT? Somebody fired the Russian version of a LAW rocket at the U.S. Embassy in Greece.

An anti-tank rocket slammed into the U.S. Embassy on Friday, causing limited damage and no injuries but reviving fears of a resurgence of far-left Greek militant groups that carried out deadly attacks over three decades.

The shoulder-fired missile narrowly missed a large blue-and-white U.S. seal on the embassy's facade and damaged a third-floor bathroom near the ambassador's office.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Ries called the attack "very serious" and said no warning had been given.

"There can be no justification for such a senseless act of violence," he told reporters outside the cordoned-off embassy, which officials closed for the day. "The good news is no one was hurt and (there was) minimal damage."

Greek authorities blamed domestic militant groups that have carried out a bombings against police and government buildings despite a crackdown on terrorism before the Athens Olympics in 2004.

Police are examining the authenticity of two calls claiming responsibility from the group Revolutionary Struggle, which has carried out six bombings since 2003. The shadowy group has criticized the United States in past statements, citing treatment of prisoners at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"It is very likely that this is the work of a domestic group," Public Order Minister Vyron Polydoras said. "We believe this effort to revive terrorism is deplorable and will not succeed."

Not officially Islamist terrorism. But (as was the case in the 1960s) communist sympathizers will make common cause with jihadists when it is convenient.

JUST BEFORE 0700 IN ATHENS. Possible explosion at the U.S. Embassy. Call me in the morning (Illinois time.)

PUSHING THE KIDS TOO HARD? Quick summary of a Census report on the time use of children.

The report provides a snapshot in time, a snapshot of American kids at home, school and on playing fields. In some ways, it appears America may be growing more like author Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average." Nearly one in four children in the 12- to 17-year-old age group was enrolled in a special class for gifted students or high school honors and Advanced Placement classes. Three in four kids in that age group were academically on track for their grades.

"The percentage of kids on track academically has consistently been going up," says Bill O'Hare, director of the Kids Count Program at the Baltimore-based Annie Casey Foundation. "The dropout rate is going down."

In other ways, America has further to go. Around 30 million children participated in the National School Lunch Program in 2003. Black and Hispanic children also lagged behind non-Hispanic white children in a range of areas, from being read to at home to participation in gifted classes at school.

Looks like lots of material to occupy policy analysts of all types.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Donald Sensing.

I am, for the first time, deeply pessimistic about the future of this country.

In my studies of American history, I cannot identify another time when both political parties were of such small ideals, little intellect, less vision and greater selfish interest than both parties are now. The American people are more poorly served by our national political figures now than ever. We've certainly had times when one party or the other was miserable, but fortunately there were some voices within them who were heeded for renewal and during such times there was a reservoir of excellence in the other party. Today neither the Republicans or the Democrats have anything to commend them to the admiration of future historians and there exists no one in either party who can possibly lead them out of the swamp. McCain? Pelosi? Obama? Gingrich? It is to laugh. Then cry.

Read the rest, including the discussion.

I THINK THIS IS CALLED WAR. U.S.-led forces detain 6 Iranian workers.

The raid came as tensions are high between Iran and the United States. The Bush administration has accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons and of helping fuel violence in Iraq. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, is trying to expand Tehran's role in Iraq as a counter to U.S. influence in the Gulf region.

Stennis and the jeep carriers are enroute. Debka is reporting explosions in Khorramshahr and Baluchistan.

The paragraph I cite above is from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and it strikes me as quite balanced.

IT USED TO BE A SELECTIVE SCHOOL. Now it's a domestic quagmire.

[A school employee who requested anonymity] described Bradley Tech as a high school where some students read at first- and second-grade levels. She also said many students at Bradley Tech had been expelled from other [Milwaukee] schools, a sure recipe for behavior problems.

Bradley Tech is the former Boys' Trade and Technical High School, which at one time offered apprenticeship programs for aspiring plumbers and electricians, in which students would have the equivalent of on the job training in a one-year program beyond the senior year of high school. In those years, it was the only Milwaukee high school offering a ninth grade (everybody else did ninth grade in junior high, even if at the same location as their neighborhood high school as was the case at Marshall and Lincoln.)

Now it appears as if a coeducational Bradley Tech (as in Bradley Foundation and Allen-Bradley) is just another dumping ground for problem students.

Where are the educational administrators who understand "couldn't carry water for a patternmaker" is as serious a pejorative as "can't grasp limits and derivatives?"