MARKING OFF. The University is allowing our search to continue, despite the tight cash situation. Several of our candidates are working on similar problems, which will give me a chance to ask them to compare-and-contrast, and a few are working on problems of technology diffusion that might be useful for me. I'll be back again, then to mark off to mark prelims.

AT THIS FOR FIVE YEARS. In 2005, I was foolish enough to essay a compilation of all fifty books for that year's Fifty Book Challenge. That was task enough that commencing in 2006 and continuing in 2007 and 2008 I attempted to publish a quarterly progress report (the links point to the previous links for those years). Here's the fourth quarter report for 2009. Please follow the link for the date the report was posted to read the diary entry, or book review, at Fifty Book Challenge. I evaluated some books as particularly good (+) or particularly bad (-).

39. Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class, 14 October 2009.
40. The Other Side of the Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic Was Lost, 17 October 2009.
41. The Night the Fitz Went Down, 21 October 2009.
42. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, 28 October 2009. (+)
43. Keeping the Millennials: Why Companies are Losing Billions in Turnover to This Generation and What To Do About It, 29 October 2009. (-)
44. The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 November 2009.
45. Sam Walton: Made in America, 23 November 2009.
46. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, 23 December 2009.
47. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, 28 December 2009. (-)
48. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, 29 December 2009. (+)
49. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, 30 December 2009.
50. A Tale of Two Subs: An Untold Story of World War II, Two Sister Ships, and Extraordinary Heroism, 31 December 2009. (-)

The first-and-second, and third quarter reports are also available.

The bookworm has reached its mature length. With bowl-bound Huskies and playoff-bound Packers, the colors of the segments should be obvious.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Cross-posted to European Tribune and Fifty Book Challenge.)

THIS IS A BIT MUCH. Long ago, a Milwaukee Hamilton basketball team won a state championship. From time to time, surviving players and coaches gather. In those days, however, a long road trip was to Pewaukee, and the closest thing to a recruiting scandal would be a neighborhood player transferring out of the Catholic Conference (where there were allegations of tuition waivers) to enroll at Hamilton (note, almost never at Pulaski or Juneau.) More recently, Hamilton's resurgent basketball program has taken on some of the attributes of a renegade college program. No matter, though, as long as the program keeps winning.

Milwaukee Hamilton, the No. 1-ranked boys basketball team in the area by the Journal Sentinel, suffered its first loss of the season Tuesday at the Beach Ball Classic in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

The Wildcats (4-1) were defeated, 64-51, by Cedar Hill (Texas) in a second-round game at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center.

Oops. A Wisconsin team plays a Texas team at a holiday tournament in Myrtle Beach. I wonder how many child buyers assistant basketball coaches were in attendance. No word on whether the astronomy club (there once was a planetarium at Hamilton) made a side trip to the Kennedy Space Center.

С Новым Годом

A GOOD SEA STORY RUINED BY A BAD TELLING. In keeping with a down year ending a down decade, a down Book Review N^o. 50. Submarine operations in the Pacific Theater provide material for more than a few good stories. All it takes is a straightforward telling and a sense of organization. Jonathan J. McCullough's telling, in A Tale of Two Subs: An Untold Story of World War II, Two Sister Ships, and Extraordinary Heroism, offers neither.

The untold stories are told better elsewhere. They go better if told in order.

Start with the sister ships, U.S. Navy submarines Squalus and Sculpin. On a test in 1939, Squalus sank when he submerged with an air induction vent still open. Some of the crew were rescued, and the submarine was subsequently raised, rebuilt, and renamed Sailfish.

The retired submariner at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum is standing near an emergency lever that was subsequently fitted to U.S. submarines, to give the crew a fighting chance at being able to close the induction vent without standing directly under it.

USS Cobia, 20 May 1999.

Sculpin and Sailfish put to sea after Pearl Harbor, aided by the successful code-breaking of Naval Intelligence, hampered by unreliable torpedoes, and mindful of the risks of a relatively quick death by drowning or a somewhat slower death in a Japanese prison camp. Some of Sculpin's crew, bound for just such a camp after the Japanese forced him to surrender, were lost when Sailfish sank their transportation, carrier Chuyo. The reader will pick up a few nuggets of useful information on each of these things, that is, if he hasn't abandoned his reading after one too many jumps from the conn to the codebreakers to the homefront, without continuity. There are better tellings of each of the sub-plots elsewhere.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.)

THE END TO A DOWN YEAR THAT ENDS A DOWN DECADE. As only Dave Barry can do it.

In short, it was a year that we will be happy to put behind us. But before we do, let's swallow our anti-nausea medication and take one last look back, starting with. . . .

Go. Read. Enjoy.

THE LONG TWILIGHT STRUGGLE. President Kennedy took the short view, according to Harvard's Niall Ferguson. The thesis of his The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West is that the beginning of World War II is difficult to establish, although the September 1939 German invasion of Poland is probably too late, and that the spring and summer 1945 surrenders did not end many of the other conflicts spawned by the same forces that led to the main event itself. Thus Book Review N^o. 49, which will recommend the book for the author's provocative and often contrarian assertions about the tensions in the European colonial system that led to both World Wars and that contribute to the ongoing clash of civilizations, if that is, indeed, a proper description of the current state of world affairs.

Before I turn to the substance, I have to vent. Far too many of the books I have reviewed, this year and previously, have the annoying habit of providing references to some supporting material in endnotes numbered consecutively, chapter to chapter, while offering other supporting material in footnotes identified with asterisks and other typesetter's symbols more properly displayed in railroad timetables. My preference is for all references to be provided in consecutively numbered footnotes. If the printer must collect them as endnotes, I would prefer that all such references be done that way. Enough with the hermaphrodite reference systems.

Let me offer a few provocative claims for your consideration. Try this, at page 104, on the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. "From a modern standpoint, the only European power to side with the victims of terrorism against the sponsors of terrorism was Germany." Or identify the speaker (see page 223).

We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife. With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

He goes on to contrast the responses of the United States, where political institutions retained much of their traditional form in depression and war, with those of Germany, where the Nazi state emerged. "To attempt to explain why is to address perhaps the hardest question of twentieth-century history." (p. 225) I suggest the American Civil War: the first republic to hold elections during a rebellion, the first republic to reconstitute itself upon the surrenders of the main rebel armies, the first republic to suffer more loss of life in civil war than it has ever suffered in international conflict, is a republic that will tear its principal institutions apart only very reluctantly. That ought give pause to advocates for, and critics of, today's tea-party movements. You'll find the uncertain start date of World War II on page 312.

So where does the long twilight struggle, in which the developing nations of the rest of the world have inherited their borders and many of their resource endowments from the European colonial dispositions (that's the same point Christopher Hitchens has made in the popular press) leave us now? Professor Ferguson suggests that it hasn't ended, and that the tensions between the West (secular or Christian) and the developing (particularly Islamic) world continue much as they did at the beginning of the 20th century, albeit with the divisions in every major European city, rather than at the gates of Vienna or somewhere in the Balkans. (For a crabbier version of the hypothesis, see Mark Steyn.)

That's a possibility, but it need not be the only possibility. One of the comments on Mr Pants-on-Fire's failure to destroy that jet over Detroit is that al-Qaeda has a victory, in that air transportation will become more inconvenient, and Moslems in the United States and in other secular or Christian Western nations will be treated less well by their neighbors. That's a possibility, but it need not be the only possibility. Consider the history of religious persecution of Catholics and Jews in the United States. On the one hand, yes, nativist organizations have used those traditions as their hobby horses. On the other hand, Reform Judaism got rid of the black coats, broad-brimmed hats, and beards. John Kennedy became President, and the Roman Church permitted congregations to conduct masses in the local language. That transformed a belief system associated with teeming immigrant slums (Slavic, Mediterranean, Hispanic, Irish) and incomprehensible rituals (Credo in unum Deo, et expecto ...) into just another prelude to the afternoon Packer game. It's called assimilation, and I'd be surprised if there aren't already Moslem congregations on these shores considering holding services in English.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN. In the Champs Sports Bowl, Wisconsin made Miami (a correspondent suggests issuing them orange uniforms) look over-rated. Miami had to resort to some trick plays to get their points, and to depend on some Wisconsin errors to keep things close. For the most part, though, Wisconsin dominated the game.

They were very physical, aggressive, punishing, relentless and dominant, which is to say they were once again 100% Wisconsin. They were all over the Miami quarterback. And even when they did something silly - a turnover here, a personal foul there or a surrendered onside kick - they quickly made things whole in a most redemptive end to 2009.

"I can't explain why it didn't go our way," Miami coach Randy Shannon said.

I can. The Badgers kicked your behind all the way back to Coral Gables.

Or back to reform school.

The back story to this game, however, is the presence of Donna "Queen of Clubs" Shalala, the high priestess of political correctness who brought in the personnel to strengthen the athletic department while the academic programs declined, as president of Miami, where the academic programs have yet to reach a height where decline would be regrettable.

"I say to people, 'If you go to Wisconsin and you walk into a bar and you mention my name, they'll buy you a drink,'" Shalala said by phone the other day. "I'm remembered more for what I did with the athletic program, and I think we had a very good academic strategy while I was there, too."

Shalala is now president at the University of Miami, which plays her old school next week in the Champs Sports Bowl. That puts her in a very different place these days, a private school that leads with a dominant football program.

She's done some work to clean up the football program, although there have been problems, and skepticism of her efforts, and good reason for Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez to not go there.

Meanwhile, celebrating diversity takes on a new meaning in Madison. We've been following the social stratification in which rich Coasties confront Wisconsin residents for some time, and that confrontation has taken on a harsher tone of late.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. Professor Munger considers the possibilities.

In 1964, the right wing seized control of the Republican National Convention in the "Cow Palace" in San Francisco. They nominated Barry Goldwater, a "true" conservative who represented fundamental values of the right, and had no prospect whatsoever of winning the Presidency. Well, it might just be happening again. Remember, Ron Paul and the "Liberty Republicans" of 2007 and 2008 were not primarily running against Democrats. They were trying to take over the Republican Party, from the inside.

Losing sight of that fact seems to have blinded many in the chattering classes to the real significance of the grassroots Tea Party rebellion. But there are clear echoes, in opposition to Republican Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, and governor candidate (and long-time Republican Senator) Kay Bailey Hutchinson in Texas. Their toughest challenges will come from fierce primary challenges by populist, "Tea Party" conservatives, not general elections against Democrats.

So, are we heading toward 1994, when a public repulsed by what many saw as the liberal excesses of the Clinton administration and a Democratic Congress turned en masse to the right, creating an immediate Congressional Republican majority? Or toward 1964, when a sharp turn toward the right led the Republicans briefly to an electoral wipeout, but laid the foundation for the majorities that put Republicans in the White House all but 12 of the 40 years starting in 1968?

On the one hand, it takes something to beat a bad policy. Much of the electorate has learned that Not-Bush is not enough to produce improvements in public policy. On the other hand, it will be harder for the Democratic Establishment to mischaracterize principled opposition to overweening government as racist or mean-spirited in the same way they were able to trash Senator Goldwater for voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (In retrospect, a national policy that limited the power of state governments to enforce segregation along libertarian lines -- No state shall prohibit freedom of association -- might have served racial minorities more effectively than the policies put into place has.)

THE MOST USEFUL CHART FOR THE UPCOMING YEAR. Professor Mankiw has been posting a number of instructive charts. This one, illustrating the declining proportion of spending on medical services paid for directly by consumers, illustrates one reason for rising expenditures on health care.

I refuse to use the expression "rising health care costs" because many services that were previously not available at any price are now available at some price. But when those services qualify for coverage by insurance, including coverage at the national government's monopsony Medicare rates, the incentives for consumers to shop around and the providers to find improvements are attenuated.

Investors Business Daily figure courtesy Greg Mankiw.

A BAD PENNY COMES BACK. The Denver to Winter Park ski train is ceasing operation for this season.

Iowa Pacific Holdings LLC on Monday said it won't be able to operate the ski train this season after failing to resolve differences with Amtrak. The company was negotiating to use Amtrak crews.

The Chicago-based Iowa Pacific claims last-minute demands by Amtrak for insurance coverage derailed the effort. A federal judge last week rejected the company's request for a temporary restraining order against Amtrak that would have allowed it to start running the train last weekend.

Iowa Pacific President Ed Ellis said the railroad had to cancel what would have been the train's 70th season because it relies on advance reservations and they were halted last week. He said the company has refunded most of the 13,000 reservations that were sold.

I would strongly urge any passengers who have not yet received their refund to pursue them aggressively. Years ago, Mr Ellis was president of something called Golden Arrow Railtours in the midwest. His company scheduled an excursion train, using vintage coaches and diesels, that would run from Milwaukee to Green Bay and return on the Lake Shore Division, now torn up, of the Chicago & North Western. I sent the company a check and received a ticket. The company subsequently cancelled the trip, but never sent me a refund. I see Mr Ellis is still up to his old tricks, running vapor train trips.

Here's more on the history of the ski train, a Denver institution of long standing that once ran with classic coaches handed down from Northern Pacific that also starred in a very bad made-for-TV movie called Runaway.

PLAY-DOH AND ERECTOR SETS. It all seems so obvious now. Railroading, North American style, is long strings of coal or grain or ethanol or automobile cars staying out of the way of the time-sensitive stack trains. Recently, I observed some children watching trains from the Chesapeake Bagel store, and they're attuned enough to contemporary practice to wait for the end of the train before they finish counting the engines.

Rochelle, Illinois, 9 July 2006.

Marc Levinson's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, the subject of Book Review N^o. 48, suggests that it wasn't at all obvious, and that (as in the emergence of any industry standard) what we see today is not necessarily what any of the pioneers intended.

The book touches on a number of themes that frequently provide material at Cold Spring Shops. Start with the cartelized industrial economy of the United States immediately after World War II, the one that the self-styled progressives have retrospectively decided wasn't so bad after all (see here or here or here or here) in which public policy rigorously separated transportation companies by type (a trucking company could not own a railroad or a ship) and ratemaking equalized opportunities by equalizing rates (such that a good offloaded at any Pacific port would pay the same freight charge to Chicago, and a good manufactured at a midwestern city would pay the same freight charge to any Atlantic port) and unions and political bosses would keep everyone poorer in order that their members would be relatively less poor. The container is an idea of a trucking executive, Malcom McLean, who, worried that cheap government-surplus Liberty and Victory ships would take business from him, conceived of the if-you-can't-beat-em gambit of designing something that could be loaded at a factory, trucked to dockside, shipped to another dockside, and trucked to the consignee. To do so, however, breaches the wall of separation between over-the-road trucking and shipping companies (the book alludes to, but probably wisely does not get too deeply into, the complications of trailer- and container-on-flat-car ratemaking in those days) and it threatens the ability of the longshoremen to take a slice of the gains from trade through their special ability to stow cargo into the odd spaces inside a tramp steamer's hull in such a way that it doesn't shift and capsize the ship, while stacking it in such a way that the entire ship doesn't have to be unloaded to get at the consignment for the next port of call, and while helping themselves to some of the whiskey going into the hold. (I vaguely remember an advertisement from the early days of container shipping comparing the fate of a cask of olives in a container to what happened on the traditional waterfront. At each stop, a few olives got crushed and a few got eaten.) The container is clearly a Marshallian improvement, (the benefits to its adoption outweigh the losses from its adoption) although the agreement the ports and the longshoremens' unions came to is not the same thing as a full Kaldor or Scitovsky compensation. Dockers received job-protection or buyout compensation, and at some ports retraining to operate container-handling equipment. But other ports were bypassed as the technology diffused, and Mr Levinson notes that the substantially larger minimum efficient scales of container ships and container ports has effectively isolated much of the developing world.

At the same time, the container gave shippers opportunities to negotiate with transportation companies, and transportation companies temptations to deviate from the very strictly defined rates of the day (does anybody else remember class, commodity, and exception rates?) producing pressures to deregulate surface freight transportation (relatively straightforward for trucking, somewhat more challenging in railroading, where relationship-specific assets are common, and potentially a research topic for shipping, where the relatively small-scale tramp steamer operators had sufficient irreversibilities to make Marshallian competition difficult, something probably exacerbated by the larger scale of the container ships.)

The container ship gave ship operators new opportunities to deal with uneven trade flows. Although the money value of trade flows tends to be equal among trading partners over time, the volume, which is what matters for providing transportation capacity, can be unequal. (A New England that imports staple foodstuffs and exports textiles, shoes, and machine tools has a better chance of supporting ports and railroads than a New England that imports staple foodstuffs and exports live lobsters and computer software; the latter New England is richer than the former. Marshallian improvements again.) The notorious triangular trade of the European colonial period is an attempt to equalize volumes. Some container shipping lines offered round-the-world sailings, primarily eastward, in an attempt to keep the ships more or less continuously filled. Those attempts require reliable timekeeping, however, and come a cropper whenever fuel prices rise.

Mr McLean, I discover, was slightly ahead of his time. As early as 1966, his company envisioned "an audacious proposal to build railroad yards in Chicago and St. Louis, at its own expense. Freight forwarders owned by McLean Industries would collect freight from shippers, consolidate it into McLean-owned containers, and load the containers aboard McLean-owned railcars, specially designed by the Pullman Company to carry containers stacked two high. The Pennsylvania Railroad would pull McLean's all-container train straight to a rail yard Sea-Land would build by the docks at Elizabeth, arriving in time to meet a Europe-bound ship." Page 169. John Kneiling's visionary Integral Train Systems of 1969 anticipates intermodal trains for anything that isn't a single cargo of a bulk commodity, but his container trains are single level flats. Conrail and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania got around to enlarging the Gallitzin tunnels on the old Pennsylvania Railroad for double-stacks in 1995.

There is plenty of additional material for the student of transportation economics. My colleague and shipping conference expert William Sjostrom has a more formal review along those lines.

The Play-Doh? An engineer stuffed some into the space between the stacks of containers and the walls of the hold, to measure deflection in heavy seas. The Erector sets? To work out, on a small scale, the practicality of a shipboard crane that could move a container from hold to dockside without capsizing the ship. The Imperial Walkers the railroads use pose fewer challenges.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

BIN LADEN'S LOST DECADE. Despite the navel-gazing and introspection prompted by the failed suicide bombing of an airplane arriving Detroit, a Frank Rich column in the New York Times strikes me as accurate.

We’ve rarely questioned our assumption that 9/11, “the day that changed everything,” was the decade’s defining event. But in retrospect it may not have been. A con like Tiger’s may be more typical of our time than a one-off domestic terrorist attack, however devastating.

And while we played, the best al-Qaeda could do was Mr Pants on Fire.

We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.

We win.


Via 11-D, with this summation: "We should be able to lower our expectations and fine tune our BS barometers to know when we're being sold lies and when we're presented with the real thing." To which I note, yes, if we're willing to work at it.

I also note, pace Mr Rich, that his hope for the people to identify leaders who can lead the country out of the sand trap it's in, to use his metaphor, is a false hope. It's the belief in leaders that gives us the cult of the CEO and the cult of the Presidency and the cult of the sports hero and celebrity culture in general -- and the resulting fascination with the shortcomings of those supposedly special people. Complex adaptive systems will do what they please ...

IT'S BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS. Via Insta Pundit, a Washington Post article on the difficulties matriculants encounter in obtaining college loans.

The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.

To pay for higher education, most Americans had come to rely on a range of financial products born of the Wall Street boom. Nearly all of these shrank or disappeared in the storm that engulfed the stock and debt markets.

Chicken, Egg. Egg, Chicken? But it's not the direction of causation (easy credit, student loans, higher sticker prices) that I wish to address.

Some educators worry that college programs will sacrifice quality to contain costs or become limited to those who can afford it.

"The big macro question is: Will we have to sacrifice the quality of education, or the access, based on talent rather than the ability to pay?" said [Anthony] Marx, the Amherst president. "Either of those make America less competitive for the next generation."

Cost containment is nothing new, particularly at the community colleges and regional comprehensives where most credit hour production takes place. I will not generalize from my own experience, although I note that Northern Illinois has been in retrenchment mode for going on twenty years now. The recession that accompanied the Kuwait crisis? Cut back. The dot.com bubble economy? Cut back. The recession that bracketed September 11? Cut back. The real estate bubble economy? Cut back. Our course offerings are all too frequently an artifact of who didn't retire or take grants elsewhere or who could be replaced rather than any coherent vision of a dean or a curriculum committee. Now that the shoe is pinching at some of the Public Ivies, the establishment press notices.

AN INCOMPLETE CASE. We continue our survey of writing on the financial crisis of 2008-09 with Thomas E. Woods's Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Book Review N^o. 47 will be relatively short, as the subtitle takes away any possibility of a review including spoilers. Mr Woods covers some of the same history as columnist Michael Lewis did in Panic (reviewed here) and he offers a different policy perspective from Paul Krugman in The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (reviewed here). Where Professor Krugman sees merit in Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policies and changes in government regulation of financial markets, Mr Woods sees none. In his view, the government's mortgage agencies and the Federal Reserve created and enabled serial bubbles, and those agencies cannot be depended upon to undo the effects of the unwinding of the bubbles. He'd rather offer (this being a Regnery book, it's more likely to appeal to the converted than to change minds) a potted Austrian business cycle explanation for the bubbles and a return to money backed by precious metals. His use of the Austrian business cycle models would probably not satisfy a serious historian of economic thought, and, although I remember only enough of income theory and monetary economics to be dangerous, I would have liked first, a more careful explanation of why exhaustible resources (which is what gold and silver are) that have uses in industrial processes and in ornamentation as well as in stores of value are necessarily superior to other mediums of exchange -- that's not as easy as it looks; second, an explanation why a central bank with a common reserve requirement is necessarily inferior to competing banks with different reserve positions -- anyone who claims that all cash transactions were once upon a time backed by precious metals has not thought through the origins of fractional reserve banking in the receipts issued by goldsmiths; and third, a more careful analysis of the ability of a central bank to monopolize the creation of money -- researchers having identified M₁ through M₅ or M₆ when I was in graduate school, and I'd be startled if there weren't more definitions including ever more creative instruments of credit.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

A TRENCHANT OBSERVATION FOR THE DAY. I made a trip to Titletown, where the Seattle Seahawks, who had surrendered 56 points in their previous two outings, allowed the Packers to score 48 and secure a spot in the playoffs (although their opponent is yet to be determined) with a little help from the [North] Carolina Panthers. Hidden among the copious football coverage in the Green Bay Press-Gazette (more coverage than the Seattle secondary offered) is an instructive column by jobs guru Andrea Kay.

It's up to you to explain the kind of work you do or want, skills you've honed and how that helps someone.

The notion that getting it done is good enough: I was talking to a college junior about how the paper she was writing for a particular class had gone. When I last saw her, it was due the next day. "I got it done. That was good enough," she told me.

Is this what Robert Capps of Wired magazine meant when he talked about "The Good Enough Revolution" in which for a new generation of consumers, things don't have to be of the highest quality, but just good enough?

Competition for good jobs is steep. Just sending out e-mails and asking for a job isn't good enough. If you're trying to hold on to your job, just getting through your daily to-do list won't cut it.

Your competition is going to cream you. Their philosophy: I'm going to go beyond your wildest dreams. Anticipate problems and take the initiative to fix them and make you see you can't live without me.

Since employers can be choosy, kiss goodbye the notion that getting it done is good enough. It's not. It's also a terribly unrewarding way to run a career.

Per corollary, since professors can also be choosy, kiss goodbye the notion that getting it done is good enough. It's not. And I don't give grades, I just report the news.

MARKING OFF. Thanks for looking in. Enjoy the Festive Season in Greater DeKalb.


The Waterman Illuminations.


The Waterman and Western Railroad gives people, primarily youngsters, a close look at the illuminations. Use your imagination to supply the cheerful little voices.


The Christmas tree is in the Reavis lobby, with English, Journalism, and Womens' Studies nearby.

The Northern Illinois University holiday greeting.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY. Cyclical models of history often draw a cpnnection between the remoteness of an event in the living memory of the current population and the greater likelihood of something like that event recurring. Something like that appears to be at work in Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, material for Book Review N^o 46. Professor Krugman begins with a summary of macroeconomic hubris ("between John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, we thought we knew enough to keep [stagnation and deflation] from happening again," p. 4; "The Central Problem Has Been Solved," chap. 1) and the collapse of Communism, taking the principal intellectual challenge to market-system economics in theory and practice with it. He then notes that early in the 1990s, ominous signs, not unlike those present in the 1920s and oh-so-visible with hindsight, appeared in the economies of developing countries and diffused to more developed countries and particularly their financial sectors. Professor Krugman does not make his case in detail, although he covers some of the same ground Michael Lewis's Panic, reviewed here, and Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World, reviewed here, is a useful companion piece on events leading to the Great Depression. And thus we are contemplating the end of the Oh-Ohs, and Professor Krugman's concluding observation invokes that cycle.

Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes's world -- and ours -- was therefore not of of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding.

We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow hose thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

What makes this year's collection of Book Reviews intellectually intriguing is that other books contemplating The Latest Bubble to Pop, or Depression 2.0 would treat the Keynesian doctrines as obsolete.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

PREPARE TEACHERS TO TEACH. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that the University of Minnesota "backs away from ideological screening."

The plans from its College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) involved redesigning admissions and the curriculum to enforce an ideology centered on a narrow view of "cultural competence." Those with the "wrong" views were to receive remedial re-education, be weeded out, or be denied admission altogether. In a letter to FIRE, however, the university's top lawyer has now promised that the university will never "mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with ‘wrong beliefs' from the University."

I suspect this story is not yet over, as the Diversity Boondoggle, at Minnesota and elsewhere, has a lot invested in enabling the destructive habits of ineffective people, while guilt-tripping people who have internalized productive habits.

The proposal, initiated by the college's Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, sought to require each future teacher to accept theories of "white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression"; "develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity"; and "recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism ... but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation." They were to be judged by their scores on the Intercultural Development Inventory, a test of "Intercultural Sensitivity." In one assignment, they were to reveal a "pervasive stereotype" they personally held and then demonstrate how their experiences had "challenged" it. They also were to be assessed regarding "the extent to which they find intrinsic satisfaction" in being in "culturally diverse situations."

Presumably, being a Viking fan at a Packer game doesn't satisfy that last assessment. I also doubt that the social and cultural transformation the task group envisions includes reading, or spelling, or calculating accurately, or showing up on time. On the other hand, cutting the person with poor life management skills some slack might be a simple, if not necessarily extraordinary, demonstration of intercultural sensitivity.

WHAT IS SEEN, WHAT IS UNSEEN. Emory's Mark Bauerlein contemplates higher education's supposed boy problem.

Colleges want to keep the ratio as even as possible, however, for a variety of reasons. One is that when one sex significantly outnumbers the other, sexual rivalries and competitions set in. When we head toward a two-thirds majority (remember the Jan and Dean line, "Two girls for every boooooyyyyyyyyyyy"), the sexual gamesmanshiip of social life goes up. Added to that, admissions people worry that strong female students won't want to go to school where the number of men is low.

Advantage, Cold Spring Shops.

Gonna go to college, gonna have some fun. (Apologies to Jan and Dean.) The economist in me always wondered about the stability of that equilibrium. University administrators do too, if in a different way.

Professor Bauerlein's comments, and the Inside Higher Ed column he reacts to, focus on the usual identity politics, diversity, affirmative action cluster. I wonder, though, if that isn't missing the point. Suppose beer 'n circus isn't an aberration, it's the mission? Here's a comment to the Inside Higher Ed column.

The big time football playing universities have a interest in the pending court case. Title IX requires the university to award athletic aid in proportion to the gender proportion of the student body.

In theory, if the gender balance is 60 percent female, then approximately 60 percent of athletic aid should be distributed to females. In all probability this means adding female sports.

The old boy network would claim that male sports, in particular the fottball [c.q.] team, would suffer because the male sports would receive less athletic aid based on the gender enrollment.

Certainly testable, although there might be constituencies within the administration for whom an exogenous reason to dial football back is more persuasive than mere budget constraints. And here's a comment to a tangentially related post offering anecdotal support.

At the first TT job I had, the football team accounted for about 20% of the male students. The recruiting folks counted it as a big help in keeping the gender ratio from being skewed. (For some reason they thought that educating women wasn't as important as educating men... hmmmm, IBTP.)

It's worth looking at football budgets in themselves, since they're often a big part of the Title IX dance.

A recent book by Rutgers sociologist Jackson Toby, which receives praise in part and criticism in part from Ben Wildavsky, might be another part of the same picture.

Early on, Mr. Toby concedes that education has become the country's "main economic escalator." But he is alarmed at how few students are prepared to meet even the minimal demands of a real college education. He faults lax college-admission standards that give high schools little incentive to push their students harder. Too many undergrads can't write with minimal competence or understand basic cultural references. Students often take silly, politicized courses. And they feel entitled to inflated grades: Mr. Toby reports that one of his students spewed obscenities at him for ending the young man's straight-A record.

Perhaps this kind of experience accounts for Mr. Toby's seeming bitterness toward unserious students, whom he calls "unprepared, half-asleep catatonics who drift in late and leave early." Most undergrads, Mr. Toby suggests, enjoy a steady diet of extracurricular hedonism while skating through their coursework (though it's unclear how this claim jibes with his complaints about low graduation rates).

Despite years of starvation rations at Northern Illinois, we have been able to entice some scholars away from Rutgers (I don't know the magnitude of the reverse flow) but their (relatively recent) high-visibility sports program has done well, particularly in football and womens' basketball. Perhaps the main culprit remains a higher education willing to do the high schools' work for them (as a way of obtaining larger budgets and demonstrating responsibility for larger institutions?) rather than a perceived market in beer 'n circus. That perceived market, however, strikes me as worthy of further research.