THE LIMITS OF WISHFUL THINKING. There have been a few technical difficulties to start the new year, some self-inflicted (why does the transition to a new computer have to involve reloading all the programs from scratch?) and some exogenous (the joys of running electrical and telephone cables in the same tunnel). Thus a stack of books waiting to be reviewed, and we commence the 2011 Fifty Book Challenge with Book Review N^o. 1.

Sometimes, when the post-modernists work at being serious, they are at their funniest. So it is with Marc Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. It's definitely in the cultural studies tradition, with promiscuous use of scare quotes and sesquipedalian prose. Cary Nelson, he of the American Association of University Professors, Defender of the Faith, writes a foreword that sets the tone.

To theorize the contemporary university is to recognize that there was nothing inevitable about its formation. It did not have to be, and it can still be dismantled. Set a $200,000 limit to faculty salaries and a $300,000 limit to upper administrative salaries. Limit coaches to $300,000 as well. At my institution, even the president's assistants earn $300,000; I'd cut their salaries by 50 percent. Redirect the money saved to hiring assistant professors, raising part-timer salaries to parity and graduate student employee wages to the cost of living, and eliminating all tuition payments for poor and lower-middle-class students. Deny administrators the right to fund gratuitous pet projects at the expense of a principled salary schedule. If administrators refuse to comply, sit in their offices, sit in front of their cars, block campus streets, block access to buildings, picket their houses. Use nonviolent civil disobedience to force change. Or, if that seems too confrontational, form a union and negotiate those matters at the bargaining table. Increasingly, graduate employees and contingent faculty are doing just that. The key decisions about the job system are made on your own campus when budget priorities are set. Take the money in your own hands. You have nothing to lose but your colleagues' chains.

The focus of the work is on the supposed business model being deployed by universities. There are some ideas that might merit further study, although someone with a working understanding of actually existing business, organization theory, economics, and the proper use of plain English is likely to do a better job. Thus does Professor Bousquet draw comparisons between the behavior of health maintenance organizations and institutions of higher learning. There is one absent referent, however. Both medical care and higher education are full of third-party payments. Nobody really knows what the opportunity cost of a textbook or a passive progressive splint is. His discussion of the origins of management fads as a way to stress the supply chain is intriguing. One wonders, though, whether organizations prone to stressing themselves rather than maintaining their core focus are injuring themselves (creatively destroying themselves?) and whether coming up with the Next Big Thing in operating systems or automotive drive trains has anything in common with helping the young skulls full of mush develop their jive detectors. His metaphor of the university as a computer desktop is interesting, in part because of what he doesn't understand. Perhaps it is instructive to think of the senior manager as a coordinator, facing a computer desktop, clicking on the right icon, and getting the task done, never mind the stresses that mouse click causes on the circuits and individuals responsible for getting it done.

That's where Professor Bousquet's lack of understanding of economics bites him. The point of a division of labor society is to have individuals in place to do the things one does not know how to do, and one contributes by doing for others the things they do not know how to do. (Alfred North Whitehead got that right.) Markets exist to provide incentives for people to develop those talents rather than develop other talents. That's not how Professor Bousquet sees it (pp. 90-91):

Charles Eliot's University Administration portrait of faculty life radiates a confident paternalism that remains viable in many ways today. Despite sporadic press coverage of the term faculty and graduate employees who do 75 percent of the teaching in higher education, the public image of the professoriate remains that of Stanley Aronowitz's "last good job in America": tweedy eggheads effortlessly interpellated in a system of rational, meritocratic reward, administered on a generous scale by a trusteeship of honorable men. Indeed, for faculty in certain overwhelmingly male-dominated disciplines, Eliot's picture is accurate enough. In engineering or business at a research institution, the phenomenon of a generously compensated young male wage earner on track to a quadruple family wage (say, $140,000) by the age of forty is quite common.

To an economist, there's a simple explanation. Market tests exist. In the Wolkenkuckucksheim of cultural studies, however, that's too simple an explanation.

For most others, and especially the majority of women faculty, like "Lucy Snowe" working off the tenure track in the feminized liberal arts, the wages are similar to those of the women who stitched and laundered Eliot's shirt. (The author's use of the educator-heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Villette refers to the condition of nineteenth-century schoolteachers, who often compared their compensation unfavorably to that of needleworkers, whose circumstances were then, as now, a byword for extreme exploitation.) In every region of the United States, women faculty teach for as little as a few hundred dollars per course, frequently earning less than $16,000 for teaching eight courses a year, without benefits.

Supply and demand don't exist in this formulation.

A chief component of Snowe's oppression is the very idea that this arrangement is fair or rational, the inevitable -- and impersonal -- consequence of some such guarantor of the public good such as a "market" in the wages of women (and the men who do such "women's work" as writing instruction in higher education). She characterizes her injuries in the terms employed by survivors of domestic violence with the intention of underscoring the systematic solidarity of the oppressor's logic -- the web of beliefs, loyalties, privileges, and institutions composing the patriarchy itself, not just the individual abuser.

Neither do there exist testable implications. The paragraph rambles to an observation that the oppression requires the sanction of the victim -- but it does not require a John Galt to lead the vanguard into hiding, all it requires is fewer people to enroll in doctoral programs generating that excess supply of Ph.D.s Withdraw that sanction and the substitution of graduate students and temporary faculty for tenure-line faculty fails for want of an industrial reserve army. (Professor Bousquet uses that argument to rebut the suggestion that graduate programs enroll fewer students, as the students provide the cheap labor, giving the management the incentive to keep running the graduate programs. But without the novices and postulants, the order collapses.) That's too simple. The author has to establish his common room cred hence (turn to page 195 and pour yourself four fingers of vodka).

Berelson and Allen don't need the idea of "the market" because they don't need to fantasize an elastic relationship between demand and supply such that controlling the "supply" represents an action affecting the whole system. For Orr, the problematizing of the concept of the supply is a real intellectual convenience, because it both (a) offers the fantasy of doing something to "the market" (i.e. balancing it) by "controlling" or "regulating" supply (1186, 1191), and (b) diverts attention from the real problems of "demand" (i.e. the willingness of administrators to use nondegreed flexible labor instead of degreed persons in jobs). Orr and his successors need "the market" to legitimate the fantasy of a supply-side fix, a fantasy that averts the consciousness of political struggle that would quickly transpire if the concept of "demand" were problematized.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing. No wonder cultural studies is failing the market test. It does not have to take all of higher education down with it.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

TRAINS ON THE MOVE, OR OTHERWISE. Bloomberg reports progress in England and China. The comparisons with the U.S. are not encouraging.

Unlike almost every other developed nation, the U.S. has no national transportation strategy. The nation fails to raise taxes that are supposed to pay for roads and rails. Gasoline taxes, for example, cover only about 50 percent of road projects, much lower than in the past, according to recent Federal Highway Administration figures.

The analysis refers to public projects. Improvements in the freight railroad infrastructure go on, unseen and generally unremarked.

America certainly isn’t developing the design, construction and management capacity to build on a large scale to global standards.

Looking at renderings of the West Kowloon Terminus, I see giant roof-supporting columns that ascend through the 600-foot- long atrium like intertwined tree limbs. From the exterior, the heavily planted roof, threaded with walkways, curves in a great U around a parklike plaza, which will lead to the West Kowloon Cultural District, a waterfront complex of parks and arts institutions that will rise just to the south.

Once upon a time, The New York Central could give us Buffalo Central Terminal and the Michigan Central Station, neither of which ever realized their full potential as railroad stations and office towers, both of which remain compelling as ruins. Cleveland's Terminal Tower is doing somewhat better, although with only rapid transit at track level, and with a more practical heavily planted roof.


The fallout from the November election has led to changes in transportation spending in the states.

"High-speed rail" conjures up images of sleek bullet trains that whip around Europe and Asia at over 200 m.p.h. (320 km/h), but so far Obama is pushing bullet trains only in California and Florida. Much of his program is actually "higher-speed rail": gradual upgrades to Amtrak lines that share track with freight railroads and can never exceed 110 m.p.h. (180 km/h). This is not crazy. When the goal is to provide alternatives to long drives and short flights, top speeds matter less than overall trip times, and relatively modest investments can generate real improvements that attract new riders — which in turn can generate momentum for additional investments, and so on. Slicing an hour off Chicago–St. Louis makes sense. Improving Charlotte-Raleigh in North Carolina makes sense.

But Ohio and Wisconsin said no to even those modest investments, and California picks up some of the money instead.

California fortunately got more than half of the $1.2 billion diverted from Ohio and Wisconsin, which will help it expand its first link to cover 120 miles (190 km) between Fresno and Bakersfield, the Central Valley's two largest cities.

That said, no one in their right mind would spend billions of dollars to build a Fresno-Bakersfield line in isolation either. It could only make sense as a jump-start for a line connecting L.A. to San Francisco in less than half the driving time; laying track around the densely populated endpoints would have been much more expensive, controversial and time-consuming than in the primarily agricultural Central Valley.

The French, and to some extent the British, use a similar approach, with TGVs and Eurostars going onto existing, in some places 150 year old, trackage to enter cities.

The editorial comment that concludes the article, however, places too much faith in public-supported internal improvements.

By then, the first stakes will be sunk in Florida, and opponents will be mocking the Tampa-Orlando project as a ridiculous relic of a free-spending era, while supporters will be hailing it as an inspiring throwback to the days when America dreamed big and built big. It will be a proxy for a larger argument about the role of American government, and the outcome may well determine whether Obama gets to ride the train as President — and, perhaps, whether the train ever really leaves the station.

Once upon time, the passenger railroads dreamed big and built big, and the freight railroads still do. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects have biased too many analysts' thinking.

STARTING AFRESH. The Packers picked just enough passes to earn a playoff spot.

THE ORIGINAL THINKERS CAN BE STRONGER.

A recent Colman McCarthy column in the Washington Post arguing that ROTC has no place on university campuses got a number of the leading lights of the Rightosphere angry, with Vodkapundit identifying it as a self-fisking column. The constraints of the printed page might have compelled an earlier generation of writers to offer pithier rebuttals. Consider this passage from the column.

When I suggested that Notre Dame's hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school's many positives, [university president Theodore] Hesburgh disagreed. Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame's ROTC program was a way to "Christianize the military," he stated firmly.

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ's teaching of loving one's enemies?

Good going, pick a theological fight with a priest. The simplest rebuttal, however, comes from William F. Buckley. At page 55 of the paperback edition of Quotations from Chairman Bill is a reflection on military-sponsored research in academic departments that applies as well to military science.

Would we really be better off breeding a class of government-scientists unexposed to the leavening influence of the humanities, such as them as survive in the nation's colleges and universities? Do they really believe we would then be better off? Because that is exactly what is going to happen if the militants have their way.

It's from Mr Buckley's 15 February 1969 "On the Right" column. The decline of the humanities has been going on for a long time.

A CALL FOR ADMINISTRATIVE MODESTY. Peter Berkowitz's Obama and the State of Progressivism, 2011 returns to familiar ground (if one of your frames of reference is the futility of taming complexity).

But progressivism went astray owing to a defect in its basic orientation. It rejected the sound principles of government embodied in the Constitution, because of a critical difference of opinion about human nature. Progressives believed that great improvements in the moral character of humanity and in the scientific understanding of society had rendered the Constitution’s scheme of checks and balances — or better its separation, balancing, and blending of power — unnecessary to prevent majority tyranny and the abuse of power by officeholders. Whereas the makers of the American Constitution believed that the imperfections of human nature and the tendency of people to develop competing interests and aims were permanent features of moral and political life, progressives insisted that progress allowed human beings, or at least the most talented and best educated human beings, to rise above these limitations and converge in their understanding of what was true and right. Indeed, according to the progressives the Constitution’s obsolete and cumbersome institutional design was a primary hindrance to democratic reforms to which all reasonable people could agree and which upright and impartial administrators would implement. It is a short step from the original progressives’ belief that developments in morals and science had obviated reasonable disagreements about law and public policy and dissolved concerns about the impartiality of administrators to the new progressives’ belief that in domestic affairs disagreement is indefensible and intolerable.

The paradox of American progressivism, old and new, is rooted in the gap between its professed devotion to democracy, or the idea that the people legitimately rule, and its belief that democracy consists in a set of policies independent of what the people want. The paradox may not inhere in every single progressive utterance or program, but it typifies progressivism as a whole. It certainly receives expression in the disjunction between official progressive aims. On the one hand, progressives proclaim their intention to democratize American politics by making it more responsive to the will of the people and giving the people greater say in government. On the other hand, progressives favor the steady enlargement of the national government’s responsibilities, which increases the distance between the people and government, while supporting the expansion of an educated administrative elite, which reduces government’s accountability to the people.

It's a long article, touching on a number of ideas of political philosophy, provocative in places, worth your time reading it.

INSPIRED BY THE RAILROADS? Cadillac's latest slogan is "The New Standard of the World." (Once upon a time, The Pennsylvania Railroad was The Standard Railroad of the World. Despite carrying a great deal of the men and materiel to win in Europe, the carrier dropped the slogan in 1946.) A commercial for the CTX sedan claims its shape is derived from a drawn arrow. (But unlike Hiawatha, the CTX did not go forward with such fleetness that the arrows fell behind it. Just as well, no matter how stylin' the car is, it is to a train as a pop can is to a car.)

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

NOT QUITE THE ALL WEATHER MODE? Some British commuters had a sing-along heralding the Southern Electric's recent troubles.

You Tube video from Going Underground.

Electric trains are supposed to get through in winter. The last few years of the North Shore Line coincided with a run of cold winters, with one of the coldest days on record the night the line quit business.

Ryan Road, early 1959.

The cars were in good shape for the weather right up to the end. Here is a transfer of equipment to Highwood Shops to be put into good running order. One track of the original Shore Line remained in service for these empty stock moves, and for delivery of coal to dealers in the northern suburbs.


Some North Shore cars in preservation were relatively easy to return to service as the carrier continued its regular maintenance schedule right to the end.

A LATE GROWTH SPURT FOR THE BOOKWOORM. I've been participating in the Fifty Book Challenge since the beginning of 2005. That early spring arm injury set me back some, but a summer train trip gave me an opportunity to catch up on some reading, and the year-end office closure allowed time to catch up on posting the reviews. Here's the fourth quarter report for 2010. 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 (-).

22. The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, 6 October 2010.
23. Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System, 25 October 2010.
24. America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation, 26 October 2010.
25. General Sherman's Christmas, 27 October 2010. (+)
26. Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, A Year Spent Riding Across America, 1 November 2010. (+)
27. The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, 3 November 2010.
28. The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It, 13 November 2010. (-)
29. Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It, 21 November 2010.
30. My Father Owned a Circus, 30 November 2010. (+)
31. The March: A Novel, 6 December 2010.
32. Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th, 12 December 2010.
33. Dead or Alive, 13 December 2010.
34. The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy, 14 December 2010. (+)
35. Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. -- How the Working Poor Became Big Business, 16 December 2010.
36. Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War;
37. Grant Comes East; and
38. Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory, all 21 December 2010.
39. Var$ity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, 22 December 2010.
40. The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance, 23 December 2010. (+)
41. Planning for Place and Plexus: Metropolitan Land Use and Transport, 28 December 2010.
42. House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, 29 December 2010.
43. A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, 30 December 2010.

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

The 2009 summary cross-references book lists for 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005 as well.

This year's bookworm is short for its age.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Cross-posted to European Tribune.)

THE FIRST NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME? Milwaukee radio station WTMJ rebroadcast some old Rose Bowls this afternoon, starting with the January 1, 1963 game. Wisconsin went to Pasadena ranked #2 in the polls, and Southern California was ranked #1. The pregame introduction, from a contemporary perspective, noted that nobody paid much attention to those polls. Progress of two generations ... the college bowl season now lasts almost a month, with the teams ranked 1 and 2 in the polls playing a "national championship" game unless bowl commitments get in the way. Meanwhile the space program and big science and passenger rail and business have stagnated.

The game broadcast was also a throwback. The radio station used a scratchy tape of some national network announcer giving the game call. Early in the third quarter the announcer made mention of Wisconsin, trailing 42-14, going for a consolation touchdown, and the spoiled children chanting "Bring on the Packers." Wisconsin scored three consolation touchdowns and a safety and stole the story with their comeback.

That was not the biggest comeback in Wisconsin sports history. That honor goes to the March, 1973 hockey semifinal at Boston Garden, in which Wisconsin had no goals through two periods, yet tied Cornell with 18 seconds remaining and won in overtime, proceeding then to beat Denver for the national title the following day.

MUGGED BY REALITY. We fall short of the fifty, completing this year with Book Review N^o. 43. Richard Posner, one of the leading lights of law and economics, and a scholar prone to look for efficiency explanations of social phenomena, concludes that the incentives to allocate resources efficiently were insufficiently strong in financial markets. Thus A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression. Strong words in the subtitle, but defensible as a characterization of the reluctance of individuals and corporations to borrow money for capital investments after the housing bubble burst and the glamour drained away from the clever financial products. His thesis, however, is that the bubble and its bursting were consequences of excessive confidence in the Invisible Hand (turn to page xii):

The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience -- the self-healing powers -- of laissez-faire capitalism.

Although the crash was forseeable, nobody knows the day or the hour, and Judge Posner notes that the usual corrective to inefficiently high asset prices -- short selling -- didn't work, in part because the bubble kept inflating long enough to break several waves of short seller. Toss in the short-term gains to many people on the long side of the market, from the owner of a starter house to the highest-rolling hedge fund manager, and expect few tears to be shed for the killjoys being wiped out. Much responsibility must also rest with economists, whether in the professoriate or practicing business economics (pp. 258-9).

[P]rofessors of finance, who are found mainly in business schools rather than in economics departments, and whose field overlaps macroeconomics in regard to recessions and depressions, tend to be deeply involved in the real world of financial markets. They are not only armchair theoreticians; they are consultants, investors, and sometimes money managers; many of them ... have worked for the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, or other nonacademic institutions. Their students typically have worked in business for several years before starting business school and so bring with them up-to-date knowledge of business practices.

The entwinement of finance professors with the financial industry has a dark side. If they criticize the industry and suggest tighter regulation, they may become black sheep and lose lucrative consultantships. This conflict of interest may have caused some economists to pull their punches. More important, few theorists spend their time poring over or digging behind banks' balance sheets. Business economists -- consultants, and employees of business firms or trade associations -- emphasize economic forecasting, and often have industry-specific knowledge and data, but many are compromised by their business status. One does not expect economists employed by real estate companies or by banks to be talking about housing and credit bubbles.

The spat among adherents of various approaches to macroeconomics (Keynesian, monetarist, rational expectations - representative agent, New Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian) doesn't help. Judge Posner points to the presence of these schools of thought, often motivated more by ideology than by confidence in their transversality conditions as evidence of the field's weakness. His work is primarily an evaluation of the causes of the financial depression and the failures of business, of policy, of academic thought, and his conclusion recapitulates that message, rather than issuing a call for action.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

COST CUTTING NEITHER IMPLIES NOR IS IMPLIED BY EFFICIENCY GAINS. Case in point: snarled air service all over this land.

Airlines have culled airplanes from their fleets and cut capacity during the past two years to reduce costs and better match supply to demand that collapsed during the recession. As a result, carriers have few spare planes to put into service. The volume of holiday travel poses an additional obstacle.

Translation: there's barely sufficient capacity for normal service, and planes that would be scheduled for maintenance at weekends in order to be available for the business travel peaks are in the shop. Mix in Corporate America's love for labor-substitution in the form of voice mail and long waits on hold and everything breaks down.

"Many flights during the holiday are at 100 percent load factor," David Swierenga, president of aviation consultant AeroEcon in Round Rock, Texas, said of the average number of occupied seats. "This means the airlines' ability to accommodate travelers from canceled flights is greatly diminished."

More precisely, further diminished. The cost reductions and downsizing has made the air carriers more profitable, but it appears to be the profitability of restricted output and enhanced prices.

BOOKENDS. The last team to beat ZooCon was Stanford, with former Secretary of State Rice, a onetime deputy provost, looking on. The next-to-last team to beat ZooConn was Stanford, toward the end of the 2008 basketball tournament. The broadcasters were noting that the longest winning streak in men's collegiate basketball began following UCLA's (motto: On! Wisconsin) loss to Notre Dame, and it ended with a loss to Notre Dame. In those years, however, Notre Dame might not have been the best among the also-rans, as the Marquette Warriors (none of this Golden Chicken stuff) and Kentucky were pretty strong. It's hard to characterize Stanford as an also-ran in the women's game, in which Them That Has Gets, and Them include ZooConn, Rocky Top, and Stanford.

Is a run of 90 wins in basketball more difficult to achieve than a run of 132 years defending the America's Cup?

WHEN THE LIMIT IN THE CENTRAL LIMIT THEOREM IS REALLY INFINITY. Many of the hotshots of high finance enjoyed playing high-stakes poker, bridge, and other games of chance, and the quants among them worked out strategies for beating the casino that worked precisely because there's an upper bound on the number of cards the house deals, and an event out at seven standard deviations from the mean is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. But when those gambling strategies become the basis of investment strategies, it is the nature of complex adaptive systems that events beyond the second standard deviation occur, sometimes much more frequently than any gambling-based model can handle. If you have a run of events several standard deviations above the mean, and you've played your financial cards right, you're rich, but if those events start coming in below the mean, down comes your house of cards.

And thus William D. Cohan's House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, Book Review N^o. 42. The focus is on Bear Stearns, a company full of aggressive personalities who became so dizzy with their own success that they held extremely dangerous positions, antagonized many customers, and whose troubles in March 2008 were the first warning of the great financial crash to come.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LIVING FOR THE CITY. China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs. Did China put more money into expanding higher education to less effect than the United States has?

In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

"College essentially provided them with nothing," said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China's education system. "For many young graduates, it's all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability."

China's economic development strategy resembles that of the Great Lakes states in the early twentieth century, with ample work for blue-collar workers. Unlike that United States, however, the manufacturing economy turns out routine products cheaply with cheap labor and unsafe working conditions.

In a kind of cruel reversal, China's old migrant class — uneducated villagers who flocked to factory towns to make goods for export — are now in high demand, with spot labor shortages and tighter government oversight driving up blue-collar wages.

But the supply of those trained in accounting, finance and computer programming now seems limitless, and their value has plunged. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant laborers grew by nearly 80 percent; during the same period, starting pay for college graduates stayed the same, although their wages actually decreased if inflation is taken into account.

Socialist solidarity goes only so far: graduates of the regional universities may be even more disadvantaged relative to the graduates of the more famous institutions than graduates of U.S. party schools.

While some recent graduates find success, many are worn down by a gauntlet of challenges and disappointments. Living conditions can be Dickensian, and grueling six-day work weeks leave little time for anything else but sleeping, eating and doing the laundry.

But what many new arrivals find more discomfiting are the obstacles that hard work alone cannot overcome. Their undergraduate degrees, many from the growing crop of third-tier provincial schools, earn them little respect in the big city. And as the children of peasants or factory workers, they lack the essential social lubricant known as guanxi, or personal connections, that greases the way for the offspring of China’s nouveau riche and the politically connected.

Emerging from the sheltered adolescence of one-child families, they quickly bump up against the bureaucracy of population management, known as the hukou system, which denies migrants the subsidized housing and other health and welfare benefits enjoyed by legally registered residents.

Add to this a demographic tide that has increased the ranks of China's 20-to-25-year-olds to 123 million, about 17 million more than there were just four years ago.

"China has really improved the quality of its work force, but on the other hand competition has never been more serious," said Peng Xizhe, dean of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Given the glut of underemployed graduates, Mr. Peng suggested that young people either shift to more practical vocations like nursing and teaching or recalibrated their expectations. "It's O.K. if they want to try a few years seeking their fortune, but if they stay too long in places like Beijing or Shanghai, they will find trouble for themselves and trouble for society," he said.

Chinese political correctness evidently doesn't address the oppressions of class the way North America's does, and Chinese universities apparently don't have the party culture as compensation.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S GRIM DECADE OF DECLINE. The bottom ten lowlights, as seen from the Pope Center.

Whether academia will undergo the same sort of collapse that the housing market suffered remains to be seen. But higher education's Gilded Age is now over. When the Dow Jones Average fell below 7,000 in March of 2009, the private colleges' endowments no longer looked so big, and the schools became less eager to fund extraneous activities.

The down economy, which continues, is having even more impact on the public sector. State revenues have fallen dramatically, and their universities are being forced to pull in their belts in equally severe fashion. Mission creep will necessarily end, courses, programs, and even entire schools will be eliminated, and many universities will reduce enrollments.

The result should be leaner universities, more focused on primary goals.

If those primary goals are a restoration of academic integrity, with the responsibility for high school returning to the high schools, 'twould be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

PURSUING THREE HARES, CATCHING NONE? David Levinson (The Transportationist) was kind enough to send a copy of his book with Kevin J. Krizek, Planning for Place and Plexus: Metropolitan Land Use and Transport. Book Review N^o. 41 suggests that, in setting ambitious goals, the authors might have provided nearly enough information to enlighten each type of reader, without necessarily satisfying any one type. Their preface (turn to page xii) spells out their efforts.

We realized we were trying to satisfy three goals. We endeavored to write a text that would: (1) merge two sub-disciplines (land use and transport) in a straightforward and coherent, but also compelling manner; (2) be useful for graduate-level education in urban planning, civil engineering, geography, regional science, urban studies, and other allied disciplines; and (3) be interesting and engaging enough for other "professional" citizens, high-level policy advisors, or even politicians wanting to wade through. It became apparent to us that there is good reason why no single book stands out in terms of satisfying those demands. Were we aiming for the impossible?

Perhaps. Your reviewer has an undergraduate degree in transportation and public utilities, a doctoral dissertation with a strong regional economics focus, two old articles and a few book reviews in The Journal of Regional Science, and two large collections of National Geographic maps awaiting installation on the new computer. On the one hand, a book that blends the main ideas of central place theory, Thunen rings, and bid-rent curves with a look at precursors of Monopoly appeals (competition for the use of land dissipating the potential monopoly rents) appeals. On the other hand, the use of figures referred to as "diamonds" to help organize the reader's thinking seems contrived. Such diagrams are popular with middle managers and colleges of education: the conclusion is left to the reader as the exercise. In Place and Plexus, the Diamond of Action almost works, the Diamond of Design is almost too clever, and the Diamond of Evaluation was cut by Procrustes himself.

Plexus stands in for "the complex of networks that connect people and places." There are multiple such networks, and, in the manner of any complex adaptive system, each tends to do what it darn well pleases, which planners would be wise to heed. The book is aware of those tendencies, and it will reward careful study. David, thanks for letting me look at it.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

OUCH. Instapundit: Mayor Michael Bilandic Bloomberg.

A BAD DAY TO WEAR MAROON AND GOLD. Minnesota's men's basketball team bounced into Madison ranked 14th. They bounced out, probably with a derating. The Axe was not at stake. Loyola's women's basketball team paid a visit to DeKalb. Despite a good turnout of parents and friends of players from Rockford and the northwest suburbs, the home team prevailed. Six up, six down, with ten of the first dozen games away from DeKalb.

SCOUNDRELS AND PISS-ANTS. Posting has been annulled account the Christmas holiday and an unusual occurrence. Cold Spring Shops are undergoing a computer upgrade that, while planned (in order to provide additional hard disk capacity and in anticipation of component failure) is uncovering disquieting things about the technology business.

First, if we can send a man to the moon or flip a cruise missile into Osama's cave, we ought to be able to build hard drives and motherboards with a service life of more than five years. My initial plan was to replace the hard drive on the existing machine and continue with the existing operating system, but when capacitors are starting to pop, that is not a cost-effective repair. Perhaps for some people a new machine every other year is desirable, and there is no profit in providing a more durable basic computer for householders not necessarily seeking the latest gadgetry that frequently. Note that the Superintendent still keeps track of due bills on a TRS-80 Model 100 (oh, the looks he got, when he'd board an Amcoach, stake out one of the few seats with an AC outlet, provided in those days for the coach cleaners, and fire up the computer: now each seat has an outlet at just below the window) that is tied to a disk drive and an old black and white TV. The Model 100 does not run CadRail or Internet Explorer.

Second, I'm not sure how software developers react to the creation of new operating systems, in this instance Windows 7. On the one hand, they have to rewrite their creations. On the other hand, they get to sell their rewritten creations. Imagine buying a new range and having to purchase a new set of pots and pans and a different kind of chicken to make dinner. There are some help files for running Windows XP applications, but is it really necessary to make recreational consumers go to all this trouble? (Think of new techniques to use your existing knives to cut the new kind of chicken and you get the picture). Then some genius decided to package the new operating system without Outlook Express, or any other kind of electronic mail program. It's a free download, and that probably mollifies most people, but imagine taking a free voucher to the store to get handles for the knives.

Third, the vendor that provided my computer struck out. I'd previously dealt successfully with Sycamore's TBC, which is why I entrusted them with the upgrade. (On previous upgrades, the data transfer to the new computer and the adjustments to the new operating system ran without a hitch. Not this time.) The company failed to install the virus, spybot, and malware protection. Strike one. (Freeware. The Shops can handle that.) The company failed to transfer all data from the old computer to the new computer. In particular, none of the Outlook Express .dbx files transferred. Strike two. (The Superintendent maintains backups, and the files are available on a portable hard drive once the Shops tackle configuring the Windows Mail.) The company also did something that caused Windows NT on my existing machine to require activation when I fired up the existing machine to compare its data with the backup data. Strike three.

Perhaps the next time Cold Spring Shops gets a computer, something that seems to happen at five to six year intervals, the Superintendent will prepare a full backup on a portable hard drive and purchase a naked machine from a reputable discounter. Account TBC's failures and Microsoft's fantasies, that's where things stand anyway.