DROWNING IN A QUICKSAND OF BULLET POINTS.

Why Big Companies Die.  Read and understand.

The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

But those bar charts showing revenues have an enticing uptrend, and those reduced expenses on creativity can be hidden in bar charts showing falling costs.

It’s not just the salesmen. It’s also the accountants and the money men who search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

In this mode, the firm is basically playing defense. Because it’s easier to milk the cash cow than to add new value, the firm not only stops playing offense: it even forgets how to play offense. The firm starts to die.

Ah, but come up with a catchy tagline, or paint a big Q on the side of a boxcar, so that everyone knows how au courant you are, and you'll have lots of material for case studies.

QUIETLY OUTSPENDING KOCH AND SCAIFE.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel presents a profile of the Bradley Foundation and current director Michael W. Grebe.  Lots of interactive visuals, lots of information.

The post title highlights the foundation's profile in The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (so effective that it got Sarah Palin elected Vice President).  Browse, and you see that the foundation also provides money for visual and performing arts and for higher education.

Harvard got some money.  The Milwaukee School of Engineering got a lot more.

I hope the March model railroad show is not politically tainted.  It's a great chance to touch base with the local ferroequinologists.  I wonder if Harvard even has a model railroad on campus.  I bet they don't have a whole art gallery full of paintings of steel mills.  (There's an album, or perhaps another extended post, just on that museum.)

DON'T SEE THAT EVERY DAY.

One staff benefit at Northern Illinois is the series of free concerts and recitals from the School of Music.

There's a fall steel pan concert, and the current Ambassador to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago attended, to inter alia thank the university for its work in demonstrating the versatility of the pan as an instrument more versatile than a source of cheerful tunes on a cruise ship.

The Philharmonic featured the world premiere of "Runic Echo" by David Maki.  I can't guarantee a premiere with the composer in attendance every semester, but check us out.  After that came the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto (I read somewhere that this work, not the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, is the basis for the third movement of the Fifth Symphony) and Dvorak's "New World" (does that first movement feature "Turkey in the Straw" set as a furiant?)

HANG TEN.

The Packers website characterized the team as "off their game", thus the tenth win of this season doesn't merit the more obvious title.

“It’s about fundamentals, especially when the temperatures go down. We tackled too high today. We were not as crisp in the area of fundamentals,” Lombardi McCarthy said. “My disappointment, especially at this time of the year, is with the fundamentals.”

An undefeated Packer team heads for Detroit, with the first trash-talking coming from an unusual place.

THE FINAL CADENCE.

Dee Palmer, 1915-2011.

Palmer spent his entire life bringing joy to other people through music. He gave up the life of a professional musician in 1948 and returned to his hometown of DeKalb to become director of the community band, a post he held for more than 60 years.

Palmer followed in his father and grandfather's footsteps to get involved with the band. Palmer conducted his first concerts as the band's official leader in 1948.

The band, which today has approximately 50 members, has performed in the DeKalb area since 1854 and claims to be one of the oldest continuous bands in Illinois.

We have video of Maestro Palmer's last performance, which is on the production schedule for posting.

Palmer conducted his last song – "The Star Spangled Banner" – at the band's final performance in August. He had been absent most of the season due to a left arm injury and was uncertain whether or he would retire.

At that final concert, Palmer reminisced about the first time he took the stage 63 years ago, saying when he opened his first paycheck, he was a little disappointed – not because of the money but because his position description said “temporary.”

“Sixty-three years has gone by. Last week, I opened my paycheck and it said ‘part time’ and ‘temporary,’" he said. “So I guess I’m never going to have a steady job.”

His season-ending thanks to the audience didn't include his usual "The Good Lord willing, and the creek don't rise" invitation for all to be back again the following June.

Thanks for the great shows.

After 63 years of seeing Palmer conducting the municipal band, it will be bittersweet next summer to not see him with his baton. But we also know that with the love of music he passed on to countless others, Palmer’s presence and influence will live on.

Indeed.

THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF THE COLLEGE BOARDS.

Say what you want in defense of access, or of holistic admission standards.  A low score on the standard test is still an accurate predictor of academic difficulties, renorming notwithstanding.

The fact that so many students need remedial classes seems to confirm the accuracy of the ACT and SAT benchmarks.

These end-runs around real academic achievement allow administrators to continue pursuing their goals of access and graduation while ignoring poor student preparation and performance.

It’s time for universities to face reality: many students are not prepared for college-level material. Waiting for high schools to improve outcomes hasn’t worked. Universities must change their focus from access to achievement by raising admissions standards to meaningful levels and stopping the debasement of the curriculum and grading standards.

Sending unprepared students to college only sets them up for failure.

It also drains resources from more academic pursuits.

THREE - NIL.

Northern Illinois advances in the NCAA soccer tournament.

THE INEXORABILITY OF LOGIC AND CONTENT.

Years ago, I learned about administrative bloat in a humorous way.  The acting chairman of my department reported that the ratio of full-time-equivalent students to faculty had increased in the department, because the number of faculty members had decreased.  He then noted that the number of vice presidents had increased at the same time, and in a quantity sufficient to lower the ratio of students to vice presidents.

To some extent, the perception of administrative bloat varies by discipline and worldview.  It's more likely to be pointed out by critics of the radical vision that captivates postmodernists, culture-studies True Believers, social constructionists, deconstructionists, and careerist conscience-cowboys.

And yes, the self-styled progressives and deconstructionists are more than a little bit responsible for the lowering of higher education, whether by treating standards as an oppressive social construct, or by admitting Distressed Material and calling it Access.  Their efforts, however, are still subject to market tests much stricter than any grading curve, and for which the absence of detailed rubrics is not grounds for appeal.

Because economists, irrespective of political orientation, understand market tests, readers are likely to encounter more criticism of excessive management (cf. Work is What We Do Between Meetings) on economics weblogs.  (Serendipitous moment!)

And yet, in the latest iteration of Historiann's Tony Grafton symposium, a colleague who has gone into administration considers the case for the flamboyant exit.

Many of us down in the trenches at Provincial State U are going to counselors now. Our jobs are driving us crazy but we can’t afford to walk away. The psych professionals tell us that our anger and sadness are entirely rational responses to the corporatization of our university. “Just try not to yell so much,” they say, “try to hold on until you can retire.”  I think the counselors are right, what ails us at my large state university does have its roots in our transformation into a public corporate organization but it is not just that. What ails us are the class divisions associated with hierarchical ordering of people and the performance-metrics drive to value quantities that are not about learning.

There's a passage somewhere in the lengthy John Galt speech about the worker of the mind suffering in silence that might also apply.  Or, leaving either the Marxian or the Randian analysis aside, there's an echo.

Access, assessment, remediation, retention, subprime.  Meanwhile striving students who lack the finances or the social connections to get into an institution where some of their classmates might be smart and motivated, even if the curriculum is coreless or trendy, end up in the academic gulags.

Dig into the comments, where the siteowner comes up with a capital idea.

I find myself fantasizing about the day a prestigious public university (Berkeley, Michigan, or in my wildest dreams, Texas) says, “[****] this assessment [$***]. We assess our students all the time with ‘instruments’ that we call grades” If a really prestigious public uni did that–and dared people to call their bluffs and not send their children there, thus proving their value in the vaunted marketplace, which should shut up conservative state legislators–then it might give lower-ranked public unis the stones to get the assessment monkey off of our backs.

Texas might be a good place to start, as the faculty pushback against reducing everyone to an entry in a spreadsheet has begun.

Open markets are environments within which powerful and appraising evolutionary forces are at work.  (Borrowed from John S. McGee).  Incentives matter.

RAILWAY RECLAMATION.

Railway reports that the Ivatt Diesel Recreation Society proposes to bring to the rails a replica of Britain's first mainline diesel-electric locomotive.

The down Royal Scot, 1 June 1949

Railway photograph.

The diesels were withdrawn in 1968, "before the preservation movement was sufficiently mature to act on their historic significance."

Too true.  The British diesels might have been improved with the Otto Kuhler treatment.

Providence, Rhode Island, 1957

Photograph by Edward Ozog.

Penn Central offered the last of these, retained as a stationary power plant, to preservationists in the late 1960s, with no takers.  (The shell was in rough shape at the time.)

Fortunately, a number of the early Electro-Motive passenger diesels remain.

One lead unit of the first FT diesel survives.  The booster unit is a replica.

Spencer, North Carolina, 29 May 1989

Kevin Hunt photograph.

The locomotive generally regarded as the first successful diesel switcher (which is how the British refer to a "shunting locomotive" if it's made in the USA) is also in preservation.

Jersey City, 2 April 1955

John Dziobko photograph.

There are several early diesels in the collection of the Illinois Railway Museum, located not far from Cold Spring Shops.  The Nebraska Zephyr, with an honest-to-Harold Hamilton E-5 Silver Pilot on the head pin, has the proper certification to be operated on mainline railroads, and it has made appearances on the Burlington Racetrack.

The Superintendent wishes the Ivatt Recreation many days of recreation doing their recreation.

THE CASE FOR TRADITIONAL PASSENGER RAIL.

Some Minnesotans like the idea of a faster train ride to LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

Upgrading rail tracks between St. Paul and La Crosse, Wis., is the best bet for a Minnesota link in a future high-speed passenger line between the Twin Cities and Chicago, federal and state officials said Tuesday.

We're not talking about a Mississippi Valley Neubaustrecke here.

Advocates say upgrading the existing track could produce top speeds ranging from 80 to 110 miles per hour and cut more than two hours from a Twin Cities-Chicago trip.

If that sounds like Not-Quite-so-High-Speed Rail, or perhaps Traditional Passenger Rail, it should.

Extra credit if those speeds and timings call this to mind.

Swift of foot becomes Hiawatha.

The Minnesota route would upgrade the Amtrak Empire Builder line that runs largely along Hwy. 61 through the Minnesota cities of Hastings, Red Wing, Winona and La Crescent before crossing the Mississippi River into La Crosse.

Two problems: there is no money, and there is no interest in Wisconsin in rebuilding the traditional racetrack east of Tunnel City.

YOU CAN'T FIRE ME, I QUIT.

Flamboyantly, notes USA Today.  It's not clear whether those workers are going Galt, or engaging in revolutionary consciousness against the extraction of surplus value.

While some people have a natural penchant for all things dramatic, including giving notice, many of these over-the-top resignations come from frustrated workers who've reached a boiling point.

"Many people are doing twice the work with half the resources," says Anne Kreamer, author of It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace. "They feel overwhelmed and undervalued. … It comes to a point where they just want to open their doors and shout out, 'I just can't take it anymore!' "

In higher education, the stress levels are an attempt to have excellence without money.  Or perhaps a simulacrum of productivity gains.  In business, the grinding down of workers has to have deleterious effects on productivity, but until management recognizes that it is not measuring those effects, the beatdown will go on.

Four in 10 employees say their work stress level has increased in the last six months, according to a CareerBuilder survey from late this summer. Two in 10 feel burned out. (USA TODAY parent Gannett is a part owner of CareerBuilder.)

More than half of workers say they have more responsibilities than at the start of the 2007 recession, with 70% saying they have not gotten a pay increase to compensate for the added work, according to a survey from employee support services provider Workplace Options.

There's probably a lot of secret updating of resumes on company printers, or plans to start small businesses being hatched.

Meanwhile headquarters is probably contemplating a revision of its strategic plan, or otherwise neglecting to take care of its business.

GETTING THE OPPONENT MOTIVATED.

It's been a bad weekend for football teams located in Minnesota playing teams based in Wisconsin.  But when members of the Wisconsin football team brought the Axe into the Kohl Center, it got the visiting Minnesota hockey team into a most un-Lake Wobegon state of mind.

"We got a little riled up, we wanted to defend our honor," Gophers coach Don Lucia said on Monday during his weekly radio show on 1500ESPN. "Guenz [Mike Guentzel] was really riled up on the bench about it, which was good, and made a few choice comments."

Probably not printable.

"From there end of it, I don't blame them at all," Lucia said. "It was perfectly all right for them to do that. It is a good rivalry and they won the axe. [Beating the Gophers 42-13 in football at TCF Bank Stadium.] They probably just got off their charter [bus] not too long before [their entrance at Kohl] and probably came right by the rink and brought out the axe.

"Hopefully next year when the Gophers are playing Wisconsin in Wisconsin and we are playing at home, we can bring the axe out at Mariucci Arena. That would be great."

In a pig's eye.

The proofreaders at the Star-Tribune are about as alert as the Vikings secondary, aren't they?

WHY THERE IS EXCESS DEMAND.

More or Less Bunk, another participant in Historiann's call for papers, claims to have little use for economists, yet summarizes in two sentences why U.S. News sells those ranking issues and well-off parents buy test-prep services and otherwise grub to get their spawn into the Ivies.

You would think that as the number of available jobs decreased, what you actually learn in college would matter more, not less. Increased knowledge and a track record of success would be the best way to distinguish yourself from the pack.

Or, failing an actual track record of success, a track record of acquiring the signal that suggests the potential for future success.  Lo, a separating equilibrium in a positional arms race!  Regular readers know the solution.

FORTY YEARS AGO.

A new Amtrak timetable took effect in mid-November 1971.  Although Amtrak might have been conceived to execute the mission of winding down some of the passenger trains in order to wind all of them down, commencing with that timetable the carrier began the reassignment throughout the country of the stock it had bought, to the distress of coach-yard superintendents and mechanical departments, but to the delight of the photographers who later referred to this time as the rainbow era.  There might be opportunity to post some slides from the early days of that rainbow era, taken in Milwaukee, which for a short time had two daily passenger trains to St. Louis (via Chicago), and two daily passenger trains to the Twin Cities, on approximately the schedules if not the timings of the old Hiawathas, with through service to the Pacific Northwest.  Clunky equipment, with some imagination in the scheduling, and lots of dome cars and parlor cars.  After a quarter-century of retrenchment, it was heady stuff.

THE SHAPE OF THE FOURTH TURNING.

The popular culture is crude and dysfunctional.  Tyler Cowen notes that those might be features.

Many Americans have not been personally persuaded by all the talk about pro-wealth and pro-discipline norms, least of all in the geographic strongholds of conservatism.

The counterintuitive tragedy is this: modern conservative thought is relying increasingly on social engineering through economic policy, by hoping that a weaker social welfare state will somehow promote individual responsibility. Maybe it won’t.

For one thing, today’s elites are so wedded to permissive values — in part for their own pleasure and convenience — that a new conservative cultural revolution may have little chance of succeeding. Lax child-rearing and relatively easy divorce may be preferred by some high earners, but would conservatives wish them on society at large, including the poor and new immigrants? Probably not, but that’s often what we are getting.

In the future, complaints about income inequality are likely to grow and conservatives and libertarians won’t have all the answers. Nonetheless, higher income inequality will increase the appeal of traditional mores — of discipline and hard work — because they bolster one’s chances of advancing economically. That means more people and especially more parents will yearn for a tough, pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution. And so they should.

It remains to be seen how many of us are up to its demands.

The cleanup is going to be the responsibility of late Baby Boomers and early Thirteeners, the ones too young for "do your own thing" and too old for "whatever."  And for those who absorb the lessons as youngsters.

RECLAIMING THE RAILS.

First the troop train returns, now the unit oil train.

Oil pipelines in North Dakota are overwhelmed by the surge in output, and moreover, the pipeline network runs primarily north and south, centering on Cushing, Okla., where benchmark prices for U.S. crude oil are commonly set. However, shale oil production has contributed to a glut of supply in the Cushing market, creating a gap, currently $16 per barrel, in the price of oil there versus on international markets. True, it costs $5 to $10 a barrel more to transport oil by rail rather than by pipeline. But the price differential for crude oil is an incentive for refiners dependent upon imported oil to buy the easy-to-process light sweet crude from North Dakota that will yield gasoline commanding the same price as products that come from Middle East crude. No matter where the refinery, rail gets it there directly.

So we’re beginning to see the unthinkable: unit trains of crude oil. Rail shipments of petroleum products are running 1,300 cars per week ahead of last year’s pace, and most of the increase is believed to be crude oil. BNSF is hauling oil from North Dakota to Stroud, Okla., near Cushing on Watco-owned Stillwater Central Railroad, and to refineries in Houston, St. James, La., New Mexico, California and the Pacific Northwest. Denis Smith, BNSF’s vice president for industrial products marketing, says oil loadings are currently divided about 50-50 between scheduled manifest freight trains and unit trains, but are being driven by the railroad toward unit trains as facilities to load huge volumes of oil are constructed. Right now BNSF can load crude from six locations in North Dakota. “When all is said and done,” says Smith, “we’ll have up to a dozen crude oil terminals.”

In the Second World War, the unit trains came into being as a response to coastal tankers, silhouetted against coastal cities where the boardwalks weren't yet ready to recognize that there was a war on, becoming an additional source of illumination thanks to the efforts of U-boat skippers who understood, all too well, that there was a war on.

At the moment, the railroads of the Empty Quarter are busy with business, as the development of these wells calls for the shipment of a couple of trains a day worth of oil country goods, plus the movement of the tank cars empty inward and loaded outward.

If the website goes inactive over the next couple of weeks or months, it's because the Superintendent has become engrossed in yet another research anomaly: can a train hauling North Dakota crude to refineries around the Great Lakes deliver the oil at a lower price than a pipeline whose tariffs are f.o.b. destination, delivered from Cushing, Oklahoma.  Where?

CASTING OUT NINE.

The Packers dispatch the Vikings, completing a football weekend that began with the Axe remaining in Madison.

NO ELEPHANTS, NO CIRCUS.

Tony Grafton writes an omnibus review of recent books that offer gloomy assessments of the state of higher education in the United States.  The review includes a number of books that are on the list of "nice to have", but the order to a bookseller has not gone out, and it includes Academically Adrift, which is in the pile of items to be reviewed here, but that review requires me to check, carefully, the statistical inference and peer-reviewed cross references in the appendix, something that is enough like real research that the real research gets done first.  (Yes, despite the numerous administrative burdens everyone in a radically-downsized department bears, we persevere at the research.  The problem is getting a project re-started, time after time after time, something that wasn't an issue when I was still pursuing tenure and didn't get the requests to be on this panel or that task force.)  There are passages that hit home.

Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.

Somebody is likely to tell me to be grateful my 'phone hasn't yet been removed; on the other hand, it hasn't rung that frequently when I'm in the office, and the odd voicemail is likely to be a blanket message from the techies about something or other.  More to the point, though, are some observations Mr Grafton makes about the current cafeteria of higher education offerings reinforcing social stratification.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

That paragraph calls for a separate post, one that tackles the tension between the higher learning as higher learning and the baccalaureate degree as an entry-level credential.  At the risk of oversimplifying: drop any pretense of the trivium and quadrivium and go straight to Microsoft applications and whatever else goes on in cubicles all day, which ends for once and for all the disengaged careerist in poetry or high school algebra or the current diversity offering in the distribution requirements; but send the credentialed careerist back into that box with no prospect of exit upward.  (Exit downward is easy enough, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances we face.)

But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact.

Indeed.

The article has prompted a great deal of thoughtful commentary, some of which is in response to a call for reactions, that, as produced, have been summarized by Historiann, up earlier this morning.  It's worth your time to go there and follow some of the links, particularly if your universe of academic weblogs is primarily those by economists.  The theme there is "evaluate Mr Grafton's argument, with particular emphasis on conditions at your institution."  The sample is not yet large enough for a proper statistical analysis, but the stylized facts seem to be emerging.  A common observation is that there are limits to doing more with less.

Sometimes, though, the best thing to do with that phenomenon is to point out, directly, the refutation that those limits place on claims to be student-centered.  The editorial board at the Northern Star gives the university a low C for making good on course offerings.

The university offers many courses to students on the pages of its undergraduate catalog, but it only offers about 71 percent of those courses in a classroom.

In accountancy, 77 percent of courses that appeared in the '11-'12 undergraduate catalog were offered in the fall or spring semester of the '11-'12 academic year. Sixty-seven percent of communication studies courses in the catalog were offered this year.

Accountancy is one of the crown jewels of the curriculum, because the department has historically done well preparing graduates for the CPA examination. Communication is a popular major, featuring both a solid debate team and a lot of scholarship athletes.

The catalog offers a disclaimer: "Although the university attempts to accommodate the course requests of students, course offerings may be limited by financial, space and staffing considerations or may otherwise be unavailable."

Especially in the wake of the 2008 recession, it's understandable NIU is experiencing financial difficulties.

The disclaimer continues: "Nothing in this catalog may be construed to promise or guarantee registration in any course or course of study."

The catalog doesn't have to be perfect; it doesn't have to be a promise. But it should be better than a C average.

The financial difficulties, and the retrenchments, preceded the popping of the dot.com bubble by about eight years. The university periodically culls the catalog, so that courses taught by specialists long since retired, or recruited away to other universities, and never replaced, no longer appear to frustrate the students.   Bringing in a new specialist to meet those classes is often a tough sell.

The editors note that, despite the skimpy class offerings, schedule completion is sometimes difficult.

There are too many students that fall behind in their programs because the classes they need to take aren't offered at times when they can actually take them. It really sucks for students that have to stick around and pay for an extra semester of school just because the classes they needed weren't able to fit into one schedule.

Departments should be more aware of this problem and try and offer classes at a variety of different times and on different days so more students can take them and not fall behind. [An elementary education major] said even offering some of the general education classes as a once a week night class would have helped her stay on pace with the program.

Departments recognize the problem, and schedule in such a way that majors, at least, don't face conflicts among field classes. That's often forced because the one subject specialist can't be in two places at the same time. But there are limits to what the specialists can do. In the framework of my circus analogy, the elephant trainer can't be directing the band performing the waltz in time with the pachyderm on the ball.

There are also limits to the faculty's sympathies when the editorial continues thusly.

Another huge problem I have with scheduling classes is all of these Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes. [The writer doesn't] want class on Fridays, and I don't know anyone that likes having class on Fridays either.

Offering more Monday, Wednesday options would give students greater flexibility in scheduling and would reduce the number of days that we would have to travel to NIU. This would greatly help commuter students and students that have jobs at home on the weekends

The party animals and professors seeking more research time (or perhaps a chance to catch up on the grading or the committee work) will also welcome that schedule.  The run-the-university-like-an-airline types and the legislators who appropriate money for buildings will not like all the idle classroom capacity such a schedule implies.  Our current, slimmed down course offerings are skimpy enough that we could fit them into four days a week with no conflicts, but that's not a Pareto-optimal outcome.

OUCH.

Via Media too uncritically buys into the hippie-yuppie stereotype of Baby Boomers.

That the greatest and most effective political leader the Baby Boom produced was William Jefferson Clinton tells you all you need to know.

Yes, there's a lot that's gone wrong, and there's a lot of truth here.

We are the generation that accepted the behavior of the multi-millionaire CEO with the trophy wife.  We are the generation that failed to protect its children from a tide of filth and debasing popular entertainment without parallel in the history of the world.  We are a generation that deliberately and cynically passed the cost of its retirement down to its children.  We are a generation that preferred and rewarded financial engineering over business construction.  We lost control of the borders and failed to make provisions for the illegal immigrants our fecklessness allowed into the country.  We embraced a free trade agenda that accelerated the hollowing out of manufacturing and took no thought about what to build in place of the industrial economy we condemned.  We shopped until we dropped, and then we got up and shopped some more.  On a scale unprecedented in American history, we broke the most solemn vows human beings can make in order to pursue something we deemed much more important than honor and fidelity.  We chased chimeras and started at fantasies but failed to take sober measures to prevent a clearly visible and, once upon a time, easily preventable budget crunch.

The damage wasn't all done in a generation. Yes, the Baby Boomers, particularly in the United States, were full beneficiaries of the postwar industrial monopoly and the military victory.  The procedural reforms that made the "debasing popular entertainment" legal preceded the accession of a few to the elite law schools and national politics.  The deliberate passing along of retirement costs is a design feature of "Social" "Security".  Did The Best and The Brightest really expect that developing countries would stop developing, which can be done most easily by undertaking onetime high-tech tasks that are now routine?

It's when the guardrails break and there are no adults left that the secular crisis begins.  Sometimes the evidence of the secular crisis is in the perception of something that used to be mundane now becoming a signal of something gone wrong.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration this week of our leaderless culture came with the riots in State College that followed [football coach Joe] Paterno’s dismissal. The display resembled Lord of the Flies. Without revered figures from the older generation to lead them, thousands of students at one of the country’s best state universities acted like children home alone.

Once upon a time, the latchkey kid was a symbol of the exigencies of late capitalism (never mind that the Say Aggregation Principle means an increase in the labor force participation of women will be followed by prices adjusting to allocate housing and other goods in proportion to those dual incomes) that some people saw as providing greater autonomy for kids.  (Never mind that early-pubescent tweens now had the perfect hiding place for getting to know each other better.)  Regular readers have long understood that there are alternatives to the work-obsessive treadmill that is blighting kids' lives.  The dismissed coach is a few years too young to have served in World War II.  Much of the now-resigned-or-fired Penn State authority figures are early Baby Boomers.  The cleanup is going to be the responsibility of late Baby Boomers and early Thirteeners, the ones too young for "do your own thing" and too old for "whatever."

ONE-NIL.

Northern Illinois earns a seeding in the World Cup NCAA soccer tournament.