THEY ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON.

The latest Destination: Freedom meditation on Amtrak at Forty notes that there are other passenger trains available to travellers in the U.S.

One step that Amtrak management could take is to give potential customers more information that would help them make connections between Amtrak and local transit. While a few Amtrak riders take a long-distance train from one small community to another, many more go to or from a city, or between two cities. This is certainly true in the Northeast Corridor (NEC) region, where almost every stop serves a major city. Other corridors serve hubs such as Chicago or Los Angeles, and every long-distance train goes through a number of medium-to-large cities on the way from one major destination to another.

That's long been a cause at Cold Spring Shops, where regular readers are familiar with the case for connectivity, and the way things work in Britain, where interline ticketing among the passenger train operators, some of which operate competing trains on the same routes (but don't look for the choice of a Zephyr or Hiawatha, generally it's a diesel railcar in a different paint job).  Getting around Boston, where some of the suburban trains are practically intercity trains, is a challenge, and connections among Amtrak's corridor trains radiating out of Chicago are erratic.

It is unreasonable to assume that the casual traveler has the sophistication to plan his or her transit use in the destination city by calling the local transit or using the provider's web site. That site may not be user-friendly for persons who are unfamiliar with the layout of the city or where the transit goes. Amtrak could solve this problem easily and inexpensively, and make many new friends in the process.

Many Amtrak managers spent portions of their careers managing local transit providers, so they are familiar with those providers. Amtrak also works with local transit providers in many cities, often on issues concerning shared track or stations. It would be an easy task for Amtrak to provide more detailed information about local connecting transit in the timetable and on the Amtrak web site. The most important information that Amtrak can provide customers is which transit lines connect with Amtrak at or near the station, and how to get there. Of course, the information must be up-to-date, but it would be easy to present, and presenting it to customers in an understandable format will allow them to plan their trips more effectively. That, in turn, would encourage them to use Amtrak more often.

Admittedly, detailed information on connecting trains in the States has always been hard to come by unless there's an Official Guide handy (the British, on the other hand, have always had a version of Bradshaw's, even though only Sherlock Holmes understood all of its intricacies).  Perhaps there's a market for a travel publisher to put together regional rail timetables.  For instance, the Northeast Corridor services, including those of all the Passenger Rail authorities, could probably fit into a 40 page folio.

Such a book might have great play value: identify all the twenty-minute-missed-connections at Penn Station or Baltimore.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE.

A Fresno Bee editorial takes businesses, most frequently the former regulated utilities, to task for their artlessness in imposing fees for services that used to be part of the cost of doing business.

Then once outrage invariably builds, they have to do an embarrassing U-turn, plus damage control to their brand.

The latest mea culpa was almost immediate. Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest cell phone company, pulled the plug on a plan to charge $2 for some customers to pay their bills, just a day after announcing it.

As fees go, this one was more ridiculous than most. Starting Jan. 15, it would have hit customers who choose to make one-time credit or debit card payments, either online or over the phone. To avoid the fee, customers would have to enroll in automatic credit card payments, go into a store to pay, or mail a check.

That's right -- you would have been charged for paying your bill on time. Amazingly, Verizon Communications, the landline phone company that owns most of its wireless cousin, tried last year to introduce a similar fee but was forced to back off after customer complaints.

The good news is that consumers can often get businesses to do the right thing through promiscuous use of the social media.  Business, however, might do well to remember what market tests are for.

At the mercy of short-term investors, corporations are looking for ways to pad their bottom lines. Still, too many have forgotten the fundamentals of growing a business: Provide products or services that people want, make them available at a fair price and treat customers with respect. Charging exorbitant or unnecessary fees is the opposite of those principles.

The comment about short-term investors might be misleading. Even a short-term investor has to be aware  that a policy that alienates consumers or gives them reason to pick a different supplier is a policy that destroys shareholder value.  Otherwise the short-term investor is a guesser: not bull, not bear, not speculator.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

At Phi Beta Cons, Jason Fertig notes that abolishing academic tenure for its own sake and in spite of possible cost fails to consider the downside of the alternatives.

If tenure goes away, how will this new majority of professors on “multi-year contracts” be assessed? By student teaching evaluations and number of pubs (regardless of quality)? That’s the system we have now. With professors repeatedly fighting for their reappointment, there will be even greater incentives to play it safe, which will only make the classroom experience worse for students.

The current system rewards looking good rather than being good. I’d like to see deans and P&T committees sitting in classes to assess the art of teaching. I’d like to see them reading every word of a professor’s scholarship to separate the meaningful from the fluff.

Alternatively, one can ask the tenure candidate to identify the five or ten best articles, and have the case evaluated on the basis of those.  Most disciplines have a pecking order for the journals and book publishers, and external reviewers know what those are, should a department attempt to pencil-whip a politically-favored but professionally weak case through the committees.

GOOD MEANS POOR.

A dean at Illinois Valley Community College helps judge student projects for the regional history fair.

He's not happy with the performance ratings.

When the Social Studies teacher gave me the grading rubric, I saw only three categories: Superior, Excellent, and Good.

I asked the teacher what I was supposed to do if a presentation was bad or poor. She looked at me and said, with a straight face, "Good means poor." "How so?" I asked. "What kind of semantic gymnastics is that? Does that mean that superior is above average, and excellent is average?" She didn't answer the question, but said that the students worked really hard on their projects and the school didn't want any of them to feel discouraged. If they scored in the 70s, then their presentation was considered bad. "But you're telling them that it is good," I said.

The instructions clearly imply that a project earning a "good" rating is a superficial project. As long as the rankings are ordinal and applied consistently, the tail-enders will be tail-enders.

He's right, though, to suggest that the absence of a strict evaluation system might be evidence of a deeper rot.

This is why so many of our students come to us unprepared. They go through grade school and high school and are told that they are doing a superior, excellent, or very good job when in reality their academic performance is average, bad, or very bad indeed. Of course I can't blame the students. I blame the system that perpetuates this kind of fraud and the Social Studies teacher for not holding her students accountable for the quality of their work. But then, her supervisor probably assures her that she is doing a very good job.

Since participation in the history fair is, as far as I know, not mandatory, it's possible that Illinois Valley, or Northern Illinois University, the host of the regional fair as well as participant in an articulation agreement, do not see the students who don't even submit projects.

WHAT HIGH SPEED RAIL LOOKS LIKE.

Sometimes, railroad maintenance trains recycle classic passenger cars for use as bunk cars or kitchens or crew space.  On occasion, one of those cars remains in something close enough to its original condition to warrant restoration.  Such appears to be the case with an original Hiawatha coach 4448, being rebuilt by the Institute for Small Town Studies in Fairfield, Iowa.

Image courtesy Milwaukee Road Restoration Blog.

Fairfield is close enough to Cold Spring Shops headquarters to warrant a road trip.  The interior of the coach is in somewhat rougher shape, and the other side has additional doors cut into it, but the restoration appears to be professional.  The car survived in work train service on The Milwaukee Road.  A number of cars went to Mexico, and the Mexicans are reluctant to sell rolling stock back to the States for preservation.  Two went to Chicago Great Western.  They were subsequently purchased by a historical society, then they disappeared.

What intrigues, though, is that several other cars from the 1934 Hiawatha were converted to baggage cars.  I took a picture in Portage about 20 years ago of a maintenance of way car that, if you look at the seams closely, shows a lot of welds in the shape of arched windows on each side.  Wonder where that went, and if that was one of the original parlor-observation cars.  (Maybe that picture will turn up on Cold Spring Shops with a request for further research.)

THE CASE FOR CLEANER INCOME ACCOUNTING.

Paul Krugman takes on some misconceptions about public debt.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Strictly speaking, families don't have to pay their debt back either, if they accumulate assets more rapidly (something that the mortgage-makers were too optimistic about in Professor Krugman's example) and have a good tax advisor. That's one purpose of a trust fund, to ensure that assets in the name of any one family member exist to cover that person's remaining liabilities at death.  The better analogy might be with a corporation, which can refinance old debt with new, and retain its credit rating as long as consumers buy its products.

But family mortgages are balance sheet items: there's an asset, the house, and a liability, the mortgage, and, with correct financial discipline, there's equity in the house.  The same principle applies to the corporation.  But not to the government.  Arguably, the money used to win World War II created an asset, the Pax Americana, which, although it depreciated, it made possible the conditions within which people could work and shop and pay their taxes.  Professor Krugman has the opportunity to make that point, but he opts not to.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

That's the return on investment.

There's also a peculiarity of holding government bonds for readers to contemplate.  Cash in the savings bonds, use the proceeds to pay your taxes, by buying the bonds you're effectively prepaying your taxes. Or cash in the bonds, use the proceeds as down payment on a house.  You've converted an asset into a different kind of asset, but the government's balance sheet, because it doesn't exist, doesn't show that, although your action has reduced the national debt.

EVERY JOE AND TITTLE.

The Packers did not dress several of their starters for Sunday's game, one that the Lions really wanted to win.

Sunday's video-game eruption of yards and points and records ended in a 45-41 Green Bay Packers win over Detroit. Inside the locker room, ultra-reserved, shun-the-spotlight Jordy Nelson wore a champion's smirk. A quiet swagger emanated.

There might not have been much defense, but a long-standing record was broken.

Backup quarterback Matt Flynn got the start because the No. 1 seed in the playoffs was locked up. He promptly set Packers records with 480 passing yards and six touchdowns. Flynn became the fourth quarterback in NFL history to throw for at least 475 yards and six touchdowns in a single game — joining Y.A. Tittle (1962), Joe Namath (1972) and Joe Montana (1990).

That's the same Y. A. Tittle who was trying in that season to avenge a drubbing the Giants absorbed fifty years ago, at the end of 1961.

From the Green Bay Press-Gazette archives. Green Bay Packers tight end Ron Kramer (88) drags New York Giants linebacker Sam Huff (70) into the end zone as he scores one of his two touchdowns in the NFL championship game at new City Stadium on Dec. 31, 1961. Giants safety Jimmy Patton (20) is behind the goal post. From left are Giants cornerback Dick Lynch (22) and safety Joe Morrison (40) and Packers receiver Max McGee (85).

A Lambeau Leap, well, City Stadium Leap, was somewhat easier in those days, although Vince Lombardi would not be pleased, and, yes, the field goal posts were over the goal line.

Mr Flynn's performance might lead some pundits to view someone other than Packer starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers as Most Valuable Player, but those individual awards don't mean anything if you come up empty on February 5.

POTTED POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Robert Freeman draws the wrong lessons from the loss of the postwar industrial monopoly the U.S. enjoyed.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. bestrode the world like a colossus. Its only industrial rival, Europe, had blown its brains out 30 years before, in World War I. And it did it again, in World War II, with Japan joining in. In the history of the world, there has never been such asymmetry in power between one country and all the rest.

It was U.S. capital that rebuilt its allies’ economies, through the Marshall Plan in Europe, and through military spending in Asia. U.S. factories boomed, to service not only its own vast and ravenous market, but those of all the rest of the world. All the equipment (and much of the food) to rebuild the industrial world came from America.

It was truly the Golden Age. There was enough wealth so that capital, labor, and government could all drink deeply from the seemingly inexhaustible spring of capitalism.

But by the 1960s something began to go wrong. Our allies’ economies had by then been rebuilt, and with the newest equipment and technologies. Theirs were more efficient than ours. The Volkswagens and Toyotas that would later become a tsunami began to trickle in. Same with the Sonys and Panasonics in consumer electronics. Shipbuilding, steel, machine tools, industrial electronics and other major industries began to migrate out of the U.S. and into the hands of foreign companies.

At the same time, the then-99% began to place serious claims on national resources, and to insist on being a player in major national decisions.

It's interesting how the political economy of the late 1950s and early 1960s changes to suit observers' prejudices.  In the article, evidently that part of the 99% who had union contracts with Big Steel and the Detroit car-makers or a Machinists shop or the cartelized railroads and trucking companies were simultaneously drinking from the "inexhaustible spring of capitalism" and beginning "to place serious claims on national resources".  The notion that oligopolies might be dissipating some of their rents to secure a more productive work force at the expense of consumers is an alien notion, except when it's not.

It's bad history, however, to invert cause and effect in describing the rise of the counterculture.

[President Lyndon] Johnson launched the Great Society program with the goal of eradicating poverty. The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the environmental movement all proved dramatically effective in redirecting national priorities and resources away from those favored by the wealthy elites and toward those of the rest of the people.

In other words, at exactly the time the profits of corporations were under assault by growing international competition, the people began to claim a greater share of society’s fruits. It couldn’t square. There was not enough output from the faltering economy to both satisfy people’s expectations of middle class affluence and economic security and capital’s demands for higher and higher returns. Something had to give.

Equally, the elites who had run the country for decades were indignant at the presumption of a mangy mob of un-bathed, pot-smoking, long-haired, bra-less, draft card-burning, tree-hugging hooligans who didn’t even have a job but wanted a seat at the table of national decision-making (sound familiar?). They were certainly never again going to allow such a scabrous cabal to decide that the country should not fight a major war (Vietnam) that was so enriching to the elites who had lied the country into it.

So the elites decided to take “their” country back.

It's true that the various so-called liberation movements (taking a page from the National Liberation Front, perhaps?) drew parallels between their situation and the situation of blacks under Jim Crow or de facto segregation.  Some of these causes drew some of their inspiration from the Vietnam protests, as it became evident that the national economy could not produce larger amounts of guns and of butter, and at the same time allowing The Best and The Brightest to allocate human and material capital in The Best Way.  (There's a reason the military draft is called Selective Service, and it, like Model Cities and the National Endowments, is a way for people who see their calling as ordering others around to justify it in the name of Progress.)

As far as capital demanding higher returns, wouldn't it be easier for that capital to simply go on strike, or build factories in China, than attempt to sell the voting public the bill of goods that Mr Freeman goes on to suggest it did?

THE CASE FOR DIVISION OF LABOR.

Interesting question at Unlocked Wordhoard. "What modern dishes were impossible or impractical in the Middle Ages?" It builds on the recollections of one Waldo Jaquith attempting the do-it-yourself cheeseburger. No joy.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.

A commenter, correctly, describes the essay as the "I, Pencil" of cheeseburgers.

FIVE GOLDEN RINGS.

He spent much of his junior and senior year as a reserve for a tradition-rich college program going through a rough spell. He obtained a tryout for a professional team and spent the first few years of his career as a reserve for a tradition-rich program going through a rough spell.  His name, though, continues to surprise number-crunchers who would like to quantify the value of professional quarterbacks.  Search the records, though, and only one has earned the jewelry noted in the post title.  On to Book Review N^o. 36.  Keith Dunnavant is a long-time sports journalist, and his America's Quarterback: Bart Starr and the Rise of the National Football League leaves the unanswered social science questions, and there are many, to others.  But as such works go, it is not unabashedly hagiographic (an ill the genre is oft subject to) and it weaves a number of strands, including the adversity in the Starr family's life (a favored younger brother develops a tetanus infection, a promising son runs with the wrong crowd), the emergence of broadcast television and NFL Films concurrent with the Packers' title runs, and the changes in the national mood that coincided with those runs.  There are too many typographical errors to suit me, and the definitive social science investigation of the causal or collinear relationships between civil rights, the counter-culture, and the flamboyant athlete remain for some other researcher.  (A more famous Alabama alumnus would not have been as celebrated in the third Super Bowl absent a strong infusion of "do your own thing, man" into the supposedly stodgy culture of professional football.)  The book will reward careful study for the sports fan. Do your own comparison and contrast of Bart Starr and Brett Favre.  The latter has the stronger throwing arm; the former is more careful.  And reflect on Bart Starr's repeated shoulder injuries.  The book traces those events to a tackle by Atlanta's Tommy Nobis during Vince Lombardi's final season.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WHERE THE EXCESS DEMAND IS.

Jonathan Robe of the sometimes-misnamed Center for College Affordability and Productivity questions the preferences revealed by the state flagship universities.

Could it be that the prestigious public research universities are the ones who are throwing teaching to the side in their quest to catch and overtake the most prestigious private research universities? Are these public institutions the ones who view their missions even more in terms of scholarly research than do the elite private institutions with which those public institutions compete, both for students and faculty?

Competition, whether it involves differentiated products or not, often manifests itself in convergence to a standard.  Mr Robe's colleague Richard Vedder has, probably correctly, suggested that the most highly regarded private universities create excess demand for their services by charging less than the traffic will bear, in order to raise their selectivity profile by generating enough applications to be able to turn down nine in ten, or nineteen in twenty.  Although there are probably fifty claimants to membership in the U. S. News top twenty, there are still plenty of frustrated applicants who treat the state flagships as safety schools.  (I'm not making this up: a few years ago at application season the Wall Street Journal had the story of some young man from a well-off neighborhood forced to settle for his safety school, the University of Michigan.  Talk about crying with your mouth full.)

The state flagships have to credibly commit to the experience and to the profile maintained by the elite privates, and do so in the face of tight state budgets.  Excess demand implies the existence of someone with the willingness and the ability to pay, but to realize the gains from trade, the institution has to provide the desired services.

The trend we see, looking at just instructional and research spending, is the prioritization of research over teaching at both private and public institutions, though the trend is much more noticeable at the public research universities than at their private, not-for-profit counterparts. Whereas spending on research was 52.3% of instructional spending at public institutions in 1999, by 2009, research spending was 58.1% of spending on instruction (at private institutions, the comparable percentage for 1999 was 53.4% and for 2009 was 55.7%).

It is certainly true that a wide variety of factors (including external factors entirely outside of universities’ control) affect institutional spending; nevertheless, it is striking that, during a time when real per student total revenues rose by 11.8% at public research institutions (without the 2007-09 recession, they likely would have risen more), spending on research outpaced revenue growth while spending on instruction lagged revenue growth. The fact that spending on research grew so much faster than spending on instruction is, in my view, strong evidence against the claim that public institutions have needed to hike tuitions to make up for shortfalls from other revenue sources. If revenues were the real problem public higher ed faced, could these institutions not have adjusted by cutting down on their research spending (or at least bring it more in line with instructional spending growth) rather than further burdening those students they are supposed to be serving?

In the presence of common and joint costs, any allocation of costs to a specific activity has an element of arbitrariness.  At the same time, those public institutions cannot simply assert that their faculties are as creative as their Ivy counterparts: those people have to be supported, and they are mobile.

GOING UPSCALE?

A Chicago Tribune article on the construction of new housing at Northern Illinois University buries the lede.

Residence hall improvements are part of the university's broader plans to boost enrollment and improve academic standards by 2020.

[University president John] Peters' Vision 2020 initiative calls for enrollment to rise from 23,000 to 30,000 — including 27,500 on campus. Tuition and fee revenue from higher enrollment will help fund a series of initiatives.

Or provide the debt service on the housing?

Note, though, that the investment in capacity precedes the expansion of the student body.  I hope to be able to report that a similar phenomenon will be at work in the academic departments, where the past twenty years have been a downsizing of the faculty to a university of roughly 15,000 students.

The generalization to the provision of capacity for, say, Passenger Rail, is left to the reader as an exercise.

POTTED POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Steven Horwitz offers a Trenchant Observation for all time, and particularly for political economy.

One of the most commonly deployed arguments against free markets is that they are plagued by “market failure.”  Critics point to particular cases where some problematic outcome has occurred and then argue that markets either did not or cannot possibly address those situations.

The market-failure criticism has two problems, both related to the fact that the critics rarely understand the meaning of term has in economics.  First, the meaning itself is problematic from a Austrian understanding of the market process.  Second, saying that markets have failed does not mean that government intervention can improve on the outcome.

Lynne Kiesling elaborates.

But if market processes in realistic contexts have imperfections, don’t government intervention and regulation have imperfections too? The relevant comparison is between the results of market institutions and government institutions in realistic contexts, not in simplified blackboard theory.

I would add a third point to this analysis. Often when I encounter the “market failure” argument I make a quick riposte of “markets don’t fail, they fail to exist”, which is the Coase/transactions cost response. Transactions costs interfere with the ability of parties to find mutually beneficial trades, thus impeding optimal resource allocation and the creation of maximum gains from trade. Transactions costs lead to missing markets, as in the case of environmental pollution and other common-pool resource situations.

Combine knowledge problems with cognitive hubris and there may be a case for the failure of technocracy that can't be so easily dismissed as Special Pleading For The Rich.

THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

In The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America, longtime NBC correspondent Tom Brokaw looks at the complicated, Washington-centered procedural world he and his Silent Generation contemporaries created, sees that it's too complicated to accomplish much, and expresses his regrets.  There's not much to say in Book Review N^o. 35, as there's not much by way of organization or consistent reasoning for readers.  There might be some play value in looking at the commentary masquerading as fact that introduces each chapter, followed by answering the rhetorical question that follows (weak argumentation per se) in such a way as to turn the analysis of some other chapter upside down or inside out.  Try this.  Fact:  One farmer is capable of feeding many more people today than a frontier farmer in the Dakota Territories.  Question:  What inference might you draw about the smaller number of people in military service today, compared to World War II?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

REDISCOVERING THE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT.

A recent David Rotman column in Technology Review notes that technical progress requires shop floor experience to provide reality checks and unanticipated improvements to the scheming in the research office and boardroom.

After decades of outsourcing production in an effort to lower costs, many large companies have lost the expertise for the complex engineering and design tasks necessary to scale up and produce today's most innovative new technologies, not to mention the appetite for the risks involved.

The logic of agglomeration economies (as regional economists have it) or of "ideas in the air" (as Alfred Marshall once put it) doesn't go away, even with high-capacity internet connections and ever-better graphics software and prototyping hardware.

Academic researchers have begun documenting the complex connections between innovation and manufacturing with an eye to clarifying how the loss of U.S. manufacturing could affect the emergence of new technologies. Willy Shih, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, has created a list of basic technologies in which the United States has squandered its lead in manufacturing in recent years. They include crystalline silicon wafers, LCDs, power semiconductors for solar cells, and many types of advanced batteries. And he has detailed how losing the "industrial commons"—the research know-how, engineering skills, and manufacturing expertise needed to make a specific technology—can often mean losing the knowledge and incentives to create advances in related technologies. For example, as silicon semiconductor production and associated supply chains have shifted to Asia, the development of new silicon-based solar cells has been hampered in the United States.

It turns out it's not necessarily true that innovative technologies will simply be manufactured elsewhere if it doesn't happen in the United States. According to research by Erica Fuchs, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, the development of integrated photonics, in which lasers and modulators are squeezed onto a single chip, has been largely abandoned by optoelectronic manufacturers as they have moved production away from the United States. Many telecom firms were forced to seek lower-cost production in East Asia after the industry's collapse in the early 2000s, and differences in manufacturing practices meant that producing integrated photonic chips was not economically viable in those countries. Thus a technology that once appeared to be just a few years away from revolutionizing computers and even biosensors was forsaken.

The way in which a country exploits its comparative advantage still matters.

STILL UNDEFEATED IN GREEN BAY.

The team name begins with P, and it includes a number of players never recruited by better-known programs.

It’s a remarkable record made even more remarkable by the fact it’s been accomplished largely by players from Wisconsin who were not highly recruited, if recruited at all, by the big schools in the power conferences.

The players use that knowledge as motivation.

We all kind of play with a chip on our shoulders,” [guard Hannah] Quilling said. “We’re trying to make Green Bay known. I think we’ve done a good job of making it more than just a school with a hyphen in it. We’re becoming in landmark in women’s basketball and we’re not done. Sweet 16 isn’t the only banner we want to hang. We want to keep going.”

Over the weekend, the Phoenix rallied at halftime to beat another Big 12 Ten program, one the local newspaper seems to be holding a grudge against.

Maybe the University of Wisconsin should have hired Matt Bollant.

The UW-Green Bay women's basketball took down another Big Ten team on Friday night, beating the Badgers 65-49 in front of 5,035 at the Kohl Center.

The victory extended two winning streaks for the No. 18 Phoenix, which has won 30 straight regular-season games and its last seven against teams from the Big Ten.

The coach at Green Bay isn't taking Wisconsin's failure to interview him personally, although the Press-Gazette never misses an opportunity to remind readers.

It's not [Phoenix coach Matt] Bollant vs. Wisconsin, even though it's difficult to imagine that Bollant wouldn't mind showing the Badgers what they are missing.

Wisconsin had interest in hiring Bollant last spring after he led UWGB to its first Sweet 16. For a while, it even appeared he was the school's top candidate despite odds that appeared to be stacked against him.

The school had never hired a male to coach its women's basketball team, and that didn't change.

Gary Becker and Milton Friedman have long noted that discrimination carries a price. Years ago, their argument often served as a rebuttal to claims that businesses discriminated against women and minorities in order to make more money.  Choosing to make do with less qualified workers just to indulge a preference means foregoing gains from trade.  Politically correct discrimination, which Wisconsin might be engaging in, also means foregoing gains from trade, or surrendering the unofficial state basketball title to Green Bay.  The shame is that Green Bay remains with the remnants of the old North Star Conference, after DePaul left for the Big East and Northern Illinois returned, for better or worse, to the Mid-American,  and the Phoenix have to win out in their league and their tournament to get into the national tournament again.

IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

The case for activist or paternalistic government often, but not always, is an argument from bounded rationality or incomplete information.  Arnold Kling suggests that bounded rationality or incomplete information can also be reason for the activists or paternalists to back off.

Cognitive hubris is particularly troublesome when combined with radical ignorance. Indeed, this configuration justifies limiting government intervention in order to avoid setting up systems that are excessively fragile.

Read and understand.

ONE WEEK TO THE IOWA CAUCUSES.

Betsy's Page has a lengthy roundup of investigations, most from the right side, of some of Representative Ron Paul's more outrageous public statements.  Probably better to have the scrutiny before the first delegates get assigned.

MARKING OFF.

Santa's elves double as Huskies.  (The reindeer are otherwise occupied.)

Their enthusiasm was not wasted.

The university's Festive Season greeting features One World, Many Huskie Stories.

Closer to home, the stockings are placed near the train set with care.

Are you ready for some football?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

RIDING ON THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.

Don't mess with Cajun Mama.

Train travel with Amtrak is what travel by air used to be like. I realize traveling by train is the alternative to driving, but with the craziness of the TSA over the past decade, paired with the airline’s nickel and dime shenanigans, train travel should be the alternative to flying. Yes, it will take you longer to get to your destination, but if you factor in layovers, missed connections, and cancelled flights, Amtrak is where it’s at.

Note, that's on the etiolated City of New Orleans (you only think this is a Tip Top Tap, it's really the dining section of the cafe-lounge that now passes as a dining car) running on slowed-down Illinois Central tracks.

Image courtesy Cajun Mama.

Imagine double or triple-daily service, or a full four or five trains a day between Chicago and Memphis, and the 110 mph running reintroduced on The Main Line of Mid America south of Kankakee.