COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Three economists suggest that the continued to-ing and fro-ing of Washington politics keep the capital on the sidelines.

When businesses are uncertain about taxes, health-care costs and regulatory initiatives, they adopt a cautious stance. Because it is costly to make a hiring or investment mistake, many companies will wait for calmer times to expand. If too many businesses wait, the recovery never takes off. Weak investments in capital goods, product development and worker training also undermine longer-run growth.

So how much near-term improvement could we gain from a stable, certainty-enhancing policy regime? We estimate that restoring 2006 levels of policy uncertainty would yield an additional 2.5 million jobs over 18 months. Not a full solution to the jobs shortfall, but a big step in the right direction.

The way forward, though, depends on your perspective.  Victor Davis Hanson suggests that resolving the certainty in favor of President Obama and the Democrats' vision of forward will keep the resources idle.

The only thing more discouraging to investors than class warfare generally is a certain type of class warfare: a hypocritical crusade that emanates from the upper classes and selectively targets enemies on the basis not of wealth, but of the degree to which they have failed to buy exemptions with their wealth. Meanwhile, on the other end, the message is more weeks of unemployment insurance, vastly more food-stamp recipients, and constant promises of mortgage-debt relief, credit-card-debt relief, and tuition-debt relief. If one were to dream up a perfect way to destroy incentives on both the top and bottom ends, one could do no better than what we have seen since 2009.

The net result is that those with capital, even if they are small businesses, do not believe that the Obama administration likes them. They feel that regulations will increase, that taxes will increase, that energy costs will increase, and that as they pay more to government and keep less, government will nevertheless become even more arrogant and inefficient — and they will become even more demonized. When people pay over 50 percent in payroll, federal, state, and local taxes and are still caricatured as “not paying their fair share,” a sort of collective shrug follows and bodes ill for the economy at large. One need not be liked to make money, but the constant presidential harangues finally take their toll in insidious ways.

Countless times each day, a contractor chooses to hire only a part-time electrician, a CEO hoards cash rather than opens a new plant, a renting family declines to buy a reasonably priced new house, an indebted graduate heads home to kick back and wait until “something turns up,” and an unemployed worker wonders whether it is not wiser to receive all two years of federal benefits before reentering the work force.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney’s economic package will bring instant prosperity. But I suspect that the fact alone that it is not what we have seen and heard for the last four years will unleash a pent-up energy of the sort we have not seen in a long time. In short, President Obama has achieved the impossible — he has convinced millions of rational, profit-minded Americans eager to invest, buy, and hire that he doesn’t worry much whether they do.

Robert Reich disagrees.

[Stock prices] are up because corporate profits are up, and profits are up largely because companies have figured out how to do more with less.

Payrolls used to account for almost 70 percent of the typical company’s costs. But one of the most striking legacies of the Great Recession has been the decline of full-time employment – as companies have substituted software or outsourced jobs abroad (courtesy of the Internet, making outsourcing more efficient than ever), or shifted them to contract workers also linked via Internet and software.

That’s why most of the gains from the productivity revolution are going to the owners of capital, while typical workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or else getting wages and benefits whose real value continues to drop. The portion of total income going to capital rather than labor is the highest since the 1920s.

There is, unfortunately, no compromise between those conflicting visions, out of which a modicum of policy consistency might emerge long enough for some of those idle resources to be put to use in a sustainably productive way.

FAREWELL TO FOOTBALL?

A number of writers come to the same conclusion: tackle football is hazardous to the health of young people.  Never mind that there's nothing more American than episodes of violence interrupted by committee meetings.

Here's Buzz Bissinger in The Wall Street Journal.

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.

The analysis is cold-blooded: participating in the positional arms race is crowding out resources from the rest of the academic mission.

The average student doesn't benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.

If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don't—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs. This is the tier of schools that includes such examples as that great titan of football excellence, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, who went 3-and-9 last season. The athletic department in 2008-2009 took in over $13 million in university funds and student fees, largely because the football program cost so much, The Wall Street Journal reported. New Mexico State University's athletic department needed a 70% subsidy in 2009-2010, largely because Aggie football hasn't gotten to a bowl game in 51 years.

There's no academic analogue to Ronald Reagan calling the Bowl Championship Series an evil empire yet, in order that the mandarins of big time football can be properly mocked.  But there is much to mock.

The president there, Wallace D. Loh, late last year announced that eight varsity programs would be cut in order to produce a leaner athletic budget, a kindly way of saying that the school would rather save struggling football and basketball programs than keep varsity sports such as track and swimming, in which the vast majority of participants graduate.

Part of the Maryland football problem: a $50.8 million modernization of its stadium in which too many luxury suites remain unsold. Another problem: The school reportedly paid $2 million to buy out head coach Ralph Friedgen at the end of the 2010 season, even though he led his team to a 9-and-4 season and was named Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year. Then, the school reportedly spent another $2 million to hire Randy Edsall from the University of Connecticut, who promptly produced a record of 2-and-10 last season.

Sunk costs, or throwing good money after bad?  Coach Friedgen, however, has been on double-secret probation ever since his team went into DeKalb ranked 15th in the country and lost in overtime in the "Immaculate Interception" game.  Ever since then, the administration at Northern Illinois has sought greater visibility in football, most recently lining up private financing for an indoor practice field, ostensibly to be made available to all students.  (A Cold Spring Shops source within the athletic department suggests that the field may be made available to other student-athletes, as the locution goes, on a space-available basis, which suggests little or no availability to students for indoor exercise or Ultimate Frisbee.)

Mr Bissinger refers to public recognition of the medical consequences as further reason to scale football back.  Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh reacted to a related column by detecting new Fabian gradualism at work.

My point with this is just that I know who these people are, and now that this is being speculated about on a tech blog, wait 'til the forerunners of the liberal sports media get hold of it.  Even though their bread is buttered with this stuff, I know these people.

Some of them are leading the charge and don't even know it with the way they're covering the sport.  Some of them are leading the charge for getting the game banned and  they don't even know it! By the way they're covering it.  They're demanding this and demanding all these new safety features, safety regulations, safety rules. Empowering the government to police the game.  They're begging for it, and they don't even realize it.  They, in their naivete, think they're working hard to make the game safer and so forth, and all they're doing is paving the way for the game to be banned.

Not a tech blog, by the way, a sports site with economists on retainer, occasionally Instalanched.

Moviemaker Sean Pamphilion also concludes, after a good deal of work with football players, that the game is poisoning the common culture.

I interviewed the principal of my son's junior high school today because they just eliminated their tackle football program. I am not personally advocating for the banning of football on any level. However, this is a public health concern and needs to be taken seriously.

There's the opening for the Fabian gradualism. Rooting football out, however, will take time, as it is well-established.

It's about the culture. Everything trickles down. I've seen coaches in amateur football, like young kids, speak in a way that you should not speak to children. I've seen high school coaches scream and curse at these kids for making a mental error—well, what if a kid makes a mistake on a math test? Does the teacher get to start screaming, "You're fucking up!"

Why do we give these football coaches this anointed position? What other sport besides football do these guys get to treat our children like pawns? One of the things I asked people throughout making the film was, "Should coaches be vetted the way we vet teachers? Or should they just be guys with football experience?"

To me, [Saint defensive coordinator Gregg] Williams was the height of this mentality. People say that's just a part of football culture. Well, the culture needs to change. It has to change.

University Diaries asks, probably in jest, "What would our universities do without it?" I've been known to tell new administrators, when we cross paths at one of the football related university meet-'n-greets, that there have been a lot of good things going on here long before the BCS run of 2003, or the 2011-2012 mid-major championships.

There will be a New York University Ban College Football debate on May 8.  The event is sold out, but there will be a web-cast.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING.

Once a week, the Vivek Express transits the east coast of India.  It's not the East Coast Champion, as an Economist report reveals.

SPENDING four days on a crowded, grubby train as it trundles over 4,200 kilometres, past 615 stations, and through eight states in India, is a lesson in endurance. Splash out 2,500 rupees (around $50) and you may board the newly inaugurated Vivek Express, the world’s eighth-longest train ride. A weekly service, for the first time it connects directly, by rail, the far north-east of the subcontinent—the seven poor and neglected states stuck on the wrong side of Bangladesh—through “mainland” India and down to its southernmost tip, at Kanyakumari.

There's no mention of dealing card games with the old men in the club car, but you have to pass the paper bag that holds the bottle.

The middle-aged, the men, pass their hours furtively swigging on bottles of rum and whisky and then subsiding into sozzled sleep. This is strictly against train rules so they cower behind curtains when pouring their shots. “The tipsy train”, observes a laconic young Indian novelist, along for the ride.

A telling detail is the beep of mobile phones. Not only does everyone appear to have one, the coverage along the entire journey is unbroken. For a Briton used to wretched phone reception on a densely populated small island, the triumph of Indian telecoms is self-evident.

India is thickly settled enough that there's no place for a train to run out from cellular coverage, which can happen on Amtrak's long-distance trains, sometimes to the annoyance of people who have to be wired, even if there's a pinochle game in progress.

Some truths are universal.  To learn something about a country, ride its cross-country trains.

Fellow passengers, of course, offer the most. A companion in your correspondent’s cabin, who boarded in Dibrugarh, rides all the way south to Kerala. He calls himself Mr Kamil, tells stories of being a trader in coconuts and “small things”, and of roaming the country for work over the past 27 years.

That's true on the City of New Orleans and the Sunset Limited and any other long-distance train.

ENGINEERS IN MOTION.

On a recent visit to the Milwaukee School of Engineering's art collection, I learned that the dance team had performed at a Milwaukee Bucks basketball game.

That's one way to turn engineering and business into something other than a male preserve.

HISTORIANS, NOT RE-ENACTORS.

But the First Brigade Band provided excellent music to drive Old Dixie down.

From 1861-'62 and again in 1864-'65, the Brodhead musicians played quick steps, or marches, to move soldiers and materiel, they serenaded troops in camp and at send-offs, and provided music at ceremonies, balls and Sunday worship services. They joined Gen. Sherman in Savannah, Ga., for the march through the Carolinas, playing "The Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's opera "Il Trovatore" as South Carolina's capital fell to the Union Army.

No Brodhead band members were killed or wounded, but many became ill, common in unsanitary military camps.

From that perspective, even the re-enactors are really historians, as there's little interest in re-enacting diphtheria.

Historians, re-enactors, or conservators of original instruments, the First Brigade Band is busy during the Sesquicentennial.

ANOTHER CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS?

The secret deal that ended the 1962 standoff involved the USSR publicly agreeing to remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba, with the USA subsequently removing some obsolete missiles from Turkey.

There are more modern missiles in Turkey, and the heirs to Khrushchev, heck, to the Romanovs, aren't pleased.

The U.S. repeatedly has said the European missile-defense system is designed to fend off an attack by Iran, but Russia has insisted that the system would blunt its own arsenal. Moscow has proposed to jointly operate the missile shield, but NATO has rejected the offer.

No automatic alliance with Cuba to provoke an arms reduction agreement by basing missiles there, and no Ronald Reagan to consider joint use of a strategic defense system, which elicited no end of scorn from Democrats when he proposed to do so.

THANK YOU FOR LOOKING IN.

The usual summer slump, not unusual for an academic-themed weblog.  Then traffic begins to recover during the academic year.

Site Meter traffic report.

Posting will continue during the summer months, although Higher Education provides less day-to-day material, and the election cycle loses interest until Labor Day.

PERPETUALLY TIRED IS PERPETUALLY UNPRODUCTIVE.

Here's a nineteenth-century perspective on fair labor standards.

It's a sentiment honored in the breach in the contemporary positional arms race called outworking the competition, but that positional arms race is a costly coordination failure.  (Via Economics Education.)

Research shows that consistently working more than 40 hours a week is simply unproductive.

For many in the entrepreneurship game, long hours are a badge of honor. Starting a business is tough, so all those late nights show how determined, hard working and serious about making your business work you are, right?

Wrong. According to a handful of studies, consistently clocking over 40 hours a week just makes you unproductive (and very, very tired).

The article is well-researched, and one of its sources suggests that business interests saw a gain in limiting the work week, all that talk from the labor unions about "fighting" for the weekend notwithstanding.  And it's time, that source suggests, for people to recognize the diminishing returns to long hours. "[T]he single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing."

WISCONSIN MUST BE IN PLAY.

Our President's re-election theme for this year is "Forward."

It's in the song.  So is "Champion of the right," but that is probably not a political allusion.

Or perhaps he intends to secure the Northern Illinois University vote, or a law school post.

In that song, there's victory in view.

To the partisans, though, the motto takes on a different cast.

Here's Victor Morton in the Washington Times, and a morning roundup at Betsy's Page.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Watching other people identify your life's major accomplishments looks like this.

Writing down your life's major accomplishments for other people looks like this.

NICHT KLECKERN, KLOTZEN!

Adolf Hitler himself countermanded one of Heinz Guderian's principles of armored warfare, with the intention of more quickly dividing the Allied forces in Belgium from those in France in order to prepare an encirclement of the remaining French armies south of the Somme, in order to avoid a replay of 1914-1918.  It worked.  Whether that countermand made Hitler sure enough of his instincts as to make him contemptuous of his generals when the military situation got worse historian Ronald Powaski doesn't say.  His Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940, tonight's Book Review N^o. 12, is a readable, relatively short account of the proper implementation of the Schlieffen Plan.  (First, you make a temporary alliance with the Russians.)  The accounts from the Belgian, British, French, German, and Netherlands point of view appear in their turn.  There are several useful maps.  Professor Powaski is careful about drawing inferences about missed opportunities, the most significant event being the British evacuation of Dunkirk.  Yes, another Hitler countermand arises.  All the same, Dunkirk was close enough to Britain for the Royal Air Force to contest the skies, for the Royal Navy to operate under cover of British shore defences, and perhaps the British were losing the war faster than the Germans could win it, dashing panzer columns notwithstanding.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE SEVENTY-SEVEN CENT CANARD.

It's easier for hack journalists to repeat soundbites than to analyze the facts.  Here, Rachel Maddow finds meaning in the comparison of medians. The video is not for the faint of heart.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Kay Hymowitz notes that those median differences conceal tough tradeoffs, and more generous family leave policies in Scandinavia accompany countries with differences in median income by sex.  (Note carefully: "accompany" carries no implication of cause or effect.)

But it's so much easier to smirk, "Listen, this is not a math is hard type of conversation."  Republican strategist Alex Castellanos's response, "If so, every greedy businessman in America would hire only women, save 25% and be hugely profitable" ought be deployed whenever misconceptions about pay inequities come up.  But to the women of the fevered brow, passing a law with a high-sounding title means there is a problem and it has been fixed.

But given that some of us believe that women are getting paid less than men for doing the same work, there is something called the Fair Pay Act.  There was a court ruling that said the statute of limitations, if you're getting paid less than a men, if you're subject to discrimination, starts before you know that discrimination is happening, effectively cutting off your recourse to the courts.  You didn't know you were being discriminated against.  You can't go.

The first law passed by this administration is the Fair Pay Act. 

That the short title says it is such an act does not make it such an act. That is where market tests do come in.

NO ORPHANED TRAINS IN ILLINOIS.

Although Wisconsin's almost-finished and not-quite-big-enough Talgo trains may never turn a wheel in revenue service in the midwest, Illinois and California are combining their purchase of coaching stock for the accelerated service on Illinois lines out of Chicago and augmented California service.

The $551 million request for proposals was announced by the Federal Railroad Administration, which is coordinating a California-led effort to purchase standardized bi-level rail fleets for use on Amtrak routes in California, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Indiana and potentially Iowa.

California will acquire 42 of the 130 new rail cars, which will be equipped with seating on two levels, WiFi and other customer amenities, officials said. The Midwest states will share use of 88 rail cars.

The existing California cars, on the San Diego and Bay Area services, are impressive. They're also capable of giving Britain's long-serving 43 Class Inter-City 125 trains a run for their money.

Existing Amtrak locomotives would be used initially to propel the new rail cars at speeds of up to 110 mph.

Bids will be let later to purchase new high-performance diesel locomotives capable of sustaining 125 mph, as well as for single-level passenger cars, officials said.

That "propel" might be a solecism, or it might anticipate push-pull operation. Is it too much to hope that the California cars might not go faster with a dual-mode electric under catenary?

ESCALATE THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee provides college for more Wisconsin residents than Madison does.  It has long been the Cold Spring Shops position that UWM continue to raise its academic posture, rather than reposition itself in the sports world.

Nothing, though, has the staying power of a bad idea.

A 30,000-enrollment school must be called the University of Milwaukee for proper athletic branding. It certainly doesn't hurt in places such as Memphis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Houston and Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh has a long academic tradition, it's across the street from Carnegie-Mellon, which also has a long academic tradition, and Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning inspired the Stalinist pile that houses Moscow State University.  If that's part of the branding, fine.  There are solid academic programs at the other institutions, although these names usually come up in late February or early March as "good basketball schools," not necessarily a compliment.

It's not enough, though, to raise the basketball profile.

Finally - and this is where the new [athletic director] cannot be afraid of butting heads with small-thinkers in this town - UWM should restore football.

Adjacent Shorewood High School is almost ready-made for a small, start-up non-scholarship program. Have a fundraiser for bleachers that would seat about 5,000. Better yet, find a stadium that is about to be razed and buy its seats on the cheap.

Hire UW-Whitewater coach Lance Leipold, who has built the best Division III program in the country. He does it without scholarships and with players from suburban Milwaukee, Madison and Northern Illinois. You're telling me he couldn't make it work at a place that deserves to be called the University of Milwaukee?

Thus does the quest to become the next Northern Illinois which aspires to be the next Boise State, never mind the expense, begin.

Those secondhand seats?  Look for the latest high school to upgrade its athletic plant.

ONE MORE SUMMER, ONE MORE LINE.

Gen^l U. S. Grant famously described his 1864 Overland Campaign with a line, "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  That campaign took more than the summer, but ended the war, at a lower human toll than that levied by his predecessors in the east.  Twenty years later, the now past-President Grant lent his name to a Ponzi scheme (as events transpired) set up by Gilded Age hustlers Ferdinand Ward and James D. Fish.  The Ponzi scheme unraveled, and Mr Grant contracted a cancer.

To provide his survivors with an income, he, in partnership with Mark Twain, contracted to write his memoirs.  Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year, is the account of that writing.  Book Review N^o. 11 will note that it is a lot more.  Samuel Clemens, for instance, deserted to Nevada from a Missouri Rebel unit that was being pursued by the 21st Illinois Reg^t, then under the command of Col Grant.  President Grant expressed regret about the conquest of the Southwest from Mexico, and anticipated the potential of the U.S. as a world military and commercial power.  The reader will also learn of a Presidential appointment of a three-year-old grandson to West Point (yes, there was a Gen^l Ulysses Grant in service in both World Wars) and of other contemporary military histories of the Civil War that might make for instructive reading.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WE EXPECT THIS OF URBAN WARD-HEELERS.

Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickolaus does not fit the profile of an urban ward-heeler.  Several vote counts from Waukesha, however, have looked like something the elder Mayor Daley would have organized.

Nickolaus drew criticism last year during a tight state Supreme Court race when she announced nearly two days after the election that she failed to include 14,000 votes from Brookfield in her unofficial totals. The error helped lead to a statewide, taxpayer-financed recount and flipped what appeared to be a close loss for Justice David Prosser to a 7,000-vote victory.

A state Government Accountability Board investigation found Nickolaus violated state law in how she reported election results, but without criminal intent.

Results have been slow in other races, as well. During the April 3 election, Nickolaus failed to post timely election results online and update them periodically for the public, as promised.

She will not be standing for re-election.

PRIVATE RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS WIN BY DEFAULT.

There's a lengthy, by InstaPundit standards, discussion of The Paternalistic Impulse.  "See, the thing is, some people say that people aren’t clever enough to plan for their own retirement. But what makes anyone believe that people can then be clever enough to plan for other people’s retirements?"  That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  (So long, in fact, that some of the links in those posts are probably dead.)

Call the roll: we have the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as government insurance against managers of private pension funds putting all the money into one company's stock, or using the pension money as a piggy-bank.  That's exactly what Congress has been doing with the "Social" "Security" "Trust Fund" for these many years.  In Illinois, the legislature has been writing IOUs to the various state employee pension funds, so as to secure resources for their pet projects, and those IOUs have become more and more suspect.

The discussion at InstaPundit concludes, "As I say, if people are too dumb to plan for their own retirements, they’re probably too dumb to plan for other people’s, too. And certainly there’s no evidence that the folks in Washington are any less dumb than the public at large."

When you have eliminated the impossible ...

LEFT, RIGHT, LIBERTARIAN.

Walter Hudson summarizes in three paragraphs the case for Tea Partiers and Occupiers to make common cause.

Government is force. That is its essential and exclusive quality. Government has the unique capacity to lawfully coerce behavior. When that capacity is unmoored from justice, it becomes available to the highest bidder. That is what has happened in America. Lobbyists and donors are lined up to purchase the initiation of force against their economic and political competitors. Winners get to wield a club with which to bludgeon others into submission. Losers are S.O.L.

That is why constitutionally limited government is so important, and why Tea Partiers are so enamored with the Founding and all its historical trappings. Limiting the state’s power to strictly defined roles prevents regulatory capture and other forms of cronyism.

If Occupiers really want to defang corporate lobbyists, they should defang Washington. Some of them may eventually come to realize that.

Those paragraphs are part of a longer essay. The rest, though, is elaboration.

MARKETS MAKE SOME PEOPLE RICH AND OTHERS POOR.

Yes, markets are environments in which there are incentives to reduce costs and seek productivity gains.  They are also environments in which scarce resources get reallocated to more rewarding uses.

Professor Craig Maher, a Wauwatosa resident with a post at Wisconsin-Oshkosh (hey, Wisconsin, do you regret not restoring the Valley 400?) recognizes one of the incentives speed-ups and pay freezes gives to ambitious people.

Since joining the UW-Oshkosh faculty, I have done all that is expected of a good academic. I consistently receive strong student evaluations, I publish consistently and on topics particularly germane to my course responsibilities in the MPA Program - public budgeting and finance. I was promoted to associate professor and will be promoted to the highest academic rank, full [c.q.] professor, at the end of this semester. My research was recognized in 2011, when I was awarded a highly coveted Endowed Professorship.

In addition to professional pursuits, I have been active in the Wauwatosa community, where I successfully ran for elective office in 2004 and 2008 (receiving more than 80% of the vote in 2008). My children are in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; my oldest daughter is in an after-school program called Kids Who Care, where the students interact with residents in a local retirement home.

The point of this is to highlight how much this city and area mean to my family and me, and any decision to leave would need to be significant.

As a faculty member, I have not had a salary increase in at least four years. In fact, my take-home pay today is lower than it was in 2009. The current political climate is such that I am reluctant to tell people what I do for a living because my profession is perceived as a drain on the state, that faculty are lazy and that they are paid exorbitant salaries.

As any smart professional would do, I finally decided that personal attachment can only go so far, so I tested the market and was recently hired at Northern Illinois University. The program I am joining is much stronger (nationally ranked), the salary is much better and the benefits are comparable.

My question is: If I was put in a position where I felt I needed to leave Milwaukee and Wisconsin, what does that say about the future of the UW System faculty?

It is widely known that UW System faculty are compensated well below faculty at comparable universities elsewhere. The response historically has been that a portion (never all) of the difference is made up on the benefits side (health insurance and pension). The changes this year now make the gap even greater. I worry about what that means for retention of top faculty in the UW System.

We're glad to welcome new colleagues, although I hope Professor Maher negotiated a good starting package, as Northern Illinois has sometimes frozen pay, apart from making counter-offers to outside offers.  Headquarters is receptive to the observation that "if you can get a better offer, we'll match it" forces the people most likely to receive such offers to cast about for offers, and there have been occasional raises, and, thus far, no layoffs or furloughs.  On the other hand, we've had a lot of retirements, as uncertainty about the future of the state pension funds, and a change in the benefit formula going forward, has induced people to cash in now.

Commenters to Professor Maher's column note that Northern Illinois is a larger university, and the program he is joining, public administration, is one of the country's best.  All true, and both of those things were true long before the football program got noticed.  That's no reason for complacency in Wisconsin.  Start treating attrition as "those people would have left anyway" and do nothing about the working conditions, watch a change in the criteria by which you define "would have left anyway."  In markets, resources are reallocated from less rewarding and less productive to more rewarding and more productive uses.

RUNNING BEYOND THE WIRES.

California's bullet train service might go into operation sooner, and more cheaply.

Some of the cost and time savings will come from a “blended” approach to rail construction, merging the new bullet trains with existing commuter lines. It would involve upgrading commuter rail in L.A. and in the San Francisco Bay Area while building the initial HSR line in the Central Valley as planned using federal funds.  Los Angeles gets linked to the Central Valley first, then San Francisco in a following phase.

The blended approach, however, involves changes of trains, an inconvenience to passengers, until the entire high-speed line is in place. That will discourage passengers. On a through train, you may be late, but you will get to your destination. On a train that makes connections, you may be late, and fail to make your connection. Sometimes that's adventurous, when a failed six minute connection in Cologne requires an improvised search for quarters in Brussels. But as a regular business proposition, it is something to be avoided.  The editorial writers of the Sacramento Bee are satisfied with the changes of trains, at least for now.

From Merced to Burbank, no longer would passenger trains, like Amtrak's San Joaquin, have to share travel with BNSF or Union Pacific freight lines – which have a maximum speed of 79 miles per hour.

This dedicated tracking not only would improve passenger service, it would free up freight capacity south of Merced. And no longer would passengers have to take a bus from Bakersfield to Burbank – because the only rail line is a busy, slow Union Pacific freight line over the Tehachapi Mountains. High-speed rail would have its own tracks.

In that first phase, the system also would connect, through a "blended system" to existing  – making the cost to build the larger network a lot cheaper. Riders would jump off high-speed rail at Burbank and on to Metrolink to get to Los Angeles. As High-Speed Rail Authority chairman Dan Richard said, "That beats the hell out of the car trip" – and with future improvements would beat airplane travel.

In our region, passengers would see improvements in Amtrak's San Joaquin rail service between Sacramento and Merced – improving speeds from 79 mph to 125 mph. Passengers from the Sacramento region would be able to get to greater Los Angeles with a single transfer, cutting travel time from what is now almost eight hours to just over five hours – competitive with car travel.

The suggested 125 mph speed on the new line suggests either best-practice diesel trains, or electrification. The commuter lines are not electrified, although the Peninsula commute service may be electrified as part of the Passenger Rail upgrades.  Transfers between faster intercity trains and suburban trains presumably take place at the end of electrified zones.

That involves unnecessary inconvenience for passengers.  Railroads have, for a long time, looked for ways to run an electric locomotive beyond the wires, either with an onboard power plant or with a battery.

Lackawanna tri-power locomotive 3501, somewhere in New Jersey.

Railroad Magazine photograph. 

Scanned from p. 302 of Middleton, When the Steam Railroads Electrified.

In 1930, the state of the art was a locomotive with electric motors energized by the overhead wire, or by a battery recharged by an onboard diesel-powered generator.  Hermann Lemp had recently worked out the control system that prevented the electric motors, which draw maximum current at startup, from stalling out the diesel engine.  A hybrid that could go from battery to diesel-energized motors was not in the card.

Locomotive builders have learned a few things in the past eighty years.  New Jersey Transit operate a fleet of dual-mode locomotives, originally purchased with the intent of operating through trains from the never-electrified Erie lines into Penn Station, a project that has been set back by the cancellation of the new North River tunnels into the sub-sub-basement of Penn Station.  The carrier still sees possibilities for dual mode operation of commuter trains.

"This kind of equipment never existed; this is the first of its kind," [Martin E.] Robins, director emeritus of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University [and retired from New Jersey Transit], said as he eyed a dual-powered locomotive on Track A at Newark Penn Station. "There were years when it was said this kind of a locomotive could never be built."

Transit officials say the locomotives will allow for more one-seat rides for the thousands of passengers who now must transfer between trains.

At the Wayne Transit Center, for example, passengers travelling to New York City now ride a diesel-powered train for 10 minutes to Montclair State University. Then, after a 16-minute wait, they board an electric-powered train and ride 59 minutes to New York Penn Station because a diesel train can’t be operated in the tunnels to New York.

By "this type of locomotive, he's presumably referring to a locomotive capable of sustained running either in electric or diesel-electric mode. New Haven (now Metro-North in Connecticut) and Long Island have such locomotives, capable of drawing power from the third rail for short distances, then having extended range in diesel mode, and British Rail's Southern Region had locomotives with a short range in diesel mode, as was the case for Lackawanna's two tri-power units.

The applicability of such power to California is evident.  Electrify the Peninsula commute zone and the high-speed lines with the same voltage and frequency, then equip the diesel with sufficient fuel capacity to cover the non-electrified parts, and offer a single seat service, with a mode change during a station stop.