PERSISTENCE

Sometimes, solving a hit-and-run accident involves understanding positive and negative space.  A grocery store worker suffered injuries in a hit-and-run collision.

DeKalb police officer Jeff Winters was the first to arrive on the scene. He talked to two people who saw the crash, including one who had chased the vehicle as it sped off toward Peace Road.

There was debris left behind, including a piece of evidence that would help Winters put it all together: A broken piece of plastic grillwork with the outline of a cougar on it. Like you’d find on a Mercury Cougar.

Winters kept that, along with part of a headlight that had broken off, in his duty bag. He was relatively sure of two things: The driver was local, and they [c.q.] probably wouldn’t repair the damage any time soon.

I'm not sure, based on the evidence given in the story, that Officer Winters's conjecture is supportable as a strictly logical argument.

That's not to say broken parts of cars aren't useful in solving hit-and-run cases. There was one in Oakland County, Michigan, thirty years ago, that the police solved by bringing a piece of trim from a car to the car plant that built the car, and an officer, assisted by a parking lot guard, in the course of looking for the type of car that had that trim, found such a car with precisely the broken trim missing. The driver was duly convicted of leaving the scene of an accident, despite an ingenious legal defense based on the police running the car's plates without a warrant.

The more recent DeKalb case had a more prosaic resolution.

Winters, an 18-year veteran of the DeKalb force, kept his eyes peeled around town for an old Merc. Whenever he spotted one – whether while on duty or even while making an off-duty trip to Walmart – he would check for front-end damage.

“When you’ve got an accident with a guy on a motorcycle and [a driver] doesn’t stop to see if the person’s OK, it kind of gets you upset,” Winters said. “So I kind of took a personal interest in this one.

“There’s some things, certain cases will drive you to keep looking for more, because you know there is more.”

Presumably, had he found such a car in a parking lot, and run the plate, that Michigan case might also govern. Sometimes, though, careless drivers are habitually careless.

Then one afternoon in mid-March, Winters saw it. A black, 1993 Mercury Cougar with front-end damage turning from Fairview onto 7th Street, right in front of his squad car.

Winters stopped the car, explained to the driver what was going on.

“I went to the front of the car, and I’m like, ‘This has got to be it,’ ” he said.

Sure enough, the pieces Winters had kept with him the past three months fit perfectly. The vehicle was impounded. The driver that day didn’t have a license, but she said it was her friend who had been driving when the damage to the car occurred.

The next day, Winters found the woman who had been driving the car Dec. 14.

“Through the investigation, she admitted it was her and she was on her way to pick her friend up,” Winters said. “She was just nervous because she didn’t have insurance and [her license] was suspended, so she panicked and left.”

I'm not sure what good it does to suspend the licenses of bad drivers who will continue to drive, badly, without benefit of a valid license, and cause greater havoc in the aftermath of their errors. On the other hand, I'm not sure putting all bad drivers on house arrest, or requiring them to wear tracking devices, is a good use of resources.

INADVERTENTLY MAKING THE CASE FOR FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY.

A recent Anderson Cooper segment on CNN mischaracterized Washington State's use of federal stimulus money to improve the Cascades Talgo service as failure to produce a European style high speed passenger train.  The usual suspects pounce. "$800 million have been used to reduce the length of the trip from Seattle to Portland by 10 minutes." No, the money made additional train frequencies possible, and provided additional sidings, in order that the 10 minute reduction in trip time was actual, not notional.

Paula Hammond, former secretary of transportation for Washington state, argues that there are other benefits from the project, such as expanded routes and more reliable scheduling. She explained that the state never intended to build a system like the famous “bullet trains” of Japan and Europe. Notwithstanding grandiose D.C. promises, in the Northwest region, said Hammond, “we want the ability of our communities to be connected so that we can provide travel, a daily business trip between Seattle and Portland, and the opportunity not to have to fight traffic.”

That, despite having devoted nearly all of the stimulus money, close to half a billion dollars, to road projects that will have almost no effect on the volume of traffic drivers have to fight.  Despite the campaigning at Destination: Freedom for a true high-speed Passenger Rail service, toward which the stimulus money is at best the earnest money deposit, the high benefit-cost ratio projects remain the regional rail corridors of California, the Carolinas, radiating out of Chicago, and in the Pacific Northwest.  Most of these corridors are short enough that spending the really big money on German-style fast electric trains will reduce trip length by a half hour or so, end-to-end, and such trains will be hard pressed to realize their potential between intermediate stops.  But the possibility of doing business and returning the same day, or sometimes by early afternoon, and getting work done on the train, without the airport hassles or the road distraction, makes the provision of 110-125 mph diesel trains a task worth pursuing.

MIDDLE CLASS ATTITUDES, NOT MIDDLE CLASS TRAPPINGS, MATTER.

The Dollars and Sense collective talks sense about the value of home ownership.

Johns Hopkins University researchers Joe Harkness and Sandra Newman looked at whether homeownership benefits kids even in distressed neighborhoods. Their study concluded that "[h]omeownership in almost any neighborhood is found to benefit children. ... Children of most low-income renters would be better served by programs that help their families become homeowners in their current neighborhoods instead of helping them move to better neighborhoods while remaining renters." (Harkness and Newman also found, however, that the positive effects of homeownership on children are weaker in unstable low-income neighborhoods. Moreover, the study cannot distinguish whether homeownership leads to positive behaviors or whether owners were already predisposed to these behaviors.)

The research also does not negate the claim that providing people with middle-class trappings, such as owned houses and college degrees, does not produce middle-class outcomes in the absence of such middle-class habits as deferred gratification and perseverance.

Even the expected Dollars and Sense identification of base capitalist motives hedges.

Low-income families can run into a range of pitfalls when they buy homes. These pitfalls may stem from the kinds of houses they can afford to buy (often in poor condition, with high maintenance costs); the neighborhoods they can afford to buy in (often economically distressed); the financing they can get (often carrying high interest rates, high fees, and risky gimmicks); and the jobs they work at (often unstable). Taken together, these factors can make buying a home a far riskier proposition for low-income families than it is for middle- and upper-income households.

Most low-income families only have the financial resources to buy rundown houses in distressed neighborhoods marked by few jobs, high crime rates, a dearth of services, and poor schools. Few middle-class homebuyers would hitch themselves to 30-year mortgages in these kinds of communities; poor families, too, have an interest in making the home-buying commitment in safe neighborhoods with good schools.

Perhaps, though, there's a simple strategy for increasing asset value: stop behaving like the stereotypical member of the underclass, and work with your neighbors and the police to root out the people who insist on continuing to behave badly.

ARE THE COMMON SCHOOLS OBSOLETE?

The Elusive Wapiti counts the ways.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that public schooling is designed to "produce" "identical" cogs for the industrial age machine, cogs just smart enough to pull a level but not smart enough to rock the boat, the cure the decline in male academic achievement is for parents remove male children from the system entirely.  A system where feminine behavior is rewarded and masculine behavior punished and/or drugged into compliance, liberalist/feminist scholarship is taught, higher male cognitive variability is binned (on the low end) and ignored (on the high end), and where the presence of men in the teaching ranks is discouraged.

That's a pessimistic assessment. It is, however, based on an interpretation of conclusions in peer-reviewed research.

ANNUAL INCOME TEN SHILLINGS, ANNUAL EXPENDITURES NINE AND SIX, RESULT, HAPPINESS.

President Obama proclaims April to be National Financial Capability Month.  (It's also March Madness in Overtime Month, but I digress.)

Financial capability also means helping people avoid scams and demand fair treatment when they take out a mortgage, use a credit card, or apply for a student loan. My Administration continues to encourage responsibility at all levels of our financial system by cracking down on deceptive practices and ensuring that consumers are informed of their rights.

We also know that too many families are living paycheck-to-paycheck, unable to take advantage of tools that would help them plan for a middle class life. That is why we must build ladders of opportunity for everyone willing to climb them -- from a fair minimum wage that lifts working Americans out of poverty to high-quality preschool and early education that gets every child on the right track early. These reforms would encourage the kind of broad-based economic growth that gives everyone a better chance to secure their financial future.

Our President missed an opportunity to organize the communities of the struggling masses, in order that their teachers might put in their lesson plans the content that many of the children of prosperous districts get as a matter of course.

The state council for economic education suggests teachers, or parents, or the youngsters themselves, check out Pathways to Financial Success.  All the preschool and subsidized lunches and minimum wage jobs (if there are any) will not protect a young person from the blandishments of the payday loan hustler or the lottery: it takes awareness of the logic behind "if it sounds too good to be true, it's a scam."

The national Council for Economic Education invites teachers to submit "elevator pitch" videos of their best stuff for teaching financial literacy.  Get cracking, though.  The contest closes April 14, with a popularity contest opening April 16 on Facebook.  (There is no contradiction between teachers proscribing social media on company time and using social media on whatever they view as being off the clock.)

It's a task worth doing.  I cannot rest until I'm confident that students are capable of understanding the traps present in some of the more complicated financial instruments.

TRANSITIONS.

Northern Illinois names Douglas D. Baker (Ph.D. Nebraska) as its twelfth president.

Baker said he plans to hit the ground running at NIU.

By this fall, he will form working groups to address special topics or challenges, such as identifying the needs of the region’s employers, finding ways to leverage NIU’s competitive advantages, building a more sustainable financial model and fine-tuning action plans to improve student success in retention, graduation and employment rates.

“We spend a great deal of effort on recruitment of students, who spend a lot of money to get a degree,” he said. “I want to make sure we also are doing all we can programmatically to make sure they find employment and are on a track to becoming lifelong learners.

“My sense is the 225,000 NIU alumni can play an even bigger role in student success by helping in recruitment, mentoring, internships and post-graduation networking. NIU alumni represent a tremendous resource, and we need their involvement throughout the pipeline.”

That's all helpful. An emphasis on recruiting potential honors students is likely to be more productive than selling the Orange Bowl, Tuesday Night Football aspects of life in the Mid-American.  I'm troubled, though, with the business jargon, which crops up again in a Daily Chronicle report.

Baker emphasized his focus on students, saying his top priority in his first year would be to focus on the student aspects of the Vision 2020 plan and modify the broad set of goals for the university's future to maximize its potential.

"Being a student-centered university is critical," Baker said. "I think the 2020 plan is on target. ... We're going to work hard to make it operational."

The Vision 2020 Initiative was one of Peters' major goals for the university and will progress in some form under Baker when he officially takes over July 1.

Potential is either unbounded, or an outcome dependent on resource constraints. Put another way, one cannot power an Apollo mission with bottle rockets. The encouraging possibility, for colleagues with longer time horizons, is that a full-on bout of strategic planning may not immediately follow the installation. And the new man recognizes the university's strong points.

"NIU's big enough to matter, but small enough to care about the students that it serves," Baker said.

Baker said NIU has its greatest days ahead. Cherilyn Murer, Board of Trustees chair, said Baker would bring NIU to "different heights and different directions, and we see this as extremely positive."

"His enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of his wife, Dr. [Dana] Stover, I think is perfect for this university at this time," Murer said.

Baker said he knows NIU has faced obstacles. He said NIU must emphasize a campus culture where there's ethically inspired leadership at every level; he said he would not let the university be distracted by its challenges.

I note only that it is difficult to square "small enough to care" with departmental staffing levels that might be best practice at a liberal arts college one-fourth our size.  We somehow make do, but again, that's for people with longer time horizons than mine to grapple with.

I WILL CLING TO THE OLD FLAMING CROSS.

North Carolina was one of the more reluctant participants in the Confederacy, and residents thought of themselves as socially inclusive compared to their less-reconstructed neighbors as the civil rights movement took hold.  And yet a strong unreconstructed presence in the state led sociologist David Cunningham to investigate Klanville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil-Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan, the object of this year's Book Review N^o. 7.

The work is an academic study, extensively endnoted, and fortunately free of the barbarism of numbered endnotes accompanied by footnotes within the body of the text and identified by asterisks or other timetable symbols.  The distinction among Klans of various eras is clarified (the trappings are similar, the policy goals differ, the social prestige of being a member varies).  Professor Cunningham suggests that the influence of Klan attitudes remains, despite the organization itself being in eclipse, and the more egregious manifestations of white supremacy scattered among a variety of smaller groups.  His working hypothesis is that competition for resources based on ethnicity provides an organizing principle for Klans (as well as for associations among people suppressed by the existing order?)  Left uninvestigated, though, is the appeal of racialist organizations among the least well-off members of the dominant society as a way of keeping others in an even worse condition (the explicit or implicit logic of Klan opposition to integration.)  Poverty among the poorer members of a community does not of itself make the richer members of a community better off.  That's an anomaly for future research.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

RETHINKING THOSE DEMSETZ AUCTIONS.

Last fall, a kerfuffle over Passenger Rail operating rights broke out when Britain's Department for Transport awarded the franchise to operate the fast trains on the West Coast Main Line to First Group, stripping longtime operator Virgin Trains of what may have been its signature service, those pale shadows of the New Haven Comet called Voyagers notwithstanding.  A tussle of prodigious intensity erupted, during which franchise bidding for Passenger Rail franchises was suspended.

Railway reports franchise bidding will resume.

The Government has restarted its rail franchising programme by inviting bids for the East Coast franchise and other franchises in a timetable spanning the next eight years.

The Government has restarted its rail franchising programme by inviting bids for the East Coast franchise and other franchises in a timetable spanning the next eight years.

In addition, the DfT and Virgin Trains have concluded negotiations over the temporary 23 month extension to the West Coast franchise until late 2014 following the cancelled competition at the end of last year. The new agreement means Virgin will continue to operate the West Coast route until April 2017. It will mean that if the franchise runs to term, Virgin will have had a 20-year tenure on the line.

The article expresses a hope that the resulting extended durations for franchises will "bring more stability and also franchisees to make a greater investment."  So much for using franchise bids to introduce a form of contestability into what might be properly viewed as quasi-monopolistic or naturally monopolistic markets.  The more entrenched a Virgin Trains or a Grand Central is as a train operator, the more sunk its investment becomes, and the more difficult might be (the economic theory on this point is not settled) the ability of a competing bidder, whether it is First Group or The Milwaukee Road, to put together a successful competing bid.

THE CORPORATE DEAD POOL.

As a way of provoking students, I sometimes offer odds on a large corporation going out of business sometime in the next ten to twenty years.  To be really provocative, I sometimes roll out supposedly solid companies including Apple or Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

My task is sometimes made easier when one of the corporations evinces an intent to self-destruct.

Walmart is starting to look like a Soviet-era retailer. The prices are still low, but shelves are going empty for months while products sit unwrapped in storage, lines are interminable, and no one is around to help.

Bloomberg reports that in-store service problems for the world’s third-largest corporation are so bad that people are willing to pony up the extra cash to shop at stores like Target and Walgreens.

Via Media cites an analyst who suggests current labor market policies are making it harder for corporations to hire cheap labor.  There are at least two other hypotheses that come to mind: first, doing more with less, which appears to be de rigueur in business these days, is a formula for doing what you do badly (see the first paragraph supra); second, low wages are a signal of low productivity (see the second paragraph supra.)  Sic transit gloria Walmartia.

AT THE MARGIN, OVERTIME IS CHEAP?

Voluntary Xchange asks, "If the Labor Market Is So Poor, Why Are Overtime Hours So Strong?"  Reported work-weeks are as long now, as they were in the second quarter 1944 run-up to D-Day.  One possibility might be that employers are unable to find additional people with the ability to hold the jobs.  Another possibility might be the fixed costs of adding a new worker are prohibitive.

Compensation of employees is near historical norms. If compensation is normal, and wages are down, then the difference — benefits — must have gone up.

That gap is likely to increase under the provisions of the Affordable Care (c.q.) Act.  It doesn't surprise me that employers might simultaneously be scheduling additional overtime and laying off workers.

RENTS WILL BE DISSIPATED.

Professor Munger has produced an instructive video explaining that there is no such thing as the government giving money away.  With links to case studies consistent with the proposition.

WHY THERE ARE STATE COUNCILS FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION.

The dean at Pioneer Valley Community spends time at at a conference, comes away with a potential project for higher education.  Money management, apparently, is not in the skill sets of the young.

I’ve been told by an economics professor on campus that her students recoil in horror when she goes through the details of how credit cards make their money; they simply didn’t know.  (I can only imagine how they’d react to learning the details about payday lenders.)  Young adults who’ve never dealt with insurance may not have any sense of what a “deductible” is -- the word always struck me as misleading -- or why it matters.

If anything, I’m wondering if financial literacy might make a good substantive focus for a freshman seminar.  Yes, it could cover student loans, but it should go well beyond that.  As a subject, the relevance should be obvious.  Better, it would allow students to exercise the various general education outcomes that most colleges profess: communication skills, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning all leap to mind.  The actual math involved may be relatively simple, but the way of looking at the world is both powerful and complex.

The conversation in his comments section includes several observers suggesting that the proper place to equip the young with money management skills might be in high school.  Or earlier.

F*** ROBERT MUGABE. THIS IS DETROIT.

Thus did Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a man capable of ruining a city, keep waiting a man at the time regarded as a freedom fighter, and now recognized as capable of ruining a country.  It's one of the many events recorded in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy.  Mr LeDuff is a native of Southeastern Michigan, an itinerant returned home, and Book Review N^o. 6 suggests his book be viewed both as his own voyage of personal discovery as well as his attempt to make sense of what went wrong with what used to be the Motor City.

Mr LeDuff's personal story is that of the internal migration of ethnically ambiguous people from South to North.  That internal migration, in quest of fur pelts or factory jobs, is more colorful and less easily valorized than the internal migration of Puritans and similarly motivated, or obsessive, people, from Coast to Inland.  Thus, southeast Michigan becomes a place where regional cultures collide.  It's a place where the collapse of formerly quasi-monopolistic industries that hired people for their muscle and neglected their brains has gone on for the longest.

And thus an autopsy, for a polity, and sometimes for the people living there.  But not always.  A dime novel with dames and hard-boiled cops that spoke or carried on in the manner of people Mr LeDuff encountered would not be believable.  The stories might not be believable to people who have never spent any time in Detroit.  But as a warning about what might happen in parts of Chicago or Milwaukee or Kansas City or Cleveland (to name a few other jurisdictions with school closings and industrial decay and political malfeasance) the American Autopsy of the title is apposite.  I offer a few passages from pages 144-145.

It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader [convicted former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick] plundered, pillaged, and lied, all the while presenting himself as the guardian angel against the White Devil.

Kilpatrick, who walked into that jailhouse as a quivering-lipped pretender, walked out as the creature he always claimed to be, the preening Hip Hop Mayor. ...

He probably would have benefited from a few hours spent working in a factory.  Factory work tends to give you perspective on the importance of things.  Of course in the hip-hop world, work was for suckers.

Not that the automobile executives were much better at running things.  Turns out our masters of the universe couldn't manage a grocery store.

With Detroit going from a place that had plenty of money to a place with no money.  The malfeasance, and misappropriation of public money, and failure to spend money on routine maintenance of firehouses, has been going on for years.  This is the same Detroit, by the way, that had staff in the tax collector's office going through all the income tax returns, changing all roundings to even dollars back to dollars and cents, in order to trim a few pennies off of tax refund checks.  If you don't work you die.

What's sobering about Detroit, though, is that it's the Perfect Storm of safe congressional districts and protected markets and political corruption and education that doesn't educate and business managers that have no idea how the companies they manage actually make things.

Put bluntly, the stuff I've been posting about for years, in the hopes that people won't let it happen to them.

Ignorans quaeris epistolis meis sequi, circumspice.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

REINVENTING THE ZEPHYR?

Let's hope it's not more political patronage.

Locomotives capable of exceeding the 110-mph speed limit on the passenger rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis will be bought for Illinois and four other states under a process the Illinois Department of Transportation will lead, officials said Thursday.

I'm sure there are safety appliances to consider, and having one prime mover rather than two offers some advantages. But the officials could do worse than this.

Apparently, some members of the public thought as much.  First and Fastest published a report on last September's Nebraska Zephyr excursion.  Amtrak, Metra, and the Illinois Railway Museum worked together to make the experience authentic.  Amtrak assigned Track 12, a track normally used only for Metra dinkies, in order to load under the original remaining trainshed.  Metra assembled inbound dinky 1302 of cars (other than the cab car) lettered or relettered B U R L I N G T O N (yes, in the proper Z E P H Y R typeface) to flip as the outbound 8.40 departure, and brought it in on adjacent Track 10.  First and Fastest reports that some arriving passengers on that dinky took mobile phone pictures of the unusual move, with a few of them wondering if they were seeing the new higher-speed Michigan and St. Louis trains (!)  I'm told that 9911 has 90 mph gearing now, not the 117 it was built to achieve.

Amtrak and Illinois Department of Transportation, you could do worse.

AN ECONOMIST IN MADISON.

The new chancellor of the University of Wisconsin is Becky Blank, with an undergraduate degree from Minnesota and a Ph.D. from MIT.

From 1999 to 2008, she was dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as a professor of public policy and of economics. During her eight-year tenure as dean, the public policy school began a bachelor's degree program in public policy and moved into a new $35 million building.

"We really - literally - built the Ford School," Blank told The Michigan Daily in 2007, when she announced she was leaving. "We were responsible for raising the money, constructing the building, getting the right students and faculty and putting the undergraduate program together."

In addition to her work at Northwestern University, Blank taught economics and public affairs at Princeton University and was a visiting professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Journal-Sentinel can't resist some editorializing in the announcement.

She has advised presidents from both political parties, serving as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers first for George H.W. Bush and later for Bill Clinton.

Blank's husband, Hanns Kuttner, is a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, working with the Institute's Future of Innovation Initiative. He also served in the George H.W. Bush administration as a domestic policy staffer for health and social service programs.

There's something jarring in the juxtaposition of "conservative" and "innovation initiative", but I digress.

A Progressive column takes the opportunity of Professor Blank's appointment to distance its progressivism from that of Our President.

Gone are the days when research, teaching, and outreach at UW-Madison were oriented toward improving the health, quality of life, the environment and agriculture for all citizens of the state. Now economic growth and commercialization in the service of “job creators” take pride of place as the institution’s guiding principles, and Blank is well positioned to promote them.

Blank has a strong record of developing and promoting neoliberal economic policies that put so-called free markets and the profits of large corporations ahead of the needs of people, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership for the Obama administration, and GATT and NAFTA as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors during the late 1990s.

News of her appointment was met with bipartisan praise from her current boss, President Barack Obama, and her future one, Governor Scott Walker. Said Obama, “A tireless advocate for American businesses, Becky has helped to increase our competitiveness, support our innovators and entrepreneurs, and bring good-paying jobs back to our shores.” Walker praised her “keen knowledge of economic issues that can help the UW promote great prosperity in the state.”

Agreement between Obama and Walker on her appointment is not surprising. On many education and workforce development issues, the two are in complete agreement. They both promote policies based on the assumption that the primary function of public education is to prepare students for the workforce. They also both use the fictitious “skills gap” – a purported misalignment between the skills required for vacant jobs and the skills possessed by people looking for work – as a justification for an inordinate amount of corporate influence in public policy.

Higher education's political masters are likely to take an instrumental, workforce-development attitude toward the universities. Some of the responsibility, though, rests with higher education, either for making promises of human capital development, or for gutting the liberal arts.  One economist in Bascom Hall, more or less, will not be enough to reverse forty or fifty years of that institutional rot.

THE VIEW OUT MY BACK WINDOW.

An early spring, my eye.

Those are snow flurries, and in the distance, those are ice fishing tents.  I have to wonder about the fishers' judgement though.  That's open water on the far side of the pond.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

I've been working on the railroad.  Here are two examples of big power on the temporary test track.

That's a brand new Baldwin Double Ender and a repowered Lionel body shell that's been on hand for years.

RENTS WILL BE SOUGHT. RENTS WILL BE GENERATED. RENTS WILL BE DISSIPATED.

Mahablog offers a distinction between makers and takers based on an instructive Michael Lind essay.

If we look at some of the major economic battles taking place, they are over patents, how the risks and rewards of large, systemically important public-utility style financial institutions are distributed and who gets to control the residual over the delegated ends of the government with the mad rush for the privatization of government resources and responsibilities. These are all, in some way, about rents. And the battle over these will determine a lot about who gains in the future of the economy.

Mr Lind refers extensively to a reading of Karl Marx that attempts, to use contemporary language, to distinguish the entrepreneurial urge from the rent-seeking urge.  Perhaps, though, some of those scholars and policy wonks will discover the good in public choice theory, and consider the possibility that limiting the powers of government limits the ability of government to create rents.  It might also behoove some adherents to the contemporary Tea Party to understand the role of rent-seeking in creating the East India monopoly that led to the event that inspired the name.

THE VALUE OF RESEARCH.

Some years ago, a colleague from History developed a simulation called Vatican: Unlock the Secrets of How Men Become Pope.  The game appears now to be out of print (does my autographed copy thus have collectible value?)  Although it's a board game, a simulation, and allegorical, and thus not worthy of the Nihil Obstat, there's evidence of research in creating the game.  I give you one of the "origins" cards drawn by players to establish their base support as Pontifex Maximus.

Habemus Papam!

BREAK UP THOSE SAFE DISTRICTS.

That's been a recent Cold Spring Shops hobbyhorse, and your Superintendent was pleased to hear commentators on a point-counterpoint radio show agreeing that the creation of safe districts likely attenuated any hope of genuine bipartisan compromise (as distinct from an agreement by the political class to fleece everyone else.)

A Via Media essay argues, from a different perspective, that safe districts are nothing new, and continue to impede the progress of the constituents therein.

Democrats are shocked, shocked by the news that there is gambling going on in America’s blue cities. They do their best to avert their eyes from the close political ties between corrupt urban political machines and exploitative Wall Street banks. In the lame progressive mindset that characterizes these decadent times, Wall Street is bad, and urban politicians are good. There can’t possibly be some sort of symbiotic relationship between them. How could something so good, so honest, so dedicated to serving the poor as the Detroit Democratic machine be engaged in a vicious conspiracy with Wall Street to bleed the poor and suck the city dry?

Some Democrats don’t like this kind of talk because they are cynical and others don’t like it because they are naive. The cynics are either in the game themselves or knowingly agree to look the other way because they value the support of political allies and don’t care how much those allies bleed the poor. The naive ones, and there are lots of starry eyed intellectuals in this country who don’t know a hawk from a handsaw, think that because many of these urban thugs are African-American, and because they advocate for more government programs to help the poor, they must obviously be sincere and be part of a general wave of good progressive people fighting to make this world a better place. Surely nobody is so cynical as to lobby for government programs because they plan to cream off the money?

Others have an uneasy sense that something is amiss, but a combination of historical ignorance and race sensitivity strikes them dumb. They look around America and see a number of urban areas with predominantly African-American populations. They see that many (not all) of these cities are run by incompetent, race-baiting hacks and criminals who use identity politics to bond themselves to the voters they exploit.

Because they don’t understand that corruption and identity politics have been the hallmark of American municipal government since the 1830s and 184os, they think the ghastly spectacle of demagogic corruption ruining our cities today is somehow a racial phenomenon. The racists among us see that picture and want to draw racist conclusions about African-American capacity for self governance; most of the rest of us are made so uncomfortable by the whole topic that we let the subject slide.

But thieves like the despicable Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit are anything but a racial phenomenon. There were Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish and Greek Kilpatricks in their day. We can confidently expect a wave of Latino Kilpatricks as Latino voting power pushes African-American machines aside in more urban areas.

That's a long excerpt from a long essay. Let me give you just a little more.

If our so-called ‘progressives’ today weren’t so intellectually decadent and, well, historically challenged, they would be leading the charge to clean up American cities. Instead they are mostly silent — and sometimes even defend the machines.

It’s a terrible shame because reformers and progressives really can fight the rot and help the poor — if they can get past their messed up ‘political correctness’ illusions long enough to recognize the basic facts of the case.

That's a more challenging project. Probably worth the thought.