LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, CHILDREN OF ALL AGES.

Circusmodellbau visits the Circus Model Builders Baraboo show.  Photos were submitted by tiger trainer Ryan Holder.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS TEND TO DO WHAT THEY DARN WELL PLEASE.

Straight talk from a sociologist.  A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea.  Money quote.

Back in February, some of my sociologist friends retweeted another [Neil deGrasse] Tyson quip: “In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why Physics is easy and Sociology is hard.”

We sociologists appreciated the recognition, even if some of us resented needing a famous astrophysicist as our hype man. Yet it’s simply galling that a person who can recognise the difficulties of studying social life somehow doesn’t connect those same challenges to their philosophical and political implications. If simply studying sociology is complex, governing society with it is anything but simple.

Particularly if one attempts to govern society on the basis of aggregates such as "society" or "classes" or "interest groups." The microfoundations are messier, and more interesting.

I think the "Rationalia" Mr Tyson proposes is Swiftian, not Marxian, and that he and author Jeffrey Guhin are in accord.

There has always been a hope, especially as elites became less religious, that science would do more than simply provide a means for learning about the world around us. Science should also teach us how to live, pointing us towards the salvation that religion once promised. You can see this in any of the secular utopianisms of the 20th century, whether it’s the Third Reich, scientific Marxism, or the “modernisation thesis” of Western capitalism.

Yes, there's a reason that enlightened scholarship rules out any final say. The "settled science" of the early twentieth century got a number of things badly wrong.

Social Construction is Subject to Constraints.

JUST HONOR THE TICKETS.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops cause.  "A rail pass good on Amtrak and on the commuter rail systems would offer travelers additional convenience."  The British still do so, for tourists on a rail pass.  "A holder of a rail pass has the option of taking the next service out, no matter whose it is, but if you're at Doncaster headed for York on a Virgin ticket and the next down train is one of those Great North Eastern expresses, you just have to wait." Likewise, in Germany, your pass, or your day ticket is equally good on a split-level puddle jumper or an Inter-City Express, although you may have to procure a seat reservation to board the latter.  And the day the Chicago Aurora and Elgin quit, Chicago and North Western and the Burlington honored the interurban's tickets.  Chicago has taken a step forward, in that a Metra ticket is good on any Metra train, but a South Shore Line ticket is not.

Now, with Philadelphia's Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority having to take its newest multiple unit cars out of service for running gear repairs (doesn't anybody know how to build Passenger Rail cars any more?), Amtrak finds itself in the commuter business, and engendering ill will.

Amtrak will make four more stops at Ardmore - three inbound and one outbound - and add an extra car to six of the eight Keystone trains between New York and Harrisburg.

Passengers will need Amtraks ticket to ride on the trains.

This apparently required a ukase from L'Enfant Plaza.

As an Amtrak train pulled into the Ardmore Station Wednesday morning, hopeful SEPTA passengers approached the open doors, only to be disappointed.

While Amtrak had let commuters catch a ride to 30th Street Station on Tuesday, the conductor would only let Amtrak riders board on Wednesday.

"We will take them at 11 bucks a piece," he told the crowd as the train pulled away.

Let's see if I understand this ... Amtrak stops additional trains at Ardmore for the benefit of commuters and then requires those commuters to have Amtrak tickets to board.  Legally sound, but politically, that's the kind of thing that will make voters receptive to Tea Party arguments about Washington agencies.

ECONOMISTS MAKE BETTER FATHERS.

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed notes that nobody has repealed the Law of Unintended Consequences.  This time, they catch egalitarian family-friendly policies, under which new fathers as well as new mothers can request the stoppage of their tenure clock.  "Colleges adopted policies to stop the tenure clock to help professors who are new parents, especially mothers. Study suggests fathers may be the real beneficiaries."  The specifics:

The study, "Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits From Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?" was conducted in a limited subset of higher education: economics departments ranked among the top 50 in the United States. These are all departments that place a large emphasis on research. But the results are striking, and likely to alarm advocates for women in academe across a range of institutions.

The study was conducted by Heather Antecol of Claremont McKenna College, and Kelly Bedard and Jenna Stearns of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by the Institute for the Study of Labor, a German research organization.

The study included data from 49 top economics departments and examined the impact of clock-stopping policies that are open (as has become the norm) to both male and female professors who become parents. Stopping the clock typically involves giving tenure candidates an extra year before they are evaluated for tenure. Notably, stopping the clock does not require a leave of absence, so the extra time covers a period when faculty members are in many cases working and being paid. The study was based on data about 1,299 assistant professors hired by these departments between 1985 and 2004.

The findings are based on comparing the tenure rates for male and female candidates before and after adopting clock-stopping policies that cover all faculty members who have a child. At these universities, only a minority of men and women were earning tenure prior to the adoption of the policies -- so earning tenure was not a given for anyone.

The bombshell finding was that, when comparing candidates for tenure, the success rate for male candidates increased by 19.4 percentage points after stopping the clock was offered. For women, the rate fell by 22.4 percentage points. (Many appeared to go on to win tenure at institutions whose economics departments were not as highly ranked as those where they started.) While each tenure case is unique, the authors did not find other changes in tenure policies to explain the numbers.

The study's focus on tenure outcomes at highly-regarded economics departments is salient. Economics has a pretty good match of tenure-line openings and Ph.D. completions. But there is very much a pecking order of departments and journals, and the strategy of getting a lot of Minimally Publishable Units into archival journals will not win you tenure at the fifty departments claiming to be among the top twenty.  Justin Wolfers, of Michigan, explains.

To succeed at top universities, academics must finish graduate school, find a job as an assistant professor and then race to establish themselves as world-class researchers before being evaluated for tenure. Succeed within seven years and you have a job for life. Fall short, and you’re fired.

It can be a particularly difficult path for women, for whom this career pressure typically coincides with prime childbearing years. Making matters worse, while many early-career male academics are supported by stay-at-home wives, women more typically wed husbands with their own professional career pressures.

I wonder how relevant that "male academics supported by stay-at-home wives" is any more. There's a reason most academic novels are set in the English department, or someplace related -- that's where the wife-beaters and neurotics are, but one positive development of Sixties style feminism was the encouragement of young women to aspire to anything, and that likely contributes to the two-career and two-body challenges; thus the ambitious women will favor supportive men. But the coincidence of launching career and peak fertility poses a new challenge, one that the old sexual division of labor didn't face.

To combat these disparities, many universities have adopted tenure-extension policies that give new parents greater flexibility. Typically, this means extending the seven-year period of tenure evaluation, usually by an extra year for each child. In practice, these policies are usually gender-neutral, giving dads an extra year to establish their reputations, just like moms.

What comes next is no surprise.

They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists.

Perhaps this reflects the physical toll of pregnancy, the difficulties of a complicated birth, the extra task of nursing or simply an unwillingness to shirk parenting duties. Whatever the cause, the findings are exactly what you would have expected if becoming a parent exacted a greater career sacrifice for women than men. By giving men a relative advantage, these gender-neutral policies appear to have effectively raised the tenure bar for women.

Giving birth is not gender-neutral.  Duh. But the strategy the successful men used is available to the women. Back to the Inside Higher Ed report.

In economics, journal articles are the coin of the realm in tenure decisions, and top-ranked departments pay a lot of attention to which journals publish an assistant professor. The paper defines the top five journals as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Review of Economic Studies.

Trying to publish in those journals, while desirable to any up-and-coming economist, is also risky, due to their higher rejection rates than other journals. The authors of the new paper speculate that male economists who become fathers are taking the extra year on the tenure track not to nurture their offspring, but to write more articles and to have time to submit them to top journals. They then had time, if rejected by those journals, to submit elsewhere.

"These results imply that gender-neutral tenure-clock-stopping policies do not adequately reflect the true gender-specific productivity losses associated with having children," the paper says. "Men are more likely to be productive while their tenure clock is stopped and women are much less able to do so, yet they are treated equally under these policies. As a result, the policies actually increase the family gap in economics at research-intensive universities. Since tenure at a highly ranked school is a measure of professional success, this finding is important even if women are not more likely to leave the profession altogether."

Without time diaries, we have no way of knowing whether Economist Dad, up to feed or change or soothe the baby, doesn't stop at the computer to run a regression or check electronic mail before attempting to grab some more sleep. That doesn't rule out continued differences in the division of labor. Back to Mr Wolfers.

Male economists typically approach parenthood with few concerns about possible professional consequences. Women, however, are often counseled to delay motherhood until they have been evaluated for tenure.

That phenomenon is widely enough recognized to have its own meme, higher education's baby penalty.

Women without children are 33 percent more likely than women with children to secure tenure-track faculty positions. In other words, at a pivotal point in establishing their careers, mothers in academia pay a "baby penalty." Why should parenting continue to weigh so much more heavily on female academics than on their male counterparts?

Certainly, cultural attitudes play a role, including persisting assumptions that so-called career mothers shortchange their babies, their professional competence or both. For example, Princeton University students were asked recently to consider several fictitious consultants including two new parents who continued to work.

There are many more possibilities.  The Sixties feminism that pushed for subsidized day care and universal preschool was one that made it possible for professional women to neglect their children the same way professional men could.  I hesitate to dip further into the culture wars, although the possibility that the ambitious women came off as angry harridans is out there.  Or, more generously, that a high-powered career might be at odds with married life; this being equally true for the men and for the women.

But where there are, as American Interest notes, Unintended Consequences, there is room for more ideas.

The study points to an uncomfortable tension between two important goals of the liberal feminist political program: paid leave and equal pay.  So long as women shoulder, on average, a disproportionate share of child-rearing responsibilities within families (a cultural predisposition that no government policy is likely to be able to break entirely), it’s possible that parental leave policies will give men more room to advance their careers.  Indeed, a 2013 Pew study found a significant (positive) correlation between the length [of] parental leave policies and the size of the gender pay gap.

This is a difficult problem to crack. Giving only mothers time off, and not fathers—as some universities are apparently trying after the failure of the gender neutral policy—seems likely to eventually give rise to progressive objections that it is endorsing traditional gender roles, or discriminating against gay couples (to say nothing of transgender people).  But even setting aside those dilemmas, a world where mothers get time off but fathers don’t is also likely to increase the pay disparity in the long run as well. While foregoing care for their children, fathers would enjoy several months of career development that their spouses would not.

None of this means that we shouldn’t keep pursuing a world where men and women can command the same salaries, or where more parents have the flexibility to time off work to raise their young children. But it does mean that we should be cognizant of the limits, in the short run, of government policy in achieving both goals simultaneously.

In addition to being better fathers, economists are sensitive to trade-offs and to the surprising incentives of policies, no matter how well-intentioned.  And economists are likely to understand that these new workplace policies are problems of being underemployed relative to our ancestors.

THE HARD TASK OF SEEKING ALLIES.

We looked previously at the value of assimilation, plus the importance of the Western powers seeking the assistance of practicing Moslems who are not mad jihadis.  Thus Max Boot.  "To defeat those Islamic extremists, we will need the cooperation of moderate Muslim states and of the Muslims who live in the West."  That idea figures early in Strategy Page's recent Wars Update.  "In 2015 the Islamic terrorist related deaths declined in large part because Moslem nations have finally become less tolerant of the Islamic radicalism, especially when it is practiced on them instead of non-Moslems."  The article notes there are ample reasons for True Believers to attempt to convert, or eliminate, the not quite true believers.

Sunni Islam is what the majority (over 80 percent) of Moslems practice and in Arabia itself (where Islam first appeared in the 7th century) the locals believe they are more Islamic than other Moslems. After all, the Koran was written in Arabic and all the founders of Islam were Arabs. Yet for over a thousand years there has been a tradition of different factions in Arabia trying outdo each other to prove who is “more Islamic” than each other. This led to constant fighting and suppression of new ideas. One of those fanatic factions is the Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam in what is now Saudi Arabia. Wahhabis, who first appeared in the 18th century, are very conservative and very hostile to non-Moslems and Moslems who are not Sunni.

The Wahhabi problem is still most obvious in Saudi Arabia, which always practiced what it preached. Saudis comprise the largest faction of ISIL and al Qaeda recruits because so many Saudis have been educated in Wahhabi run schools. The Saudi rulers control the clergy, to a point, and do not allow public expressions of anti-Saudi Islamic radical ideas. But many Saudis back ISIL goals (which include replacing the Saudi monarchy), even is many of them do not wish to live under ISIL rule. This ideological mess is something Arab rulers, particularly in Saudi Arabia, have been dealing with since Saudi Arabia was formed in the 1920s. Change comes slowly in religious matters but meanwhile religious zealots Arab oil wealth has paid to create threaten us all.

Perhaps in the price war Iran and Saudi Arabia have gotten into there will be some respite for a troubled world. Plus fracking. Plus continued research on fusion, and improvements in batteries and capacitors.

Perhaps, though, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness can catch on, even in what appears to be inhospitable places.

This is why the Arab Spring uprisings, and their desire to establish democracies, may do some permanent damage to the Islamic terrorism tradition. There are already more condemnations of Islamic radicals by Islamic clerics and media in Moslem nations. These changes have not come as quickly as many hoped, but at least they finally arrived. This came as a surprise to many Moslems. That’s because the past has had a huge influence on Islamic societies. For many, this resistance to change is considered a religious obligation. Many Moslems consider democracy a poisonous Western invention. There is still a lot of affection for the clerical dictatorship of legend; a just and efficient government run by virtuous religious leaders. The legends are false and there are centuries of failed religious dictatorships to prove it. But this legend have become a core belief for many Moslems and tends to survive assaults by reality or the historical record.

Plato, Marx, Herbert Croly, the unnamed holy men the passage alludes to, posers all, deserving of oblivion.  (I was tempted to title this post "Allah Be Praised, I've Invented the Clerisy," except for the fact that Islam's greatest minds knew their Plato.

The article rewards careful study.  By all means, read and understand.  And consider, dear reader, the possibility that maybe we shouldn't miss the Cold War.

Most current wars are basically uprisings against inefficient, corrupt and oppressive police states or feudal societies which are seen as out-of-step with the modern world. Many are led by radicals preaching failed dogmas (Islamic conservatism, Maoism and other forms of radical socialism) that still resonate among people who don't know about the dismal track records of these creeds. Iran has replaced some of the lost Soviet terrorist support effort. That keeps Hezbollah, Hamas, and a few smaller groups going, and that's it. Terrorists in general miss the Soviets, who really knew how to treat bad boys right.

I suspect more than a few bad boys miss Saddam Hussein, all of Donald J. Trump's statements about how he brooked no terrorists notwithstanding.

WHEN THE RAILROAD LEAVES TOWN.

July 3, 1957 began as most Fridays (after review, it was a Tuesday) before a national holiday began, with people heading off to work with hopes of sneaking away at lunch.

A few commuters headed toward Chicago on the Chicago Aurora and Elgin.

On occasion, the postwar St. Louis cars did serve as the Batavia shuttle car, as illustrated here, and the early wood cars regularly provided peak-load capacity.

There are enough wood cars in the Illinois Railway Museum collection to completely cover weekday electric car service, and enough Chicago Aurora and Elgin cars for the museum to accommodate all weekend riders with equipment from that electric railroad alone.

Here 309-36-308-319 await passengers.

But thanks to the desires of Chicago city fathers to provide an upgrade to the L in the median strip of a planned expressway, Aurora and Elgin cars are terminating at Forest Park, with passengers transferring there to the L, for a slower ride downtown.  The railroad has been seeking to abandon all passenger service, with approval from the Illinois Commerce Commission for a suspension of service effective in late April enjoined.  Suburban interests would obtain legal authority to assume the service upon posting of a bond.  But no such bond was forthcoming, and on July 3 a judge voided the injunction, then closed court for a long weekend.

Railroad officials promptly suspended all service.  At the museum, the re-enactment is a bit more dramatic than reality, with passengers asked to leave the train at the next station.  It was true back then that a Chicago-bound train and a Fox Valley-bound train both tied up at Wheaton, leaving passengers to their own resources.

A Pullman-built steel car, 409, and Cincinnati steel car, 431, set passengers down.

They then deadhead to the Wheaton car shops.

The wood car train is also on the railroad, and its crew has also received word that service is suspended, effective immediately.

Reality was more dramatic ... there was a set of wood cars laid up at Forest Park, and the station agent there was instructed to post the discontinuance notice, lock up the ticket office, then (despite not being a qualified motorman) use his set of control levers to run the train west, where a relief crew would be available to bring the cars to Wheaton.  Oh, and make sure none of the irate passengers attempt to board the train.  Here's where an electrified third rail comes in handy ...

Chicago's commuter railroads did honor the tickets of other railroads, and the accounting departments had some work the next day ... plus, at the time, neither the Burlington nor the Chicago and North Western had enough seats for the stranded interurban passengers.  But honor the tickets they did.

Steam powered commuter trains were rare in Chicago by 1957.  As were commuter trains equipped with push-pull gallery cars.  A few years ago, the museum used its Commuter Streamliner as the rescue train.

To keep things in perspective, a two-car Commuter Streamliner can seat more passengers than six of the wooden interurbans did.

There's more on the weekend's events, including reenacting the abandonment, and the work required to get the cars ready, at Hicks Car Works.  Just keep scrolling.

PERSPECTIVE.

The Continental Congress voted on 2 July, 1776, to declare independence, and ratified the Declaration of Independence on 4 July.

Four score and seven years later, we were engaged in a great civil war.

This poster, displayed at the October 2006 reenactment outside Stockton, Illinois, gives an idea of how great that civil war was.

On 3 July, 1863, the rebellion became militarily untenable, with Meade and Hancock breaking Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, and Vicksburg garrison commander John Pemberton asking Grant and Sherman for terms, reckoning that his former colleague Sam Grant would be disposed to be magnanimous on Independence Day.

"Militarily untenable" is not the same thing as "crushed utterly," and there were still ways in which rebellion could have lingered as guerrilla warfare or a low-level insurgency, even after the last rebel armies in the field stacked arms in April 1865.  And yes, to this day, the South is different from the North.

And yet, does anyone seriously expect North Carolina to leave the Union over its bathroom policy, or Mississippi to do so over its religious freedom law being contrary to the Establishment Clause (let alone that it's a form of nanny-statism?)

Reasons for disagreement?  Yes.  Causes that Impel them to the Separation?  I'm not persuaded.

THESE UNITED COLONIES ARE, AND OF RIGHT OUGHT TO BE, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.

John Adams, 2 July, 1776:

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even although We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

I, too, trust We shall not.

God Helps Thofe who Help Themfelves.

RECLAIMING THE AMERICA THAT WORKED.

Retired financial advisor Jim Ruth explains, to Washington Post readers, "I hate Donald Trump. But he might get my vote."  It's about achieving a state of good repair in the culture, something that much of his birth cohort was complicit in destroying.  "Members of this new silent majority, many of us front-wave baby boomers, value hard work and love the United States the way it was."  Probably better to help with the restoration, rather than hope for people who never experienced it, to attempt to build a functional public culture from scratch.  "The only pleasure the new silent majority has taken throughout this primary season has been watching progressives marinate in their own righteous indignation." That marinade has turned rancid, as I shall argue once the holiday is past.  If you could confine it to Cambridge and Madison and Hollywood, that might be tolerable.  But the rot is everywhere.  "In our view, the thought of four to eight more years of a progressive agenda polluting the American Dream is even more dangerous to the survival of this country than Trump is."  Naivete, good intentions, policy failures.  Dangerous, indeed.  Thus the Trump candidacy just might be a protest vote that works, despite Mr Trump's shortcomings as Gray Champion.

There's a longer meditation at The Right Geek that will reward careful study.

I agree wholeheartedly that Trump is not fit for our country's highest office. But if we engage in a little bit of self-examination, I think we'll find that our own views are also, in some way, driven by fear. I think we fear that if Trump is permitted to fly the Republican banner, that will kill any chances of conservative principles ever being thoughtfully reconsidered. Moreover, we fear that the coarseness of the Trump campaign is reflecting a decadence in our own society that, if it's further encouraged, will never be reversed.

Maybe it would be better if we openly acknowledged this fear instead of putting on the facade that we are wholly rational, which makes the Trump backers feel like we're lording our intellectual superiority over them instead of listening to what they have to say. [And now that I've mentioned it, we should also thoughtfully consider where Trump's backers might be coming from and not simply dismiss them as simpletons.]

That's Mr Ruth's point also: not all Trump voters are knuckle-draggers. (Nor, to be clear, are all knuckle-draggers Trump voters, but I digress.)  Ultimately, though, it's about lifting the burden of bad ideas (which have metastasized from Cambridge and Madison and Hollywood, to our disadvantage.)

The classically liberal values that once formed the bedrock of our society are under constant – and vicious – assault by a faction that yearns to control what we do, say and think. This faction has successfully harassed perceived malefactors out of their jobs; argues for the abandonment of our rights to free speech, free association, and self-defense; and feels absolutely no shame in doing either. What will become of us if we let these social justice warriors get their way?

It can be argued defensibly that, of all the battles we must fight, removing the social justice left from power and restoring our civil rights in our academic and creative spaces is perhaps one of the most important battles of all.

Thus Mr Trump's strongest selling point. He refuses to be "politically correct," by which he means indulging in the euphemisms by which ignorance becomes strength and perversity becomes normal.

Many people believe that Trump is usefully nudging the Overton Window further right – that he is the catalyst that will start a necessary preference cascade – and they are willing to back him on these grounds. Could this be just as principled a position as ours? Yes, I think so. Free speech does matter.

Now for my last thought: Over the past eight years, our elites have displayed nothing but naked contempt for ordinary Americans and their values – aided and abetted, of course, by our current president, who clearly despises both our religiosity and our attachment to the Constitution and the principles it represents. And no – I don’t know that we can survive yet another president who perpetuates this oikophobia. Something will explode. If you keep kicking the dog, eventually the dog is going to turn around and bite – and the results will not be pretty.

The descriptions I’ve read of various rallies reveal that Trump approaches our “flyover” citizens in a much more respectful, affirming way. He constantly tells his (mostly rural and working class) supporters that he loves them and the America they represent. And yeah – I tend to think it’s all a show and that Trump is a clever manipulator. But we don’t actually know that for sure. We can’t read Trump’s mind, and we don’t know his true endgame. Thus, it is just as defensible to hope that he’s being genuine. And it’s defensible to back him because you want to encourage our political leaders to drop their snooty-ass attitudes and start treating their American neighbors like full-fledged human beings instead of incomprehensible Others.

Reality, which is emergent, tends to be socially conservative,  And the snooty-ass gentry have, inter alia, erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance; declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatever; and excited domestic Insurrections among us.  And they fret about the Incomprehensible Others thinking of torches and pitchforks.  It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish.

POST HOC, NEC ERGO PROPTER HOC.

Here's Rebecca Rosen in The Atlantic.  "In the 20th century, America invested in policies that created widespread prosperity."  What were those policies?  She quotes María Teresa Kumar, founder of Voto Latino, and making the participants at an Aspen gathering of the gentry comfortable with their prejudices.

Kumar argued that government policies following the two world wars—the G.I. Bill, investments in infrastructure and education, the establishment of Social Security—made the middle class. It’s true, she noted, that “Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and African Americans were excluded from that,” but the fact that the government did it, and that it worked, stands as proof of what is possible—and what kind of investment is required. “A lot of the issues that I hear about today about where are we are going this century, we’ve actually grappled with them last century—we doubled down with less knowledge, and less resources.”

The G. I. Bill? No.  (Ask yourself, dear reader, how well a government guarantee of college as a veterans' benefit would have worked in Soviet Russia or Great Britain or France.)

Investments in infrastructure and education?  When so much of that went into military procurement and moon shots and urban renewal and interstate highways?  And as early as 1960, John Hersey's The Child Buyer fretted about misplaced government emphasis on cultivating the best young minds?

Social Security?  Might there be more childhood poverty today because the payroll tax reduced economic growth?

Including Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, African Americans?  You'd think that expanding the pool of potential producers would produce a plethora of new products.  And the logic of the early 1960s civil rights campaign was precisely, Let Us Compete.

What went wrong?  My conjecture: policy makers assumed that the good times would continue to roll, and it was OK to celebrate diversity and authenticity.  That error was compounded by a Radical Chic under which encouraging the Wretched of the Earth to opt out of bourgeois society rather than participate in it.

To borrow a line, reality tends to be biased toward social conservatism, because social conservatism is about conserving emerged and evolutionary stable behaviors.  Deconstruct them at your peril.

INCOME AND SUBSTITUTION EFFECTS.

Or perhaps it's the Peltzman effect, or it goes back to George Stigler's "automobiles travel faster because they have brakes."

Put simply: increased availability of contraception might lead to fewer pregnancies (the income effect) and to more people having sex (the substitution effect.)  New Study Shows ’90s Era Condom Programs Increased Teen Fertility Rates.  It's economics research out of Notre Dame.

The study is very rigorous. The authors identified 22 school districts in twelve states that launched condom-distribution programs during the 1990s. Some of these school districts are among the largest in the country including New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Overall, the study analyzes teen-fertility data from 396 high-population counties over a span of 19 years. A range of demographic and economic factors are held constant. It finds that if 100 percent of high-school students attended a school with a condom-distribution program, the teen-fertility rate would increase anywhere from 10 to 12 percent. Furthermore, this finding was fairly consistent across school districts with condom-distribution programs.

Caffeinated Thoughts isn't surprised. "Twenty years of youth ministry experience tells me that free condoms led to increased sexual behavior."  And the kiddie corps at Vox starts to grow up.  "But it does call into question some of the unintentional side effects of making the contraceptive more freely available."

Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Plus sound economics.

WHY IT MATTERS.

The Huffington Post, otherwise known as clickbait for the Acela passenger, features an instructive excerpt from J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.  "Yale Law School Brought Me Face-to-face With Radical Inequality."

A part of me had thought I’d finally be revealed as an intellectual fraud, that the administration would realize they’d made a terrible mistake and send me back to Middletown with their sincerest apologies. Another part of me thought I’d be able to hack it but only with extraordinary dedication; after all, these were the brightest students in the world, and I did not qualify as such. But that didn’t end up being the case. Though there were rare geniuses walking the halls of the law school, most of my fellow students were smart but not intimidatingly so. In classroom discussions and on tests, I largely held my own.

It's like that. The size of the fight in the dog and all that. Plus law school cannot be as challenging as Marine boot camp.  But I highlight the article for a teachable moment that comes to some overbearing professor.

Not everything came easy. I always fancied myself a decent writer, but when I turned in a sloppy writing assignment to a famously stern professor, he handed it back with some extraordinarily critical commentary. “Not good at all,” he scribbled on one page. On another, he circled a large paragraph and wrote in the margin, “This is a vomit of sentences masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.” I heard through the grapevine that this professor thought Yale should accept only students from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton: “It’s not our job to do remedial education, and too many of these other kids need it.” That committed me to changing his mind. By the end of the semester, he called my writing “excellent” and admitted that he might have been wrong about state schools.

And that, dear reader, is why faculty and administration at the state flagships, the land grants, the mid-majors, the regional comprehensives and community colleges (Dean Dad: "They need the nearby one to be good") ought view themselves as in the same business as Yale, and bring out the best in the students in their trust. Because a few will matriculate at Yale Law.

There's a lot in the essay suggesting why the upscale institutions of the higher learning might want to instill a sense of gratitude and empathy for others less advantaged (which now sails under the flag of privilege checking.)

But read this.  Contra F. Scott Fitzgerald, there's more to the difference of the rich than having more money.

The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining—my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis.

These aren’t exactly major problems, and if given the option all over again, I’d trade a bit of social discomfort for the life I lead in a heartbeat. But as I realized that in this new world where I was the cultural alien, I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager: Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America’s elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different?

For all of their radical chic, those backslid preppies understand bourgeois conventions and can revert to them once they move to Wall Street or Official Washington, and those who migrate to the pro-American parts of the country can master enough good manners to conceal their contempt for their neighbors and their professional counterparts with less fancy degrees.  Possibly including joining colleagues at a sports bar or a Cracker Barrel.  Those status markers are symbols.

On the other hand, fifty or sixty years of affirming the authenticity (a euphemism for "behaving badly") of people in straitened circumstances behaving badly, rather than as a matter of education and public policy, inculcating the habits of the middle class, brings us to a pass where the "successful people feel so different."  It's the trashy culture, stupid.

IT TURNS OUT WE HAVE FAST TRAINS LIKE THEY HAVE IN EUROPE.

That is, when Bombardier builds them.

The Acela Expresses proved to be too heavy and too wide to deploy the tilting mechanisms properly, which limits their speed on curves.

That's the same Bombardier that built a set of regional trains that look a lot like TGV sets to serve the south coast of France (including Cannes and Nice) and onward to Ventimiglia, in Italy.  Just one problem ...

The trains were delivered in November 2014 but they didn’t come into service as they turned out to be a few millimeters too high for Italian tunnels, Nice Matin newspaper reported, citing former railway workers group "The shipwrecks of the TER."

Eric Sauri, president of the group, told the paper that the SNCF confirmed that the Regio 2N trains “would not go further than the town of Menton because they did not pass under the tunnels."

That's after French railroad SNCF ordered two thousand trains (are we referring to multiple unit sets or to individual cars) that left the works too wide for the platforms.

Makes one think that promoters of the Houston to Dallas high speed rail project weigh the proposals from the current countries that build such trains and look for the kind of home-grown talent the North Shore Line used to develop the Electroliners.

THERE'S MONEY IN POVERTY

Years ago, when I was studying for a Ph.D. at Wisconsin, and Wisconsin was home to the Institute for Research on Poverty, we'd mentor incoming graduate students arriving without financial aid to "talk to the poverty people, they have money."  Yes, those who hired out spent a lot of time keypunching and offloading data from tape decks, which is how one trolled through the Panel Study and the other resources available for empirical research in those days.  It's possible that more than a few careers might have been launched that way.

Today, it's still true that there's money in poverty, but that gets Minding the Campus's Marc Joffe worked up.

Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university.

It's true, former Secretary of Commerce Robert Reich is there, and Edward Saez, who has worked with Thomas Piketty is there, and former Institute director Eugene Smolensky moved to Berkeley during one of the previous periods of austerity to hit Wisconsin.

But Mr Joffe decides to focus on the symbolism, not the substance.

Income inequality at Cal extends to the university’s inequality research arm, the Center for Equitable Growth mentioned earlier. According to 2014 data from Transparent California, Center Director Emmanuel Saez received total wages of $349,350. Its three advisory board members are also highly compensated Cal professors: David Card (making $336,367 in 2014), Gerard Roland ($304,608) and Alan Auerbach ($291,782). Aside from their high wages, all four professors are eligible for a defined-benefit pension equal to 2.5% times final average salary times number of years employed. It is also worth noting that all four are in the top 2% of UC Berkeley’s salary distribution, and that Saez is in the top 1%. It could be that an effective researcher has to know his or her subject: thus to the study the top 1%, we suppose one has to be in the top 1%.

Yes, there are market tests for good researchers, whether they be economists, political scientists, or astronomers. There are also market tests for coaches, who don't enjoy the protections of academic tenure.

But there has to be a better way to end the column than with a subtle charge of hypocrisy aimed at the poverty researchers.

So if UC Berkeley economists are really opposed to income inequality and are concerned about low-paid workers, they might consider sharing some of their compensation with the teaching assistants, graders, readers and administrative staff at the bottom of Cal’s income distribution.

We’re not saying income inequality is a bad thing; we’re not saying that Reich, Saez and other Berkeley professors should make less than they do, or that student teachers ought to make much, much more. In fact, there are reasonable arguments that income inequality is not only inevitable and even ethical, but that it’s also a generally positive feature of advanced economies.

We are saying there’s something unusual in the Berkeley phenomenon – the high-profile role of high-income earners in criticizing income inequality.

Let's try something more direct. Such as, Why has the policy advice coming from these court intellectuals for Democrats been so bad that Hillary Clinton has to somehow offer a continuation of Hope and Change whilst making progress helping all the people hurt by Hope and Change?

MORE MATERIAL FOR THE NIMBYS.

Five years ago, I flagged a story warning of railway tunnelling posing a risk to Michelangelo's David.

The statue is riddled with tiny cracks, particularly in the ankles of the boy warrior, and could collapse as a result of vibrations from the 1.4 billion euro project, which is due to start in the summer.

The threat of serious damage being done to one of the world’s most famous statues has prompted calls for it to be moved to a purpose-built museum away from the construction work.

“The tunnel will pass about 600 meters (2,000ft) from the statue of David, the ankles of which, it is well known, are riddled with micro-fissures. If it’s not moved before digging begins, there is a serious risk that it will collapse,” said Fernando De Simone, an expert in underground engineering.

The cracks in the marble are mostly in David’s left ankle and in the carved tree stump which bears part of the statue’s weight.

They are thought to have developed because for more than a century the statue leant at an angle, and because the marble used in the statue was not of a high standard.

Five years on, the Bologna - Florence - Rome passenger rail project continues, and David still stands, as far as I know, in the same place.

The European Union, not so much.

A FOURTH TURNING MANIFESTO.

Commentary's Sohrab Ahmari writes about illiberalism as the worldwide crisis, but there's something deeper at work.

Since World War II, the U.S. has overseen a liberal world order, promoted and protected free trade, including at home, and viewed democratic development abroad as essential to its own prosperity and security. The strength of the Trump and Sanders presidential candidacies has revealed the hollowness of this liberal consensus in the 21st century.

The hollowing out began long ago. Perhaps it's the victory dividend resource curse in another form.  The social destruction that erupted in the 1960s began with the premise that the machinery of prosperity would always be working, no matter how outrageous the mockery of the avant-garde or the hippies or the race hustlers was.  Woodstock could always coexist with moon shots.

Thus the unintended consequences of free trade and globalization are only a part of the story.  Here's M. Ahmari's hypothesis.

Planet Trump is what happens when liberalism’s capacity to absorb and dilute enmity falters, and when liberals neglect to give politics, ideology, and enmity their due—when they take a little too seriously their own claim to stand outside and above ideology. To see Planet Trump as merely a reaction to social, economic, and legal developments is to reproduce this common error, and some of Trumpism’s sharpest critics and most sympathetic observers are equally guilty of it.

Both camps are caught in liberalism’s blind spot, in other words, because they fail to discern the simpler if more discomfiting explanation. What if Planet Trump represents the emergence of a serious ideological alternative to liberalism—one that echoes the illiberal and authoritarian movements of the previous century but, crucially, isn’t an exact replica?

The simpler explanation, dear reader, is that what M. Ahmari calls "liberalism" has already brought in its own illiberalism, in the form of a self-despising multiculturalism under which others are allowed to behave badly.  And in the three organizing points the author offers to make sense of what he calls illiberalism, we see the possibility of a corrective.

1.  Restoration of a prouder, more wholesome, more coherent past.

Put another way, there are people who remember when the institutions worked and people got along.  Perhaps there were difficulties, but the conceit that there is only one direction for change has to encounter a reality check.  Restoration of good health, or a state of good repair on a railroad, is not turning the clock back.

2.  Collective grievance and a desire for national recognition.

The self-despising multiculturalists recognise some grievances, whilst dismissing others, and marginalising some people to celebrate others.  The logic of push-back is relatively simple.  How long can the gentry stick their fingers in some people's eyes and get away with telling them they're racist, or unenlightened, or (pick your epithet) and expect those people to take it?

3.  Politics reflect the dark realities of the present.

Otherwise known as the tragic vision.  And the gentry establishment has to learn that some of its constructions are not evolutionary stable.

There's much more in the essay.  It will reward careful study.

CATHARSIS.

A Texas entrepreneur sells women the opportunity to break stuff with an axe or sledgehammer in a rage room.

The entrepreneur notes that her modal clients are stay-at-home moms and schoolteachers, and the number one reason for clients booking time is a divorce.

The clip also features a Columbia academic griping that the service "lowers the bar for behavior."  That's after the interviewer asking the proprietor about what happens if somebody with "serious mental health issues" books the room.

I conjecture that stay-at-home moms and schoolteachers have better impulse control, as well as more reasons to want to release their rage, than most people; that it's better for people who are experiencing divorce in the days of marriage as notarized dating to take out their frustrations on somebody else's junk rather than their soon-to-be-ex's collection of beer mugs; that people with "serious mental health issues" are going to act out in ways that don't require an appointment and an expenditure; and that there's a lot worse people are now "allowed to do in public" for the fretful academics to fret about and write about.

WHEN THE INSTITUTIONS FRACTURE.

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns posts "The Ignorant and The Elites."  The elaboration, dear reader, will reward careful study.

Here's what's not absurd: Politicians have wanted to make college more affordable yet, after decades of government intervention, tuition (not to mention public  spending on education) rises far higher than the rate of inflation. Politicians have wanted to make housing more affordable yet, after decades of government intervention, home ownership rates among the poor are as low as ever and middle class families must have two working adults to afford a median home. Politicians have wanted to make medical coverage more affordable, yet the more government intervenes in the medical system, the more unaffordable it becomes for the average blue collar person.

It's not unreasonable for someone working two part-time jobs to make ends meet to believe this system isn't working for them. It's not a leap to see them looking at the people in the education system -- salary earners who encouraged that now blue collar wage earner to take out student loans that paid the educators' salaries but does little for the wage earner -- with suspicion and envy.

Thus it's not a "temper tantrum" or "nihilistic" or "false consciousness" to "shake the etch-a-sketch and reset the drawing."  Plus fifty or a hundred years of Four of Five Experts Agree on Policies That Fail.

I'll just add to that, while many young and educated people believe that the deficiencies of our current system can be corrected after-the-fact through proper tax rates and redistribution programs (and maybe some job training programs or free tuition), many blue collar workers are beyond skeptical of such schemes. The skepticism is not based on the theory behind the policy but on the fact that the policy doesn't originate from a place of true respect.

My comparative advantage is in identifying the ways the policies don't work. Others, possibly including Donald J. Trump and Boris Johnson, do a better job of pointing out the ways in which the Acela-riding gentry hold the people they're supposedly "fighting" for in contempt.

THE WAY IT USED TO BE FOR EVERYBODY.

Global Inequality Robbing Millions of Children of 'What It Is to be a Child'.  That's how a Common Dreams article introduces a United Nations report on the state of the world's children.

"As we look around the world today, we're confronted with an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: Millions of children's lives are blighted, for no other reason than the country, the community, the gender or the circumstances into which they are born," UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake writes in his introduction to the report (pdf).

"Before they draw their first breath," he continues, "the life chances of poor and excluded children are often being shaped by inequities. Disadvantage and discrimination against their communities and families will help determine whether they live or die, whether they have a chance to learn and later earn a decent living. Conflicts, crises and climate-related disasters deepen their deprivation and diminish their potential."

All true. But you have to have children experiencing childhood differently in order to see blighted lives, opportunities to earn a decent living, and the rest.

"Taken together," the report reads, "these deprivations effectively cut childhood short, robbing millions of children of the very things that define what it is to be a child: play, laughter, growth and learning."

That used to be the reality for children everywhere.  At best, a few opportunities to mess about with a hoop and a stick, or to hang out whilst fetching water.  Neither the Common Dreams article nor the home page for the UN report get into policy implications.

That's my job.  We have some children able to be children (that is, if their parents don't overschedule them) because some children grow up in productive economies and some don't.  But it's going to take a great intellectual transformation for the people at Common Dreams and in the United Nations to start encouraging people in the third world to thrive in bourgeois society rather than agitating to wreck it.  Thus Knowledge Problem.

Market processes and the price system enable people pursuing their own life projects to coordinate their actions and plans in ways that allocate the resources that enable people to fulfill those projects. That’s how we flourish. That’s part of how we lead fulfilling lives. That’s a big part of how we live together in peace.

Yes, and market processes reduce global poverty and lift up the middle class.  More on that in a few days.

THE CRAFTSMANSHIP OF THE ORIGINAL COLD SPRING SHOPS.

There's always opportunity to provide illustrations.

Yes, we feature the East Troy Electric Railroad regularly,  and yes, line car D-23 still does the work it has been doing since Cold Spring Shops built it out of a flat-car motor in 1929, and locomotive L-8 is capable of pulling the hayride train, which is less exertion than shifting coal hoppers at Port Washington or pulling the ash to a dump southwest of town.