THE NOBLE SAVAGES WERE AT WOODSTOCK.

Ed Driscoll summarizes a number of columns suggesting that claim.

DISCOVERING LOCATIONAL ARBITRAGE.

City Observatory proprietor and Strong Towns columnist Joe Cortright comes to grips with the bid-rent curve, recognizing that "affordable housing" is misleading in the presence of "the tradeoff between cheap rents and costly transportation."  In its simplest form, the tradeoff manifests itself in rents (or mortgages).  In a monocentric city, a renter ought be indifferent between locating near the jobs and paying little for transportation, or locating at a distance, which means the rent on a comparable apartment will be lower in proportion to the transportation costs.  That might provide little comfort to people stuck in traffic.  Here's Mr Cortright.  "If you have to drive everywhere, and drive further for every trip, what you save in rent or mortgage payments, can be more than eaten up in car payments, gasoline purchases, and time wasted traveling."

In equilibrium, no, but to the extent that cars become more costly (thanks, fuel efficiency standards and crashworthiness standards) and the roads become more congested, the value of living closer to work goes up.  Thus do we get the rising rents in city centers.

The arbitrage principle is still at work.

It turns out that the value of accessibility gets priced in to the cost of walkable, well-located housing; and conversely, rental and for-sale housing that’s located at a distance from everything is priced at a discount to the market.

What this means as a practical matter that you can’t judge whether an individual household’s living situation is affordable just by looking at whether they spend less than 30 percent of their income directly on housing.

It gets more complicated if people are also judging locations on the basis of school quality or distance from noxious facilities such as rail yards or factories, or contemplating the incidence of crime.  In isolation, though, the price of house plus transportation tends toward an equilibrium in which the marginal renter or buyer is indifferent as to location.

That broad pattern is evident in the consumer expenditure reports your tax dollars pay to provide.

What’s interesting to note here, is how, within each quartile, households that spend less on housing end up spending a great deal more on transportation.  Conversely, households that spend a larger fraction of their income on housing spend, on average much less on transportation. For example, households in the second quartile who spend less than 30 percent of their income on housing spend 12.6 percent of their income on transportation. That falls to less than 10 percent for those who are somewhat cost burdened, and less than 5 percent for those who are severely cost burdened. This pattern across income groups is consistent with the idea of a tradeoff between cheaper rents and higher transportation costs.

Exactly as the theory of locational arbitrage would suggest. Thus, the normative conclusion Mr Cortright reaches might be too strong.

The practical implication is that we shouldn’t be talking about housing affordability in isolation. We should really be talking about “affordable living” rather than “affordable housing.” If your rent is low, but you have to spend a disproportionately large share of your income on transportation, then your living situation isn’t affordable.

The economist in me bridles at the use of "disproportionate." Relative prices matter, and what looks "proportionate" under one set of relative prices will appear "disproportionate" under a different set.  It gets more complicated if what people are doing is buying relatively inexpensive houses a long way from work in response to some combination of historically cheap gasoline and perceived better schools.  Oh, and you can capitalize the test scores in house prices.

In a subsequent article, Mr Cortright touches, indirectly, on the role of supply restrictions in generating steep rent gradients.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on suburbs growing faster than cities. The article, “American suburbs swell again as a new generation escapes the city,” looks at Census data showing that some of the nation’s fastest growing cities are sunbelt suburbs."

There are a number of possible explanations for that phenomenon, and, again, locational arbitrage is in play.  Consider "High and rising rents & home prices in urban centers show demand is outstripping supply. Higher relative prices for city homes versus suburban ones is the most powerful pieces of evidence of consumer preference for cities." No, it's just your plain old bid-rent curve, and perhaps what we're seeing is the inconvenience of expressway congestion and the capacity constraints on Commuter Rail changing the incentives.  The townhouse (I don't want to complicate things further comparing large and small houses) a half hour commute away looks like a good deal; it has to get a lot cheaper relative to its central city counterpart when that commute becomes an hour.  It doesn't matter whether the city price goes up or the outskirt price goes down, and preferences can stay the same.

The policy problem might be too many regulatory constraints, such as zoning and parking minima.

The unrequited demand for urban living indicated by high rents and home prices, and the complaints about having to move to suburbs to afford homes signals that policy needs to respond by creating more housing in cities. When we finally make it as easy to build new housing in cities as we do in suburbs—for example, by allowing missing middle housing to be built—we’ll see urban population grow more rapidly.

Perhaps so, although mandating the construction of those missing-middle houses might not work so well. An advocate for building more roads might see in that "unrequited demand" those high urban rents being an artifact of expensive or slow transportation, rather than some desire to cluster with like-minded hipster.  I suspect, though, that simpler policies favoring experimentation with a variety of housing types will do more to fill that missing middle than any comprehensive policy from some Committee of Wise Experts.  I have seen that movie, and it was a flop.

WOODSTOCK'S LEGACY.

No, not Snoopy's buddy, the music festival in a mud field that took place shortly after the first Moon landing and the Golden Spike Centennial.

In a sentence, it might be this question from Selwyn Duke.  " How can you build a moral society when its shades-of-gray people don’t even believe in morality?"

It's been a long time coming, but then, there has been a lot of erosion of bourgeois norms in the past half-century.

Here's Reason contributing editor Glenn Garvin, pouring on the scorn.

The most notable thing about the PBS Woodstock is the contortionist specter of a generation blowing smoke up its own ass. The last 15 minutes or so are mostly devoted to people who attended Woodstock declaring it a utopically transformative event that changed everything. Really? Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. The Vietnam War continued for another three. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon, and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was Afghanistan and Iraq. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969.

You could as easily make the argument that what defined a generation was not Woodstock but Altamont or the Manson Family. Baby Boomers didn't change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word "Fuck!"without getting spanked. It's sad that, 50 years later, they still can't tell the difference.

Perhaps so, although "Gimme an F" might have been the leading edge of "My transgressiveness is OK, yours is not."

We start with a few young people sleeping rough and not bathing and yelling profanities in a field in rural New York.  We now have tent cities of reality-challenged people sleeping rough and not bathing and yelling profanities and pooping in the streets of some of our proudest cities.

We start with a few young people using "Do your own thing" as an excuse for their "open" relationships, their drug use, their long hair.  We now have a one-time Olympic decathlon champion being hailed as a pioneer for deciding a retirement career as a woman is what creating that New Man, er, crosser, is.

There's a passage from Anatoly Kuznetsov's diary on the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution that's germane.

Shout hurrah, clap your hands.  Otherwise they will notice at once that you are not "reacting" and they will ask you why ...

I am getting stupider.  I am gradually turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros.  I feel the hardening on my forehead.  I feel sick ...

(Shub, An Empire Loses Hope, page 316.)

And celebrating what?  Maureen Dowd laments, Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds elaborates. "All the stuff that the Dowds of the world wanted to extinguish — because, you know, chivalry was a system, one that demanded certain behaviors of women as well as men. And demanding behaviors of women might limit their options, or hurt their self esteem, or make them regret their life choices, all things that are not allowed."

Taken together, fifty years of enabling social rot and calling it social progress culminates in today's E-T-T-S moment, as summarized by J. H. "Clusterf**k Nation" Kunstler.

In a nation afflicted by fads, crazes, manias, and rages, mass murder is the jackpot for nihilists — [provoking] the question: why does this country produce so many of them? Answer: this is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games.

For many, there is no armature left to hang a life on, no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out.

Perhaps a few random crazies going off is going to look like the good old days. "It’s not hard these days to imagine the political animus ratcheting up to something like a new civil war. If it works out that way, it will be the most psychologically confused political event of modern history."

It's only going to get more interesting with China buying dollars, the better to be able to undersell Our President's tariffs, refusing to buy U. S. agricultural products, thereby making the lot of the toiling masses more difficult there (and the Chinese one-child policy ensures that there are millions of adolescent males with no hope of getting a date) and China's rulers deciding that now might be a good time to crack down on any uppity hopes of home rule in Hong Kong.  " Clarity is a lagging effect," indeed.

THEY'RE FRUSTRATED AND INHIBITED AND NOBODY UNDERSTANDS THEM.

It's going to take more than a nickel's worth of advice from Lucy Van Pelt to help the vanguard of today's Young Socialists.

Image retrieved from Schulz Museum.

They'll sell you this as a sticker.

Power Line found the puzzle and the piano and the stamp collection all kicked around over the format of questions.

Victory Girl Lisa Carr has a few more excerpts, plus just about the right amount of snark.

I don’t know which aspect of this whole DSA circus is more comical, really. The fact that Jackson went up to the podium and asked “Comrade” for a “quick point of personal privilege”, referred to himself as “He/Him”, told the audience that he was triggered by “sensory overload” or the fact that a person was triggered by Jackson’s “improper” (proper) use of gender pronouns! These are the so-called “cool kids”, folks. These are the people some of our young adults are totally on board with voting for. The triggered by the triggering political landscape and the triggering human population. They can’t stop being offended and triggered at just about everything.

In that spirit, I'll even let a pundit with probably little experience as a circus impresario refer to this virtue-signalling show as a circus.

Reason's Robby Soave pays the convention a back-handed compliment.  "Of all the various factions of progressive activism, the DSA is by far the most organized, and the least likely to be derailed by culturally woke signaling."  Yes, contrasted with a Student Affairs event, but they still deserve to be undermined with mockery.  Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green does, and he's not as ready as Mr Soave is to credit them with anything.  "The good news is, they'll be too busy arguing about genderless language, make-believe personal pronouns, and the importance of keeping the chatter to a minimum to actually wage a revolution."

RAILROAD PRESERVATION IS CHALLENGING ENOUGH.

Experts who embezzle while pretending to help don't help.  "A 61-year-old man and former Illinois Railway Museum volunteer must pay back the thousands of dollars he's accused of stealing from the volunteer-based organization."

It's worth remembering, dear reader, particularly reader who is a casual train enthusiast with toddlers who are into Thomas and Friends, that preservation railways are generally not state enterprises, nor does railway preservation generate the kind of upscale Patron of the Arts types who might host champagne brunches in support of galleries somewhere.

The Union-based museum operates on about $1 million each year, not including the cost of equipment restoration projects, which largely are funded by donations, tax documents show.

Owned and operated entirely by volunteers, the museum receives no state or federal money. All of the organization's operating costs are paid by individual donations and profits from ticket sales, according to the website.

Exactly. Rolling stock that is under roof has to earn its keep, either by running on the demonstration line (on rare occasions, the Nebraska Zephyr, which passes inspection for use on the common carriers, earns additional money venturing beyond the museum) or by having money donated by members or supporters.

PANEM VISITS THE SEVENTH DISTRICT.

Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer started a research project, with the support of the University, to sound out people about their attitudes toward the University (which might be why the University supported her efforts) as well as to do ethnography on the policy attitudes of Wisconsin residents.

The University even provided her with Wisconsin mementos such as football schedules and Bucky Badger keychains as a way of gaining access to conversations among the regulars at village coffee shops, gas stations, cafes, and perhaps the occasional tavern.  (I might be kidding about the tavern; the descriptions and venues are disguised to protect the human subjects.)  The approach worked in the sense of getting people to trust her and to talk.   (Now, if you really want to get information, you bring donuts dockside, but that's how economists roll.)

It started innocently enough, but then the housing bubble and the Obama bubble and the Walker recall happened, and the resulting The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, our Book Review N^o. 8, caught on with the punditry in a way that most academic studies do not.

THE STATES ARE IN THE TRANSPORTATION BUSINESS.

In National Review, Robert Poole, a regular Reason Foundation transportation wonk, suggest that they behave accordingly.

It’s not hard to see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we fund and manage the highways we all depend on. Highways are one of our basic public utilities — along with water, electricity, natural gas, telephones, etc. Yet we don’t have huge political battles over how to pay for those utilities. Every month you get a bill from your electric company, water company, phone company, and satellite or cable company. You pay for the specific services you used, and the money goes directly to the company that provided those services. None of that is true for highways.

There's more to this discussion than whether using tax revenue from gasoline sales on governmental functions other than road repair or traffic enforcement at work, although in Wisconsin, there are elected officials who would like to reduce gasoline taxes with the implementation of tolls on the interstate highways.  "[Now former governor Scott] Walker was cool to the idea [of making the interstates toll roads]. He said he would go along with implementing tolling or raising the gas tax if other taxes were cut by an equivalent or greater amount." There are times to think about revenue neutrality, but not when you have an asset that isn't paying off.

BURYING THE LEDE.

High-poverty schools often staffed by rotating cast of substitutes.  No continuity, sometimes the substitutes aren't really prepared to teach mathematics or chemistry.

The reader has to scroll way down to get to the heart of the matter.

The story dates to the closing years of the Obama administration, with the predictable perspective.

“This is not an issue that we see in high-income communities,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. “We know that we are shortchanging our kids and that it’s not a phenomenon that is equally borne across our school districts.”

Neither she nor the Post are going to say "pay and working conditions," but it's pay and working conditions.

In most districts, teachers earn the same salary regardless of their school assignment. Some see high-poverty schools as more difficult because many students come to school already behind academically and facing serious challenges in their lives, many of which are beyond a teacher’s control.

And it is not uncommon for veteran teachers to feel that they are fending for themselves without instructional support or consistent, school-wide expectations for student behavior.

Consistent, school-wide expectations? Isn't that oppressive, requiring students to code-shift into white supremacy culture?

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS COULD USE A DOSE OF MODESTY.

David Von Drehle suggests a first step.  That is, after a false start, in which Wise Experts somehow retroactively achieve honor as pragmatists.

At the beginning, although, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatism was a reaction by the likes of C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey to the idealistic philosophies of Europe. Truth is not to be found in some palace of the mind apart from the world, they argued. Rather, the truth of an idea is measurable by its effects.

Well, duh, you might say. And that’s sort of the point: All great and true philosophies eventually seem self-evident after enough experience. Pragmatism advanced largely because its alternative – analytical idealism – has been such a grotesque practical failure. Over the past century, grand theories of racial supremacy, nationalist destiny and communist utopia were repudiated by their terrible real-life effects. Even the more recent notion that the whole world hungers for American-style democracy has run aground on the reef of reality.

Those domestic political philosophers happened to stumble across some ideas that seemed to work. For a while. But emergence has its way.

Most Americans aren’t philosophers, thank goodness, but we are a nation of pragmatists. And so, despite the snap to her zinger, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was out of the mainstream when she shrugged off criticism during the second round of Democratic debates by saying: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

An American president ought to care deeply about the effects of her ideas – whether she can actually do the things she promises and whether her idealistic “should-dos” are also pragmatic “could-dos.” Former congressman John Delaney of Maryland was hardly out of place at a forum of would-be presidents when he expressed practical concern that hospitals can’t survive if all their services are reimbursed at Medicare rates, as Warren proposes to do.

Mr Von Drehle had better be careful, that's a good way to become persona non grata at those Georgetown cocktail parties.  What would all those pontificators on the Sunday shows, and the noisier wannabes on the opinion networks ever do if the Conventional Wisdom stopped treating The Presidency as the secular incarnation of The Messiah?

Perhaps it's necessary to smash a few other icons as well.

Asking what works is an essential element of the Progressive tradition. Reformers of the early 20th century steeped themselves in data and tested their theories relentlessly in the laboratory of the streets.

The original Progressives were incrementalists and compromisers. They built coalitions by offering – and then delivering – concrete results.

Do we get to include all the policy failures as well? Direct election of senators? Prohibition of liquor? Income taxation? All the administrative state apparatus that came with two wars and the New Deal?

I think he sort of gets it.

Pragmatism has never been more urgently needed in American politics. The widespread loss of faith in government reflects a half-century of overpromising by politicians with Big Ideas.

Yes, overpromising hyped up by the chattering classes, and their presidential cult.

What I don’t understand is why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the U.S. simply to ignore questions about real-world realities and promise fights without explaining how to win them. Reality is not going to bend to a new shape come 2021 just because a President Sanders shouts at it, or a President Warren fights with it.

On the other hand, if their ideas are sound and their promises are true, there’s no better way to demonstrate that than through diligent testing and vigorous challenges. Contrary to what we heard again and again in the debates, that’s not a “Republican talking point.”

It’s an American conviction.

So is "When a government becomes destructive, it is the Duty of the People to alter it."

IN 120 YEARS HOW GOOD WILL YOU LOOK?

Last Sunday, after my call on Big Boy at West Chicago, I decided to look in on the Fox River Trolley Museum, which could still use your help recovering from a shameful act of vandalism last summer.

One of the cars running was Niles interurban 20, built in 1902 for Chicago Aurora and Elgin.

The interurban attempted to effect a modern look on these cars by covering the arched upper sections of the windows and painting over the stained glass in the roof clerestory.  The windows still open, which is how we air-conditioned interurbans apart from the Electroliners and a few other cars.  The ride is still good, and it's one of the few places where a preservation railway runs on original interurban trackage.

GAME IN ONE HAND.

This Saturday's not-regular-Saturday bridge column might get into the weeds of combinatorial theory.  The deal itself might not be that interesting, and yes, purists might suggest that bidding Three No-Trump on 25 high-card points is cheeky.

The good news is that all the bots passed.  I can't always depend on that: a few days ago I got into one where I bid a heart and partner bot bid a spade and I raised to Three No-Trump and partner bot decided that was good enough to bid Seven No-Trump.  The East bot doubled, and then partner bot redoubled.  Then the opening lead was an ace.  I forget whether this effort went down four, or five.

In this hand, the Spades might be trouble: the Ace, Jack, and three other cards are outstanding; in Hearts, there is one winner, and finessing the Queen with eight outstanding is trouble.  With proper play, all four Diamonds ought be good, although with five outstanding there is still a three-in-eight chance of a defender being able to promote a Diamond trick later.  There are also three good Clubs, with eight still outstanding the defender has a chance of promoting a few tricks in that suit.

There are two principles in conflict here.  One is that finessing a card is safer early in the hand, the better to be able to use the stopper cards in other suits.  The other is that forcing the defenders to dip into their long suits when they are no longer able to follow suit makes it harder for them to promote a trick once they gain the lead.  Losing the lead, I've discovered, can be risky.  For example, with the lead, Ace-low on the board and King-low in hand are two tricks and two entry opportunities.  Lose the lead, though, and those low cards might have to go because the rules require a card to be played on each trick.  Thus instead of two winners and two reversals, there's maybe one stop.

On to the play.  Opening lead, ♥5, fourth highest, six higher cards out against it.  East played the ten.  If the Three to the Queen brings out the King, there are a lot of Heart tricks for the defense to win.  I chose to work on the Clubs while the lead was in hand:  Three to the Queen, Nine to the King, Ace, and discard the ♠2 from the board.  Four tricks.

In retrospect, it might have been better to have worked on the Diamonds first:  Deuce to the Jack, Six back to the Queen, King pulls out East's ♠7.  The Ace brings out the ♥7 and ♥6.  Eight tricks.

Now the nail-biting begins.  I've used up the dummy entries, thus the ♠Q comes from hand, forcing out the Ace.  (That ♥3 to the Queen is retrospectively even worse, as that could give West the lead.) The King is good, provided the defense leads another Spade.  The lead is in East: first the two promoted Club tricks, the Eight and the Six with everybody else showing out, then the ♥K (had the outstanding honors been reversed, the lead would be with West and the contract broken) and all East had to lead was the ♠J, covered by the King, and nine tricks made.

THE CONCEPT IS CORRECT, THE EXECUTION, NOT SO MUCH.

Trains Passenger Rail pundit Malcolm Kenton suggests these might be the good new days for Ontario residents who would like more rail options.  Among other things, there is now a Kitchener to Waterloo latter-day interurban.  It's not quite the second coming of the old Grand River Railway and Lake Erie and Northern that offered connecting service as far south as Brantford and Port Dover.  It's a start.

More encouraging is what the Passenger Rail authorities would like to accomplish with the Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal service.

[The authority] won a significant victory to advance its plan to build a new high-performance passenger-only rail line between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. The Canada Infrastructure Bank’s decision last week to spend $71 million CAD to begin engineering and economic analysis on the project, while remaining open to helping fund its construction provided that the analysis returns favorable results, gives VIA [the authority -- ed.] confidence that it can attract private investment to help the government-owned corporation complete the project.

Keep in mind that the proposed line is not world-class high-speed rail — it would be a conventional line allowing conventional equipment to operate at up to 110 mph with numerous grade crossings. Nevertheless, it would cut travel times by up to one third less than current schedules and offer much greater reliability by not being shared with freight. This milestone, along with Virgin Trains USA’s expansion to Orlando proceeding apace, proves that modern passenger rail projects in North America don’t have to be grade-separated bullet trains or use some flashy new technology like maglev or hyperloop in order to attract private-sector participation and deliver tremendous utility to the traveling public and to local and regional economies.

If VIA can overcome the hurdles of political will and resistance on the part of its host railroad Canadian National, and if its urban regions continue to develop and modernize rail transit, Ontario’ populous southeast and southwest regions would be well-positioned to continue providing a high quality of life to their growing populations as energy and other resources inevitably become scarcer with climate change and growing global demand. Many locales stateside could learn from this success.

In fact, given the state to which Passenger Rail has fallen, as well as the nature of the high-density corridors in North America, including the Richmond to Portland stomping grounds of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor services, Free Rein to 110 with contemporary diesel trains is the more sensible way to start.

The plan to separate passenger and freight trains between Montreal and Toronto makes sense on paper.  It's also a way to provide for even faster running later, if the tracks are surveyed and laid out with a subsequent installation of electrified running in mind.

In practice, though, Bill Stephens, who is also a Trains columnist, has doubts.

There’s much to like in VIA’s so-called high frequency rail plan. Transit times on the new corridor, VIA says, would be 25% faster than the current schedules, which cover Toronto-Montreal in about 5 hours. The new corridor would permit 110 mph operation, up from the current maximum of 100 on some sections of CN. VIA could provide more frequent service without begging CN for permission to run additional trains. And VIA projects 95% on-time performance on its own tracks.

But the whole plan falls down in the busy terminal areas in and around Toronto and Montreal. That’s where VIA’s trains would still have to negotiate trackage thick with freight and commuter traffic.

Transport Canada’s solution to this problem is laughable. “VIA Rail Canada would work with track owners to conclude necessary agreements and ensure that both freight and passenger operations can go smoothly,” a spokeswoman says.

Perhaps a few overpasses in the right places (would you believe one will be built in the area of Tower A-2 in Chicago?) might help. That, and people who know how to move trains.

VIA has said that passenger trains and freight trains are simply incompatible. What’s required, the thinking goes, is separate routes for passenger and freight. That’s never been true. If it were, Amtrak’s Hiawatha trains would not have clocked 96% reliability last year on Canadian Pacific trackage between Chicago and Milwaukee.

Keeping passenger and freight trains on time takes a combination of operational discipline, the right track capacity, and a willingness to make it work. CN takes pride in its operational discipline, and executives say the Eastern portion of the railroad, between Chicago and Halifax, is underutilized. What’s missing, it seems, is a willingness to expedite VIA trains.

VIA needs a cooperative host railroad more than it needs a new route that would bypass intermediate population centers, face opposition from the not-in-my-backyard crowd, take years to build, and in the end would still have to rely on shared trackage in key areas.

Yes, the current seven Hiawatha trips a day are generally reliable (although on occasion a rake misses an entire trip: if it doesn't run at all, it can't be late?), but getting back to ten trips is proving to be difficult, and separate passenger and freight routes well might be the way to go.  (Stay tuned.  I'm working on that one.)  Yes, it's on public officials to sell internal improvements: we have not-in-my-back-yard sentiments in part as a reaction to the excesses of eminent domain over the years.  The point of internal improvements, though, is to introduce trade-tested betterments, that is to say, Pareto improvements.

Perhaps we begin by suggesting that provincial transportation authorities run the assets they have as businesses.  Here's a question for discussion: what are the current tolls on the Queen's Expressways?

BIG BOY WAS COOL.

Kevin Solari, managing editor of the local newspaper, generally limits his train riding to rapid transit into Wrigleyville, parking being nothing short of unpleasant there.  But Big Steam makes him take notice.

It wasn't only me who got sucked in either. Tuesday morning I was standing near the railroad tracks in DeKalb near the crossing at Second Street. Dozens of people of all ages were out there. I spoke to a woman who said she wasn't a train person either, but after a few minutes she was trying to navigate the area around the crossing, looking for the best vantage point to see the train, while also staying safely behind the crossing gates.

Along the fence line, older people who could remember being passengers on trains powered by steam engines stood next to children who had only seen a steam engine as an emoji.

A whole community came out to watch a piece of history pass through. Many had never seen anything like it before, maybe only as the icon of America that railroads have been fore [c.q.] close to two centuries. Others came to once again see a memory from years long past.

I'm glad I was there. I can't say if my newfound fascination with trains will last now that Big Boy has moved on, but I know more than I did a week ago and I've experienced something few others have as a result. What more can you ask for?

Steam locomotives still symbolize railroading, perpetuating the journalistic atrocity of high speed trains "chugging," although in many ways these are the good old days for (freight) railroads. Passenger not so much, but that might yet change.

BOB GREENE'S E-T-T-S MOMENTS.

Newspaper columnist Bob Greene recently recognized that the people of North Platte, Nebraska, knew what to do when a few buses of hungry troops enroute from training to their base were passing through.

He previously documented the World War II canteen in Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.  Book Review N^o. 7 will suggest that there are two themes at play in the book.

ALL HAIL THE POWER OF MARX'S NAME.

David "Voluntary Xchange" Tufte wonders why Marx's Communist Manifesto is so frequently on collegiate reading lists.  "Marx is best thought of as a low and thick branch on the tree of economics knowledge. It was a worthwhile direction to go as the field explored new directions. But when it didn’t work out, economics as we now understand the field to be, backed out of that branch and went down the others, and flourished."  That might be, although the Manifesto isn't economic theory, it doesn't even do a good job of explaining how the bourgeois emerged as a social force incompatible with its feudal integument, it offers no plans for how to organize a proletarian society.

But it does spend a fair amount of time identifying false socialist doctrines.

In private correspondence, David noted that his curiosity stems, in part, from collaborating with Kyle Bishop on a chapter, "Endgames of a Zombie Apocalypse," in Economics of the Undead.  (I suppose, again, here is an effort that the Guardians of Economic Probity would find fault with.)  Mr Bishop works in a discipline where culture-studies jargon and Marxian citations are apparently expected by the reviewers.

That's also something you'd expect of a faith tradition.  Let referees prostrate fall, and bring forth the acceptance letter!

Faith traditions require parables, particularly redemptive parables.  So, too, is it with culture studies.  Abraham Lincoln as Marxist, for instance?  (Doubtful.)

Perhaps, though, it makes more sense to think of Marxism in general, and the various sects of culture studies in particular, as a faith tradition, one in which that which was once holy can now be profaned.

A case in point is the planned destruction of murals at George Washington High School in San Francisco. Ironically, “The Life of George Washington” was painted in the 1930s by an avowed communist, Victor Arnautoff (that’s not red-baiting: after he retired in the ’60s, Arnautoff returned to the Soviet Union to live out his days as a contented commie).

I'm quoting James Pinkerton a little bit out of context, as he's cautioning that smashing icons for its own sake is a game anyone can play.  I submit, though, dear reader, that what passes for "theory" in cultural studies is better understood as a catechism, with Marx serving as Moses and the Prophets, or perhaps as Messiah Himself.  That is, it's better understood as a church than as scholarly inquiry.

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME?

Process worship is dead, according to Ed Burmila, who is one of the regulars at the Gin and Tacos weblog.  Let's say he's not anticipating a peaceful transfer of the presidency.

It will get worse because nobody is going to stop it, or is even trying. It will get worse because this is what Trumpism has been all along, because this narcissistic fraud is the vicar of every American who has longed for someone to say the quiet part loudly. It will get worse because conservatives either agree with him or look the other way in exchange for advancing their policy goals.

It will get worse because the media learned absolutely nothing from 2016, and every time Trump kicks the ball a gaggle of a hundred reporters chase it, overanalyzing it, giving Both Sides a chance to opine on it, and asking customers in Ohio diners how they’d like to see the ball kicked next time. It will get worse because the default media frame for covering racism is, “Was this racism?” and because they still believe that congressional Republicans will surely turn on Trump with the next outburst because Republicans are people of honor and integrity, because the entire worldview of legacy media requires that to be true.

Well, no, there's no reason for congressional Republicans, or the tame kind that used to be the only kind on the Sunday shows, to spend all the time explaining that no, their intentions are not bad rather than pointing out failures of the kind of public policies I think the Daily Kos, Common Dreams, Gin and Tacos regulars would prefer.  Because there have been failures, and there are sufficiently many people, whether fired up by Our President, or not, who are no longer going to be hectored at, condescended to, or deplorable shamed.

It will get worse because the Democratic Party still believes that the mushy center is the place to campaign against Trump, that white votes are the only votes worth winning, that people of color or young people will never vote so why bother giving them a reason to, and that, in the brilliant words of Chuck Schumer, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

Except they didn’t, and they won’t, and now they want the Blue Collar Guy back. He will never come back, because the stereotypical “white working class” media caricature has lost his job and watched his city disintegrate and has no future, so whiteness is his last remaining asset, and he likes the candidate who promises to protect it. After all, implicit in every musing about Trump-loving whites “losing ground” is that being white means, and should mean, being comfortably ahead. It is the simplest explanation for why every racist outburst, far from being the one that turns Trump supporters away, makes them love him even harder. He knows what they want, and he will give it to them in the increasing doses needed to achieve a buzz over time, and if it gets more people killed in a synagogue or driven over at a rally, that’s mere collateral damage to people whose worldview is already based on the idea that every victim had it coming.

It will get worse because an entire generation of people under forty has already been written off to a life of lowered expectations and debt peonage—a generation that might get more riled up by the politics of Social Security and Medicare had they not already resigned themselves to the reality that neither will exist when, if, they reach old age. None of the relevant social, political, or economic institutions are undergoing an intergenerational transition of power; instead, Boomers have decided simply to stay at the helm until death comes, and since nobody except them has ever mattered it’s no big deal if everything burns down on their way out.

He's right, those early Baby Boomers who have held the presidency recently haven't necessarily been the most spectacular examples of probity.  But there's more at work.  Here are two quotes from two very different polemicists.  The links provide the sources, and I'll disclose the names later.  First up:

The Democratic party has spent the past three years vilifying and demonizing men and their “toxic masculinity,” and retailing the insane multiplication of “genders’ in a bad faith attempt to manufacture sexual “diversity” — with the net effect of negating all previous understandings of the relations between men and women. Newsflash: that’s not going to work, either.

The shriekings of “racism” aren’t helping much anymore. Few observers have missed the fact that the city of Baltimore has been run by an African American city hall (Mayor, Police Chief, District Attorney) for many years, with over a billion dollars in additional federal assistance. So, if political power is the answer, how’s that working out? Add some extra shrieking about “white privilege” to explain the situation? How does “white privilege” explain the fact that 86 percent of kids in Baltimore primary schools can’t read and 89 percent can’t do arithmetic to grade level? This, despite the fact that at $15,564 per pupil, Baltimore is fourth highest-spending per student of the 100 largest school districts in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Maybe becoming the party of a national race hustle isn’t such a good idea. The race hustle is wearing out its welcome in American politics, and the more the Democratic Party resorts to race hustling as its chief strategy, the sooner the party will go extinct. That is, if it doesn’t incite some kind of civil war first. Cue the cry, “That’s racist!”

Maybe there is a whole range of human values and human behaviors that have nothing to do with race — like reading to small children and helping them learn the English language so they don’t grow into adults who have to say “know what I mean?” every other sentence because they’ve barely acquired enough language skill themselves to know what they mean. Maybe there’s something called an American common culture that contains values and behaviors worth emulating rather than opposing. Maybe “multiculturalism” wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe ghetto culture is not such a precious foundation for a successful life. Maybe the Democratic Party should move out of the ghetto it’s built for itself.

Second up:

Trump said something that everyone who has spent any time in America’s cities knows. Many of them are poor, dirty, badly governed, and dangerous—often the worst conditions are in black neighborhoods and majority-minority cities. These combined phenomena create a feedback of “white flight” and capital flight, as businesses, the tax base, and the middle class flee. Over the years, things have only gotten worse.

These majority-minority districts frequently elect useless demagogues, who deliver little, other than the rhetoric of flattery and blame. Cummings and his colleagues Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) are all archetypal cases. Not infrequently, extensive corruption is the handmaiden of these politicians—Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick comes to mind. Trump’s message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.

The state of America’s lost cities—Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham—is familiar to anyone with eyes to see. One boarded-up building after another. Crime rates that rival Venezuela’s. Police insulted and attacked by shameless young people. While government is not the sole cause of or the only solution to what ails America’s cities, it certainly seems to be doing little to help, and the locales and politicians Trump singled out are in particularly bad shape.

Those are, respectively, prophet of financial collapse and resource depletion J. H. "Clusterf*** Nation" Kunstler and American Greatness columnist Christopher Roach.

But nobody, Rod Dreher laments, wants to take a step back from the abyss.  "There is no difference at all in the vitriol from extremists of the left and the right. I believe the capacity for this kind of hatred exists within every human heart. What we are losing is the sense that it is a destructive passion to be resisted."

IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER.

Under socialism, what there is makes light beer look good.

“In Cuba, there were only two types of beer, almost the same in alcohol content and both tasted like skunky Budweiser. In North Korea, it was just god awful,” [Robert] Lawson, who is also the director of the William J. O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University, told Fox News. “And, in Venezuela, the country has basically run out of beer because the government planners couldn’t import enough barley.”

That reminds me of the story of widespread bad-hair days in Poland, because the planners neglected to allocate any steel for bobby pins.

With all manner of phony socialisms en vogue these days, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World might be just the corrective.  "'Socialism is a disaster everywhere it has been tried, historical evidence illustrates this,' added Lawson. 'The freer the country is, the more it prospers.'"

The book is co-authored by Mr Lawson and Benjamin Powell of Texas Tech's Free Market Institute.  The title, and some of the presentation, sound like we get a more social-scientific version of a P. J. O'Rourke travelogue, with humor accompanying the economics.

It’s called Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink their Way Through the Unfree World. You will laugh out loud on page after page. You will thrill in the adventures. You will guffaw at the sheer silliness of what these two dudes do and what they find. You will wish you had been with them but be very grateful that they both took time to write it all down. 

Jeffrey Tucker continues his endorsement.

Listen, this is a truly fun book but it doesn’t neglect serious economics. You can learn a tremendous amount of theory and history from these two masters of the craft– and also discover how to have a great time while trying to alert the world to what is the single most important choice we face in the entire world today: freedom or government control.

I highly recommend this delightful romp. At the end, you can tell people that you took a course in comparative economics, while learning a tremendous amount about beer.

We'll see if the economics establishment takes notice. (Yes, there is such an establishment. When is the last time anyone with a Texas Tech or Southern Methodist affiliation served as a vice president of the American Economic Association, for openers?)  The prestige publications continue to be an outlet for High Theory In Justification of Technocracy.  And don't let the process worshippers in Student Affairs discover that a textbook (even as a supplemental reading) has something nice to say about beer.

RAILROADS CONNECT PEOPLE.

Trains editor Jim Wrinn saw it during Big Boy 4014's first venture into Iowa.  "I cannot show it with numbers but somewhere in those kids are future locomotive engineers and conductors, railroad managers, and, I hope, someone who will want to keep steam locomotives around for the future because of how they attract people."  At the time, he noted, "You just have to believe."

I tend to be more empirical, so let me submit evidence.  I couldn't get any photographs of 4014 that didn't have people in them, but that's fine.  It's the popular reaction that's the story, not the train itself.  Here's another picture, this from Mason City, Iowa, where the local kids appeared to be having fun running through the spent steam.

To the south, at Iowa Falls, the former interlocking tower (at one time protecting the crossing of two Rock Island lines, one now Union Pacific's Spine Line, with Illinois Central's Council Bluffs extension) is a local railroad history museum.

The younger man in this photograph is a former resident of the town who has just discovered that the older man, currently a docent at the tower, is the same railroader who years ago let a curious kid up in the tower for a look around (against all rules, but the supervision was probably occupied elsewhere.)

Before radio, the dispatcher issued instructions to train crews through the use of train orders, "in the approved form and without erasure punctuation or interlineation" that were handed up to train crews by methods such as the Y-shaped tool with a train order tied to the string that's in the background.

The Chicago area is the largest metropolitan area a functioning Big Boy has ever visited.  Union Pacific expected about two thousand visitors per day.  A total of forty-five thousand showed up.  On Sunday morning last, the early arrivals were able to get into the exhibit car almost immediately.  I got there just before eleven, and finally got into the exhibit car at about 12.30.  It was a hot day, and all credit to Union Pacific for ensuring that there was plenty of bottled water in coolers all over the grounds.

That's a view from the road bridge just east of the Metra station.  Big Boy and the supporting train are parked at the Larry Provo Training Center, a facility dating to Chicago and North Western days.  The spectators at right are outside the railroad park that Union Pacific set up, complete with display tents for Operation Lifesaver, West Chicago's visitors bureau, and the Illinois Railway Museum.  Some of those tents are at left, along the engineer's side of Big Boy.

Tuesday, it was time to head for Cheyenne by way of North Platte's Railroad Days.  There's still a Chicago and North Western station building, now a Union Pacific engineering office, at DeKalb, and some onlookers chose to set up on the platform.

Some intrepid photographers ventured into the tall grass to get pictures at the coal wharf east of town.  I just set up on the town square with a decent view of the tracks (and a monarch butterfly?)

The tracks to the west also had their share of spectators.

I'll let Mr Wrinn summarize.

Particularly gratifying is the reaction of people watching the train pass. It has attracted people from all walks of life. The businessman, the mother and her children, the retired railroaders, the teenagers. Male and female. People of all races. It has made no difference. And in the end, it has brought great joy. In suburban Chicago, at Elmhurst, Ill., last Friday, those packing both platforms of the Metra station broke into applause as tail car Kenefick passed. It wasn’t the only place that happened, either.

Giant conquerers of space and time, indeed.

AN INORGANIC AMENITY.

My sojourn through the Northern Plains in pursuit of Big Boy brought me to Dubuque, where a lot of money has gone into providing a riverwalk along the Mississippi.

It does offer an unobstructed view of the boat basin and the river, as well as an opportunity to get close to the Illinois Central railroad bridge, and there are several museums and a hostelry alongside, as well as numerous parking lots.

In a way, though, this riverwalk is a sad testament to the Big Idea of about fifty years ago of running expressways through the center of towns, which doesn't work so well in smaller towns in constricted spaces.  It didn't work so well for Worcester, nor did it work so well in Milwaukee.

The most convenient way to get to the riverwalk is to drive, although I did see a few people biking along it.

All that grassland is the levee that the riverwalk is atop, which also isolates it from the, to use the Strong Towns lexicon, parking crater.  That's an excursion boat, the aquarium, and there's a casino nearby.

There is, however, no riverside cafe.  There is a cafe, using the old Dubuque Star brewery for atmosphere.

I'm standing on the levee.  Those inverted carrots are, I suppose, art.  It's too early in the morning for the wine bar to be open.  There's no view of the river from there.

I'm sure it's all with the best of intentions, and there are undoubtedly events to get people to come to the river and mingle or view the exhibits or gamble or tipple.

But it's inorganic, which is to say, the whole thing was intelligently designed.

Emergent riverwalks look more like this.

That's Remagen, Germany, just downstream from the famous bridge.  The bicycle trail runs at least as far north as Köln, and it continues upstream past the bridge.  (Do I have enough ambition to go back there, hire a bicycle, and go for a long ride?)

That's the Rhein at left, and the cafes (and, dear reader, the German custom of coffee and sweets around 15 hours is something I endorse) place additional tables between the bike lanes and the river.  Somehow, the bikers, the pedestrians, and the devotees of ice cream cones stay clear of each other.

There might be some theming in the choice of paving materials, but the concept is more evidently something emergent than something designed all at once as a way of building a tourist attraction.

SOMEBODY TELL HER TO CHECK HER PRIVILEGE.

Inside Higher Ed guest columnist Rachel Harris gives people who don't like higher education very much reinforcement of their prior beliefs.

As colleges and universities work to increase diversity in hiring and course offerings, they don’t always realize that the small, welcoming communities they believe make up local town life are unsuited to or lack amenities for the faculty members whom they are hiring. Whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i, black, brown, LGBTQ or otherwise, faculty members may not find a place of worship or a community of significant size in a small college town two hours from a larger city. They may face racism and prejudice. Even with the internet, being single with dating options many hours away can prove debilitating and depressing.

Further, faculty members with highly educated and qualified spouses are unlikely to find work in their chosen profession if they aren’t part of the university or medical institutions that dominate the professional landscape. Institutions in remote locations often try to hire spouses and partners, but the people who aren’t academics or who depend upon a large urban space for their professional life could find the town to be a job desert. And the spouse or partner who has a job that includes a significant amount of travel may have another set of challenges when the nearest major airport is hours away.

A bull session of prodigious length and the heat only academics can generate cavilling over trivialities is in progress. It starts with this gem.

If you voluntarily choose to live hours from campus, you should not get special scheduling favors and additional money that are not available to faculty members who choose to live nearby. And if you want to talk about stereotyping, it's pretty offensive to imply that white, christian [c.q.] males are not interested in being at home for their families.

When someone chooses to commute to campus from far away, it typically imposes additional burdens on that individual's colleagues.We have a colleague who is a commuter. Every semester, the person insists that they only have to be on campus Tues afternoon-Wed-Thurs morning. The result is that the entire departmental schedule has to be built around this person's course requirements. And the person refuses most service assignments since they are rarely on campus, which means that other department members see their service burdens increase.

I posted a similar gripe about faculty splitting the commuting distance between DeKalb and Chicago years ago.  "The 15 minute bicycle riders maintain home offices for a reason; longer commutes -- or daycare schedules -- ought not be trump cards for scheduling meetings."