A FOURTH TURNING ALERT?

Yes, I've been issuing these for almost the life of Cold Spring Shops.  One might be still coming, or we might be in the middle of one.  Sarah Hoyt, however, is thinking that either the final triggering event or the values-regime-shattering climax is at hand.

We all can feel on the ground the thumps of the approaching beast.

Maybe we’ll get lucky one more time. G-d looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America, and maybe he can still get our butts out of the bear trap, even now.

As some of you — and I myself — have mentioned, even though we’re in deep, deep trouble, the rest of the world is worse, and there is some protection in being the one eyed man in the realm of the blind, even in this.

Maybe we’ll see it play out in the rest of the world and right our boat before we take in too much water.

Maybe. But also, maybe this is the black dog speaking, but that’s not what I see ahead of us. I’m sorry. I think the idiots in power are going to continue idioting because they think no one is onto them.

And I think the water is going to get very choppy, very fast.

Thus, it's either time for people to enjoy themselves before the crunch comes, or time to brace themselves to their duties.

Yes, I think in the end we win. But judging from the other countries that are now rebelling, I think it’s going to come to the brink of an irreversible situation.

Yes, I think we’ll reverse it. I think we’ll come around. I think we’re nowhere near done.

But I also think the next few years… two? three? four? are going to be difficult for almost everyone. We’re going to have to change the way we do everyday things in ways we can’t even imagine. We’re going to go through and have to do things we don’t think we could survive.

A lot of us, who are dependent on daily medication to stay alive, and who might otherwise live for another thirty years or so (forty, judging by my family history) might die if we can’t navigate alternatives.

I think most of — maybe even me, if I get very lucky — will come through this and see the other side. But we won’t be who we are now. And looking back at who we are now, we might very well think of this as our golden time of innocence, before we had to– do all those things, and endure all those things none of us wants to.

So, this last golden summer?

You know what’s coming. We all know what’s coming.

Take a day off. Take your sweetie to a park, or a museum, or the movies, or dinner, or whatever it is you’ve been putting off.

How does that song go? "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think?" Or might that misleading opening to Sound of Music, describing the "last golden days of the Thirties" in Austria, which was ripe for Anschluss, Trapp Family Singers or not.

A REFRESHER ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM.

The back to school sales are starting up, and that might be as good a reason as any for today's review session, courtesy of Aunt Deirdre and Cafe Hayek.

For more than 100 years – and especially since the 1930s – it has been considered by most economists to be a perfectly acceptable scientific move to identify and describe on chalk boards possible ways that markets might fail to achieve perfection, then to label these failures as “market failures,” and finally to conclude that the state should be charged with the responsibility of ‘correcting’ these imperfections. As McCloskey suggests, it’s a wholly unscientific move to assume – simply to assume – that government officials have the motivation, information, and power of omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent gods.

The Cafe Hayek post continues the instruction using one strong argument.

McCloskey in addition – in the book quoted above, as well as in many other of her works – correctly notes that the economists who identify these theoretically possible “failures” and “market imperfections” almost never attempt to quantify their real-world significance. Were such measurements reasonably carried out, the results in all cases would almost surely be swamped – magnificently swamped – by the the size and significance of market successes.

There are other elaborations that we've highlighted at Cold Spring Shops.  Long ago, we raised the prospect of rent seekers capturing the policy.

The welfare economics paradigm begins with some fairly tight theorizing (under conditions 1, 2, 3, and 4, a competitive equilibrium exists and is Pareto optimal. The role of government becomes either to provide the basic rules of trading, or to make transfers of endowments to provide the initial allocation from which the Pareto optimal equilibrium will emerge) and continues with additional theorizing (under any of conditions 1', 2', 3', and 4' existence or Pareto optimality do not follow) leading to proposals for policies that a properly-informed government can implement. Here is where the paradigm breaks down, as there is a great deal of research, which the public choice advocates view as persuasive, to the effect that traders can discover and improvise ways to eliminate the inefficiencies, or that the theoretically preferable policies break down, or that the agents of the government are themselves rational maximizers.

Call me a Strong Skeptic, if you wish, on any hope for Platonic Perfection once the blackboard prescription becomes law. "It matters not whether a government insurance agency acting as a monopsonist toward physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists, or whether the secretary of Health and Human Services seats a board of Wise Experts. Rents will exist. Rent-seekers will seek rents. Rents will be dissipated. The taxpayers will not necessarily be better served."

But there's yet another possibility, one also due to McCloskey, lurking in that long-ago excerpt.  "Government actions have the potential to address some outcomes from some kinds of markets. Whether those policies work properly, or achieve allocative efficiency, or some kind of equity, or might be done more effectively by other means, remains an open question."  Think carefully: if your standard for optimality is allocative efficiency, meaning all gains from trade are recognized and realized, doesn't it follow that a "market failure" involves some gains from trade not being realized?  The institutional arrangement that harvests those gains from trade might be some tax, transfer, or regulation.  Or not.  "The assumptions underlying the standard market efficiency theorems are sufficient conditions for market efficiency, not necessary ones."  But they look so pretty on the blackboard.  "Makes policy analysis somewhat more challenging than market-failure-warrants-government-intervention, no matter how pretty the optimal policy response looks rendered into four-color diagrams or sigma-algebras."  But the people who are advising the Jarrett regency just will not learn.  "Perhaps it would benefit some public policy intellectuals to be more familiar with the argument."

I found, however, another Cafe Hayek quotation that works as well to conclude today's lesson.

I'll give Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux the final word. "What is required of anyone wishing to cast doubt on the efficacy of private-property markets guided by real-world market prices is a believable explanation of how the economy might be operated better by an alternative system."

Critique is simple.  Praxis is hard.

We've seen what the Jarrett regency has done with their vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm. There is a boundary in academic economics between outlining an argument, and advocacy, and yet, equipping students with the intellectual tools to see the possibility of the Blackboard Vision of Wise Experts going wrong is part of the job.  They can keep that argument in mind, or not, when they vote.

THEY'VE GOT A LONG WAY TO GO.

The one daily train southbound into Atlanta reaches town to this inspiring view.

Some people in Atlanta want to change things.

Amtrak is looking to make Atlanta a railroad hub again, but the quasi-federal agency can’t say how much it will cost to run new routes across the Peach State and the region.

Last year, Amtrak released a $75 billion passenger rail proposal. The plan calls for a new Atlanta rail hub with routes connecting the city with Birmingham, Alabama; Charlotte, North Carolina; Macon, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; and Savannah, Georgia.

That's a rather modest plan, considering that once Atlanta was home to two stations, and featured Southern's Royal Palm from the Great Lakes to Florida; two competing services to Birmingham, two routes to New Orleans, and a St. Louis and Chicago to Atlanta service with Florida connections, plus a reasonable regional service to Savannah, Augusta, and Chattanooga.  We are at best looking at the first step toward regional corridor.

The proposed Atlanta-to-Nashville train would take 6 hours and 34 minutes to complete the 280-mile-long journey via Chattanooga, Tennessee.

One Amtrak train serves Atlanta, the New York City-to-New Orleans Crescent. The Gate City’s former railroad stations downtown were razed decades ago, and Amtrak uses a station Southern Railway constructed more than a century ago as a commuter stop.

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, the Crescent had a 56.8% on-time performance rate during the first quarter of 2021. It marked the sixth-best on-time performance rate for an Amtrak long-distance train.

There are boosters for the train project, as well as skeptics noting how much money the existing passenger trains lose (still a rounding error as the infrastructure crumbles.)  In defense of the Nashville train, that's using a busy freight railroad through mountainous territory.

LOGIC CARRIES THE DAY.

In "The Invertebrate Living Constitution," I conclude,

Under the notion of a "living constitution," mightn't there be a situation in which the Militant Normals are the leading edge of Changing Popular Opinion, and mightn't they be the ones more likely to be upset by a Supreme Court standing on Constitutional principles?  "All we wanted was to be left alone."  But that was too much restraint for Weimar America.  Constitutional protections might be their best hope right about now.

That concept might have been too simplistic for Our Intellectual Betters, according to Kevin Williamson.

It seems to be only now occurring to progressives how heavily they had leaned on the Supreme Court to act as their cat’s-paw — and how little work they have done to try not only to secure the maximum possible number of Democratic appointments to the Court but, more important, to defend and fortify the intellectual position that made those activist judges such reliable progressive policy-makers for all those decades. And it only now seems to really be becoming clear to them what they have lost by failing to defend that intellectual ground: not only the Roe regime but also much of the progressive activist thinking that made it and similar decisions possible, far-reaching regulatory power and a practically unlimited administrative state. If progressives are shocked by this — and they are shocked — it is because they made the mistake of thinking that convincing the editors of the New York Times was sufficient.

That's harsh, but not unfair.  It was also something anyone who wanted to look could see: why else did judicial confirmation hearings focus on Roe to the exclusion of everything else?  One can chant "Roe is the law" but without some sort of legislative codification, is that akin to invoking Thor to bring rain?

Manhattan Contrarian suggests that there are two "fundamentally irreconcilable Constitutional visions."  His piece, while polemical, ultimately identifies the flaw of the "living Constitution" approach.

Suppose that you are on the Supreme Court, and you subscribe to [the "living Constitution" Vision]; and thus you find yourself time after time on the losing end of these 6-3 decisions. What’s your strategy in writing your dissents? Actually, it’s easy. The goal is to divert attention away from the actual Constitution as far and as quickly as possible. Instead, you argue that the position of the current left is the only moral position, and anyone who might oppose it is a monster. Does this have anything to do with the Constitution? No, but so what? Don’t worry — you have the entirety of the media and academia to support you and to help keep the people from figuring out what you are doing.

Unfortunately, people can figure out what you are doing, and if it wasn't Donald Trump coming along with a list of potential justices not named Jeanine Pirro, that populist long march through legal studies would have continued.

I know I'm repeating myself: on current trends it will be the Democrats, particularly the noisiest self-styled progressives, who will be most desirous of Constitutional protections, and that cannot come soon enough.  What is now crazy, "A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have though of such a crazy idea?," will be the establishment's talking point.

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Two months ago, I was reminiscing.  "That takes me back to college days, when abortion activism was all the rage,  I couldn't shake the impression that some of the talk of "control my body" and "right to choose" wasn't to have a backstop plan when the free love turned out not to be so free."

All of that linkage leads to some long posts.  Meanwhile, Ed Driscoll turned up what might be a parody tweet.  The interpretation, "Leftist women discover traditional marriage," might not be totally wrong.   The poster wrote, "I am totally done with men who want to hook up and leave."

Reality bats last.

PEER REVIEW MEANS FINDING PEERS WILLING TO REVIEW.

That's causing journal editors headaches.  "This issue isn’t new: academic publishing has long been a delicate system that operates—tenuously—on goodwill, in the form of comprehensive, unpaid article analyses from expert volunteers."

No, it isn't new, and the collision of "publish or perish" job descriptions with a proliferation of new journals that might be Glass Bead Game outcomes and ever more nitpicky refereeing, with multiple referees and multiple revisions isn't helping.

There are a number of institutional reforms under consideration in the column, including limiting the rounds of revision, asking authors of submissions to do some reviewing, and (gasp!) paying reviewers.

It's been a long time since I did any reviewing, but years ago the editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics would append "Authors of accepted papers are expected to review submissions in their field, and if you do not wish to do so you might consider withdrawing your paper" to acceptance letters, and I did get a check from the American Economic Association at least once.  Never got anything in American Economic Review, but apparently had enough chops to help them screen papers.

IT IS TIME TO REJECT THE FALSE BINARY.

I've never figured out what the writers at "The Bulwark," who style themselves as "No partisan loyalties. No tribal prejudices" are really about.

The service is an effort of Charlie "Never Trump" Sykes and a number of other disaffected individuals, such as Mona Charen, to ... punish Trumpians by helping install Democrats?  Or something.  Note the confusion by Bulwark contributor A. B. Stoddard.  "Some Democrats are telling us that it’s just too much to expect their voters to turn out in November because, to them, Biden’s first half of his term has been a failure. Their perception seems to be that current events are terribly disappointing, but not dire." Why, it's as if there's an aggregation problem in electoral politics.  A goodly number of people might have voted to oust Mr Trump and to gridlock the government, and yet the communist wing of the Democrats' coalition saw an opportunity to immiserate the normies.  Now they're wondering why people aren't returning their calls.

Voters put Democrats in power with a very narrow majority and in return they got an ambitious COVID rescue plan, a bipartisan infrastructure law, and bipartisan gun reform. If Democrats want more of their legislative priorities addressed, then they should be eager to vote. Because that is how you solve your problems. And the bigger the majorities you can make, the bigger the problems you can tackle.

Those ambitious projects are going to come to grief, and turning out bigger majorities is going to be difficult.  Byron York diagnosed the problem.

The Democrats' most fundamental problem is that they entered the Biden administration with wildly unrealistic expectations. They expected to be able to get big things done, such as massive spending programs, far-reaching action on climate change, large tax increases, and more, without having won a majority of seats in the Senate. Indeed, there was talk, apparently serious, of Biden winning legislation on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society. And all this would be done with a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate, broken in the administration's favor by the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The communist rump of the party, though, wants a change at the top of the ticket for different reasons than those of the corporatists. "A third of respondents answered that the president's job performance is the primary factor, another 33% cited Biden's age, and 10% said their preference stems from Biden not being 'progressive enough.'"

Memo to A. B. Stoddard: there aren't enough self-styled progressive voters to vote in the kind of majority to enact the less incrementalist agenda they'd like.  It might be that punishing Trumpian Republicans by supporting Democrats is therefore less hazardous than some pundits would suggest.

All the same, a false binary in which both major parties are beholden to noisy fringes is one that voters ought reject, either by choosing the least insane alternative on offer, or by considering those other parties.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE.

How many ways does public radio suck?  That's been common knowledge for at least thirty years.

I’m awakened at 6 AM by the droning baritone of Bob Edwards, the anchor of Morning Edition. The program stays on until 8:30, when my sister dashes to her car and switches it on there to listen to the final half hour on her way to work. And in the afternoon I usually have to leave the house to avoid being driven to homicide by the discordant tinkling of the All Things Considered theme, which echoes from her radio from 5 PM to 6:30.

That article also mentions a public radio junkie who had their programming on for each mile of a long road trip.  It escapes me how they managed to stay awake.  My reasons for giving up on public radio are here.  It's worth reading in full, but it might be wise not to be drinking anything as you read through it, and I'm pleased to bring its continued existence online to your attention.

I really wish a populist Congress would take public radio and the national endowments out of a budget appropriation and dare the president to shut the government down over it.

NO EUPHEMISM IS SAFE.

You can count on anybody whose salary depends on the continuance of intercollegiate athletics to assiduously deploy the expression "student-athlete" in any reference to the players.  Administrators use the expression, the field coaches use the expression, the brain coaches use the expression, the nutrition coaches use the expression.  It's the kind of Aesopian language people use to refute the notion that there are people recruited to attend college for the purpose of playing (income) sports, academic performance be hanged.

The back story of the Aesopian language is troubling.

In 1955, while competing as an offensive lineman for Fort Lewis A&M, Ray Dennison suffered a knee to the head, which shattered his skull and eventually killed him. Dennison’s widow filed for death benefits since her husband’s death was the result of his work while serving as an employee of the institution.

The NCAA and Fort Lewis A&M took her to court in what is arguably one of the most important cases in intercollegiate athletics history. Here, the NCAA introduced member institutions and the public to a new term: student-athlete.

The NCAA’s argument went like this: Dennison was a student-athlete, and therefore could not be an employee. Thus, as a student, and not an employee, the widow was not eligible for benefits of any kind. The court agreed with the NCAA and ruled against Dennison’s widow, solidifying the trinity of student-athlete, amateurism, and intercollegiate sport for decades to come.

The association's president at the time, Walter Byers, subsequently regretted the legal maneuvering.

Byers noted that he and the legal team coined the term to prevent not only paying the Dennison family, but also future generations of college athletes looking for worker’s compensation or for pay-for-play.

Student-athlete keeps college athletes in their place.

That "in their place" is a tell, dear reader.

Today, the majority of revenue-producing athletes in the sports of football and men’s basketball are Black. They are coached mostly by white men. The man who coined the term student-athlete, was also a white man. Using the term student-athlete perpetuates the ideals of amateurism, while further preventing a pay-for-play model.

These actions largely favor one group: white men. These actions largely disadvantage one group: Black men. We can no longer deny the prejudicial, arguably racial, undertones associated with calling this higher education population student-athletes.

In spite of this history and the fact that the man who created the term came to condemn it, scholars, practitioners, members of the media, faculty, coaches, and athletes themselves continue to use it.

That's going to be interesting once the star athletes at the power conferences, many of whom have African ancestry, take advantage of the new name, image, and likeness provisions that allow them to capitalize on their star power until they're eligible to turn professional.

That might be a competing hypothesis for this academician to contemplate.

However, research demonstrates that priming, or subconsciously cueing, athletes with the term student-athlete, results in a decreased academic performance. This may be due to a cognitive imbalance, the perception that these two identities are in conflict.

Priming an athlete can result in lower academic performance, which may make some athletes engage even less in their education, continuing the cycle and unfairly supporting the dumb jock stereotype. So why do we continue to use this term?

In my course, Athletics in the University, I introduce students to the history and tradition associated with student-athlete. Some students are unfazed by the term and its origination, just as some students don’t consider the racist names of the buildings they enter.

There's a canonical application of a stereotype threat argument in the preceding passage; at the same time there's the possibility that under the new name, image, and likeness rules, there are some young men (there not being a good value proposition for the women yet) who will view themselves as hired athletes and do only the minimal academic effort.  It's going to be interesting when the wokes attempt to change the language in women's sports, where the "student-athlete" locution is as common, whilst the performative displays of woke-think are also common.  (Via Campus Reform.)

THE INCOMPETENCE TAX.

That's been a gripe of long standing, going back to the early days of Cold Spring Shops:

"Perhaps the hardest hit are those who impose the tax, the legions of slovenly, poorly trained people who man our grocery stores and shopping malls, our post offices and security posts. What an unpleasant life it must be to labor without the basic ability to produce value on a consistent basis. But perhaps value is an alien concept to many of them, there is simply a set of procedures to follow in order to receive one's paycheck, and numerous customers who have to be endured -- and what's their deal, anyway, getting all bent because they didn't get the pizza topping they wanted, or because I brought out the wrong size shoes twice? Customers. What a pain."

The full rant is still available online, and will still reward careful study.  It concludes, "And if all you get today are the duds, have a little pity."

Sometimes that's hard.  Here's a comment I recently submitted to the operators of a local eatery.

My immediate dissatisfaction is with the unavailability of the flavor of the day, a staffer had to start the machine and make some. I'm generally disappointed with the dependability of this store. On more than one occasion the preannounced flavor of the day is not the actual flavor of the day on offer. On more than one occasion there has been a surprise closure or early closure of the dining room. First world problems, I know, and yet if we can't get the custard right, what hope is there of getting the baby formula or the fertilizer right.

There's accumulating evidence that the correct answer is "little hope."  On the micro scale, I never got any followup from the chain, not even the pro forma "we are sorry and hope to do better next time" that sometimes comes in.  But when Our Political Masters tell us we have to do without for the good of the "rules based international order" it is our duty to turf them out, just as it might be something between our option and our responsibility to withdraw our custom from those eateries.

YOU HAVE TO PROVIDE THE CAPACITY.

Ben Jones of CNN files an analysis of Europe's plans to augment their Passenger Rail network.

Breakfast in Paris, lunch in Frankfurt and dinner in Vienna -- all without the hassle and frustration of flying.

Imagine a network of modern, super-fast and comfortable trains hurtling between every major city in the European Union, providing a reliable, comfortable and sustainable alternative to air travel.

That was the vision outlined by rail industry leaders in Lyon, France, on June 29, amid ambitious European plans to double high-speed rail use by 2030 and triple current levels by 2050.

I once attempted Wien to London in a day; that came a cropper on an overoptimistic six minute connection in Köln where a platform was not available when the train from Frankfurt showed up.  The article notes a quirk in the European fast trains: they're a step back from the international Trans Europ Express of the early 1960s, let alone the Wagons-Lits overnighters.

Only a massive -- and accelerated -- expansion of the high-speed network can achieve these hugely ambitious targets, but are they a realistic and affordable proposition?

Unlike many parts of the world, Europe already has thousands of kilometers of dedicated high-speed railway.

France's world-famous TGVs, Germany's ICE and Spain's AVE have transformed rail travel over the last 40 years, but they remain largely focused on domestic markets.

It might be that running fast is less important than running regularly and reliably, but that's not the kind of shiny object that -- up to a point -- gets the political class interested.

When countries are investing billions of euros in new infrastructure, political pressure to squeeze out the maximum benefit for taxpayers is inevitable.

Building lines across international borders, even within the European Union, creates tension over who pays for what, how the contracts are allocated, conflicting national standards and regulations and a host of other obstacles.

Yes, and the Europeans don't have investor owned freight railroads whose tracks Amtrak and the Commuter Rail authorities use.  That might be a minor reason you don't see grain trains worthy of Union Pacific or Norfolk Southern getting that Ukrainian grain to market.

THINK BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION.

I think both G. K. Chesterton and Robert Frost have reflected on fences, with a strong emphasis on understanding why somebody put it up in the first place.

Our overwrought, self-styled progressives lack that capacity for reflection.

We must vote in historic numbers for our ancestors, for our children, and for the generations to come. We must ensure that extremist members of Congress, in both houses, remain in the voting minority.

Alongside this historic effort, we call on Congress to expeditiously and absolutely end the filibuster and take legislative action immediately to codify Roe v. Wade, ensure universal, single-payer healthcare, including the expansion of Medicaid in every state, and ensure the full protections of the Voting Rights Act in every election. We call on President Biden to take immediate action to guarantee reproductive freedoms and use the power of his executive authorities to unabashedly fight for the heart and soul of this country, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people.

All of this rage because constitutional conservatives, rather than organizing street protests to question abuse of authority by federal courts, staged their own long march through the institutions, starting with Richard Nixon campaigning on a pledge to appoint "constructionist" Justices and most recently with the most unlikely Republican president working off a list that did not include Jeanine Pirro or his sister to reconfigure the High Bench. But persuasion and patient footwork are not the way of the so-called progressives.

[The constitutional conservatives'] naked grab for power is succeeding—but it could still backfire if we set our minds to it.

What would that look like? In the short political term, a promise from every Democrat that they would overturn the filibuster and expand the Court if elected. We can't get rid of every archaic part of our governmental structure, but the Constitution doesn't get in the way of these changes. And they would liberate majorities to actually write policy and not see it struck down by the partisans that currently inhabit the bench.

As I suggested last week that it would be easiest if this fight was led by Joe Biden, perhaps on a train. Biden did, yesterday, say that he favored a "filibuster carve-out" to codify Roe into law, but saying it is not the same as campaigning for it. (Also, could he maybe figure out a less convoluted way of saying it). I confess: I suspect that Biden lacks the fire to lead this fight. He has done a creditable job of restoring some kind of normalcy to America after Ketchup Boy's reign, but that's a different task than really leading a crusade.

"Biden lacks the fire" is an understatement; his brain is mush: and I suspect a lot of the people who voted for him in 2020 sought an anodyne Democrat as a corrective to the show business of the Trump presidency, and they hoped the party platform, written by the communist wing of the Donks, was standard political theater. Valerie Jarrett had other plans.  Red State's Bonchie, though, suggests that somewhere in that skull full of mush is a bit of political muscle memory.  "Biden is unwilling to outright overthrow the institutions of the United States in order to secure short-term political wins."  No matter what sort of old-man ravings the speechwriter has put into the script, it's all show, and if anything, the so-called progressives exercising their slim majorities now to ram even more foolishness through will bite them, and soon.  Bonchie continues, "While screaming about 'democracy,' they seek to exact complete power over its institutions, no matter what it takes. So despite his radicalism, Biden may be the last of a generation not willing to go quite that far."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Dear reader, how much evidence do you require that emergence will get the better of The Wisest Experts?

When CNN reports discontent with the Jarrett regency as "Rudderless, aimless and hopeless;" when Matthew Continetti says the regents have bugged out,  "There is no power, either overt or covert, in or behind the throne;" this is probably not the time to be proposing more refinements of Federal Power.  "Why are you so good at calling for new laws and so bad at enforcing the ones you have on the books?"  That is, when they're not exhorting the people to get used to the suffering.  "White House begs oil companies to improve situation. Can we drill? We’d rather you not. Can we build a refinery? We’d rather you not. Can we build a pipeline? We’d rather you not. Just make it better."

They're not going to.  "Since when did the welfare of 90 percent of the American people not matter to [the Jarrett regency's] party anymore?"  It never did, the reality is only being revealed now.  "Beyond the hauteur is the deceit."  Reality, though, might be on the side of emergence.  "[T]he more expansive government is, the more people are likely to feel that it is imposing someone else’s beliefs on them. The less government, the more opportunity for people to go their own way."  Complexity overwhelms the Men of System.  "[T]op-down bureaucracy is not equipped for the level of complexity, nuance, and personalization necessary to really get at the problem."

It's become a global phenomenon.  "The governments of virtually all the nations of Western Civ have become enemies of their people."  It's not the usual right-populist suspects noticing, either.  "Biden's chief flaw: his inherent lameness. He's playing president rather than being one."

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

STEREOTYPE THREATS AT WORK?

If Someone With Authority denigrates a class of people, how will those people respond?

The stereotype threat is a probably untestable hypothesis, although people have tried testing it,  in psychology.  "According to stereotype threat, members of a marginalized group acknowledge that a negative stereotype exists in reference to their group, and they demonstrate apprehension about confirming the negative stereotype by engaging in particular activities."  It's a way to make sense of the continued problems "historically marginalized people" face in school.

[S]tereotype threat refers to an individual’s fear that their actions or behaviors will support negative ideas about a group to which they belong.

For instance, if an individual is worried that performing badly on a test will confirm people’s negative beliefs about the intelligence of their race, gender, culture, ethnicity, or other forms of identity, they are experiencing stereotype threat.

The effects of stereotype threat are especially evident in the classroom, but they can also follow an individual into the workplace and throughout the rest of their lives.

The hypothesis might be more general.

[S]tereotypes are generalized thoughts that influence our beliefs about others but also beliefs about ourselves and even our own performance on important tasks. In some cases, these beliefs may be positive, and have the effect of making us feel more confident and better able to perform tasks. On the other hand, sometimes these beliefs are negative, and they have the effect of making us perform more poorly just because of our knowledge about the stereotypes.

Here's a summary of an attempt to test the hypothesis.

One of the long-standing puzzles in the area of academic performance concerns why African American students in the United States perform more poorly on standardized tests, receive lower grades, and are less likely to remain in school in comparison with White students, even when other factors such as family income, parents’ education, and other relevant variables are controlled. Steele and Aronson (1995) tested the hypothesis that these differences might be due to the activation of negative stereotypes. They hypothesized that African American students are aware of the inaccurate stereotype that ‘African American students are intellectually inferior to White students,’ and this stereotype creates a negative expectation. This negative expectation then interferes with students’ performance on intellectual and academic tests through fear of confirming that stereotype.

That's a pretty convoluted hypothesis, even by social science standards, but put simply it works like this: tell a person he's not going to measure up often enough and long enough, and his fears of not measuring up will manifest themselves in ... not measuring up.  Thus: they don't measure up.  "Be it race, gender, [socioeconomic status] or some other form of identity, examples of stereotype threat impacting the achievement of stigmatized groups is evident."

REGULATION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

Years ago, I taught courses on the regulation of public utilities. Legislatures established independent regulatory commissions, which had the power to authorize entrants and approve the rates the firms so authorized (traditionally railroads, electric power companies, coal or natural gas producers, and telephone companies) could charge.  Those commissions would hold public hearings, withdraw to the secular version of the Sistine Chapel, and issue certificates permitting some entrants to operate whilst denying them to others, as well as to approve rates.  Loosely, these commissions had a role similar to district courts as finders of fact and application of the law, and affected parties could appeal the rulings to the state or federal appellate courts, and some such proceedings ultimately were appealed to state or national supreme courts.

UNDO THE PROGRESSIVE EXCESS.

Ed Morrissey and Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds have been contemplating a reform to the Supreme Court in which each state appoints an associate justice to join the nine seated under the current rules.

That’s such a good idea, in fact, that the founders were way ahead of Glenn. His proposal reflects the Constitution’s foundation for the US Senate, which was supposed to be filled by appointees from state governments to represent their interests. The House was the People’s chamber, and the Senate was the states’ chamber, a structure that balanced the interests of both and tempered the reach of the federal government. The 17th Amendment destroyed that balance and made the Senate another vox populi instrument instead, which allowed for the rapid growth of the federal government at the expense of state governments that would have otherwise checked it.

I concur with the view that the Seventeenth Amendment has proven to be a mistake, and suspect, for example, that a Chuck Schumer seated by the New York legislature would not have subjected the country to that protracted (and failed) reconciliation wrangle of last year.

Hot Air's "Allahpundit" concurs.

Ideally we’d ban them from running for president and repeal the 17th Amendment.

But having been granted the power to directly elect their senators, American voters won’t agree to return it to their state legislatures. And that might be for the best in the age of Trump, when ambitious state politicians may be more willing to kowtow to his whims in hopes of earning his favor than MAGA voters are.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner indirectly corroborates that argument.  "I can’t imagine why anyone who has been or could be a state governor would want to become a US Senator."  If you're a governor, you're already as well positioned to seek the presidency as a senator is.  And perhaps his concluding process complaint, "[the Senate] has been the place where legislation goes to die."  Silly political scientist!  The Senate isn't for passing legislation.  It's for establishing yourself as a future president, that is, if you're not preoccupied with fending off a primary challenge.

SOMEBODY BUY THAT MAN A TRAIN SET.

You can walk away from higher education if you want.  "Isn't the point of being retired not having to come in to the office? 'Emeritus' is not Latin for 'doing for free that which I used to be paid to do.'"  It sounds like UCLA {motto: On! Wisconsin!) anthropologist Joseph Manson wants to keep writing, although getting any new work past peer review might be perilous.

For decades, anthropology has notoriously been riven by conflict between scientific and political activist factions, leading many departments to split in two, but UCLA’s department remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s. Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty recruited even more extremely militant graduate students to work with them.

I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions.

It's apparently no longer the custom in that field to have unruly workshops but still to respect the forms of scholarly inquiry.  "This document contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles a religious proclamation of anathema."  That goes beyond arguing from tight priors, but so it goes in the Church of Intersectionality, with all the dynamics of a middle-school clique populated by the kind of querulous weaklings that fill the common room.

In private conversations, I was able to elicit from some of my colleagues an embarrassed acknowledgment that the Woke faction had treated Jeff [Brantingham] abominably, and that we strongly resembled a dysfunctional family in denial. This pervasive institutional doublethink was partly a result of Jeff’s own apparent decision to refrain from open confrontation: I offered to help him, by defending him publicly if he wished, after both the 2018 AGSA resolution and the 2020 flyer posts, and he thanked me but politely asked me to stay out of it. But the principal driver of the doublethink was fear of the Woke faction.

That's so common, whether we're talking about the United States Senate, the UCLA faculty, or any other place where the dictatorship of the sociable holds sway, those of us who are willing to take the incoming often have people confiding their covert agreement or support, whilst keeping their heads down when the opportunity to take a stand arises.

In those circumstances, though, the prudent thing to do might be to go Galt.

One of my more cynical friends, a tenured professor at a different university, suggested [drawing a salary and exerting minimal effort.] He’s no longer on speaking terms with his colleagues, refuses all requests to serve on committees, and spends as much time as possible out of the country. He thinks I’m out of my mind, swapping a salary for a pension.

Maybe he’s right. And maybe I’m craven for ducking the unpleasantness that would be entailed by going that route, or by remaining at my job and becoming a chronic troublemaker.

The problem with taking that approach is that it looks like the kind of tenure abuse that keeps Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes current whilst not changing any wokies minds.

Better to invest in that train set.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY.

That's as good a time as any to think about what sort of trains to run under the tree.

I'm partial to vintage Lionel, myself.

It's possible to fit an O-27 circle under a small tree.

The quest in model railroading, though, has been to be able to make the trains smaller, so as to be able to have more action on the top of an end table, or in a briefcase.  Thus "Standard" gauge, with its large trains and no end of action accessories, gave way to O Gauge, as in the above, and before the War something called Half O, now HO, became practicable.

When I first became aware of model railroading beyond the Christmas display, the smallest commercially available scale was TT, for Table Top, at 1/120 of actual size.  For some reason, that became a popular scale in Soviet Russia, although it was very much a boutique scale in North America.

The quest for miniaturization continued, though, with N scale, at 1/160 of actual size drawing a lot of commercial support from the late 1960s on, and becoming the second-most-commonly modelled scale after HO.

That, however, was still not small enough, and something called Z scale, envisioning the end of the alphabet and the ultimate in scaling things down, at 1/220 actual size, showed up in the early 1970s.  One selling point was that a circle of track could be concealed in a desk drawer for an office worker to sneak in some playing with trains when the pointy-haired boss wasn't watching.

The alphabet might have been exhausted, and yet, not the impulse to miniaturize.  There's now something called T scale, at 1/450 actual size.

These scales offer all sorts of potential for complex displays under small Christmas trees.  I wonder, though, whether operators who like to switch industries will find value for money in them.  On the one hand, it's possible to capture a paper mill or steel plant without having to build a barn, but on the other hand coupling and uncoupling cars looks to be a chore.

The miniature motors, though, intrigue as possible ways to motorize O Scale diesel-electric or straight electric cars and locomotives with prototypically accurate drive trains.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Can you say "national 55 mph speed limit?"  By their fruits shall we know the self-styled progressives. "For too long, members of the left have been heralded as liberators, as progressives, as open-minded, tolerant, and peaceful. It’s all hogwash and always has been."  In politics: There's too much being decided in D.C.  Federalism is great, and it is a wonderful pressure relief valve.  In the culture: It was lefty heaven. Then they got greedy. You had a chance to leave us alone.  They could have taken their victories and shut up.  It's better, perhaps, to leave some things well enough alone.  "Because the alternative to a renewed federalism is a national divorce at best, and civil war at worst."

Now we push back.

THE COMEUPPANCE WAS A LONG TIME IN COMING.

I've long been suspicious of the latest attempt to "improve rail service" by offering less of it.  "[P]erhaps precision scheduled railroading is hype.  I fear that it's dressing up the false economy that downsizing or right-sizing or re-engineering or whatever you call it these days with a more positive sounding name."  The core concept of precision scheduled railroading is simple enough.  "A parked freight car is not making money for the railroad or moving goods for the shipper."  But it's possible to have fewer freight cars clogging the yards if there are fewer freight cars on the railroad.  "If those cars don't show up as promised, the shipper well might go to trucks."  I've long called attention to the folly of focusing on short-term returns to the detriment of the long-term health of the company, and that's particularly salient when you're dealing with a railroad running locomotives good for twenty years, freight cars good for forty, viaducts good for over a century, and tunnels that might be there forever.