REPAINTING THE DECK CHAIRS?

What used to be the University of Wisconsin System is now the Universities of Wisconsin.  The system president, Jay Rothman, explains.

Earlier this week I announced a new name and identity for our constellation of 13 public universities – the Universities of Wisconsin.

The goal is to shift the emphasis from our System to our Universities, which create opportunities for students and improve communities all across the state. It’s an exciting change that I’m confident the people of Wisconsin will embrace with pride.

But the new identity is not the only change we have been making at the Universities of Wisconsin. We’re embarking on change across all of our universities, consistent with our strategic plan, to ensure Wisconsin wins the War for Talent.

We set an ambitious goal to increase the number of graduates our universities produce each year from 37,000 to 41,000. To do that we need to enroll and retain more students at a time when there are fewer high school graduates coupled with a lower percentage of them enrolling in college.

That's the Dilbert moment.  Reality will not change.  There is excess capacity in the west central part of the state, along Highway 29.  The social set at the middling high schools will still weigh the relative merits of Oshkosh or Whitewater for the party scene.  The Madison campus will still attract out of state and overseas students to pay full freight in ways the Milwaukee campus can not.  So many years pass, so little changes.

What matters, though, to the citizens of Wisconsin is that Milwaukee, despite having neither high-visibility football nor royalties from rat poison, now has more Wisconsin residents enrolled than Madison, and Milwaukee's part of the social contract is to make sure that its brainiacs and strivers get the intellectual challenge they might have hoped to get at Madison, had Madison provided a slot for them. The incentive to the former teachers' colleges ought to be to lift their academic profiles as well.

Now that the deck chairs are repainted, we hear from the engine room.

I’ve also asked our universities to address their structural deficits. While this process is resulting in difficult decisions today, it will ensure the universities remain vibrant for decades to come.

At the same time, university leaders are assessing their branch campuses. We know that the status quo isn’t working and that we need creative solutions to address declining enrollment and underutilized facilities.

We’re also addressing change in our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I have stated my support for the principle of DEI based upon my experience in the private sector overseeing an international law firm. We need to prepare our students for an increasingly multicultural workforce and help all of our students succeed. We also acknowledge that our diversity and inclusion efforts must address, in addition to the needs of historically underrepresented groups, the needs of military veterans, people with disabilities, and first-generation students, while ensuring we protect diversity of thought.

Finally, we continue to promote free speech and civil dialogue on our campuses. Our universities must be places where all students, no matter their background or world view, can express opinions and beliefs. It is this exchange of ideas that creates knowledge so critical to our future here in Wisconsin. I have taken on this work personally, meeting privately with student leaders across our campuses to discuss the importance of civil dialogue.

They can pretend that closing the excess capacity is a "creative solution" or that the Diversity Weenies are able to promote free speech and civil dialogue.  I'm skeptical.

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I've made that point a few times.  Let Marian L. Tupy make it in a more graphic way.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. It is 1723, and you are invited to dinner in a bucolic New England countryside, unspoiled by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. There, you encounter a family of English settlers who left the Old World to start a new life in North America. The father, muscles bulging after a vigorous day of work on the farm, sits at the head of the table, reading from the Bible. His beautiful wife, dressed in rustic finery, is putting finishing touches on a pot of hearty stew. The son, a strapping lad of 17, has just returned from an invigorating horse ride, while the daughter, aged 12, is playing with her dolls. Aside from the antiquated gender roles, what’s there not to like?

As an idealized depiction of pre-industrial life, the setting is easily recognizable to anyone familiar with Romantic writing or films such as Gone with the Wind or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a description of reality, however, it is rubbish; balderdash; nonsense and humbug. More likely than not, the father is in agonizing and chronic pain from decades of hard labor. His wife’s lungs, destroyed by years of indoor pollution, make her cough blood. Soon, she will be dead. The daughter, the family being too poor to afford a dowry, will spend her life as a spinster, shunned by her peers. And the son, having recently visited a prostitute, is suffering from a mysterious ailment that will make him blind in five years and kill him before he is 30.

For most of human history, life was very difficult for most people. They lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers, and people with ailments spent much of their lives in agonizing pain. Entire families lived in bug-infested dwellings that offered neither comfort nor privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset, yet hunger and famines were common. Transportation was primitive, and most people never traveled beyond their native villages or nearest towns. Ignorance and illiteracy were rife. The “good old days” were, by and large, very bad for the great majority of humankind. Since then, humanity has made enormous progress—especially over the course of the last two centuries.

Yes, or let me tell you the plot of the shortest time-travel story.  Our intrepid traveller arrives someplace he's really keen to see, and, take your pick, is bitten by a mosquito and dies of yellow fever or malaria, untreatable then, or suffers a minor scrape that turns into an untreatable infection.

Now for the "underemployed" part.

In the mid-18th century, 40 percent of children died before their 15th birthday in Sweden and 50 percent in Bavaria. That was not unusual. The average child mortality among hunter-gatherers was 49 percent. Today, global child mortality is 4 percent. It is 0.3 percent in the Nordic nations and Japan.

Most of the people who survived into adulthood lived on the equivalent of $2 per day—a permanent state of penury that lasted from the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago until the 1800s. Today, the global average is $35—adjusted for inflation. Put differently, the average inhabitant of the world is 18 times better off.

There's a lot more at the link. (Via Cafe Hayek.)

THE ILLOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION.

I confess to being troubled by the parsing of "collective punishment" in a war setting.  War is a fight among state actors, and state actors are undertaken with some notion of collective action therein.  I therefore have trouble squaring a collective action involving killing people and breaking things with doing that killing and breaking in a way that isn't collectively punishing the subjects or citizens of the state actor having war waged on it.

That's why there are rules of war, the Laws of Armed Conflict.  It sounds good in theory.  "A proportional targeted response is not collective punishment."  All the same, a pattern-bombing raid is targeted, it is "proportional" under some circumstances, and there will be a lot of collateral damage.

War, whether or not there are international conventions, remains cruelty, and refining it is difficult, whether it's besieging Vicksburg, sending Phil Sheridan's cavalry through the Shenandoah, or surrounding Gaza.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

I suspect that no matter how careful, or how active, university presidents are in performing their Public Intellectual role and Issuing Earnest Statements about the Latest Bad Thing (because what's the point of weighing in on the Latest Good Thing?) somebody is going to carp.

SMALL BEGINNINGS.

Contemporary information technologies make launching a musical career easier.

On Oct. 24, 2006, a little-known singer-songwriter from Wyomissing, Penn., released her self-titled debut album. That 16-year-old was Taylor Swift, who went on to become one of the most successful and influential recording artists of the past two decades — shattering sales, chart and box-office records.

But 17 years before she was selling out a historic six-night "Eras Tour" run at Los Angeles's SoFi Stadium (and four months before Taylor Swift came out), she performed at Yahoo Entertainment's office in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 12, 2006. She was in her very first era, just a kid with corkscrew curls, cherub cheeks and a dream.

Yahoo Entertainment had a rising entertainers campaign, "Who's Next?" and that kid with corkscrew curls performed a song that apparently is still part of her tour today.

People who claim to be Serious Musicologists carp about her performance, or perhaps they grouse about her politics.  It's not that the Custodians of High Culture have covered themselves with glory recently.  Moreover, establishing yourself in entertainment is probably easier these days than it was when Lily Pons or Jenny Lind were coming up.

A little chutzpah can go a long way, all the same.

“I decided I wanted a record deal when I was 10 years old,” she told us at the time, sounding incredibly well-spoken and grounded even at such a young age. “I came to Nashville for the first time when I was 11 and had this little demo CD of me singing [Dixie] Chicks songs, and walked into every major record label and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Taylor. I’m 11. I want a record deal. Call me.’”

The article gives no hint that her parents were living vicariously through her accomplishments, which is refreshing contemplating the early years of Britney Spears or Ludwig van Beethoven.

YE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR, SHALL YOURSELF FIND BLESSING.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Trains will be roaming North America again in the run-up to the Festive Season.  There has been a railroad merger since the trains ran a year ago.  The Holiday Train (and I have an artistic interest in how the new corporate image will be applied to the boxcars) that runs in the United States will make a swing along the new Kansas City Southern metals during its tour.  I'm not sure about the first couple days; the tour will begin at Hermon, Maine (Northern Maine Junction, in railroad terms) and get to Montreal West and tie up in Jackman??

Never mind that.  Sunday, November 26 has the train at Pingree Grove, Illinois around 9 am, Byron, Illinois around noon, and Clinton, Iowa at midafternoon.  That's enroute to the end of The Milwaukee Road at Kansas City, after which the train will get on the Route of the Flying Crow.

The following Sunday, December 23, the train calls at Gurnee, Illinois, and Sturtevant, Wisconsin, tying up for the night in Milwaukee.

Kansas City Southern used to operate a Holiday Express train with a similar purpose, and that will also run this Festive Season, making calls along the Meridian - Vicksburg - Baton Rouge lines that Kansas City Southern acquired to connect with the big eastern railroads.

These trains run to provide entertainment and an opportunity to make cash or in-kind contributions, to the local food banks along the Holiday Train's routes, and to the Salvation Army where the Holiday Express calls.

Mark your calendars and make a note in your shopping list.

GET YOUR DEUTSCH ON.

John Kass turns his column over to Bill Melonides for Opa Oktoberfest.  Had the story involved Mr Melonides's grandfather, we could have some Greco-German wordplay, nicht wahr?

Gemütlichkeit is a German term used to convey an idea of a feeling of warmth, a state of friendliness, and of good cheer. My dad was not oblivious to the less glamorous side of Oktoberfest, but he chose to overlook the drunkenness and revel in the gemütlichkeit. He would return from Germany recharged and loaded up with bottles of German wines and cases of the local beer that he had personally sampled. Year after year his affection for this “spirit” grew.

It grew so much that on many Sunday mornings while driving to church we would all be subjected to the German hour on the radio. It was only broadcast for one hour each week and that unfortunately was from 9 to 10 on Sunday mornings. As kids we thought he was crazy, my mom thought he was crazy, even his mom thought he was crazy since we picked her up on the way to church. He was undeterred.

As the years went by, he took us to various local German restaurants, most of which are now sadly shuttered: Zum Deutschen Eck, The Golden Ox, Chicago Brauhaus…just to name a few.

Later, the extended family did their own cooking.

In addition to the local German restaurants that I mentioned earlier, and the various local German fests that we would go to, my dad would periodically visit nearby European markets like Kuhn’s or Meyer’s and come home with loads of German groceries and we would eat German food for days. In his post military days, our Labor Day barbecue morphed into a mini-Oktoberfest. Spero would run out to the German stores and stock up on bratwurst, knackwurst, Thüringen and German beers and my mom would prepare a selection of different foods and sides. My two grandmothers would come over and on occasion my aunt would make the prized Karlsruhe potato salad as only she had the recipe. This tradition continued until my mom passed. For a while my brothers and I would pick up my dad and go to one of the remaining German restaurants for dinner, until he passed.

Now the home cooking is part of campouts with the next generation.

They loved the food. One of the dads who was of German descent, said that he’d never had food as good in a German restaurant. As I watched them all eat, my heart was warmed, and my mind filled with memories of years past. I wished Spero could have been there with me. It was a very emotional night for me. It had been over 10 years since I had enjoyed these dishes and now with both my parents gone, I was again with friends sharing the gemütlichkeit.

A couple years later I was preparing to cook for another fall camp out and in keeping with my desire to mix up the menus, I asked the dads if there was anything in particular that they would want to eat.

One of the dads suggested, “maybe you could do the German food again?” I suppose that is how traditions begin because the fall campout for Princesses was an Oktoberfest for the rest of my tenure as chef. Last year I was contacted by my replacement and asked to share the recipes for the upcoming campout. I heard it was a tremendous success. The tradition lives on as others now spread the gemütlichkeit.

Perhaps the opportunity for that Greco-German wordplay will still arise.

As the Oktoberfest season begins I’ll often play the music in the car for my girls on the way to school in the morning. Initially they would cringe at the sound of this foreign music until I explained to them how much their Papou Spero loved this music, how he forced us to listen to it it as children and how I have grown to appreciate it. They eventually began to tolerate it and now even they have their favorite songs. Sowing the seeds of gemütlichkeit.

Opa! Opa!  Prosit!

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Biden has the Sadim touch.  Joe Biden is not our functioning president.  He's going to appear on 60 Minutes???  "It took four days for him to give [Tuesday's] speech is probably a sign that it’s taking them longer and longer to get him ready for even the tightly managed appearances."  (Yes, that announcement was for a noon start and it began around half past one, my time.)  Let the man nap, indeed.

Confound it, isn't there enough of the traditional stuff to elaborate on?  Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, numbers, number and number.  "The poor and unconnected don’t fly internationally to attend a 'rave for peace.'"

להזדיין ולגלות  What have I always said about process, nuance, failure?  "The peace process has been dead for years, but the mindset behind it survives."  These are not serious people.  Failure.  "Weak and failing leaders and systems make for interesting times."  Consequences.  "Hamas wanted an Old Testament war and now they’re going to get one."  Responsibility.  "Gaza has been on a path to destruction for a while."  Israel has the right to act.  "Imagine it was Brighton or Plymouth, and scores of armed men were pouring in."  Israel's unity government has no appetite for restraint.  Reap what you sow.  "Peace comes when a war ends, and wars usually end when one side loses decisively. That should be the Palestinians."  It's not a time for nuance.  "In total war, the situation in which Israel finds itself, destroying the will of the civilian population to resist is the ultimate military objective."  This is a death match.  "Seen Jericho lately?"

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

SOONER OR LATER THE INTELLECTUALS WILL REDISCOVER THE VALUE OF COHERENT BELIEFS.

Indiana political scientist Jeffrey Isaac recognizes where their absence leads us.  "Voices of sanity, and reason, are in too short supply, and in constant danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war."  I mean, when Albert Camus is providing the clarity!  “When violence answers violence in a growing frenzy that makes the simple language of reason impossible, the role of the intellectual cannot be... to excuse from a distance one of the violences and condemn the other... that role is clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms, even when this is against the current tendency.”

A lengthy essay follows.  It will reward careful study.

DEMOCRACY LOOKS A LOT LIKE ORWELL'S PIGS.

A middle school teacher conducts an activity.

My scary classroom social experiment demonstrating how tyrannies arise from democracies:

I gave a bunch of extra credit tickets to the first few students to arrive in class, then everyone else received 1-2 tickets.

The kids that came into class last were outraged by the “injustice” of those that came first getting a greater reward.

There were no rules or directions for this day in class. I just told them I’d act as an enforcer of whatever they decided to do in the 47 minutes.

The story suggests this activity took place some years ago; it illustrates the folly of making up extra credit as you go along, and I can't help but wonder whether some Karen lodged a gripe with the principal, whether about the arbitrariness of the extra credit or about that Gadsden flag on the wall.  There's a snapshot at the link showing both the flag and the young Napoleon who emerges as proconsul.

She used her charisma and charm to court the majority of her peers that had less coupons, and played off their resentment of the minority that had earned more tickets for arriving to class early.

In the allotted time she convinced her peers that if they voted to give her absolute power, she would confiscate the 40+ coupons held by the minority and distribute them equally.

The minority of students were frustrated, but powerless against the majority vote.

Emily was elected to a “supreme ruler” position, and as promised she confiscated all of the tickets from the minority of students that arrived to class first.

Wolves, sheep, dinner.  Oh, sorry, no, what happened next was "Some animals are more equal."

She kept the vast majority of tickets for herself, and distributed a few to some of her friends.

It was a microcosm of what has happened historically time and time again, and the danger our republic faces.

I asked the students to write a reflection on how they now viewed unrestrained majority-rules democracy, and their opinions has definitely changed from the day prior.

The essay ends here, with only the note that Young Napoleon went on to become a restaurant manager and a mom. Nothing about whether the teacher stepped in and voided the extra credit, or whether the reflection pieces (this was middle school) touched on either vanguardism or the administrative state. “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Let the record show that Young Napoleon won the election by pretending to be public spirited.  Sometimes you don't see the advance auction of stolen goods until after the goods are stolen.

WITHDRAW YOUR SANCTION.

For years, I have called attention to the administrative usurpations turning the calling of professor into the chore of special education teacher whilst requiring the sort of input-measurement useful in crafting a control panel in such a way as to encourage derivative scholarship of the minimal publishable unit form, rather than engaging in creativity.

Do you want to know who is John Galt?  "The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts-the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises-the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found-they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values."

Little did I know, at the time, how prescient that John Galt quote was.  "The capture of American universities by this moral rot has left many professors who are committed to old-school ideas—like, say, the outlandish notion that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of truth—heading for the exits."  Details at that link, and this.

Fine.  I can easily expand the scope of my posts.  "I have withdrawn my sanction in the strongest possible terms.  I reserve the right, though, to bring to your attention the struggles of embattled faculty to reclaim rights and responsibilities more properly theirs."

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I've noted that from time to time.  "We're all underemployed compared to our ancestors who had cows to milk and fields to plow, with no mechanical assistance. We're rich enough that scaling back ambition doesn't have to mean starving."  Sometimes, sex roles figure in the evolution of work.

Apt. 11-D, Invisible Adjunct, and Sara at Crescat Sententia weigh in on the tensions between moms caring for their kids full time, women caring for their kids and doing paid work, and women without kids doing paid work. (I hope that distinction is consistent with 11-D's and Invisible's observation that raising kids is work and not really equivalent to a hobby.)

But there is a deeper theme running through several of the paid media posts inspiring the commentaries linked above. In Ellen Ostrow it's this: "The problem, it seems to me, is that issues of equity have been framed in the context of balancing work and family life. Understandably, this renders the concerns of people without children or other family obligations as irrelevant." Cady Wells puts it this way: "As a childless faculty member I wonder why the ability for me to have evenings and weekends is not as important. I'm sympathetic to the difficulties of the faculty parent, but it's not necessarily easier being childless. The pressures are just different." And Lisa Belkin goes beyond the Battle of the Sexes: "Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men."

But methinks Belkin doth claim too much, and Ostrow and Wells doth protest too much. We are all ... whether raising children or not, whether working late with the help of artificial light or not, whether tenured or not, whether taking derivatives or playing on the Internet ... seriously underemployed compared to our ancestors of 100 or 150 years ago. Consider, for example, the time squeeze that comes from making time to work out, or to run, or to get the kids to a sporting event. Fast-rewind to a time when we got PAID to work out, shoveling coal into a locomotive, or walking behind a plow, or doing the laundry on a washboard, or chopping wood for the cookstove, or gathering water. Whether I'm keying into Maple or checking the math with paper and pencil, I'm not burning anywhere near the calories I would on any of those other jobs.

That post is twenty years old, and a lot of those links have rotted.  There are also a lot of moving parts in there, many of which might provide inspiration for an economic historian who gets demography.

DO UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS HOLD FORTH AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS OUT OF A SOCIAL OBLIGATION?

Duke political economist Michael "Kids Prefer Cheese" Munger suggests they resist the temptation.

The only choices are:

A. Don't issue public statements on things that do not directly affect your university. DIRECTLY.

B. Issue statements on some things, but not others, and THEN be prepared to issue a statement on why you choose not to issue a statement.

CORRECT Answer: A

He's responding a statement from a Stanford dean, Jennifer A. Frey, who seeks to codify when Senior Administrator qua Public Intellectual is doing the Responsible Thing.  "But as a dean, it isn't my job to weigh in with my students on current affairs unless they are somehow disrupting the work of the college I oversee."  Within her post is a statement from the president and provost of Stanford.  That statement might refer to things that DIRECTLY affect Stanford, ranging from "triggering" chalkings on the sidewalk to demonstrators yelling at each other.

Stanford University is a community of scholars. We believe it is important that the university, as an institution, generally refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters that extend beyond our immediate purview, which is the operations of the university itself. Maintaining university neutrality allows for our individual scholars to explore them freely. In recent years, many universities have gotten into the habit of issuing frequent statements about news events. This creates a number of difficulties. The decision to take a position about one event or issue yields implications for silence with regard to other issues; given that different subsets of a campus community may be more or less affected by particular issues, this inconsistency is felt acutely. It can enmesh universities in politics and create a sense of institutional orthodoxy that chills academic freedom. In addition, crafting each message is challenging, from gathering facts and context on complex issues at the speed of online media and the news cycle while also walking a line between platitudes and overly political positions.

And yes, the culture warriors are in full cry, particularly when other institutions of higher learning you might have heard of unleash the Hamas cheerleaders.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR FREQUENCY.

Florida's Brightline only recently began serving Orlando, and they've added more trains.

Brightline has announced that train service between Miami and Orlando will double to 30 trips daily starting Monday.

The news comes less than two weeks after the company's inaugural trip to central Florida.

Brightline said there will be 15 trains in each direction to and from Orlando. The company currently runs eight trips each way.

The first train will leave Miami at 6:41 a.m., arriving in Orlando at 10:19 a.m., and the last train of the day will leave Miami at 9:41 p.m.

Meanwhile, the first train will leave Orlando at 4:38 a.m., and arrive into Miami at 8:11 a.m. The final train will leave Orlando at 8:54 p.m.

Brightline also has stops in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach. Additional early morning and late-night trains will operate between these stations.

There are some operational considerations, to be elaborated on in a future post, that militate against an on-the-hour memory pattern schedule.

We'll be paying attention to how well the extra frequencies draw passengers, and to whether that quasi-commuter service along the southeast coast pays off.

PLAYING TO THE BASE.

I don't have much respect for ward-heeler politicians.

There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

The phenomenon is apparently international.  Hamas is to Gaza as Black Lives Matter is to Chicago.

Yes, you might argue that one organization calls attention to militarized policing in Gaza, while the other began by calling attention to overzealous policing in Ferguson or Minneapolis.

The politics of both organizations, though, have the effect of encouraging the self-destructive behavior.  "There is no shortage of repulsive expressions of anti-Semitic hate in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel, but it is hard to top this one from the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter."  Yeah, paragliding into a dance party to rape, pillage, and murder is going to win friends and influence people.

In other words, BLM Chicago really is no better than the Hamas terrorists who paraglided into that festival and murdered, kidnapped, and raped innocent people in the name of "freedom" from the so-called "occupation" or whatever.

Not that we didn't know this already, but it's important to document it for the record all the same.

Seriously, dear reader, how hard is it to screw up BEACH FRONT PROPERTY?  By putting it in the hands of the Levantine version of ward-heeler politicians, that's how.

Entire books have been written on how the Gaza Strip came in to being. We’re not going to go back to Biblical times on today’s post, but we will stick to living memory that goes back to 1950 when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million. The various Arab-Israeli wars ebbed and flowed around Gaza over the decades, but even in peace Egypt never wanted it back. Israel tired of being an occupying force, and under pressure from local and international Smartest People in the Room™, they hoped for the best in 2005 & unilaterally withdrew its settlements and security forces from Gaza. The Gazans then had “elections” and in the end Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and have had it ever since.

Hamas. You know, the terrorist organization. Those guys.

The fact Gaza became a terrorist run safe space didn’t stop the “International Community (IC),” the internationalist left, and useful idiots from turning it in to a global welfare state that never had to earn support through constructive behavior. Humanitarian aid came in from all over the place, and with each passing year it became a stronger and more effective proxy for Iran. There was never a popular uprising against Hamas by the residents of Gaza, just the opposite. They own this. They are “this.”

Well, yes.  If the residents of Gaza, after the War, had developed those beaches and become a tourist destination, the internationalist left and the Islamists would not have had a population kept in a parlous state, the better to mau-mau Israel or neoliberalism or American hegemony or whatever with.  Chicago might be facing a similar fate.  That is, unless that Democrat base in Chicago tires of the ongoing crime and the importation of even more people to be kept in a parlous condition.

THE WRONG INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT TO MAKE.

Abbie Hoffman might have quipped, "Sometimes the best intellectual argument is 'f*ck you!'"

It's not the best argument to make when a state senator is watching.

Aggressive trans activist wearing a mask harasses people outside Penn State University.

He then verbally abuses a Pennsylvania State Senator screaming obscenities at him for attending the women’s speaking event.

🎥 @CollegeFix @thelogandubil

pic.twitter.com/8S1jbI7hf4

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) October 11, 2023

State senator Cris Dush, who represents State College, kept his composure quite well in his interaction with that exemplar of our Woke Intellectual Betters.  I doubt that the punk understood the full import of "Want to lose $150 million?"  It's hard enough to stand up for Penn State in light of the football scandals, and these exemplars suggest there's more than the odd couch burning behind some grousing I've seen on urban planning social media about State College restricting the extent of zoning for student housing.

THE CRAFT OF DOING ECONOMICS.

The economics commentariat are weighing in on Claudia Goldin's Nobel, with several observations that might be useful to the aspiring researcher.  Let's start with an observation from Brian Albrecht at Economic Forces.

[T]o truly appreciate her contributions, one must dive deep into her comprehensive body of work. Unlike last year's prize, where half of it focused on a single model of bank runs, Goldin's legacy sprawls over decades of research. If you look at her citations, you don’t see one HUGE paper. You see decades worth of hard work. There’s generally a bias against this work for the Nobel, compared to one flash of insight, and Claudia’s work probably has something to say about that…

I'm not sure about that characterization; years ago we understood the Nobel as recognition for a body of work, although if it's Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, perhaps we're talking about a HUGE doctoral dissertation!  And carp, if you must, about Paul Krugman's award being politically motivated; he adapted a number of insights from regional economics into trade theory, and influenced all sorts of derivative scholars and policy wonks.

For what it's worth, Mr Albrecht might have alluded to the two Pauls in his essay.  "My conjecture is that it is because those papers represent a culmination of years of study. This stands in contrast to a more-typically-male form of genius like one sees in some mathematical insight generated as a 20-year-old grad student."

POLITICS DIVIDES.

Dear reader, does the following list of authoritarian strategies remind you of anybody?

1. Encourage anti-intellectualism.
2. Undermine moral standards, especially among lawmakers. 
3. Pursue power for power's sake.
4. Develop a spiritual connection with loyal followers.
5. Rewrite national history.
6. Create political chaos.

Perhaps "both-sides-do-it" deflection is so popular with the political class because it works.  It's easier to point out the moral failings of one's opponents than it is to recognize that politics is a drag on civilization, and it's easier to shore up support with people who generally agree with you by boosting their self esteem, even at the expedient of running down the Others.  I'm being deliberately provocative, again, but will we ever learn that reality is emergent, and it will find ways around the most carefully constructed and polemically advocated governance structures.

RIDDEN HARD AND PUT AWAY WET.

A few weeks ago, Britney Spears posted a video involving dances with knives.

Pop superstar Britney Spears finally decided to address a recent wellness check she received from local law enforcement after posting a video that went viral featuring her doing a little jig with a couple of very realistic-looking knives. Spears’ mental health has been questionable at best for years now, but folks were convinced she was doing much better these days. It wasn’t that long ago that she was finally released from a conservatorship, during which her parents ran her estate, due to her not being stable emotionally and psychologically.

Leave the legalities aside and look closely at the lady's face.

That's the beaten down look of an adulthood of poverty, not the countenance of somebody leading a comfortable life.

I'd draw comparisons with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," except that the Migrant Mother's children built a competence for themselves after the War.

KUDOS.

To Claudia Goldin, "For having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes."

Professor Goldin was completing a dissertation at Chicago under Robert Fogel's supervision when she taught a principles of microeconomics class at Wisconsin.  I took that class.

Professor Goldin was being recruited by Princeton at the time and subsequently called to Harvard.  We've noted some of her work on those labor market outcomes, as well as research on the effect of third-party payments on tuitions.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution posted much more.  Let me highlight this.  "Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!"

Yes.  How many times did I dress students down for saying "there's no data" when they meant "I can't find a government file to download?"  Sometimes when you dig it out yourself, you can tackle anomalies, and the fun is in the anomalies.

Yes, that's a high-risk, possibly high-reward research strategy, and the prudent thing to do might be to stick to the safe topics.  The recognition, though, might go to the people with the chops and the persistence to track down the anomalies and analyze the heck out of them.

Well done.