I grew up with muscle cars around the neighborhood -- I turned 16 in that time when OPEC just raised the price of a barrel of oil from $3 to $22, so everyone wanted a Beetle like my mom had, but which I hated. We also had a '63 black Buick LeSabre that Dad had just put a stick shift into for reasons I never learned. Maybe a midlife crisis. And there was the Ford Maverick, which was either Lime Gold (officially) or baby poop yellow (my term, though with a different slang for the object -- I try to avoid those words on this blog.)

Every kid my age had a car they yearned for, burned for. A Goat, or a Mustang -- particularly one of those Shelbys. For me? It was the Charger.

I grew up in Manchester NH, and north of town was a back road out to Candia and on towards my family's ancetral home in Dover (Dad) and Rollinsford (Mom, one town over). The road was seldom patroled so many of us knew you could open up the engine on that road. So one day I'm driving the road and on the left side, and there it is. A yellow (canary, not the color of baby offal) Charger. 1969, R/T 440. And it's for sale by owner. And it was near the end of summer and I was getting ready for college and had money in my pocket. I had more than half the price.

So I get Dad to come look with me. He takes one look and says "King, forget it. You can't afford the gas." "Who cares, Dad? I'd only drive it sometimes. It would be coolcoolcool to look at in the driveway." "We're not a car museum, King. Forget it. Let's go home." Crushed, I left.

Well, I'm sending this link to Dad tonight. What's number 2 on this list, Pops? Huh? Huh?

And a few years later, damned if Dad didn't buy a 74 Pontiac Grand Am SJ, which my brother drove. That really pissed me off. Oops.

(h/t: Newmark's Door)

There is a general theory in the blogosphere that there is a strong positive correlation between the success of democracy movements in the developing world and the quality of its young female protestors. Now it's not a hundred percent correlation, but it's pretty good.

And good golly! democracy is coming to Bolivia! This is a country that was much more free five years ago, so the taste for freedom is still fresh.

A 2004 referendum partly re-nationalized Bolivia's hydrocarbon industries, but indigenous leaders like Movement Toward Socialism congressman Evo Morales are agitating for total state ownership. As a result, citizens in gas-producing districts like Santa Cruz and Tarija would like autonomy from the rest of Bolivia, whose government they view as irresponsible and responding to fear.

And in Santa Cruz, the vote for autonomy is this Sunday.

(h/t: Jay Reding)

I'm in. Now sexy is covered.

I'm overwhelmed by the response to my request for guestbloggers -- both in quantity and quality! Thanks for your offers, everyone, and if you've already sent one please stand by for further information. I will get back to everyone who's offered -- even you, Lefty. I will need to find some way to reduce the list, and maybe we can make a contest out of this.

I will still take more offers at comments at this blog's name (as one word) dot com.

I may have found something SCSU is "ahead of the curve" on. Most universities do not give college credit for internships, arguing that you only get academic credit for academic work (and by implication, academic work means stuff academics give you to do or read). But some firms are now refusing to take unpaid interns unless those students are receiving college credit, says the Wall Street Journal (subscriber link).

Employment lawyers say there has been a burst of lawsuits in recent years related to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulates wages and overtime. The number of FLSA collective-action suits filed nationwide almost tripled to 1,076 in 2004, from 397 three years earlier, according to an analysis by Allan Weitzman, who heads the employment-law practice for Proskauer Rose LLP in Boca Raton, Fla. Such suits largely center on issues of overtime pay, he says. But the increase may be leading employers to be more careful in general about their work forces, including making sure their internships are clearly defined and not exploitive.

One of the factors the Labor Department uses to define an unpaid "trainee," or intern, is that the experience is for the benefit of the student. Receiving credit for the experience helps satisfy that requirement, says Mr. Weitzman.

We're different in two ways. There may be some departments at SCSU that do not want their interns to be paid, but it's a minority. Most of our interns are. Second, we have a university number that creates internship credits for any department that wants to run an internship program. Students pay, but since our credits are about $200 each including student activity fees, there's minimal squawking. Students and the internship director can set the number of credits where they like, as long as the student's willing to pay. There's guidance that relates credits to hours worked, so that you can't work five hours a week and get twelve internship credits, but you can work forty hours, paid, per week and pay for anywhere from one to twelve credits. Students are graded based on a journal and paper -- many times, directors in programs will call or even visit the internship site. My sister does this in her culinary program all the time, though that's much different than the internships we're discussing here. But her program for a two-year certificate isn't that different from what an intern in a university's social work program would look like.

Many schools are now moving to something like what we have. But others insist that the "credit" earned at the school does not count towards graduation -- even if the student pays for it. My question is this: Why would universities view work experience that applies to their major not count as "academic work"? Are we just being haughty?

The WSJ (subscribers link) parses the Federal Reserve's statement to suggest perhaps the Fed got a little more dovish. Notice the language that the economy is "cooler" and that May's "some further policy firming may yet be needed," they say. August Fed funds futures jumped 35 basis points, indicating all those who were betting on 5.5% in August aren't so sure now, so for a few weeks we'll keep guessing. The next big sign of which way we go should be the employment report a week from tomorrow. Everyone on Wall Street went long for the weekend, it appears. My reading is, they trust the Fed's statement on cooling economy and inflation. I expect more betting in that direction next week until the employment report and then the CPI/PPI numbers in mid-month.

I will be in need of blogging assistance later this summer. If you are a younger blogger or a wannabe, and you might be able to contribute some material during the second half of July and early August, drop a line to comments at this blog's name dot com. Be it a few contributions or a daily jonesing, I'm interested in talking to you.

I mean, there's some stuff you just can't make up.

A St. Cloud man faces DWI charges after neighbors reported him riding a lawn mower up and down a city street and through people’s yards.

Karl Benjamin Thompson, 24, was passed out in his neighbor’s driveway when police arrived late Tuesday in the 6200 block of Cape East Court. His blood-alcohol level was measured at 0.23, nearly three times the legal limit for driving in Minnesota, said Sgt. Joe Kraayenbrink.

Because Thompson has prior DWI convictions, police seized the lawn mower he was riding, Kraayenbrink said.

Neighbors reported a severely intoxicated man riding a lawn mower up and down the street and through several yards in the neighborhood at about 10:50 p.m. Tuesday, Kraayenbrink said. Police found Thompson passed out on the lawn mower when they arrived. He was taken to Stearns County Jail, where he faces possible charges of driving while intoxicated.

Are you thinking Alice's Restaurant right now? "Son, whatcha in for?" "Mowing while intoxicated." I want to be sure this is preserved so he can explain this to his children some day. Tell them he rehabilitated himself.

While these letter-writers from Growth and Justice may think they are nonpartisan, a cursory look at their list shows me only one Republican on their board of directors, Arlen Erdahl, who is probably still bitter about being turned out in Reagan's first midterm elections by Tim Penny. Obviously he's learned nothing from supply side economics, or if he did he's not sharing with the bunch of them. Just like the super-rich who are asking for the death tax to be extended (but not that it will apply to them), the rich of Minnesota can shift resources so that they don't have to pay state taxes. The merely affluent -- the two professionals working to earn about $120,000 a year -- would still get socked with an extra $2000 in taxes to pay for the super-rich's better Minnesota. The executive board of Growth and Justice has no intention of paying the tax -- if they did, they'd write checks to Pawlenty's request, not whine to the STrib when Kersten suggests the same thing. Governor, let us know if you get any.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, Mitch is running a blogswarm on the patricians.

One aspect of teaching at SCSU is the faculty contract, which doesn't allow for merit pay and has rather paltry 2.4% steps for a year of experience. It's not unusual for new faculty to earn more than faculty with 8-12 years experience. What we need is a this deal wherea community college president retires for 30 days and gets his severance package, and then returns to work with a new contract. His severance? $893,000. They also gave him the Porsche Boxster they had leased for him before. The board says this president is indispensible, and that because his colege is so large that comparisons to other schools don't work.

(h/t: reader Pat Mattson.)

"So," I'm asked this morning, "what do you think of Pawlenty free tuition plan?" "Feh. In the short run it's a middle class tax cut. In the long run, it's a disaster." "Wow, I thought you liked Pawlenty."

I do, but this is a bad plan. The STrib reporters make the link to Georgia's HOPE scholarship started in 1993. But researchers at the University of Georgia have not found the program to be very useful. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution summarized these findings last year:

Predictably, high-school GPAs increased markedly after 1993 with a pronounced spike at B. SAT scores, however, did not increase so grade inflation, not academic improvement, appears to be the cause. Once in college students must maintain a B average to keep their scholarship - the program is rather lax on how many or what courses must be taken however. The result is that scholarship students take fewer classes, take easier classes and when the going gets tough they withdraw more often. Apparently HOPE comes at the expense of fortitude.

HOPE increases the number of students enrolled in GA colleges only modestly and the bulk of the increase comes from students who are induced by the cash to stay in GA, instead of going to school in another state, rather than from students who, without HOPE, would never have gone to college. What do the students do with the cash they save on tuition? Cornwell and Mustard (2002) find that car registrations increase significantly with county scholarships!

Here's the research of Cornwell and Mustard. I end up agreeing with David Strom (this happens quite often) that "we're just making a flat-out subsidy for kids who could go to college anyway and most of whom would be able to afford it." It also has had the effect of increasing tuitions at Georgia schools, so much that the state had to cap the tuition payments to remove the incentive. Like in Georgia, this will most likely make it harder for students to get into the University of Minnesota. Here's the plan Pawlenty has laid out.

It's at least only for two years -- unless you go into math and science, where you get all four years, but where it's much harder to get a B average. Cornwell and Mustard have a newer paper showing an increase in enrollments in colleges of education by HOPE scholarship recipients. On that one, Governor, you got it right.

Despite the title the newspaper chose for the column, I think Jeff Bineham's column in today's local paper on grades and grade inflation in the university is quite sensible. Bineham says grades are assigned by faculty using three different purposes: how a student ranks versus the basic requirements of the course -- where just meeting them warrants a 'C'; how students performed relative to each other in the class (the best getting an 'A'); and how much of the work assigned is completed (completing all the work is an 'A'.) Many students, on the other hand...

assume they start with an A, and if they do things wrong the assessment moves down to a B, then a C, and so on. For me, the C indicates the student has done satisfactory work; for the student it is a sign of numerous deficiencies.

That matches my experience for a majority of my lower-division students. By the time they become juniors, most of my students understand that a 'C' is a standard that spans different classes in different years, and that we grade output, not input. Thus my students should be trained to Prof. Bineham's standard. And if they're not, that would be their problem.

Prof. Bineham then suggests that the answer to this may be the elimination of grades altogether.

Some colleges already employ this strategy. They believe grades are detrimental to learning and do not issue transcripts to students. The students become less concerned about high scores and more concerned about discussing interesting texts and writing excellent papers.

These responses share a goal: to change how students think about the meaning of grades.

When students themselves demand rigorous evaluation, inflated grades will be of little concern.

I'm not as convinced. Students want rigorous evaluation, but they also want clear signals to potential employers of their merit relative to others so that they can win the race for the good job. (Oh, but King! they are pursuing broader goals than career advancement in college! Sorry, not the ones I advise.) Students do seek prizes -- and that can be used to encourage additional learning, if one structures grades to provide incentives. For example, I've recently changed my gradesheets so that I don't tell students what share of the points already awarded they've received. Students would come in saying "I had a 'B' going into the final." That assumes they would earn a B on the final. Why assume that? I now say "here's how many points you have so far, and here's how many you need for these various grades. Study enough to get the letter grade you want." Give feedback early and often, and the level of whingeing about grades goes down.

First rule of economics, right? Incentives matter.

The other problem with the no-grade rule is the concern students will have to get more favor from the professor to get that better, now-more-subjective evaluation. What would this do to the student who takes views that are different from those the professor espouses? Would the elimination of grades increase or decrease the pressure on students to conform to the political stance of the instructor? "Oh, that sort of thing never happens." Really?

UPDATE: Prof. Bineham kindly emails me to say he prefers his other solution, that each grade on the transcript would also contain information on the average grade for the course. He's right insofar as for the "philosophy of grading" he prefers, this makes the most sense.

That's the description a federal Dept. of Education report called "very rough" first draft says about the state of higher education.

What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, frequently self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a knowledge economy. It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, an increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and new paradigms.

Students now use a "cafeteria approach" to education, taking a little here and a little there in both time and place. The idea that one will shape students into "Huxley Men" through the general education program is increasingly an obsolete model. And increasingly more expensive.

We believe that affordability is directly affected by colleges’ and universities’ failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity, since the current system provides institutions with few incentives to do either. The problem is made worse by the confusing and complex nature of the nation’s financial aid system.

The thought that a university would confront its faculty senate with a program for seeking cost efficiencies would be laughable if it wasn't tragic. A business that raised its price 38% adjusted for inflation over ten years, while seeing its product quality slip in international competition, would normally be grasping for any efficiencies they can find, but not at your friendly neighborhood public university.

Pointed out to me by the Elder, this morning's StarTribune argues that the national political conventions coming to the Twin Cities would be an economic win-win.

Hosting a national political convention would cost this region a projected $40 million to $45 million, in both public and private contributions. The return on that investment is estimated at more than twice that amount. Each of the 20,000-plus partisans in attendance is projected to spend $1,500, yielding about $30 million. Add, too, the millions spent on staging the convention and broadcasting it around the globe.

The intangible benefits would also be abundant. A national convention would bring journalists from all over the globe here to file stories with Minnesota datelines. Many of those stories would feature this place and its people. Growth in tourism and economic development are bound to result.

I don't have any problem with the conventions coming to Minneapolis, but arguing for economic benefits shouldn't be part of the story, for the same reasons we gave for the Super Bowl. Our friend Mark Yost is coming out with a book this fall on the business of the NFL, and in it he discusses the costs and benefits as well. The money in the hotels doesn't stay in Minneapolis (though the room tax money does -- leave it to the STrib to like benefits to government.) The Beacon Hill Institute estimates benefits in New York City as being much lower, and even they look at gross benefits rather than netting out the loss from all those who would NOT come to NYC because of the congestion, lack of hotel space, etc., during the convention period? Beacon Hill estimated these costs at $46 million for NYC. Do it during the Minnesota State Fair period, and those costs are higher for Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I do not think the STrib is taking those costs into account.

Also, I wonder what the net economic benefit would be of having protestors at the RNC convention?

THyere has been an announcment in the last hour or so that the University of Colorado has issued a letter of dismissal to Ward Churchill. According to PirateBallerina, Churchill now has ten days to appeal the recommendation to a faculty committee. I know, I know, another committee! But tenure is such that I prefer to see them work through the whole process. Hopefully the next committee continues to understand what the previous committee did -- regardless of your feelings over Churchill's "Little Eichmanns" statement and whether the university pursued him for this, academic fraud must be prosecuted and punished no matter what the motives of the prosecution.

I'll still be "surprised" if he's dismissed, but at least that's down from "shocked".

A retired professor of education at the University of Minnesota at Duluth (it dosen't say so on the article but does at the university's website) penned an op-ed in the local paper there that argues we've gotten about as much as we can get from public education in high schools. We don't spend enough, he says. He tries the following parable:

I have an Uncle Al who always admired race cars and dreamed of the day he could own his own and race with the big boys and girls. So when he retired as a high school principal in 1995, he bought a brand new Toyota Camry, the best-selling family car in America, as his race car. He had read in Consumer Reports the Camry was the most dependable and practical car sold in America. Plus, even though the company was Japanese-owned, the car was designed in California and built in Ohio.

Uncle Al took his car to Brainerd, Minn., home of a genuine high-speed race track, and entered his car. In his first race he got whipped. But Uncle Al was not one to be discouraged. After all, he had been a high school principal for decades and knew how to deal with disappointment. He took his car to a mechanic and said, "I want you to tune this car so it runs perfectly." The mechanic did, and Al entered another race. He got whipped again.

Al brought the car back to the mechanic and complained he got beaten badly and wondered what happened. The mechanic replied, "Your car is great for doing average things, but it is no match for automobiles that are built to race. You paid about $25,000 for your car. People who buy race cars spend more than $200,000."

"Ah-ha," thought Uncle Al, "I can tune the heck out of my Camry, but it just never was designed to race." So he sold the Camry, mortgaged his home, and bought a Ferrari. Now when he goes to Brainerd he brings home trophies.

The parable of Uncle Al says it all when it comes to why American high schools can't race with the world's big boys and girls. The American high school was not built to race but to be just good enough to take the family to the grocery store and back. It was designed to be cheap and dependable.

High schools built for racing have 240 school days a year. American high schools have 180 school days a year. Racing high schools have class sizes of 15 students. American high schools have class sizes of 35 students. Racing high schools hire teachers with salaries that match those of doctors and lawyers. American high schools hire teachers with salaries that match those of social workers.

Racing high schools enroll only selected elite and gifted students. American high schools enroll anyone who walks in the door. Racing high schools cost about $20,000 a year per student. American public high schools cost about $8,000 a year per student.

Nice try, professor, except before you make such statements it might help to check the actual data. How is it that you can make this statement when Germany, Japan, and Korea -- three countries that blow us away on TIMSS or any other internationally comparable test you wish to name -- spend less as a share of GDP than we do on secondary education? And if you simply put it in dollar terms per student, we would rank second. If we were spending the money well, how would we be spending 53% of time in eighth-grade math reviewing previously taught concepts, while Japan spends 60% of that time introducing new concepts?

Oh, and on the price of that Ferrari?

Among the nations reporting data for 2001, the United States paid the second-highest average starting salary ($28,806) to public upper secondary school teachers with the minimum qualifications required (figure 1a). Only Germany reported a higher average starting salary ($43,100) for public upper secondary school teachers with the minimum qualifications.

Commenting on Greg Mankiw's ten principles, Craig Newmark says "note that seven are micro and only three are macro." True only if you think all of international trade theory is micro. And all ten pre-date Keynes except for the last, which is the one some of us still find controversial. We all bow before totems, after all.

Thus if a Micro-Econ is asked why the Micro do not intermarry with the Macro, he will answer: "They make a different modl," or "They do not know the Micro modl." (In this, moreover he would be perfectly correct, but then neither, of course, would he know the Macro modl.)

From the show today, two pieces I should direct you to:

Counterterrorism blog (first article, second article)
Ha'aretz -- tracking terrorists using Western Union

UPDATE: The three best words in blogging: Welcome Instapundit readers!

UPDATE 2: I was listening to Hewitt on this story and missed that the NYT story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The former was pointed out by a reader. While both those papers hold some blame for any fallout from the exposure of the program, it was not their original story, and I don't see how they could have published it without the NYT's publication.

I can't contribute too much to the outrage ongoing over the NYT/LAT exposure of the classified program US counterterrorism units use for surveillance of suspected terrorists' financial transactions. What I can talk a little about is the nature of SWIFT transactions generally. My knowledge comes both as a consumer when I worked overseas and as a researcher into the flow of workers' remittances around the world.

SWIFT is, in essence, a messaging service, processing about 11 million such messages each day. The messages may be for payments of cash, transfer of securities, trade credit or other messages. About three-fourths of the messages are for the first two types. The messages contain a numeric code of what type of transactions is contemplated; so, for example, transactions involving traveler's checks have their own code and are most likely to pass through surveillance uninspected. Then there are specific phrases that mean a specific type of transaction. By restricting one's purview to certain phrases under certain codes, the search grid probably can be controlled down to a fairly narrow range. As the link above points out, the record examined here looks very similar to the phone records said to have been examined:

A SWIFT consists of a one-page document containing the name and code of the originating bank, the date and time, the address and code of the receiving bank, the name and internal code of the officer initiating the transmission, the names and numbers of the accounts involved in the transfer, a description of the asset being transferred, the MT category of the transmission, and acceptable, standardized phrases as described above.

SWIFT transactions are typically large size because the cost of using the system is substantial. When I lived in Ukraine I only used SWIFT for receiving sums of about $10000, typically quarterly, for payment of expenses. The information on the slip that I would receive had codes for the banks, the accounts being transferred from and to (in both those cases, mine -- I could not get dollars without a Ukrainian bank account) and the amount to be transferred.

About 90% of the messages between banks are sent via SWIFT. If al Qaeda wanted to be sure to keep its activity private, it would want to use telex or phone messages -- older technologies pre-dating SWIFT. It can use a mail payment from bank to bank. Those are still possible and some banks use them, many in the developing world. But it slows down the transfer process; for example, the mail transfer gets caught up in two countries' postal systems.

Another way to conduct transfer that I saw a little of in Armenia is the hawala system. (Obviously they weren't called this and weren't instituted as a result of Islamic banking practices. But the principal form exists in many developing countries.) In short, someone takes money from someone in the sending country and makes a phone call to his friend in the receiving country with instructions on who to pay and how much. The hawalas will settle up later on with a settlement payment between them. I saw these most often as family-based. The sender and receiver of funds (as opposed to the two hawala operators) is very difficult to trace. Hawalas are already under investigation by counterterrorism experts. I notice that Counterterrorism Blog writes as if the SWIFT operation is over. I'm not as sure it would, because hawalas are vulnerable to surveillance -- any Muslim grocery store is going to be checked -- and telexes are really slow and just as possibly tapped by an NSA probe as a telephone call.

SWIFT has issued a statement about the NYT article.

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, SWIFT responded to compulsory subpoenas for limited sets of data from the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States Department of the Treasury. Our fundamental principle has been to preserve the confidentiality of our users’ data while complying with the lawful obligations in countries where we operate. Striking that balance has guided SWIFT through this process with the United States Department of the Treasury.

SWIFT negotiated with the U.S. Treasury over the scope and oversight of the subpoenas. Through this process, SWIFT received significant protections and assurances as to the purpose, confidentiality, oversight and control of the limited sets of data produced under the subpoenas. Independent audit controls provide additional assurance that these protections are fully complied with.

SWIFT is a co-operative of banks and makes profits that transfer back to the members. If many people switched away from SWIFT because of these actions it might cause some to ask the organization to stop sharing information. But I doubt this happens.

What I think people forget when looking at your graph is that the US is more than 20% of the world economy. I showed my intermediate macro students this chart the other day (source). In 1913 we were about 60% of the GDP of western Europe. We caught up right after World War II and are now beginning to pull away.

The other thing that will strike people is how much of the economy is located in relatively small spaces in the Northeast. But for fun, play with this map. Everyone knows California has the largest state product. Who's second?

Paradoxically, the University of North Dakota's move to Division I sports announced earlier this week could neutralize the nickname issue.

Once UND becomes a full-time D-I school in 2008-09, it will not be able to compete in NCAA postseason events during a five-year transition period anyway, per the organization's reclassification rules.

The men's and women's hockey teams, which already are Division I, are the only two Sioux programs that will be able to compete in NCAA postseason events during that period, from fall 2008 to fall 2013.

But regional playoff sites in those sports already are determined for years in advance, and Grand Forks isn't scheduled to host.

It does influence the last two years of UND's play in D-II, and President Charles Kupchella still plans to pursue the lawsuit against the NCAA.

You could have easily forgotten about the elections in Ukraine from last March. I wouldn't blame you -- there has been not much news while four of the five factions that won seats wrestled with which coalition would be formed. In the end, it's the same coalition that started the Orange Revolution government in 2005. This has been a see-saw battle between former prime minister Yulya Tymoshenko, President Viktor Yushchenko, and presidential election loser Viktor Yanukovich, whose party won the most seats in the new parliament. At one point it appeared Yushchenko and Yanukovych would bury the horilka and create a unity government that would keep Tymoshenko in opposition. But I think in the end that thought was too horrible for Yushchenko, even though he still is stung by the collapse of the Tymoshenko government last summer and the bitter words she exchanged with him at the time.

Already back in the saddle, Tymoshenko says the stinky gas deal signed between the government and Russia's Gasprom will be reviewed. LEvko has details. Vladimir Socor notes that Turkmenistan's turning of the tables on that deal may in fact help scuttle the deal.

The cover story of this week's Business Week describes the successess and failures of the Gates Foundation's attempts to fix public high schools. This is an interesting story because the Gates are not starry-eyed in their assessment of education's problems. They are real, and solutions are elusive and difficult to replicate. The keys pointed to in the article are visionary principals with tight control over whom gets hired, and that it's much easier to start a new school than rebuild one that is failing. It's not a surprise for us who read these stories of education time after time. It might help, though, to show that the "we're fine, just add money" notion of educational reform is not working, and unlikely to ever work. And closing some schools may be needed.

...as many as 1,000 of the country's 20,000 public high schools are so hopeless that they should simply be closed. That may be so, but the real question is whether financially stretched educational systems can muster the leadership and expertise to come up with more effective replacements.

When I taught the sports econ class, the most interesting discussion took place after two students -- one of whom plays basketball -- discussed this ESPN story on the use of text messaging. Now the NCAA says it's going to limit the times of the day you can text message, but not how often you can contact a recruit via SMS. They are using these things to message high school freshman. What's next? Here's a possibility, sent to me by a friend.

There's another good interview with Univ. of North Dakota president Charles Kupchella at the US College Hockey Organization's Online's website. (Corrected to proper name 6/24 -- sorry for the confusion!) Here's a very interesting question asked of him:

USCHO: In denying UND's appeals, one of the reasons given by the NCAA is that the nickname and logo create a hostile and abusive atmosphere at other institutions the UND can't control. Is it reasonable for the NCAA to make UND responsible for potentially racist behavior by fans of other schools? Do you know of any recent examples of UND fans displaying hostile and abusive behavior toward American Indians at the university's athletic events?

So can people who want to keep UND from using the nickname do so by creating disturbances on other campuses? And does anyone else see the hand of SCSU on this action now? "UND COMNG STRT RIOT"

The WWW Fest's end, I had hoped, would also kill off the Lemonade Art Fair. This event has always opened the festival, and it happens on our campus on a day when summer school is in session. When I'm teaching summers, this day usually involves a mad scramble for parking. There is nothing more disconcerting to me than seeing menopausal women driving trailers full of "crafts" that they spent all winter making, most of which you walk by and wonder how the hell anyone puts that crap in their house. And I can now hear some band playing loudly outside my office window. And it's impossible for me to drive off campus and return this afternoon, and I'm hungry. "Well they have food out there, King!" you say. Yes, but it's craft show food like kettle corn, horse bits on a stick or some such.

So when I heard WWW was ending, I thought it would be the end of this plague on our campus, but no.

Several individually funded events associated with WWWFest — the Lemonade Art Fair and Concert and the Liberty Savings Block Party — will continue on their own.

The Lemonade Art Fair and Concert is organized and paid for by St. Cloud State University. The popular event, featuring hundreds of artists and musicians, has been around longer than WWWFest.

Can anyone explain to me how this is a good use of taxpayer dollars?

That might have been the better question to ask, but Knows-Stuff Nick says he felt he just HAD to write about the UND story.

I have written about this many times over the years, always with the hope of never needing to mention it again. But the University of North Dakota, despite its big brains, is remarkably thick-skulled. Last year, the NCAA told UND it could no longer use its team nickname in post-season play. UND should have taken the deal.

Well then, Nick, maybe you could explain why Florida State didn't have to take the deal? What about the University of Utah? Why can't you get it through your thick skull that this rule is being applied contrary to NCAA rules, without a vote of the membership, and in a capricious fashion?

Anyone who's read all those many articles KSN has written knows that this is all about getting to use his Nazi trope against Ralph Engelstad.

The university used to call its teams "Flickertails," but that name never attracted interest from Las Vegas casino owners who collected Nazi memorabilia and brought out cakes with Swastika icing to observe the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

So off he goes, ignoring UND's history with North Dakota's Native Americans and leads him to this outlandish statement.

But UND can't help itself. It is like the guy with the mustache in "Brokeback Mountain" who says "I wish I could quit you," and then puts up the pup tent.

KAR-guys, you owe me a post about that line. Nihilist, you in?

And, confirming a rumor I had two weeks ago but thought I better keep quiet, UND is indeed going to Division I. This most likely spells the end of the North Central Conference as a premier D-II athletic conference, where we play and where UND's antagonist over the mascot issue will now have his luxury box at football games in a half-full stadium as we end up playing weaker and weaker opponents.

A colleague and reader explained to me the other day the difference between Episcopalians and Lutherans. Luther liked beer, Episcopalians like cocktails. Lutheran pastors can have it but only out of sight. Episcopalian pastors are the only ones who can be seen at the liquor store without embarrassment. (I might have mangled that, but the gist was we Lutherans are a little more uptight about alcohol and drink a more pedestrian variety. I do not object; I like beer.)

This story was read on Special Report last night and I have to say I laughed quite heartily.

The divine Trinity - "Father, Son and Holy Spirit'' - could also be known as "Mother, Child and Womb'' or "Rock, Redeemer, Friend'' at some Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) services under an action Monday by the church's national assembly.

Delegates to the meeting voted to "receive'' a policy paper on gender-inclusive language for the Trinity, a step short of approving it. That means church officials can propose experimental liturgies with alternative phrasings for the Trinity, but congregations won't be required to use them.

"This does not alter the church's theological position, but provides an educational resource to enhance the spiritual life of our membership,'' legislative committee chair Nancy Olthoff, an Iowa laywoman, said during Monday's debate on the Trinity.

...One reason is that language limited to the Father and Son "has been used to support the idea that God is male and that men are superior to women,'' the panel said.

Besides "Mother, Child and Womb'' and "Rock, Redeemer, Friend,'' proposed Trinity options drawn from biblical material include:

- "Lover, Beloved, Love''

- "Creator, Savior, Sanctifier''

- "King of Glory, Prince of Peace, Spirit of Love.''

Early in Monday's business session, the Presbyterian assembly sang a revised version of a familiar doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow'' that avoided male nouns and pronouns for God.

I'm sure we'll soon see, instead of "the body and blood of Christ" at Communion something like "the organic pita and crushed grapes that make us think of Redeeming Coupons at the Sanctified Whole Foods that I Love."

I call your attention to this Bogus Gold Editorial in which Doug Williams tries to tear a new one for the STrib in its rather ill-informed editorial in favor or a minimum wage increase. He is particularly incensed by this line from the STrib:

Does the minimum wage punish employers and reduce hiring? In theory yes, in reality no. After the last minimum-wage increase took effect, in 1997, the nation experienced the strongest jobs recovery in 30 years. During the last decade, states with high minimum wages have had better job creation than states with low minimum wages.

Of course the second two sentences are pure post hoc fallacious reasoning, and Doug gets off a good shot or two at this silliness. But I will come a little bit in the STrib's defense, insofar as the most cited work on the minimum wage in the last fifteen years does indeed say that we have relied too much on theory and not enough on the data. The book is almost always referred to when someone wants to make an argument for raising the minimum wage. "Just a little, it won't hurt," will be the refrain.

The problem is, the book is at least anomalous, if not just plain wrong. Russ Roberts reminds me of an old review of the Card and Krueger analysis -- the whole basis for the STribs claims about "reality" -- which is an attempt to generalize claims from an earlier paper by the same two economists that relied on a phone survey over eight months of New Jersey fast food workers. That's the "reality" on which the evidence is based. The review by John Kennan that Roberts links to (it's a subscriber link so most of you not on campuses won't get access to it) demonstrates that the "natural experiments" that Card and Krueger argue refutes theory have been done before and have shown opposite results. The other method more traditionally used -- using data over time from a full range of states, rather than looking for effects of one-off changes in minimum wages in a single state, still hold up the general theory that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduce employment of teens by 1-3% (and more recent results put it at the lower end.) We economists are pretty sure the effect of increasing minimum wages isn't very negative, but we're pretty sure it isn't positive either. The problem is that you are trying to detect a relatively small signal of minimum wage effects in a whole lot of noise from teen wages (which fluctuate quite a bit.) One study finds a positive effect (maybe) for NJ teenage burger-turners and extrapolates to the whole of the country, while ignoring other studies using the same methodology that don't show the same results (Kennan demonstrates this for California retail salespeople.)

The point of all this is that, as the title of this post says (it's a quote of Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas that was in the Kennan article), natural experiments are seldom as clear cut as we make them to be. They are very seldom generalizable.

One more part of the STrib editorial that grates:

Granted, Congress needs to be careful when meddling with market forces. But it also needs to assure that the economy is delivering for all Americans, and today it plainly is not.

Sirs, please name me an economy that did, ever. All economies have diffusion of results. The boom years of the 1920s were a bad time for buggy-whip manufacturers; the 1990s saw losers to economic restructuring. Such pablum is an excuse for exactly the meddling you think should be done with care.

The Minneapolis Teachers Retirement Fund Association is merging with the state Teachers Retirement Association because the former was mismanaged so badly to be left holding $.45 for every $1 of pension liabilities it had. The fund is closing very soon, and took what appears to be an illegal step in trying to create a trust fund to cover the backsides of its managers (including a $330k golden parachute for executive director Karen Kliberg.) This would have the effect of withdrawing an extra $1.5 million of the $783 million in assets it has left. The difference between what is turned over and what is to be paid is coming from state taxpayers, to the tune of $18 million per year.

The state auditor's office went to the fund's office to get documents about the trust and were turned away.

[Attorney for the trust Tom] Heffelfinger said the trust money would pay only for obligations not otherwise covered in the transition, and any money left over would revert to the TRA. He noted that board members are not paid and couldn't be expected to serve unless protected from potential lawsuits.

Heffelfinger, a former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, accused Anderson, a fellow Republican, of playing politics with the issue. He also said the Legislature sped up the merger at her urging, allowing barely a month to complete a complicated transition that had been expected to take 13 months.

Anderson said there is no need for a trust to withhold money to pay bills, including Kilberg's severance package, because the Teachers Retirement Association will be obligated to pay outstanding Minneapolis pension obligations. Anderson said the trust is diverting money that should be used to finance the merger and offset the Minneapolis association's nearly $1 billion in unfunded obligations to current and future retirees.

Interestingly, the attorney general's office is supporting Anderson in this food fight. Records have been subpoenaed, and the trust is fighting it in court. So it appears Hatch and Anderson, both running for political office for opposite parties, will be cooperating a little more than usual during the electoral seaosn.

The failure of Proposition 82 in California -- the universal preschool initiative -- plants seeds for new ideas. Rather than Prop 82's one-size-fits-all approach to early childhood ed, there needs to be a variety of pre-school programs, various types of providers, and recognizing that some kids (predominantly children from poor families) need more intensive preschool than others.

Ironically, universal preschool's opponents have already helped lay some of the political groundwork to support incremental steps toward universal preschool access. During the campaign, many acknowledged that preschool benefits poor children, and said they supported publicly funded preschool for low-income youngsters, but opposed funding preschool for middle-class children. Now that the campaign is over, preschool advocates should hold these individuals accountable for their words and push for publicly funded preschool for all low-income children. Such investments would help provide funding to build the state's preschool infrastructure.

Equally ironic, then, is the pissiness of local Ready4K people over a veto from Governor Pawlenty of money to create a rating system for preschools and child care providers. Pawlenty's reasoning was that it was input driven, and did not test whether kids were actually getting ready for kindergarten. Looking at the goals of Ready4K I see "It is about having RESOURCES AND ACCOUNTABILITY to implement effective strategies and be accountable for results." So how does rating whether a preschool teacher has a college degree create that accountability, and how does it tie resources to successful programs?

Prop 82's death was timely, as was Pawlenty's veto. It focuses on local decisionmaking and assessment.

A letter in the St. Cloud Times this morning praises Sen. Tarryl "Blue Dress" Clark for her work on "Character Education."

...such programs are under way in many schools, but there has been no funding to share the curricula and materials with communities who have not had the programs.

At a time when large numbers of children are getting less solid guidance at home or through churches and other community structures, schools are increasingly called upon to help in strengthening understanding in basic areas of character: honesty, work ethic, ethical values, friendship and caring skills, loyalty, etc. ...

While a small part of a large appropriation, Clark should be appreciated for her support for character education...

I have to agree with MN Politics on this -- parents do this for free, and should. Here's the bill (go to line 28.22 for the relevant section.) In the past there was concern that this money would be used for teaching "sensitivity" and "tolerance". Mn Dept. of Education has at least redefined it to include drug education, but it also includes links to "service learning" ("offers opportunities for moral action") and other such substitutions for family guidance.

The WWW Fest (or Wheels, Wings and Water, as it was called for many years) will come to an end as St. Cloud's city festival after this year. The St. Cloud Times thinks this is a bad thing. Get the list of things we'll "miss".

There are no fireworks or laser light shows, no strongman competition, no youth-oriented events like those at Lake George in recent years, no water-based events, no Saturday outdoor concert or food festival, and no celebrations of Central Minnesota’s growing diversity.

Yes, I gave you a hint. What the hell is that doing in the list? It's just one more example of the many genuflections this paper, city and university due to the PC crowd in town.

Is it sad? The next paragraph gives you a clue why not.

The fact that WWWFest’s swan song comes the same year the city turns 150 years old only adds to the sense of melancholy — as does the fact that neighbors St. Joseph, Sartell, Sauk Rapids and Waite Park all seem to have stable — if not thriving — community celebrations.

City festivals (I prefer that to "community celebrations", as the latter sounds like one of those mandatory Soviet rallies) are paid by volunteer efforts. People living in smaller cities gain more for their dollar contributed than those living in the larger places. And I've argued that much of south St. Cloud is becoming a bedroom community for the Twin Cities. There's less and less loyalty to the place.

As an example of the availability of substitutes, I note only that demand for my time in parades (for the church float, Littlest's school float, and for various political candidates) is at an all-time high. One of these events had to go.

At least the current city government hasn't decided to step in and use taxpayer dollars to substitute. Good bye, Wheels Wings and Water.

This has to be seen to be believed. A state university system chancellor asks his board for a vote saying he's in charge of the univerity presidents ... and loses.

...the board defeated, on a 5-3 vote, a motion to reaffirm Potts' authority as the system's chief executive officer. It was offered by board member Bruce Christianson, who said the system "cannot afford to lose Robert as chancellor."

North Dakota State president Joseph Chapman is said by Chancellor Potts to "thumb his nose" at the chancellor's office. Apparently President Chapman uses his position as the leading school in the state system to press for extra money for his campus, which the other schools undoubtedly dislike. But Chapman has apparently enough other friends on the board that he may win this battle with Potts.

Not much, says Ed Lotterman. He thinks there isn't that big a difference in the economic policies of Tim Pawlenty and Mike Hatch:

Decisions at the national level affect inflation, unemployment and growth. States cannot coin money or pump up the national debt. Much ballyhooed state business subsidies have little overall effect. And governors generally possess less power than legislatures. Who next occupies our governor's office will have little effect on whether the next four years here are prosperous or not.

Really? Take a look at this chart, and see where the freer economies are. Now if you'd like to argue that Hatch and Pawlenty have the same policies I would listen, but Lotterman doesn't say that.

Republicans from Teddy Roosevelt to former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson stood for prudent finance and balanced budgets. They wanted fiscal discipline but if costs could not be cut, taxes had to cover outlays. Republicans generally favored letting markets alone whenever possible and avoided trying to micromanage economic activity.

Pawlenty places priority on tax reductions, regardless of what happens to state finances. He adores ad hoc micromanagement, especially when it can be cast in the guise of tax reductions such as his JOBZ program. He scorns the counsel of Republican Party think tanks on the best ways to tackle environmental and resource conservation problems. If Pawlenty is mainline GOP, this ain't your father's Grand Old Party. In many ways, Hatch's opportunistic populism represents an old tradition among Democrats. Hatch is not a pragmatic pro-business centrist like Bill Clinton or Harry Truman. But he is honest in that he does not even give lip service to letting markets function.

At his worst, Hatch is a pale Minnesota version of populists like Argentine dictator Juan Peron. Such leaders believe in championing truth and justice against the dark forces of business. They think they are the only ones who fully understand just what truth and justice are. Moreover, they insist prosperity will flourish once they can call the shots.

Pawlenty, in other words, is more a Kemp/Forbes Republican than a Dole/Rudman Republican. You might recall how well Bob Dole ran in general elections? Unfortunately Lotterman hasn't kept up with the news -- TPaw was a Kemp/Forbes Republican, but couldn't bring himself to insist on the spending cuts needed over the last two years, and now signs on for taxes for stadiums and state parks. (I cannot wait to see what Strommie says about this article. I bet he has a coffee-tinged laptop.)

Lotterman's comparison of Hatch to Peron, however, is like a knife. What did Peron do to the Argentine economy? He helped kill it, according to Mauricio Rojas:

The policy which Perón resolutely introduced had the following main outlines: a radical redistribution of incomes in favour of the workers, an equally radical attack on the resources of the agricultural sector, heavy investment in industrial development, an extensive policy of nationalisation and, ultimately, an attempt to build up a state-corporatist society on clear fascist lines.

As a result, exports in the post-war period fell by more than 40%. Do we really think tort reform -- where Minnesota is currently in the middle of the fifty states -- is going to be improved by a Governor Hatch?

While Mitch and I might argue about whether Pawlenty should get much credit for the jobs report or not (we never got to this on Saturday, though it was in the stack of stuff we wanted to cover), it is really quite a different thing to say that state law has no effects on state economic growth.

In 2005, per capita personal income grew 31% faster in the 15 most economically free states than it did in the 15 states at the bottom of the list. And employment growth was a staggering 216% higher in the most free states. It hasn't been a "jobless recovery" in states that have adopted pro-growth tax and regulatory policies.

I'm pretty sure a guy who draws comparisons to Juan Peron isn't going to get us back to that top 15. The question really is, what about the guy who can't decide if he's a younger Jack Kemp or a nicer Bob Dole?

You have to give credit where credit is due. But you wonder how heavy-handed this was:

The ethanol industry appears to be abiding by the law of supply and demand, not breaking state law when E85 prices rise, the Minnesota Attorney General says.

An eight-month investigation produced no proof of illegal pricing of ethanol-based E85 fuel.

“I don’t believe there is price fixing,” Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch said Wednesday. “What I see is the law of supply and demand.”

Producers, distributors and retailers can charge whatever they want for E85 or other products, as long as they don’t conspire with others to set the price, Hatch said. After serving subpoenas and conducting other forms of investigation, Hatch said, no conspiracy was found.

The heavy hand of government has come down time and again on Minnesota businesses in an attempt to manipulate markets. It does not take a great amount of imagination to believe that markets can figure out how to get cheaper E-85 to consumers that desire it. E-85 already gets over sixty cents per gallon in tax incentives, which is at least a relatively more efficient way of deciding who consumers ethanol. More efficient still would be to remove the tariff wall that blocks the importation of Brazilian biofuels created from sugar. How many more protections for an "infant industry" will ethanol need? And who would be willing to carry it if they could not respond to rising gas prices by using the price to ration ethanol??

Knock it off . One of us will be too busy next October to pay attention to the Gophers' next march to the Independence Bowl.

...about pay for surgeons, I don't. The writer of the article is someone I know and work with at the SC Times, and we worked on this data for a quarter hour. And somehow it makes an AP wire. Jeez. Of all things, this may be the time I'm quoted knowing the least.

Phil Miller shows how economics can help sports teams, by recognizing that the player under the expensive contract who is playing badly shouldn't be kept because of the size of the contract. Keith Law (a former Blue Jay executive and a one-time member of a rotisserie league of which I was and still am commissioner) makes the same point.

Recognizing the difference between "eating" a contract and releasing a player whose salary is sunk already is a critical skill for any GM. It should be a question on the GMAT (General Manager Aptitude Test), right after the question about when employing Tony Womack would be a good idea. (The correct answer is D, "Never.")

So no, the Diamondbacks aren't going to "eat" Ortiz's contract with this procedural move. You could argue now that they're swallowing it, or merely trying to pass it like a kidney stone. Trust me -- it'll feel better once it's gone.

Ouch, hit me where I live!

Rondell White, start packing!

Reader (and fellow MAS member) Tim Slade points out this absurdity in another article on the WalMart-goes-organic story I discussed last week.

There are also supply problems. At some Whole Foods stores, up to 60% of the produce is organic in the summer—but that number dips in the winter because “natural” food has to respect the seasons. There is also a shortage of organic farms. “The sheer number of stores [offering organic products] has stressed the system,” says George Siemon, chief executive of the Organic Valley co-operative. The fertilisers and hormones that make mass agriculture easier are banned in the organic business.

Then there are pricing pressures brought on by large retailers. Organic Valley withdrew from supplying milk direct to Wal-Mart a few years ago after being undercut by a “significant” amount in price by its rival, Horizon Organic. But, says Mr Siemon, demand still exceeds supply—and with his co-operative growing 15-20%, there may soon not be enough organic milk to go around.

This is just silly. If Horizon can't provide the quantity of milk demanded at the price negotiated with WalMart, it either must raise the price to ration the available milk, or it defaults on the contract and pays damages to WMT. If in doing so it drives Horizon out of business, Organic Valley can step back in at the higher price.

Prices ration the available supply. It's Econ 101. And if prices rise, more farmers will be induced to switch from "mass agriculture" to organic farming. If you want the world to be more organic, what's not to like about that?

The NCAA's hunt for inappropriate logos and mascots has reached the College of William and Mary.

An NCAA staff committee ruled that William and Mary’s “Tribe” nickname was neither hostile nor abusive, but it censured the College’s athletic logo. If the NCAA decision stands, William and Mary may be prohibited from hosting NCAA-sponsored post-season games and from using the image in NCAA-sanctioned post-season play.

As you can see through this link, the logo for the W&M Tribe includes two feathers. Gene Nichol, the university's president, writes to the NCAA:

Present NCAA determinations of mascot policy—what is allowed and what is forbidden—are neither comprehensible nor capable of being sensibly defended. I’m guessing that members of the committee may realize this is so. An interpretation that penalizes the College of William & Mary while embracing the depiction of a brave on horseback, in war paint, plunging a flaming spear into the turf at midfield, to the delight of 85,000 chanting, tomahawking fans, is, at best, enigmatic.

There are costs associated with leaving logic behind when enforcing important standards. The first, perhaps, is cynicism. Having now spoken to many hundreds about the NCAA’s position, I can report that it is beyond difficult to find any who believe the organization is being serious and transparent in applying its guidelines. That cannot be good for collegiate athletics.

Beyond that, when rules are made to stand upon their heads, it apparently becomes permissible to contemplate levying heavy sanctions against a university that, according to your own Academic Performance standards, ranks fifth in the nation in scholastic attainment and graduates 95% of its scholarship athletes and 100% of its football team. Few will understand why the College—where athletes regularly don Phi Beta Kappa keys at commencement, gain admission to competitive graduate and professional programs in unusually high numbers, and avoid the corrupting misconduct that too often mars university sports programs elsewhere—has made it to the top of the NCAA’s regulatory agenda.

The appeal makes an interesting point that the NCAA admits using a "rebuttable presumption that the use of Native American mascots, names and/or imagery” will be found to create a hostile or abusive environment. Moreover, the only defense that has worked to date has been approval by an affiliated tribe for a specific name of that tribe (Seminole, Ute, or Chippewa). Thus there's no defense for a generic reference to 'brave' or 'tribe'.

Living in a town with a big college means you often find students working in the restaurants, retail shops and convenience stores. If you're like me -- a guy reaching fifty who occasionally looks at a slide rule and tries to remember how he used it -- you get a little perturbed with store clerks who look lost when the cash register can't tell them how much change to give. The whole ability to do the subtraction in their heads is lost. I usually will tell them what to return me in change (once the young man said I was wrong and I asked what he thought the answer was; he said "I don't know, but it feels like too much." "Math is not a feeling," I replied. I'm such a jerk.)

Such kids turn around and on the back of their t-shirts are quotes mouthed by liberal professors like Gandhi's "Live the change you want to see in the world."

I just want my change.

But it's little wonder. Many schools, it turns out, do not require their students to take math as a core subject to graduate from college. But most schools are recognizing that particular lacuna in general education and are beefing up their curricula. In a post reacting to Smith College's recent announcement that it was putting math back in its general education, ACTA issued a press release with this interesting paragraph.

...ACTA surveyed the Big 10, Big 12, Ivy League, Seven Sisters (including Smith), and several other major institutions and found that students could graduate without taking core subjects such as math, science, composition, literature, economics, American history or government. The schools were graded on the basis of their course requirements; Smith received an "F" since students currently can graduate without taking mathematics, literature, language, American government or history, economics, or science. For example, only 38 percent of the institutions surveyed required students to take a mathematics course, and not one required a course in economics.

Of course that last point caught my eye. I recently asked the research people in our administration for information on students who take our principles classes. We graduate about 600 students (of about 2200) who take principles. The course is required of business majors and naturally of economics majors (we're not in the business school here but rather in the College of Social Sciences.) But between the b-school and us were only about 400 graduates. You can take principles here for distribution credit in general education, but it isn't required. I find myself wondering what our contribution is to those students who took economics and didn't go into business or economics. I think it helps fulfill what Ben Rogge wrote in "The Promise of the College."

...a good college can say this: "We stand ready to confront you with a good faculty and a good group of fellow students. If you work at it (an important if) you will leave this place knowing more than when you entered it." That's it; that's all there is.

You'll be able to make change, know the difference between broccoli and spinach (a joke at the end of Rogge's address, which is my favorite commencement speech ever), and realize that none of us know enough to seize the Ring. Economics certainly can help with all three of those.

The story of the Northern Arizona reverse discrimination case (some background) reached the WSJ today, and contains an interesting piece of information. It turns out the initial study used to create the pay equity arrangement at NAU didn't show very much pay inequity, a fact that administrators of the school chose to ignore.

In 1993, the university's then-president, Eugene M. Hughes, assumed there had been discrimination, based partly on a study he'd commissioned. The study used salaries at other schools to help determine a theoretical median wage that should prevail at Northern Arizona. A lot of white males there fell below the median, but the significant finding for President Hughes was the one that showed minorities and women under a "predicted" par.

As Judge Broomfield noted in 2004, the initial study ignored factors such as whether people held doctorates. At any rate, the study's own figures indicated that white faculty were earning only about $87 a year more than minorities, and men were making about $751 more than women. Mr. Hughes's solution: raises of up to $3,000 for minorities and $2,400 for women. White men got nada.

So here's Lesson Two and the winning issue in this case: If you want to pay "catch up" wages to some employees, don't overcompensate to the point where they draw ahead for no reason other than their race or gender.

These types of studies are common, including at least two I've seen here at SCSU. They are seldom done by economists, who know a thing or two about labor markets. They are usually done with an eye towards the particular conclusion brought. In one salary equity settlement here, one white male in my department received a small raise, much to the resentment of the minority and women faculty who had pursued the study and settlement.

Worth noting -- the NAU case began in 1993. Justice delayed...

The University of North Dakota got permission from its board of higher education to sue the NCAA over the mascot issue.

[North Dakota Attorney General Wayne] Stenehjem described the decision as an edict delivered by an NCAA committee that used constantly changing standards in deciding which colleges could continue using nicknames of American Indian origin, and which could not.

An NCAA executive committee "decided, more or less by fiat, that some institutions were going to be subject to this rule, and some institutions, for reasons that are not understandable, were exempted," Stenehjem said.

The NCAA's constitution requires that major decisions be approved by two-thirds of its college membership, and no vote was ever taken, Stenehjem said. He said the NCAA's action violated its contract with its members.

"This was done, not by policy, not by established process, but mostly by press release, and by press releases that were constantly shifting sand, so nobody knew what was expected of them," the attorney general said.

The article indicates that the lawsuit will be paid for by private donations. I bet this raises a good bit of money for the university. Did the NCAA realize the cause celebre it was handing the school? As to whether it voted or not on the issue, the timeline I was working from said it got recommendations from a subcommittee and then "the executive committee" made the statement. As far as I can see, it relied on a feeling that this was not a "major decision". Todd Zywicki noted last year that Florida State was going to try for the lawsuit based on breach of contract before it was granted exemption -- it appears that UND will try the same thing.

(h/t: Fraters.)

Sean Hackbarth is going to find out. The proprietor of The American Mind since 1999 and a bookseller at Barnes & Noble since 1998, he has decided to look for a new line of work.

My biggest strength is my ability to take all the stuff I happen to remember and synthesize, to take disparate ideas and smash them together to come up with a (hopefully) useful solution. That is demonstrated everyday on my weblog where I try to publish insight rather than a regurgitation of what I found on a news web site. At Barnes & Noble that means if the customer provides a vague description of what book she is looking for I can make and educated guess or find alternative titles that would be useful.

Click the link above to get to the rest of the story, particularly if you're an employer in Wisconsin.

I wondered about this last months ago, and an AP article today gets me wondering again.

Smugglers in sunglasses and muscle shirts reclined on withering patches of grass in a tree-covered plaza, blending into clusters of migrants and offering them "safe" trips into the United States.

But on this sweltering day, there were no takers. None of the Mexicans hoping to reach the United States could pay the $3,000 the smugglers demanded to hide them in a car and drive them across the border, a trip that just weeks ago cost $2,000.

The sharp increase in smugglers' fees is due to the arrival of National Guard troops at the border and plans by Washington for even greater border security, all of which will make the sometimes deadly trip into the United States even more difficult and dangerous. The higher fees have convinced some to cancel plans to sneak into the United States, while others have decided to go it alone.

...Smugglers' fees jumped in 1994 after the U.S. sent more agents to what were then the busiest illegal crossing points along the Texas and California borders. The measures funneled migrants into the hostile Arizona desert, making smugglers even more valuable and transforming them from an underground network to a booming illegal industry.

In the past 12 years, the average price for helping migrants move north through the Arizona desert increased sixfold, from $300 in 1994 to $1,800.

Suddenly, smugglers are charging as much as $4,000, migrant rights activists say.

Deaths also have skyrocketed.

...Despite all the risks, Andres Flores, a 29-year-old construction worker who was deported to Tijuana from Los Angeles a week ago, planned to cross by himself through the desert near San Luis, Ariz.

Sitting in the central plaza in San Luis Rio Colorado, Flores said smugglers offered to guide him through the hills near San Diego for $2,000, a trek that previously cost about $1,200.

Note what I said before -- if the more elastic is coyote demand, the more likely border enforcement will be effective.

I got to thinking about this when Craig Westover dropped me a note on a recent Republican press release on the low May reading on state unemployment. He asked whether the ful