Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.
So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
November 21, 2018
QotD: Occupations and sex differences
November 18, 2018
Ironically, Pabst may be forced to start brewing its own beers
I’ve never had a PBR, so maybe all those hipster poseurs really do like the stuff, but their favourite ironic drink may be in danger, as Pabst is suing MillerCoors to force them to keep brewing the stuff for Pabst:
A Wisconsin courtroom was the setting this week for a lawsuit pitting some of the biggest names in watery American beer against each other. The case pits “hipster favorite” Pabst, parent of PBR, against the much larger MillerCoors, which Pabst claims wants “to put it out of business.”
Earlier this year, Pabst sued MillerCoors, alleging MillerCoors has engaged in “breach of contract, breach of anti-competition laws, fraud, and misrepresentation.” The companies’ currently have an agreement in which MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beer brands. That agreement is about to end, and MillerCoors seems ambivalent about renewing the contract. Pabst has asked the Wisconsin court to award it $400 million in damages and to force MillerCoors to renew the contract.
The case, which is being heard in state court in Milwaukee, could decide the future of Pabst’s entire portfolio of beers, from PBR to Old Milwaukee, Lone Star, Old Style, Colt 45, Natty Bo, Rainier, Schlitz, Olympia, Stroh’s, Schaefer, Schmidt’s, Pearl, and Blatz.
MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beers under a 1999 contract—a type of agreement known in the industry as contract brewing—that is set to expire in 2020. That contract contemplated two potential five-year renewals. MillerCoors argues the company should be free to determine whether to renew the contract, while Pabst alleges “that the two need to find a solution together if Pabst wants to continue the agreement.” Pabst also insists MillerCoors has a good-faith obligation to negotiate a renewal.
MillerCoors hasn’t foreclosed on continuing its partnership with Pabst. For example, it’s considered selling its Irwindale, California, facility to Pabst, or continuing to brew Pabst’s beers there at a much higher cost.
Pabst insists the only way the company can continue to exist is if MillerCoors, which is owned by Molson Coors, continues to produce its beers under contract at a cost Pabst finds fair. That may be true. Pabst doesn’t brew beer, and AB InBev, which owns industry leader Budweiser and which is likely the only other brewer large enough to produce the full Pabst line, forswears the contract-brewing model.
As Tim Worstall put it earlier this week: “Basically, and not accurately, Pabst books the advertising space and MillerCoors does everything else. And given that it’s the brand bit of brewing that makes the money, not the brewing bit, why would you continue such an arrangement if you didn’t have to?”
As Iowahawk put it, “Oh cripes when will I ever learn not to trigger the Beer Snobs”:
November 17, 2018
Alistair Dabbs on the “Church of Failure”
He says he’s a recent convert:
“Work out loud,” my prospective new employer tells me, adding that “we are a team, not a family”. Sister Sledge need not apply.
I try to keep my best poker face but I can sense my left eyebrow raising by itself. When I first entered the work market in the 1980s, the prevailing language of corporate bullshit rolled its tongue around paradigm-shifting and envelope-breaking. Today, we talk about “high-bandwidth collaboration” and “it’s OK to fail”.
Come to think about it, my prospective employer just said something about “failing quickly and cheaply”. Earlier, they pontificated that “failure breeds success”. Clearly, failure is the key skill they’re looking for in an employee. I’m their man.
I come well-prepared for this onslaught of hipster interview gibberish: I grew some stubble, put on a lumberjack shirt, boned up on my IT certifications (just in case) and, most important of all, learnt the language of corporate culture decks. You too can master modern marketspeak for the digital era by reading Culture Decks Decoded by Brett Putter.
Unfortunately, the interviewer is now talking about “pseudo-harmony” and has just invited me to be “a no-ego doer”. My left eyebrow feels like it is travelling towards the back of my head.
It’s when he says “date the model, marry the mission” that I realise I couldn’t possibly keep up the pretence in such a workplace for more than five minutes. I can control it no longer. Visibly shaken by my sudden and uncontrollably explosive yell of laughter, my interviewer wishes me a good day. No worries, there are plenty of other organisations out there who’ll pay me handsomely to fail for them – quickly, cheaply and even frequently if that’s what’s required.
I am a recent convert to the Church of Failure. Previously, I regarded failure as undesirable and unnecessary if there was an option of not failing. My LinkedIn profile would list items under the “Experience” heading thus:
Provided consultancy to major newspaper group on how to maximise digital publishing productivity at minimal cost; was ignored; watched helplessly as six-figure sum poured needlessly into incompetent alternative system that inevitably failed; left company to work elsewhere; those who instigated embarrassing disaster received promotion.
Now I get the picture: bosses can forgive and even admire a brave failure, no matter how avoidable… but absolutely nobody likes a smart arse.
November 15, 2018
“… like watching a spontaneous Humanitarian Olympics rise up out of the town itself”
Gerard Vanderleun is one of the refugees from the Camp fire that burned out all of the town of Paradise, California. He’s staying in Chico, fortunately with a roof over his head, unlike many of his fellow Paradisians who lost literally everything but what they were wearing:
In the 24-Hour Walgreens Pharmacy on East Avenue, the pharmacists have been working overlapping shifts since the fire swept over Paradise last Thursday. These people and their back up staff work seemingly rock solid for hours on end. They fill and file and dispense medications which people from Paradise do not have with them. This is a demanding and thankless and exhausting task. And yet — I am the witness — they have been doing this without letup. Many have come in from surrounding towns, from Redding, to help and to keep the medications needed by a town of 30,000 displaced into a city of 80,000. Yes, the Walgreens pharmacists are leaving it all on the field.
Today, after the banking holiday of Monday, there was what can only be described as a run on the banks. Not a hostile or panicked run on the banks but just an overwhelming number of people needing to get their money straight in one way or another… such as “My ATM Card and My ID were melted in my wallet when my pants burst into flame.” Please understand that today in Chico that is a reasonable statement. And the bankers all showed up looking cool and formal and professional and competent and moved the vast lines of people through with all hands on deck and cleared up a myriad of money crises. One banker I spoke with came up from Santa Rosa on his day off to help the team. He was a sharp dressed man. He and the other bankers were leaving it all on the field.
They all were leaving it all on the field everywhere in Chico. From Penny’s in the Mall to the Birkenstocks Store downtown on Broadway. In big jobs, and in small jobs, there was a long train of people working at the top of their game no matter what their game was. It has been days of this now in Chico; days of there being no big jobs or small jobs but only the unremitting effort the people to help their fellow citizens no matter what.
And since none of the Acronym Agencies have really shown up yet, this has all been done without any real government organization. Instead, it has been like watching a spontaneous Humanitarian Olympics rise up out of the town itself; and once started it has become as self-organizing and self-sustaining as the fire itself. Today as I moved around Chico I saw a town, untouched itself by the flames, rise up to restore and rebuild the lives of their fellow citizens of Paradise; lives that the fire had stolen. And by the end of the day, you could feel, palpably feel, that Chico knew it would win. Chico was leaving it all on the field.
Tomorrow? Chico will do the same.
Amazon’s HQ$2Bn decision
If you had any doubt that the Amazon HQ2 competition was about anything other than trolling for economic bribes, this should banish the thought:
Amazon is getting some prime real estate.
In exchange for more than $2 billion in economic incentives, the online shopping giant will locate a pair of new corporate headquarters just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and just across the East River from Manhattan. Tuesday’s much-anticipated announcement of the locations for Amazon’s “HQ2” also included details — which had previously been kept from the public — about the economic incentives that successfully lured the Seattle-based firm to the east coast’s political and economic hubs.
Amazon says it will invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs across the two new locations, with at least 25,000 employees at each of its new corporate campuses, to be located in Virginia’s Crystal City and New York’s Long Island City. Nashville wins a consolation prize: a new supply chain and logistics center that promises 5,000 jobs in exchange for $102 million in economic incentives.
In New York, Amazon will receive $1.2 billion in refundable tax credits through a state-level economic development program and a cash grant of $325 million that’s tied to the construction of new buildings at the Long Island City location over the next 10 years. In Virginia, the state is ponying up $573 million in tax breaks tied to the creation of 25,000 jobs, and the city of Arlington will provide a cash grant of $23 million over 15 years funded by an existing tax on hotel rooms.
Yes, the numbers are staggering — New York state’s pledge of $1.52 billion for 25,000 jobs works out to more than $60,000 in taxpayer support per new job created — but Amazon appears to have selected New York and the D.C. area based on more than just how many zeroes local officials agreed to put on the giant cardboard check.
After all, New Jersey offered Amazon $5 billion (with another $2 billion from Newark), and Maryland offered $8.5 billion. Yet Amazon passed them both over to pick their neighbors.
November 14, 2018
QotD: Protectionism and competition
The ITC [U.S. International Trade Commission] acts as if American companies have a right not to be injured by foreign competition, regardless of how poorly they serve their American customers.
James Bovard, The Fair Trade Fraud, 1991.
November 13, 2018
THE GREAT WAR IS NOT OVER
The Great War
Published on 12 Nov 2018The Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
The following information — basically the same as what Flo discusses in the video above — was sent out to Patreon supporters:
July 14, 2014 was our first day with The Great War project. 4 1/2 years later, and we managed to not miss a single Thursday to bring you the latest weekly update from 100 years ago. We could not have done this without your support on Patreon. We are not exaggerating when we say that our show would have been cancelled several times if we had to rely on YouTube revenue alone. For that we, and the rest of the production team want to say: “Thank you!”
Now, in the last few weeks we were rather quiet here on Patreon but also on Social Media in general. The main reason for that was that we, the team who researched big parts of this project, who edited, animated and published all the episodes and we who responded to your questions and criticisms over the years needed to figure out what we want to do after 11/11/18.
We quickly realised that we want to continue working in the field of historical film production and with that in mind we will start our own company in early 1919, pardon 2019. So far, we were employees of Mediakraft, the company that initially financed this channel and kept it afloat before you all started supporting us on Patreon. But now we want to stand on our feet.
And the great news is, that The Great War will stay with us and with you in the future. We reached an agreement with Mediakraft that we can continue working on the channel and publish more content. For this content, we still need your support and we hope that you trust our capabilities based on the past 4 1/2 years.
From a historical perspective, 11/11/1918 may have marked the end of hostilities in the First World War but it certainly didn’t usher in an era of world peace – quite the contrary. New wars, more revolutions, difficult peace negotiations and the attempts to create a new world order all were pivotal moments in our world history and we want to continue to tell these stories on The Great War channel.
But, there is always a but, that doesn’t mean that we won’t change things up behind the scenes and on the channel. The first, and for you probably most important point, is that Indy has moved on to new projects (and we wish him all the best for that) which means we will be looking to find a new host. This won’t be easy and I know you will be nervous, but we are sure that we can find someone that can fill these shoes over time.
Moreover, we will probably move away from the weekly episode format that was also accompanied by two extra weekly uploads for the past years. This incredible high output meant that we couldn’t always focus on topics as much as they deserved and we know from the numbers on YouTube that it was an overwhelming amount of content for a lot of our fans, too. Instead we will probably move to less uploads but longer episodes with more detail, more polish, better animations and just overall try to take it to the next level.
To wrap this long post up, I want to kindly ask you to trust in our abilities, to be open for this new direction and most importantly to continue to support us here on Patreon as now independent creators. Over the next few weeks, I will send out more updates on this evolution of The Great War. Right now we want to publish the first new episode in early January. In the meantime, you can enjoy the epilogue episodes with Indy that we will put up in the future.
And if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to put them in the comments of this post, we will try to answer them to the best of my ability.
Flo & Toni
Producers of The Great War
November 12, 2018
Reason magazine at 50
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reason, the top libertarian magazine in the United States, if not the world — I’ve been a subscriber for something like thirty years now. To mark the occasion, Matt Welch recounts the story of the magazine’s founder, Lanny Friedlander.
The New Republic was launched in 1914 by three of the most famous intellectuals of the Progressive era: Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl. National Review was introduced in 1955 by an oil tycoon’s son named William F. Buckley, already notorious for provocative books criticizing Yale and defending Joseph McCarthy. The Weekly Standard was founded with Rupert Murdoch’s money 40 years later by former Dan Quayle speechwriter William Kristol, whose legendary magazine-editor father Irving was considered the godfather of neoconservatism. Prestigious journals of opinion often emanate from prestige.
Not so Reason. The magazine you are reading was the brainchild of a 20-year-old Boston University student nobody had ever heard of named Lanny Friedlander, who stapled together and mailed out the first mimeographed issues from a hopelessly disorganized room at his mother’s brick house in Brighton, Massachusetts. You will search in vain for any editor’s note in the history of The Nation or Mother Jones with a lead like this opening line from Friedlander in January 1970: “I drive a delivery van for a living.”
From these inauspicious beginnings, Reason has grown to a magazine with a circulation of over 40,000, averaging more than 4 million visits online per month and producing videos that were watched 48 million times on YouTube and Facebook in the last year — in addition to a practical-minded public policy shop that helps reform public pensions, privatize government services, and build better highways. Almost all of that achievement took place after Friedlander exited the scene. In 1970, after two thrilling but erratic years, Reason‘s founder sold the publication’s thin assets and thicker liabilities for less than $3,500 to the industrious California-based trio of systems engineer Robert W. Poole Jr., libertarian lawyer Manuel S. Klausner, and neo-Objectivist philosopher Tibor Machan. (Their significant others, who also joined the partnership at the time, were eventually bought out.) In 1978, they launched the foundation that publishes the magazine to this day.
By the time both Reason and the modern libertarian movement began to flourish, one of the key architects of both had fallen off the grid, never to return. Yet Friedlander’s distinct vision is still visible, in the form of the magazine’s lowercase, sans-serif logo, its willingness to gather in various strains of libertarianism for examination and debate, and a certain natural sympathy for outsiders, eccentrics, dreamers. “He was bold, amazingly gifted, socially uncertain,” recalls Mark Frazier, then a high school student who helped with paste-up and other tasks on some of those early editions before moving on to a long career in the free cities movement. “He followed a compass that set many different things in motion.”
Who exactly was this sui generis spark, how was he able to rise above the 1960s and ’70s din of short-lived libertarian-world newsletters, and why did he flame out so fast? These elusive questions have haunted a succession of Reason captains. Upon Friedlander’s death in 2011, Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the magazine from 2000 through 2007, wrote that in the absence of any information, he had “started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism’s answer to Syd Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd who got something great started and then couldn’t or wouldn’t live in the world he did so much to create.” Even people who knew Friedlander in the flesh are hazy on details, tending to project onto his sparse canvas the arc of their own life journeys.
A closer examination on the occasion of this 50th anniversary begins to fill out the picture of Reason‘s starkly minimalist origin story. Lanny Friedlander was an Objectivist who believed in big-tent libertarianism, a student protester who reviled other student protesters, and an anti-war/anti-draft activist who volunteered for the Navy. He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted, an exacting truth seeker and unreliable narrator, a systemic thinker and disheveled coordinator. (“The printed format of this issue,” he wrote when announcing the magazine’s first offset-press edition in September 1969, “does not represent a guarantee that the next issue will also be printed.”) He will likely be remembered most for his striking sense of art direction — Wired co-creator Louis Rossetto, who first encountered Reason as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011 that the publication “was my gateway to good design” — yet when describing himself, Friedlander preferred the term “writer/intellectual.”
November 10, 2018
Don’t expect the “Internet-of-Things” to get better security without Uncle Sam’s pressure
Bruce Schneier believes it will take government action (or as The Register phrased it, “Uncle Sam … putting boots to asses”) to get any significant improvement in Internet-of-Shit device security:
Any sort of lasting security standard in IoT devices may only happen if governments start doling out stiff penalties.
So said author and computer security guru Bruce Schneier, who argued during a panel discussion at the Aspen Cyber Summit this week that without regulation, there is little hope the companies hooking their products up to the internet will implement proper security protections.
“Looking at every other industry, we don’t get security unless it is done by the government,” Schneier said.
“I challenge you to find an industry in the last 100 years that has improved security without being told [to do so] by the government.”
Schneier went on to point out that, as it stands, companies have little reason to implement safeguards into their products, while consumers aren’t interested in reading up about appliance vendors’ security policies.
“I don’t think it is going to be the market,” Schneier argued. “I don’t think people are going to say I’m going to choose my refrigerator based on the number of unwanted features that are in the device.”
Schneier is not alone in his assessment either. Fellow panellist Johnson & Johnson CISO Marene Allison noted that manufacturers have nothing akin to a bill of materials for their IP stacks, so even if customers want to know how their products and data are secured, they’re left in the dark.
“Most of the stuff out there, even as a security professional, I have to ask myself, what do they mean?” Allison said.
QotD: Protectionism helps domestic producers but hurts domestic consumers
Protectionists always speak of tariffs and other import restrictions as impositions the burdens of which fall exclusively on foreign producers (usually, as in the case of antidumping cases, on foreign producers who have the audacity to sell their wares to us at prices that are especially low). And while domestic protectionist measures do indeed harm foreign producers, every protectionist measure is also – indeed, chiefly – a restriction on the freedom of domestic consumers to spend their money as they choose. Tariffs, antidumping duties, and all protectionist impositions make domestic citizens less free (by closing off areas of voluntary exchange that they would otherwise choose to engage in) and less prosperous (by diminishing the volume of goods and services available in the domestic market for people to consume).
Protectionism is rank economic idiocy and an unquestionable assault on liberty. And it becomes no smarter or prettier just because it is costumed in moralistic language (such as “fair trade” or “leveling the playing field”) or is pushed by your preferred political party rather than by some other political party.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-12-06.
November 7, 2018
Quebec cabbies sue provincial government for declining revenues and lost capital cost due to Uber competition
William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:
There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.
The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?
Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.
Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.
November 4, 2018
QotD: LEED indulgences
I am not religious but am fascinated by the comparisons at times between religion and environmentalism. Here is the LEED process applied to religion:
- 1 point: Buy indulgence for $25
- 1 point: Say 10 Our Fathers
- 1 point: Light candle in church
- 3 points: Behave well all the time, act charitably, never lie, etc.
It takes 3 points to get to heaven. Which path do you chose?
Warren Meyer, “When Sustainability is not Sustainable”, Coyote Blog, 2013-07-30.
November 2, 2018
Operation Choke Point
In Forbes, John Berlau details how expansive regulatory powers and vindictive bureaucrats make doing business in the United States less “free enterprise” and more “shame if something were to happen to it”:
Every Halloween, there exists the temptation for bloggers, pundits, and commentators to describe routine events in the news with adjectives like “scary” and “frightening.” Sensitive to sounding clichéd or inflammatory, I try usually to avoid using such terminology in my descriptions of the policy process.
Yet after reading through new documents introduced into a lawsuit stemming from the Obama administration’s “Operation Choke Point,” I find that “scary” and “frightening” actually fit. These documents show that powerful bank regulatory agencies engaged in an effort of intimidation and threats to put legal industries they dislike out of business by denying them access to the banking system.
While I am often outraged about things the government does, now I am truly scared and frightened about the ability of government bureaucrats to shut down arbitrarily whole classes of businesses they deem to be “politically incorrect.” As one who champions the FinTech sector and the benefits it can bring, I also worry that such powers may be uses to shut down innovative new industries, such as cryptocurrency, that carry some perceived or real risks.
Choke Point was a multi-agency operation in which several entities engaged in a campaign of threats and intimidation to get the banks that they regulate cut off financial services – from providing credit to maintaining deposit accounts — to certain industries regulators deemed harmful a bank’s “reputation management.” The newly released documents – introduced in two court filings in a lawsuit against Choke Point — show that the genesis of Choke Point actually predated Barack Obama’s presidency, and began when President George W. Bush was in power.
[…]
When the Obama administration came into power, the FDIC would expand the definition of “reputation risk” even further, and other federal agencies, bureaus, and departments would soon jump on the proverbial bandwagon. Much of Operation Choke point would again be accomplished by “guidance documents,” which my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Wayne Crews refers to as “regulatory dark matter,” since they have legal force but allow regulators to bypass the sunlight of the notice-and-comment process of a formal rule.
In 2011, an FDIC guidance document featured a chart of business categories engaged in what it called “high-risk activity.” These included “dating services,” “escort services,” “drug paraphernalia,” “Ponzi schemes,” “racist materials,” “coin dealers,” “firearm sales,” and “payday loans.” The FDIC would post this and similar lists in other guidance documents and on its web site.
A staff report of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee puzzled over many of these categories. “FDIC provided no explanation or warrant for the designation of particular merchants as ‘high-risk,’” the report observed. “Furthermore, there is no explanation for the implicit equation of legitimate activities such as coin dealers and firearm sales with such patently illegal or offensive activities as Ponzi schemes, racist materials, and drug paraphernalia.”
November 1, 2018
Change appears to be inevitable for North American railways
In a recent column in Trains, Fred Frailey examines the long-term impact of the late Hunter Harrison’s railway management reforms:
Union Pacific locomotive 5587, a General Electric AC4400CW-CTE(AC44CWCTE)
Photo by Terry Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.
In the year since Hunter Harrison’s death, Precision Scheduled Railroading, or PSR, has progressed from crackpot railroading (in the eyes of some railroaders and shippers) to the gold standard. And it happened so fast we are still trying to wrap our arms around what it means for the future of this industry.
The facts are these: Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and CSX Transportation have been put through Harrison’s PSR wringer, emerging in every case much leaner in terms of productive assets — cars, locomotives, trackage, and employees. That meant tons of savings to hand to investors. Interesting to me is what happened after that. CN, which Harrison ran as president or CEO from 1998 through 2009, went on a growth spurt in that period that continues to this day. Revenue ton miles at CN — the most basic measure of what a railroad does — rose 48 percent between Harrison’s retirement in 2009 and 2017. So it’s clear that downsizing the railroad’s assets didn’t inhibit Canadian National’s growth, because no other railroad even approaches what it accomplished during this period. Revenue ton miles rose slightly during Harrison’s tenure at Canadian Pacific and are now rising faster. His successor there, Keith Creel, says CP is game to grow. That’s the same story coming from Jim Foote, who succeeded Harrison late in 2017 at CSX.
Harrison’s impact on the other railroads of North America is palpable. The man was scarcely buried before financial analysts forgot the chaos he unleashed in his hurry to implement PSR at CSX and began asking other railroads why they weren’t more like CN, CP and CSX. Union Pacific, the oldest surviving nameplate in American railroading, capitulated and began implementing PSR practices last October on the eastern part of the railroad, with a goal of expanding the transformation to the entire system within several years. Chief Executive Lance Fritz insists this isn’t a case of PSR Lite.
[…] To change the railroad, you must change the culture. Harrison did it in every instance by force majeure — if you didn’t embrace his plan, goodbye. Who will change the culture at Union Pacific? I am at a loss to know. My sources say the impetus for PSR came not from within the railroad, but from the board of directors, which puts Lance Fritz in a thankless position. He must lead the effort, but this isn’t his idea, and morale in management ranks is low to begin with. His chief operations officer is new to the job, and nothing in the man’s background shouts to me that he is up to this.
Yet there are a lot of smart people at Union Pacific, and no company of its stature launches something of this magnitude with a will to fail. I am heartened that UP began by pruning its management ranks — in 2017 it counted 3,678 executives, officials and staff assistants, versus BNSF’s 1,511. (In fairness, BNSF outsources its information technology, whereas UP does not, accounting for some of the difference.) UP revealed in late 2018 it would eliminate 500 nonunion jobs by year’s end, plus 200 contract workers.
But let’s face it: As done by Harrison, you begin the PSR process by stripping a railroad to its underwear. At CSX it meant cutting every conceivable cost, denuding the railroad of field supervisors and just about everything else, until it began to be dysfunctional. That’s when he knew he had cut enough and could add back assets to make the railroad workable. This method is like becoming pregnant; there is no half way. Union Pacific began Precision Scheduled Railroading with a go-slow approach, not wanting to punish shippers and arouse regulators. Hmm. The way to looks to me now, UP may achieve some good financial results but not the sort that Hunter Harrison could or that its directors might expect. It would be a lot easier for UP to simply buy Canadian Pacific and let Keith Creel, a Harrison acolyte who knows PSR inside and out, come in as an outsider and do the dirty work. And if the process will be hard for Union Pacific, imagine the barriers to PSR in front of BNSF, KCS, and NS, all under pressure to walk the walk but so far unwilling to do so.
The Living Wage Makes It Harder to Make a Living
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 11 Oct 2018We take big risks with people’s livelihoods when we make demand about what people should be paid. The reality is, people don’t necessarily need a “living wage” to make a living.
