At Bloomberg Justin Fox recounts the decline and very slight recovery of the bowling business:

In the late 1970s, just over 9 million Americans belonged to bowling leagues. As of 2017-2018, 1.34 million did. This decline has been much discussed, with political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s famous 1995 essay and 2000 book “Bowling Alone” citing it as a symptom and cause of “declining social capital” in the U.S. due to the “social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.”

Putnam admitted in the book, though, that “only poetic license authorizes my description of non-league bowling as ‘bowling alone.’” Instead, bowling was shifting from something that blue-collar workers did after their shifts to something that kids did at birthday parties and adults as part of a night out with friends.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. In 1980 there were about 10,000 bowling alleys in the United States with the average bowling alley having 8 lanes. Now there are as third as many alleys and the average store has 26 lanes. Throughout the Midwest there were thousands of bars which had a couple of lanes of bowling attached. Most of those are gone now.

Contrary to what you might conclude from reading Mr. Fox’s piece, bowling alleys have always derived most of their revenue from their bars. Selling upscale mixed drinks might be new but the importance of their bar business is the same.

Some other tidbits. String pinsetters began to catch on in the United States in the early 1990s when Brunswick began selling a Swiss pinsetter here. I think they may eventually have acquired the Swiss manufacturer. And, as the graph Mr. Fox includes in his piece suggests, labor productivity in bowling alleys actually began to rise in the 1990s after years of stagnation when proprietors began automating their operations. Important factors in that were bar management systems, point-of-sale systems, automatic scoring machines, and backroom computers that tied it all together.

I would also suggest that changing demographics has a lot to do with with bowling’s decline. Also average hours worked per worker per year may have something to do with bowling’s decline and rise.

I agree with the slug of Nobel award-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s op-ed in the New York Times:

On their own, markets can’t deliver outcomes that are just, acceptable — or even efficient.

but their broader claim, that incentives don’t work at all or work very little, is obviously overblown. How else do you explain the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are fleeing high tax states for low tax ones? Or that changes in tax policy result in easily measurable changes in behavior? Or, frankly, that people don’t just routinely blow through red lights on the street?

I would like to see a more extensive treatment of the conditions under which incentives work or do not.

As to whether tax incentives are good policy I would much rather see tax policy be limited to raising money than changing behavior if only because it’s hard to measure the effects of anything along multiple planes simultaneously.

A “straw man” argument is one in which, rather than directly criticizing something with which you disagree, you construct an extreme version of it and attack that, the “straw man” instead. In a piece at the Wall Street Journal Yaroslav Trofimov makes a straw man argument against pulling U. S. troops back in Syria (as of this writing they have not even been withdrawn):

Ever since the national trauma of the war in Iraq, both winning presidential candidates have run on pledges to extricate the U.S. from costly Middle Eastern entanglements.

Barack Obama promised in 2008 to end the war in Iraq launched by President George W. Bush, and during his 2012 re-election campaign, he touted America’s withdrawal from Iraq as a striking achievement. By the time Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, Mr. Obama had been forced to send some U.S. troops back to Iraq to prevent a takeover by the newly arisen Islamic State. Still, Mr. Trump campaigned on plans to finally end America’s “endless wars” and to cease nation-building abroad.

“We have done them a great service, and we’ve done a great job for all of them, and now we’re getting out,” Mr. Trump said this week. “Let someone else fight over this long bloodstained sand.”

He proceeds by arguing against complete withdrawal of the U. S. military from the Middle East. To the best of my knowledge neither President Obama nor President Trump have proposed such a thing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has, yet another reason I’m skeptical of a possible Warren presidency.

The map above illustrates our many military bases in the Middle East. Has any president announced plans to remove them? Not to my knowledge. Mr. Trofimov is making a strawman argument.

I opposed our participation in the first Gulf War for any number of reasons including that I thought it was none of our business, Saddam Hussein would sell us oil as eagerly as the Emir of Kuwait did, and we would not possess the coldbloodedness to force the war to its conclusion and remove Saddam Hussein entirely. There is a direct connection between the Gulf War and the two attacks on the World Trade Center, the second of which impelled two decades of war by the United States and has not rooted out violent Islamist terrorism.

I opposed our invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that there was quite literally nothing that would be accomplished by an invasion that couldn’t be accomplished from 50,000 feet and putting “boots on the ground” would legally impose certain obligations on us that we could not reasonably satisfy. Both of those have proven true.

I opposed our invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it was illegal, immoral, and, heinous as Saddam Hussein was, a strong Iraq was more in our interest than a weak one. The rise of DAESH following our exit from Iraq demonstrates why that might be.

I opposed our engagement in the civil war in Syria on the grounds that it is illegal and immoral and, heinous as Bashar al-Assad is, his successor was unlikely to be any better and at least his administration is secular, multi-confessional, and multi-ethnic. Additionally, neither supporting violent radical Islamists nor supporting the Marxist YPG is in our interest. The Kurds are not our allies but the Turks are and supporting the YPG aggravates the Turks.

I do not support dismantling all of our Middle East bases or complete withdrawal from the Middle East.

As to Mr. Trofimov’s argument about the rise of DAESH, whatever they are called violent radical Islamist movements are endemic in Islam. In discussing this issue with genuine Middle East experts they have generally agreed with my assessment that such would be true in any sola scriptura religion whose scripture may be interpreted as advocating spreading the religion by the sword and that does not have a magisterium. Shorter: there will always be violent radical movements in Islam. The only way we have to eliminate them entirely is to abolish Islam itself. Since I do not advocate that, the only alternatives that are left are containment and being willing to accept episodic mass terrorist attacks. We have chosen the latter alternative.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune wonder what the heck the striking teachers want:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot was going to get a strike no matter what. That’s the undeniable take-away as 300,000 Chicago school children lose crucial instructional time and athletes miss out on their playoff and college scholarship dreams.

Here’s what should infuriate Chicagoans: This strike is about power and relevancy for leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union. It always has been.

How else do you explain this walkout even as Lightfoot continues to offer a generous pay and benefits package while committing to the union’s demands for additional support staff, smaller class sizes and a social worker and nurse in every school? The parameters of those arrangements are in writing. Lightfoot bent to most of CTU’s key demands.

Yet teachers still were marching on sidewalks and street corners Thursday instead of teaching in classrooms. CTU members participated in “civil disobedience training” and planned a rally for Saturday. Union leaders Jesse Sharkey and Stacy Davis Gates in media interviews continued to push the false narrative that Lightfoot was resisting their student-focused contract demands at the bargaining table.

That assertion wasn’t true. But in their group-think hive, teachers are failing at the critical thinking skills they so often request of their students. It should be clear now to everyone that the strike is about nothing more noble than a CTU power grab.

From the get-go Lightfoot has given all she can, arguably more than Chicagoans can afford. Yet the teachers won’t take “yes” for an answer.

Not to mention that Mayor Lightfoot’s offer to the teachers consisted of money she didn’t have. Her proposed budget, as I have pointed out, is a prayer rather than a plan.

An important objective of the strike is and always has been to show Mayor Lightfoot who’s boss while demonstrating enormous disdain for the people of Chicago. As I’ve said before she has been much more conciliatory than I would have been in her position.

At Bloomberg Ferdinando Giugliano casts some rain on the wealth tax parade. In reporting on the results of a conference whose attendees include Saez, Zucman, Lawrence Summers, and Greg Mankiw, he writes:

Overall, Saez and Zucman failed to make a convincing case for their proposal. Their eye-catching claim that the very richest now pay less tax as a proportion of their income than the poor is based on highly dubious assumptions. A wealth tax also suffers from a string of substantial practical and theoretical problems not shared by other ideas to reduce inequality, such as raising capital gains taxes or closing estate-tax loopholes. As Summers put it during the debate: “For progressives, to use their energy on a proposal that has a more than 50% chance of being struck down by the Supreme Court, little chance of passing through Congress and whose revenue-raising potential is very much in doubt, is to potentially sacrifice immense opportunities.”

The problem with the analysis offered by the Berkeley economists starts with their stunning finding that was recently advertised in a widely-shared column in the New York Times. Saez and Zucman claim that in 2018, the top 400 earners faced a lower effective tax rate, measured as a share of pre-tax income, than everyone else. This finding is only based on an estimate, since the actual data for 2018 are not yet available. Moreover, as noted by Wojciech Kopczuk, an economist at Columbia University, the result hinges on making some extreme assumptions on the incidence of taxation and the measurement of pre-tax income. As Kopczuk noted, their calculation is presented as a “fact” when it is not.

Of course, one can still believe that the rich should pay much higher taxes regardless of what exactly happened to their tax rate. Any policy-maker can legitimately prefer greater redistribution. The tax burden in the U.S. is significantly lower than in most other OECD countries. There is a good case to be made that the U.S. should increase revenues and spend more on education and infrastructure. The question, however, is which taxes are best suited for this aim.

Zucman believes that wealth taxes have several advantages. They allow one to overcome what he identified as the “Warren Buffet problem”, after the billionaire founder of Berkshire Hathaway, who once famously said he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Buffett’s annual income flows mainly from him selling a small proportion of his shares, on which he pays a capital gains tax. Capital gains taxes don’t take into account the enormousness of Buffett’s wealth, which would be taxed under Sanders’s and Warren’s plans. Moreover, unlike an estate tax, a wealth tax allows the state to obtain revenue immediately, rather than waiting until the death of a billionaire. Saez and Zucman believe that Warren’s plan — which would tax fortunes over $50 million at 2% annually, and those over $1 billion at 3% — would raise $2.75 trillion over the course of 10 years.

However, there are reasons to be skeptical of this number. For starters, you would expect billionaires to make different choices when faced with a wealth tax. They could donate much of their money to a charity, for example, or decide to spend more of it; a wealth tax could then end up encouraging lavish consumption. Mankiw outlined the paradox that a wealth tax would spare a wasteful top manager who spends all his income annually, while hitting a frugal one who saves a lot and perhaps invests in successful start-ups. Finally, a wealth tax is a form of double taxation, because the money was often taxed when it was earned, and because it would recur every year. (An estate tax, sometimes also called a form of double taxation, is at least levied only once.) As such, one wonders to what extent it is as fair as its proponents suggest.

There are also important practical problems: Billionaires’ wealth often stems from private companies. Private valuations of unlisted companies can often be spectacularly wrong. Zucman suggested that billionaire owners of private firms should be given the option of paying the wealth tax based on an estimated value or payment of shares. But the idea that the state would over time acquire significant holdings of some private companies is also problematic, as it would amount to — at least temporary and partial — nationalization.

Whether or not a wealth tax is a good idea or not depends somewhat on your objectives. If your objective is greater income and wealth equality, it’s not that great an idea. If your objective is class warfare or undermining the U. S. economy, it’s an excellent idea.

This seems like a good time for me to repeat my not particularly helpful suggestion that if you want greater income and wealth economy you should identify all the things that have been done since 1970 and do the opposite or, at least, change them so they push things more in the direction you’d like to see.

Immigration and free trade have been a bust as far as income equality is concerned, particularly the attempt at integrating China into the world economy (it’s been even worse for the environment). So have changing the rules to provide incentives for companies to provide compensation to their top management in the form of stock options and subsidizing the rich. Subsidies for the rich take all sorts of forms, from the forms of investment to which capital gains taxes apply to the home mortgage income tax deduction.

A poll from Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service has found something rather disturbing: 2/3s of Americans think that a civil war is imminent in the United States:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A majority of Americans believe political, racial, and class divisions are getting worse, according to the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Civility Poll, the second component of the Battleground Poll. This includes three-quarters or more of men and women; urban, suburban, and rural voters; approximately 7-in-10 or more voters in every age cohort; white, black, and Latinx voters; and nearly two-thirds of voters of all partisan stripes.

These observations contribute to the Civility Poll’s additional finding that the average voter believes the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to the edge of a civil war. On a 0-100 scale with 100 being “edge of a civil war,” the mean response is 67.23.

Consistent with the Civility Poll’s findings in April, this installment of the poll reveals significant contradictions within the electorate. Voters broadly agree with the premise that our political culture has become too uncivil and lacks a focus on solutions, and that common ground and compromise should be the goal for political leaders—while at the same time, equal numbers want leaders to “stand up to the other side” and stand up to “powerful special interests.”

or, in other words, people are actually fomenting the discord that they decry.

I’ve heard people scoff at the idea. Their arguments tend to run along the lines of what are a bunch of old white hicks spread across the country going to do?

I think this story, reported by Chicago’s WGN, might provide a hint:

CHICAGO — Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 board of directors has given police superintendent Eddie Johnson a vote of “no confidence.”

An FOP spokesperson said Johnson’s decision to skip President Donald Trump’s speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police this coming Monday in Chicago was “the last straw.”

Imagine that when called to quell a violent rally, rather than arresting those participating in the rally, the police arrest the city’s officials. Imagine that when the National Guard is called in, the National Guard sides with the people against the officials. That’s how it could happen.

We have a situation no unlike that in the UK. Our leaders are in revolt against the people. I don’t know what will ultimately happen but the ratcheting up of tensions cannot persist forever.

Can someone help me out? Today I’ve read several complaints, pertaining to AG Barr’s investigations, of violations of the Justice Department’s independence. Where did the notion that the Justice Department was an independent branch of government come from? It’s not true. It’s a department of the executive branch. I don’t recall hearing such complaints about the DoJ during the Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter Administrations.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Gus Hurwitz pronounces “gotcha” on Nate Silver:

Political data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com recently tweeted that Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about free speech were mistaken because “false statements of fact aren’t protected speech in the U.S.” That was a false statement—which, fortunately for Mr. Silver the First Amendment does protect. As the saying goes, the remedy for bad speech is more speech.

Those who want to purge “misinformation” from social media should learn from this incident. Mr. Silver is smart, thoughtful and well-educated. He’s an active participant in policy debates and has every reason to be familiar with the First Amendment. And the First Amendment isn’t an obscure area of law. Most Americans are broadly aware of it; it is constantly discussed and in the news and throughout the education system; it is foundational to our democracy. How can someone like Mr. Silver confidently misstate such a familiar part of U.S. law?

Actually, although I think he’s clever and skilled, I have seen few signs of education in Mr. Silver. Mr. Hurwitz is confusing education with training. Mr. Silver is not well-educated. He is well-trained like a competent blacksmith or weaver. As Plato wrote in Republic:

Education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as through they were putting sight into blind eyes…but the present argument, on the other hand…indicates that this power is in the soul of each and that the instrument with which each learns–just as an eye is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole body–must be turned around from that which is coming into being together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at that which is and the brightest part of that which is

Education is something that emerges over a lifetime not something that is conveyed in a few short years. It is wide-ranging and brings with it an understanding, not just of current events but of the human heart.

Today’s emphasis on the relevant and job preparation followed by total pre-occupation with work and killing time is not conducive to education. It is, as Mr. Hurwitz notes, at odd with with views of the Founders:

Yet the idea that more speech is the remedy for bad speech assumes more than a polity of speakers eager to correct their peers. The cacophony is deafening, making it difficult to sort fact from fiction. More speech is only a cure in a polity of charitable listeners. Judge Learned Hand once observed that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” If we don’t accept others’ good faith and the limitations of our own expertise—if we are so quick to attack others’ errors that we forget how often we too are wrong—the enterprise of free speech is fraught, and the spirit of liberty of which it is part is at peril.

In her Wall Street Journal column Kimberley Strassel makes what is essentially the opposite argument:

Welcome to impeachment, Schiff-style. Democrats keep their witnesses locked behind secure doors, then flood the press with carefully sculpted leaks and accusations, driving the Trump-corruption narrative. And so the party goes, galloping toward an impeachment vote that would overturn the will of the American voters—on a case built in secret.

Conservative commentators keep noting that Mrs. Pelosi’s refusal to hold a vote on the House floor to authorize an official impeachment inquiry helps her caucus’s vulnerable members evade accountability. But there’s a more practical and uglier reason for Democrats to skip the formalities. Normally an authorization vote would be followed by official rules on how the inquiry would proceed. Under today’s process, Mr. Schiff gets to make up the rules as he goes along. Behold the Lord High Impeacher.

Democrats view control over the narrative as essential, having learned from their Russia-collusion escapade the perils of transparency. They banked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proving impeachment fodder, but got truth-bombed. Their subsequent open hearings on the subject—featuring Michael Cohen, Mr. Mueller and Corey Lewandowski —were, for the Democrats, embarrassing spectacles, at which Republicans punched gaping holes in their story line.

Mr. Schiff is making sure that doesn’t happen again; he’ll present the story, on his terms. His rules mean he can issue that controlling decree about “only one” transcript and Democratic staff supervision of Republican members. It means he can bar the public, the press and even fellow representatives from hearings, even though they’re unclassified.

It means he is able to shield from scrutiny the whistleblower who prompted this impeachment proceeding. It means he can continue barring Republicans from calling opposing witnesses. It means he can continue refusing to allow White House counsel in the room to hear the accusations against the president.

Mr. Schiff apparently even believes his impeachment authority allows him to ignore longstanding rules. A recent letter from Republican members of the Intelligence Committee objected to Mr. Schiff’s new practice of withholding official documents. They listed nearly two dozen letters from the committee (to recipients ranging from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to White House counsel Pat Cipollone) that had not been uploaded to the committee repository—which, they note, violates House rules. Republicans aren’t even allowed to know what questions Mr. Schiff is asking.

As I’ve said an open, factual, and impartial process will garner support while agonistic and partisan declarations will lose it. There’s a difference between a politically motivated investigation and a purely politically motivated investigation.

Also as I’ve said before President Trump is not handling the situation as I would have done and, frankly, I really don’t understand his thinking. The Democrats should hope he continues so fecklessly.