-
Brad DeLong: Earl Cook’s Estimates of Energy Capture…
Another way of looking at the transformation of everyday life in the long run, and again it’s striking how enormously the energy expended on transport has grown. Though one thing the chart doesn’t show is that hunter/gatherers moved around a lot more and had a much better understanding of the whole landscape than agriculturalists.
Daily links 01/24/2012
24-Jan-12
Daily links 01/23/2012
23-Jan-12
-
The Changing Ethnic Structure of Housing Tenures in London, 1991—2001
“This paper examines the changing ethnic composition of housing tenures in London (inner and outer) from 1991 to 2001. The question that it addresses is the extent to which ethnic minorities have become increasingly concentrated in social and privately rented housing in the inner city, as much of the literature on other European and American cities suggests, and the extent to which some of them have been able to move outwards and upwards into suburban ownership. The period 1991—2001 is particularly important in London because it witnessed a major increase in the size and importance of its ethnic minority population and important changes in its tenure structure. The introduction of an ethnicity question in the 1991 census permits analysis over time. The paper shows both an increase in suburban ethnic minority ownership and a growing concentration of ethnic minority groups in social and privately rented housing. “
-
Inward and Upward: Marking Out Social Class Change in London, 1981—2001
“Converting the 2001 census NS-SEC categories back into SEG categories for the 1981 and 1991 censuses, the authors show that there is a continued process of class upgrading occurring within Greater London compared with the rest of England and Wales. Inner London continues to see an increase in the proportion of residents in the higher social classes (particularly in the boroughs that were already gentrified in the centre and west of the centre). In outer London, there has been a process of upwards class change, but this is being led by the intermediate social class groups and is geographically more uneven. The authors conclude that these trends provide evidence for a continued gentrification of and social upgrading in inner London. The most significant finding is that London’s gentrification is now being partly driven by the expansion of the `middle’ middle classes of lower professional and intermediate non-manual groups. “
Daily links 01/19/2012
19-Jan-12
-
Joseph Blitzstein’s lectures on probability and statistics, free to view.
Daily links 01/17/2012
17-Jan-12
-
“We also find that usage rates of the most common profanities are remarkably similar and are roughly anticorrelated with the observed happiness cycle. Fig. 11 shows the normalized frequencies for five example profanities. Cursing follows a sawtooth pattern with a maximum occurring around 1 am, and the lowest relative usage of profanities matching up with the daily early morning happiness peak between 5 and 6 am. These patterns suggest a gradual, on-average, daily unraveling of the human mind.”
Fascinating and superbly illustrated research into the ‘happiness patterns’ revealed by Twitter.
-
Residential Energy Literacy and Capitalization - Nils Kok
“With the residential sector accounting for some one-fifth of global energy consumption — resulting from the requirements to heat, cool, and light residential dwellings — energy efficiency in private dwellings has again gained interest in recent years. In this paper, we examine the importance of awareness and behavior of households with respect to their residential energy use. Using a detailed survey across 1,721 households, we measure the extent to which consumers are aware of their energy consumption and whether they have taken measures to reduce their energy bill. Our results show that “energy literacy” among respondents is low: just 56 percent of the respondents are aware of their monthly charges for energy consumption, and 60 percent appropriately evaluate investment decisions in energy efficient equipment. We document that energy literacy, consumer ideology and attitude towards energy conservation have a direct effect on behavior regarding heating and cooling of the home. The impact of the moderating factor, measured by thermostat settings, ultimately results in strong variation in the energy consumption of private consumers.”
-
“The collapse of the housing boom led to an unprecedented number of homeowners who are “underwater,” that is, owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth. These homeowners cannot move without incurring significant losses on their homes, possibly causing a “lock-in” effect reducing geographic mobility. This raises concerns that a reduction in labor market mobility may hamper the ability to move to accept employment in another geographic market, degrading labor market efficiency and contributing to higher structural unemployment.
This paper examines housing market turnover and finds significant evidence of a lock-in effect. The lock-in, however, results almost entirely from a decline in within-county moves. As local moves are generally within the same geographic job market, this decline is not likely to affect labor market matching. In contrast, moves out-of-state, which are more likely to be in response to new employment opportunities, show no decline, and in fact are higher in counties with greater house price declines. Housing market lock-in does not appear to have degraded the efficiency of the labor market and does not appear to have contributed to a higher unemployment rate.”
-
“Geography is widely viewed as the important determinant of city location. This paper empirically disentangles the different roles of geography in shaping the European city system. We present a new database that covers all actual cities as well as potential city locations over the period when the foundations for the European city system were laid. We relate each locations urban chances to its physical, first nature, geography characteristics, and develop a novel empirical strategy to assess how the existing urban system surrounding each location (second nature geography) determines its urban prospects. First nature geography is the dominant determinant of city location until the sixteenth century. Second nature geography becomes important from the seventeenth century onwards, in a way that corresponds closely to predictions from new economic geography theory. “
-
AEAweb: 2012 AEA Annual Meeting Papers
A fairly amazing range of research from the 2012 American Economists Association conference.
-
DfT’s estimates of the marginal external costs of car traffic. Very well-hidden, these figures are a sort of official guilty secret. As they’re never highlighted in any departmental DfT press releases, they are never mentioned by the media and don’t enter into public discourse on the costs or benefits of car traffic. That’s a shame.
-
polis: The Original Urbanist Graphic Novel
Frans Masereel’s “The City: A Vision in Woodcuts”
Daily links 01/10/2012
10-Jan-12
-
Lengthy but completely worth it, this is the best analysis of ’shared space’ I’ve read, and with plenty of ancillary lessons regarding sustainable transport.
-
In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars - Dream City - Salon.com
“It feels strange to equate slowing down with moving ahead, but in some ways, slowing down cities, much like the slow-food movement, is about shrugging off some of the 20th century’s ill-conceived “innovations.” A hundred years ago, city streets were a multi-use melting pot of cars, trolleys, horses, buggies, bicycles and pedestrians, all moving together in a low-speed symphony. It was easy to share the road because few things moved fast enough to be really dangerous. It wasn’t until the 1930s and ’40s that we started to see the streets as reserved for things that could go very fast, and pedestrians were expected to stick to the sidewalks. “Over time, without express agreement or even acknowledgment, the streets gradually became off-limits to the unwheeled,” wrote the New York Times in a recent look back at mid-century urban street life.”
Daily links 01/09/2012
09-Jan-12
-
Heterodox economics: Marginal revolutionaries | The Economist
“His analogy implies that economics, like chemistry and physics, makes enough intellectual progress to allow economists to ignore some old thinkers. But is economics that kind of science? Its practitioners cannot run controlled experiments on whole economies. The natural experiments that might help falsify theories do not come around often. And when they do, the refutations provided are only ever partial.
What is more, intellectual schools are not simply about the rights and wrongs of specific cases. Compared to the oxygen theory that replaced it, quasi-alchemical phlogiston provided a poor account of combustion. But it captured an idea about the tendency of the world to require replenishment on which its immediate successor was silent, and which prefigured some ideas that thermodynamics would bring to science most of a century later.”
Daily links 01/08/2012
08-Jan-12
-
Daddy, the cars aren’t stopping | Londonneur
“What is clear is that Shared Space doesn’t work without the raft of other measures that complement it. Principally that motor traffic must be limited or removed for the scheme to work. Local authorities are attracted to the concept but fail to implement the wider changes needed. Ultimately, the way to reduce the negative effects of heavy motor traffic is simply to reduce its access. There is just no getting around the fact that there are too many private cars in our city.”
-
Why I’m Not a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian | Bleeding Heart Libertarians
“Somebody’s going to ask “Isn’t Ron Paul making a difference?” So I’m going to say, “Yes.” None of this is to say that right-fusionism of the Ron Paul variety isn’t now having an influence, or that none of it is good. I’m glad to see Paul spreading a few profoundly important ideas about foreign policy. But that doesn’t mean Paul’s decades of bilking paranoid bigots with bullshit prophesies of hyperinflationary race war was really a stroke of strategic genius after all. Or maybe it means it was. But that doesn’t make it right. I don’t think Paul would be where he is today without all those years of vile fear-mongering. And I don’t think anyone ought to get away with climbing up that evil ladder, kicking it away, then pretending he was born a thousand feet off the ground in the pure mountain air right there next to heaven. He knew what he was doing, chose to do it, and none of it can be justified by a little TV-time for salutary anti-imperialist and free-market ideas. I’d rather not be affiliated with a “movement” that includes him in even a conflicted way.
Anyway, I would encourage other decreasingly standard-libertarian libertarian-ish types to hasten their passage through the liminal “bleeding heart” stage and just come out as liberals. Or, better yet, to come out as inscrutably idiosyncratic. You are not alone. Well, if you’re inscrutably idiosyncratic, you are. But the similarly inscrutably idiosyncratic can be alone together. I’ve heard some good things about individualism. Maybe some of us should try it.”
-
Bicycle Route Choice Model Developed from Revealed-Preference GPS Data - Publications Index
“cyclists are sensitive to the effects of distance, turn frequency, slope, intersection control, and traffic volumes. In addition, cyclists appear to place relatively high value on off-street bike paths, enhanced neighborhood bikeways (bicycle boulevards), and bridge facilities.”
-
cyclists are sensitive to the effects of distance, turn frequency, slope, intersection control, and traffic volumes. In addition, cyclists appear to place relatively high value on off-street bike paths, enhanced neighborhood bikeways (bicycle boulevards), and bridge facilities.
-
-
“This study showed that cyclist collisions were sensitive to changes in both cyclist and motor vehicle flows. A 10% increase in bicycle flow was associated with a 4.4% increase in the frequency of cyclist injuries. A 10% increase in the total number of motor vehicles that passed through the intersection would result in a 3.4% increase in cyclist injury occurrence.”
-
This study showed that cyclist collisions were sensitive to changes in both cyclist and motor vehicle flows. A 10% increase in bicycle flow was associated with a 4.4% increase in the frequency of cyclist injuries. A 10% increase in the total number of motor vehicles that passed through the intersection would result in a 3.4% increase in cyclist injury occurrence.
-
-
-
The results of the cumulative regression model agree with the perception that the presence of bicycle lanes or shoulders increases the comfort level of bicycle users, while higher auto speeds, higher number of lanes, and presence of unsignalized conflicts along roadway segment causes impedance to the bicycle mode.
-
-
-
The review indicates that one-way cycle tracks are generally safer than two-way and that, when effective intersection treatments are employed, constructing cycle tracks on busy streets reduces collisions and injuries. The evidence also suggests that, when controlling for exposure and including all collision types, building one-way cycle tracks reduces injury severity even when such intersection treatments are not employed.
-
-
-
The results suggested that bicyclists perceived a higher average comfort on physically separated bicycle paths as compared to on-street bicycle lanes
-
Daily links 12/24/2011
24-Dec-11
-
Economic geography: Moving toward stagnation | The Economist
Ryan Avent:
“The picture that emerges is one in which employment growth in high productivity, tradable industries is constrained at the rate of housing supply growth in skilled cities. And that rate is slow; for much of the past decade, Houston approved about ten times more new housing each year than San Jose. Value creation in high productivity cities continues, but a lot of that value is siphoned off through taxes and transfered to residents of low productivity cities, who use it to buy non-tradable services. That dynamic would seem to be the main mechanism through which America has been generating net job growth over the past two decades.”
Daily links 12/22/2011
22-Dec-11
-
Under the Raedar: London’s Daytime Population
Nice visualisation of day vs night-time population in London, by Alisdair Rae.
-
Day vs night-time population in various large US cities.
-
David Romer - lessons from the crisis
Read the whole thing, but here’s a bit I liked:
“We know that monetary policy has powerful real effects, which means that aggregate demand matters. We know that current disposable income is important to consumption. And we know that cash flow and sales have strong effects on investment. It would take a strange combination of circumstances for those things to be true but for fiscal policy, which one would expect to work through those channels, not to be effective”
-
“A “Keynesian” world is a world in which three things are true:
Spending is held down not because of a shortage of liquidity but because people’s portfolios don’t have enough or the right kind of savings vehicles to make them happy.
Investors are eager to hold the nominal liabilities of governments that can print money at will and so turn those liabilities into cash with certainty–never mind any long-term political-economic inconsistency between spending plans and tax rates.
Private-sector leverage is sufficiently high that adjustments to reduced spending via lowering the path of the price level are perverse–that they create enough bankruptcies and moral-hazard credit-channel problems that they such adjustments push the pace of production not up but down.”
Daily links 12/21/2011
21-Dec-11
-
The Geography of Transport Systems
“The second edition of The Geography of transport systems maintains the overall structure of its predecessor, with chapters dealing with specific conceptual dimensions and methodologies, but the contents have been revised and updated. It provides material about transportation issues to practitioners, policymakers, educators, researchers, students, a nd individual learners. It includes a wide variety of media elements such as maps, figures, GIS-T datatsets, and PowerPoint presentations. The second edition also offers new topics and approaches that have emerged as critical issues in contemporary transport systems, including security, energy, supply chain management and GIS-T. Relevant case studies have also been included to underline real world issues related to transport geography. “
Daily links 12/19/2011
19-Dec-11
-
ScienceDirect - Transport Policy : Benefits of shift from car to active transport
“There is a growing awareness that significant benefits for our health and environment could be achieved by reducing our use of cars and shifting instead to active transport, i.e. walking and bicycling. The present article presents an estimate of the health impacts due to a shift from car to bicycling or walking, by evaluating four effects: the change in exposure to ambient air pollution for the individuals who change their transportation mode, their health benefit, the health benefit for the general population due to reduced pollution and the risk of accidents. We consider only mortality in detail, but at the end of the paper we also cite costs for other impacts, especially noise and congestion. For the dispersion of air pollution from cars we use results of the Transport phase of the ExternE project series and derive general results that can be applied in different regions. We calculate the health benefits of bicycling and walking based on the most recent review by the World Health Organization. For a driver who switches to bicycling for a commute of 5 km (one way) 5 days/week 46 weeks/yr the health benefit from the physical activity is worth about 1300 €/yr, and in a large city (>500,000) the value of the associated reduction of air pollution is on the order of 30 €/yr. For the individual who makes the switch, the change in air pollution exposure and dose implies a loss of about 20 €/yr under our standard scenario but that is highly variable with details of the trajectories and could even have the opposite sign. The results for walking are similar. The increased accident risk for bicyclists is extremely dependent on the local context; data for Paris and Amsterdam imply that the loss due to fatal accidents is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the health benefit of the physical activity. An analysis of the uncertainties shows that the general conclusion about the order of magnitude of these effects is robust. The results can be used for cost-benefit analysis of programs or projects to increase active transport, provided one can estimate the number of individuals who make a mode shift.”
Daily links 12/11/2011
11-Dec-11
-
Professor Colin Pooley | Lancaster Environment Centre
Publications by Colin Pooley, professor of historical geography at Lancaster. Includes some fascinating stuff on the history of urban transport choices.
-
New Understanding of Pricing Impacts on Travel | Planetizen
Recent evidence suggests that the demand for driving is more sensitive to fuel costs than previously thought. As Todd Litman points out,
“This has important implications for policy and planning. It indicates that pricing reforms (road tolls, parking pricing, fuel price increases and distance-based pricing) are likely to be more effective at reducing travel demand than conventional models predict, and that fuel efficiency standards will provide less energy savings and emission reductions, and induce more travel and associated costs, than usually assumed. It also indicates that pricing reforms can provide greater benefits and impose smaller costs on consumers (less consumer surplus loss), and that toll roads will generate less revenue than experts often assume. This is good news for planners because it expands the range of solutions that we can apply to transport problems such as congestion, traffic risk, oil dependency and air pollution.”
-
A Summit to the Death - Kevin O’Rourke - Project Syndicate
“Rather than creating an inter-regional insurance mechanism involving counter-cyclical transfers, the version on offer would constitutionalize pro-cyclical adjustment in recession-hit countries, with no countervailing measures to boost demand elsewhere in the eurozone.”
Translation: hope you liked that recession, because there’s going to be a lot more of it where we’re going.
Daily links 12/10/2011
10-Dec-11
-
The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin) - book review
“The Story of the Stone is very much a domestic novel, with its dramas set almost entirely in the household sphere. Much of the “action” involves the characters holding banquets, giving each other precious objects, putting on plays, composing poetry, sharing clothing, and so forth. Cao Xueqin has a remarkable ability to lure the reader into caring about such mundane domestic matters, however, and intertwined with this is an ever-present background of tension and conflict over status, involving both the family and the servants. Aunt Zhao schemes to raise the status of her own children by bringing down Xi-feng and Bao-yu. A faction among the domestic staff attempts to unseat the cook. And so on.”
Daily links 12/08/2011
08-Dec-11
-
Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (Samuel Bowles)
A glowing review of Bowles’s ‘Microeconomics’, which I bought a few years ago but have never read.
-
A town called Malice | l’Art Social
“96% of calls to the National Benefit Fraud Hotline are malicious or timewasting. Of 254,000 calls to the hotline in 2009/10, only 3,360 (1.3%) resulted in a claimant being sanctioned for fraud. In a further 8,000 cases (3.1%) error, not fraud, was found…
87,000 investigations were undertaken as a result of calls to the hotline in 2009/10. Of these, 87% showed neither fraud nor error. That’s 76,000 innocent claimants a year being hauled over the coals as a result of timewasting calls.”
Daily links 11/30/2011
30-Nov-11
-
Small samples mean statistically significant results should usually be ignored — Marginal Revolution
“If the sample size is small then statistically significant results must have big effect sizes. Combine this with a publication bias toward statistically significant results, plenty of opportunities to subset the data in various ways and lots of researchers looking at lots of data and the result is diminishing effects with increasing confidence”
Daily links 11/25/2011
25-Nov-11
-
Nile Rodgers’ top 10 music books | Books | guardian.co.uk
“4. Beethoven’s Letters
Whenever I’ve seen the famous bust of Beethoven, he looks like the ultimate tortured soul. A genius who’d be cantankerous, reclusive, and cynical - but his letters are anything but. They reveal a tender, kind, and loving man, the antithesis of the glaring-eyed bust. They were never written to be read by anyone other than their addressees, and this intimacy makes them great to read. This sign-off to his friend Pastor Amenda is typical of their poetic humanity:
“Two persons alone once possessed my whole love, one of whom still lives, and you are now the third. Farewell, beloved, good, and noble friend! Ever continue your love and friendship towards me, just as I shall ever be your faithful BEETHOVEN.” I read these letters over and over again.”
Daily links 11/23/2011
23-Nov-11
-
Estimation of Social Costs of Transport in Japan
“Using a dataset of 111 Japanese cities in 2005, the article estimates the social costs of car transport and analyses the structure of the components of and the relationship between social costs and city size. The following major results are obtained. First, the social costs of vehicular transport increase at an accelerated pace as city size becomes larger. Secondly, while the construction of roads does not work to decrease the social costs of vehicular transport, public transport has a tendency to decrease such costs, although with minimal effect. Thirdly, the traffic congestion component represents more than 45 per cent of the total social cost of vehicular transport. Cost due to global warming accounts for 5–11 per cent of the total. Fourthly, the social costs of vehicular transport are about 8 per cent of GDP. Fuel tax for cars covers only 16.3 per cent of the social costs of regular car use.”
-
Lovely visualization from Duncan Smith of UCL showing the concentrations and mix of uses (retail, industry, office) around London. Would be nice to be able to add residential to the mix but AFAIK there is no comparable data on residential floorspace.
-
10 Questions for Charles C. Mann | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine
Hugely interesting short discussion about … well, about a lot of stuff.
-
Permanent Income and the Black-White Test Score Gap
“Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and permanent income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in two commonly used data sets. When we add permanent income to the controls used by Fryer and Levitt (2006), the unexplained gap in 3rd grade shrinks below 0.15 standard deviations, less than half of what is found with their controls.”
Daily links 11/17/2011
17-Nov-11
-
Digital Urban: Crowd Density at the Lord Mayor’s Show 2011 (London, UK)
A fairly remarkable live map of crowd dynamics at the recent Lord Mayor’s show, using data volunteered through a mobile phone app.
Daily links 11/16/2011
16-Nov-11
-
Tom the Dancing Bug Comic Strip, November 11, 2011 on GoComics.com
Cartoon dog goes Galt, with informative consequences.
-
24 hours of Flickr photos printed to fill a room
One day of flickr uploads is enough to fill a room.
-
Does School Autonomy Make Sense Everywhere? Panel Estimates from PISA
“We construct a panel dataset from the four waves of international PISA tests spanning 2000-2009, comprising over one million students in 42 countries. Relying on panel estimation with country fixed effects, we identify the effect of school autonomy from within-country changes in the average share of schools with autonomy over key elements of school operations. Our results show that autonomy affects student achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, but positively in developed and high-performing countries. These results are unaffected by a wide variety of robustness and specification tests, providing confidence in the need for nuanced application of reform ideas.”
Post to OWIOW 11/13/2011
13-Nov-11
-
What drives the global land rush?
“This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as well as indicators of land rights security. Results confirm the central role of agro-ecological potential as a pull factor. In contrast to the literature on foreign investment in general, the quality of the business climate is insignificant whereas weak land governance and tenure security for current users make countries more attractive for investors. Implications for policy are discussed.”
-
“We suggest that psycho-social benefits of protection, autonomy and prestige may help to explain people’s attachment to cars and also why studies have found consistently that car owners are healthier than non-car owners. In our study cars were seen to provide protection from undesirable people events, and a comfortable cocoon (but not as providing protection against accidents). Cars provided autonomy because car use was seen as being more convenient, reliable and providing access to more destinations than public transport. Cars were seen to confer prestige and other socially desirable attributes such as competence, skill and masculinity.”