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Beautifully illustrated example of how randomness plus small populations make for uncertain comparisons.
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Nice to see William Labov interviewed on the subject.
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Life sure is tough when you're a billionaire who just wants to distort media, science and politics to suit your own personal whims.
links for 2010-09-02
03-Sep-10
links for 2010-08-31
01-Sep-10
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Fascinating comparison of office costs and parking costs in a cross-section of cities. Seems to me that those cities which have a relatively high parking cost to office cost ratio have a better street scene as a result.
links for 2010-08-30
31-Aug-10
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Karl Whelan:
"I think it’s worth noting that the Ricardian equivalence idea put forward by Barro—that consumers see deficits and taxes as basically the same thing—has been tested many many times. And the general consensus on this, as I understand it, is that there is very little evidence to support the idea.
Moreover, though the idea works in one very simplified model set up, there are lots of reasons why the proposition does not hold in reality (liquidity constraints, people having finite lives, people not having rational expectations, uncertainty about the path of government spending—see this extract from David Romer’s textbook.) Very few economists emerge from graduate schools believing in the Ricardian equivalence idea."
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In Chongqing the government is trying to force high-speed urbanisation, hoping that peasants will give up their land in exchange for 'urban resident' status and the various services that go along with it. But many rural residents aren't so sure it's a good deal (partly because services are improving in the countryside), while it's also unclear that the city can absorb millions of new residents in such a short space of time.
links for 2010-08-29
30-Aug-10
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"Toronto’s geography reflects a city that has become almost completely post-industrial: There are very, very few districts left in the city where working class jobs are the dominant concentration."
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"In short, attempting to subsidize the American dream for low and moderate income families may be a fundamentally bad policy. However, it does not appear to be either the origin of the housing bubble or the source of Fannie and Freddie’s trouble."
links for 2010-08-28
29-Aug-10
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Trend in availability of London Cycle Hire bikes, over the last 24 hours, week and month. By Tom Taylor.
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"This was something that John Stuart Mill and Jean-Baptiste Say had gotten right in 1829.
Our problem is not that there is a shift in demand from construction to manufacturing, and we have to move workers from construction to manufacturing. Our problem is that there has been a shift in demand from currently-produced goods and services to safe high-quality assets and that as a result workers in goods-and-services-producing industries have been fired. There is no counterbalancing sector in which demand for employment is high, for what is in demand is high-quality safe AAA assets, and the lack of trust in the private sector is so great that no private business can make money by putting people to work creating high-quality safe AAA assets."
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"Rationing healthcare resources is a soul-destroying and unavoidable horror, in which some people who are dearly loved will always die, and this makes it an irresistible magnet for questionable behaviour from people who are happy to release themselves from the burden of being realistic about difficult decisions… You’re always going to draw the line somewhere, and if you paid £200,000 for 6 weeks of life there would still be more you could do. Whoever draws that line, wherever it falls, is always going to be pilloried and despised. When you’re writing about such an incredibly easy and emotive target, it might be fair to at least use a representative anecdote for illustration, instead of Barbara Moss."
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"The Coalition seems to follow the last Government in believing that single parents are not in work because benefit conditions are not tight enough. But we know that nine out of ten single parents want a paid job; the problem is that the jobs they could fit with their family life aren’t out there…
Single parents can’t move into jobs that aren’t there – and although the right to request flexible working has helped, workplace reform remains the missing piece of the jigsaw of parental employment. The Coalition has said it wants to extend flexible working to all – we think such moves should come before work requirements are extended to more parents."
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An apology that introduces new lies, but still.
links for 2010-08-26
27-Aug-10
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I'm not quite so sure that the Republican leadership isn't (somewhat) leading rather than (entirely) following grassroots sentiment, but this is still a pretty good description of the sentiment:
"This idiotic foofaraw could be a distraction only if the GOP rank-and-file actually cared more about the size of government than the cultural politics of American identity. But they don’t. It’s not even close. American conservatism is a movement consumed by protecting and asserting a certain fabricated conception of the traditional American way of life against imaginary enemies. Support for small government is no more than a bullet point on the Right’s “What We Believe” cheat sheet, mouthed at opportune moments. I approve of what Gene’s trying to do here rhetorically, but the fact is that complaining about Muslims and keeping holy the memory of 9/11 and Ground Zero — the legitimizing altar of aggressive American imperialism — is a direct manifestation of contemporary conservatism’s essence."
links for 2010-08-25
26-Aug-10
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Someone dumped a bike because they were unable to find an empty docking point. Mark finds it and tries to get the scheme operators to come and pick it up. This proves surprisingly difficult …
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I think we're beyond 'teething problems' at this point:
"This morning about 20 cyclists were unable to dock their Boris bikes at Holborn Circus station due to a shortage of docking points. A caller told me that they had collected the bikes at mainline stations but could not find a free docking point, with the nearest half-dozen stations full (according to the on-street terminal)."
See also the first comment, which includes:
"THe other detail to check is the level of staffing. The Bike trade expressed surprise at the indication that Serco planned to have a staff-bike ration of 1:200 when Paris (and most Decaux operations) have a 1:50 ratio and Clear Channel has a 1:100 ratio for many of their operations."
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Another, much better, take on 'intergenerational fairness'
links for 2010-08-24
25-Aug-10
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Good analysis of why motoring costs have fallen overall without people really noticing. It's purchase prices which have fallen, while fuel and other running costs have gone up. As fuel costs are for some reason the most 'visible' or tangible cost fof running a car, it's that which people obsess over.
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Excellent, sobering analysis of where Liverpool stand at the moment.
links for 2010-08-23
24-Aug-10
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"The income distribution in many developed countries widened dramatically from 1970 to 2000. Scholars speculate that inequality contributes to a host of social ills by weakening the public sector. In contrast, we find that growing income inequality is associated with an expansion in revenues and expenditures on a wide range of services at the municipal and school district levels in the United States. These results are robust to a number of model specifications, including instrumental variables that deal with the endogeneity of local expenditures. Our results are inconsistent with models that predict heterogeneous societies provide lower levels of public goods."
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Laudo Ogura:
"This paper presents an empirical study of the effects of urban growth controls on the intercity commuting of workers. Growth controls (land use regulations that attempt to restrict population growth and urban sprawl) have increased housing prices and diverted population growth to uncontrolled cities. It has been suggested that resulting changes in local labour supply might stimulate intercity commuting from uncontrolled to controlled cities. To test this hypothesis, a gravity model of commuting flows between places in California is estimated using alternative econometric methods (OLS, Heckman selection and count-data). The possibility of spatial dependence in commuting flows is also taken into consideration. Results suggest larger commuting flows to destination places that restrict residential growth. "
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"Using panel data for 12 EU countries, we analyze the relationship between self-reported housing satisfaction and residential mobility. Our results indicate the existence of a positive link between the two variables and that housing satisfaction exerts a mediating effect between residential characteristics and dwellers' mobility propensities. Some interesting cross-country differences regarding the effect of other variables on mobility are also observed. "
links for 2010-08-22
23-Aug-10
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Robert Skidelsky:
"The truth is that it is not fear of government bankruptcy, but governments’ determination to balance the books, that is reducing business confidence by lowering expectations of employment, incomes, and orders. The problem is not the hole in the budget; it is the hole in the economy…Policymakers need to re-learn their Keynes, explain him clearly, and apply his lessons, not invent pseudo-rational arguments for prolonging the recession."
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"Although the corrective tax has long been viewed by economists as a theoretically desirable remedy for the problem of harmful externalities, its actual use has been limited, mainly to the domain of pollution. Liability, in contrast, has great importance in controlling harmful externalities. I compare the tax and liability here in theory and suggest that the conclusions help to explain the observed predominance of liability over taxation, except in the area of pollution…"
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The first comment to this post, arguing that 'propertarian' libertarians are in fact 'crypto-feudalists', raises an interesting question. As long as it could be shown that the land was at some point in the past acquired 'legitimately', however that is defined, are such libertarians okay with a situation in which one person owns all the land and everyone else is a tenant, with all the inequalities in wealth, power, opportunity and so on that implies?
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"The men with cowboy hats and guns on their hips are not in a bar in Texas, but in a Starbucks in Pinole, California, 22 miles from San Francisco. They are members of East Bay Open Carry, one of a number of intertwined grassroots groups which have popped up in California to promote the currently existing right of citizens to carry unloaded firearms in public."
Can someone explain to me how *unloaded* guns are meant to be a deterrent to criminals?
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"So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused."
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This does appear to be an empirical regularity:
"And though the story shifts, the moral is always the same: the little people have to suffer."
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Seems fairly straightforward to me that increased inequality led to reduced regulation of financial services which led to increased inequality, and so on until … well, you know what happened.
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This is a fairly striking claim:
"It is shown that New York house prices have a direct effect on London house prices."
The obvious question is whether this is really causation or the result of some other factor such as excess returns in financial services. I've not read the paper yet but I'll be interested to see how the authors deal with this.
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Matthew Kahn is optimistic about how cities will adapt to global warming:
""I foresee a lot of challenges for urban cities, but I think they'll reconfigure themselves," he said. "I'd guess that in 2070, Los Angeles will have New York- or Hong Kong-style density, clean air, a working subway and much more development in the city's temperate zones."
I hope this does happen, but I'm less optimistic that it will. Kahn's work documents that as cities get richer their citizens become more concerned about their quality of life or amenity value. This has certainly led to environmental improvements, but I think it has also led to increased opposition to new development, particularly of the Hong Kong, high-density variety.
There's also the side issue of whether such high density development will actually worsen urban heat island effects …
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"Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they've encountered, determining those tribes' fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They've dubbed this the "Policy of No Contact." After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test."
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"When I heard in the news the Government saying they were ending a 'war on motorists', I thought that all they were doing was enabling people to break the law and endanger lives by speeding.
"What about people's rights to use local streets safely? What about people's right to life? The Government should be prioritising saving lives on our roads not accumulating deaths. The cost of a speed camera does not compare to the cost of a life."
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I wonder who will benefit from this.
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In passing, Orwell remarks, "It is curious that I always attribute these devious motives to other people, being anything but cunning myself and finding it hard to use indirect methods even when I see the need for them."
links for 2010-08-21
22-Aug-10
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As Roger Ebert says, it's remarkable that some people are outraged about a mosque being built somewhere in the vicinity of Ground Zero but not about the shopping mall that is going to be built *in* Ground Zero - y'know, among the ashes of the dead and all that.
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"The Jedi Principle runs so:
If you need the Jedi in order to make your project work, don’t start."
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Adam Curtis has just got hold of 18 terabytes of raw BBC news footage from the last 30 years of Afghanistan coverage. He posts a few excerpts. It's fascinating to observe all the undramatic, apparently humdrum stretches that are usually edited out of news bulletins.
links for 2010-08-20
21-Aug-10
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Lovely gridded map of London cycle hire stations, by the GI centre at City University.
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Notes on the physical form and development of Vancouver.
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It's easy to 'increase overseas aid' if you just re-classify a bunch of other spending as aid.
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It's reassuring when Douglas Murray says that racial discrimination no longer happens. After all, as a white man he should certainly know! And it is fascinating how he just knows that Dianne Abbott yearns to call anyone who criticises her a racist, even if he can't identify any instances of this actually happening.
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More improvements in transparency:
"Ministers are poised to scrap the requirement for English local authorities to report on whether or not they are improving public transport accessibility, increasing bus patronage, cutting congestion and improving road condition."
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"when works (on Crossrail and Thameslink) complete Farringdon will surpass Clapham Junction as Britain's busiest train station"
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"There is a class dimension to scrapping road safety cameras; yet again, the cuts harm the interests of groups disproportionately likely to be poor and benefit the interests of groups disproportionately likely to be better-off."
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The fact that TfL are starting a two-year trial of 'average speed' cameras on four streets is hardly a massive step towards more enforcement. In fact I'd say it's more like a delaying tactic. I'm sceptical that we need a two-year trial to tell us that more enforcement will result in more compliance.
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Matt Kahn makes a very good point about complementary inputs undermining the strength of conclusions from randomised trials.
links for 2010-08-18
19-Aug-10
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Classic Daily Mail stuff in that it only pretends to care about social housing tenants as long as they find them culturally acceptable like this unfortunate old man, but the point remains that there are huge personal costs associated with the costs of making social housing more 'efficient'. Fundamentally, you're talking about moving people in and out of their homes against their will.
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World Series-winning home run by Bobby Thompson, who died yesterday.
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A selection of Herman Leonard's wonderful jazz photos.
links for 2010-08-17
18-Aug-10
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"A series of bizarre protests from residents has left 1,000 “Boris bikes” stranded in an underground garage and unable to be used by cyclists.
Councils have refused to grant permission for 76 docking stations, meaning that Transport for London can only put 5,000 of the 6,000 hire bikes on the street.
One group of residents claimed it would be a “violation of their human rights” if a docking station were to be built outside their mansion block in Bloomsbury. "
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Your Ph.D. in context.
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Sadly, the 'precious right to discriminate' is still very important for a lot of conservatives and libertarians.
links for 2010-08-16
17-Aug-10
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"As revenue from raw material exports and taxation slumped, the crisis created a huge “fiscal hole” in the 56 poorest countries, decimating their budget revenues by $53bn (£33bn) in 2009 – nearly 10% of their pre-crisis revenues. A further $12bn will be lost in 2010, creating a total fiscal hole of $65bn over the two-year period. That hole ensures that the poorest countries will share the rich world’s pain of cuts in essential services (while countries in the middle like China, India and Brazil steam on relatively unharmed), even though they missed out on the preceding financial boom. It’s like suffering a monumental hangover when you weren’t even invited to the party."
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Superb post from Daniel Little on what 'folkloric' analyses of French rural traditions can tell us about anthropology and social science in general.
I liked this bit:
"The grand theories — structural-functionalism, Freudianism, Marxism, rational choice theory — simply can't be used as a formula in terms of which to understand a society or a culture as a whole. This isn't to say that theories are irrelevant to the investigation of communities; but they must be brought to bear in partial ways, not as general comprehensive schemes of interpretation."I've been trying to think about whether and how you could apply this kind of thinking to economics, but not getting very far. Economic theories seem to strain towards comprehensiveness in such a way that precludes combining them in a mixed approach.
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The carrying capacity of a road is largely independent of the speed of cars on it. It's the variations in speed, the stopping and starting, that make the difference.
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" The reason we have one of the least corrupt systems is because we made it that way, by creating a rigorous system of policing to ensure probity in public office.
A secondary reason for creating the AC was to provide the public with rigorous analysis of how well various local public bodies were doing in spending public money, not just honestly but efficiently and effectively as well. This role vastly increased in the 1990s under the previous Conservative government, not least after their failure with the Poll Tax. It was not New Labour that gave the AC the role Eric Pickles now finds so objectionable – that of monitoring the performance of local services. It was his Party."
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Amazing!
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"Dropping the PD [Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness] means DfID have just lost a massive amount of moral authority in the fight to improve the way aid is used, and equally in the fight to improve the way Governments manage their own resources."
links for 2010-08-15
16-Aug-10
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The usual subsidy-seeking from motorists, but I'm puzzled by this:
"A spokesman for the Federation of Small Business said: “By increasing parking charges in local town centres it will drive people to out-of-town shopping centres where most of the time they can park for free."
Do businesses still not realise that higher parking fees means greater turnover and therefore *more* customers?
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Hilarity ensues. Also, many of them seem to be defining 'American History' as 'The last 30 years'.
links for 2010-08-13
14-Aug-10
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In general, being a libertarian is probably a lot more enjoyable in a place with government than it would be in a place without.
1. How the Telegraph reported the coalition government’s proposal to give councils financial rewards for allowing housing development, 8th August 2010:
Councils paid bonuses to build more homes
Town halls which approve new housing schemes will qualify for cash bonuses from central Government.
Grant Shapps, the Housing minister, said he wanted to use the incentives, which can fund either more frontline services, new playground facilities or council tax discounts, to boost housebuilding.
Under the plans councils which give the green light to new homes will qualify for a New Homes Bonus for every property that is built …
The story includes 90 words of quotes from the relevant government minister and 27 words from a critic of the scheme (the shadow housing minister), in the last paragraph.
2. How the Telegraph reported the Labour government’s extremely similar proposal to give councils financial rewards for allowing housing development, 7th August 2006:
Councils ‘bribed’ to fuel housing sprawl
The Government intends to reward councils with cash if they give planning permission for hundreds of thousands of new homes to be built in attractive parts of England where property prices are high.
Conservationists, who recall similar schemes in the 1960s when many cheap, sub-standard houses were built, described the proposals yesterday as “cash for sprawl” …
The story, which describes the proposal as a ‘bribe’ which would ‘ignore environmental considerations and local democracy’ while providing ‘a scary new temptation to corruption in local government and planning’, includes 41 words of quotes from the relevant government minister and 152 words from a range of critics.
links for 2010-08-09
10-Aug-10
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"The most senior traffic policeman in Britain has warned the government that cutting funding for speed cameras will put lives at risk.
Chief constable Mick Giannasi has warned ministers there will be a rise in fatal road accidents as struggling councils cannot afford to operate the cameras, according to reports today."
In the course of asking whether speed cameras really cut accidents, Will Smale of the BBC posts the below chart
and comments
The chart below shows that in the 11 years between 1998 and 2008, a time during which speed cameras proliferated, the number of road deaths remained fairly constant. However, there was a cut in serious injuries - although opponents of speed cameras will say this is largely down to other factors, such as better safety standards in new cars.
The problem is that the number of road deaths is so low in comparison to the number of serious injuries that it’s very hard to tell from that chart what the trend is in the former. So I made a chart showing deaths only.
I used this data from the Department for Transport. Unlike the BBC chart, mine doesn’t have data for 1998 but does for 2009, which shows a big fall. But even looking at the trend between 1999 and 2008, there is still a fall of nearly 900 deaths a year, a drop of a quarter on the 1999 figure. No way is that ‘fairly constant’.
In case you’re wondering, the number of speed cameras really went up between 2001 and 2005, then seems to have mostly levelled off. And there’s lots of other evidence on their effectiveness too, but Smale didn’t see fit to mention it.