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The Strange Decline of the Philly Accent - Emily Badger - The Atlantic Cities
“”The idea is that in large urban centers, the density and intensity of social interaction is such that it’s really a hotbed for linguistic innovation,” says Josef Fruehwald, a Ph.D. candidate who’s been working with Labov. “Despite the broad idea that mass media is what’s spreading language change – that we’re all becoming more similar – what really matters is face-to-face interaction with peers.”
(This does, by the way, also mean that suburbs are decidedly not hotbeds of linguistic innovation. “If your house is set back 40 feet,” Labov says, “you’d need a pretty good excuse to come say hello to your neighbor.”)
“The big question of why language changes lies beyond everything we do,” Labov says. “So we attack it by breaking it down into small steps.” They’ve already learned that women in Philadelphia (and in other communities) are the leaders of language change. And now they know exactly what that change sounds like and where it’s going. The ultimate question, though, is what this evolution reveals about about how people relate to and communicate with their neighbors, be it next door, across town, or even farther away.”
Daily links 05/20/2013
20-May-13
Daily links 05/19/2013
19-May-13
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National Poverty Center | University of Michigan
“In urban areas job vacancies often exist but poor, minority residents tend to be concentrated in neighborhoods with limited geographic access to these jobs. Using a randomized field experiment with public transit subsidies, I test whether this spatial mismatch of workers from jobs causes poor labor market outcomes. Randomly selected clients of a non-profit employment agency received a public transit subsidy to assist in applying to jobs and attending interviews with potential employers. I find evidence that the transit subsidies have a large, short-run effect in reducing unemployment durations with treatment causing the probability of finding employment within 40 days to increase by 9 percentage points, from 0.26 to 0.35. After 90 days, this difference narrows to a large but statistically insignificant 5 percentage points. I find weaker evidence that this decrease in unemployment duration results from more intense search behavior, with the transit subsidy group applying to more jobs and jobs further from home. To my knowledge, these results provide the first experimental confirmation that spatial mismatch of workers from jobs can cause adverse labor market outcomes for poor, urban individuals.”
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May Day Marxism: Capitalism is looking pretty shabby.
“In summary, I’m not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one. My view is that full employment and robust systems of redistribution from the more fortunate to the less fortunate are possible. I see real evidence for this in the world. The Obama administration has actually enacted a lot of redistribution programs, and the government of Australia has maintained consistent full employment policies for a long time now. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, a good thing on its own terms, has had the bad consequence of breeding massive complacency among the upper classes in the West. It used to seem important to people in the rich countries to prove that market economies not only could but in fact would lead to broadly rising living standards.”
Daily links 05/16/2013
16-May-13
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Historical Urban Ecological data for six US cities - Center for Population Economics
Some pretty remarkable neighbourhood-level data for some US cities from 1830 to 1930.
Daily links 05/13/2013
13-May-13
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IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor
“Studies of neighbourhood effects typically investigate the instantaneous effect of point-in-time measures of neighbourhood poverty on individual outcomes. It has been suggested that it is not solely the current neighbourhood, but also the neighbourhood history of an individual that is important in determining an individual’s outcomes. The effect of long-term exposure to poverty neighbourhoods on adults has largely been ignored in the empirical literature, partly due to a lack of suitable data. Using a population of parental home-leavers in Stockholm, Sweden, this study is innovative in investigating the effects of two temporal dimensions of exposure to neighbourhood environments on personal income later in life: the parental neighbourhood at the time of leaving the home and the cumulative exposure to poverty neighbourhoods in the subsequent 17 years. Using unique longitudinal Swedish register data and bespoke individual neighbourhoods, we are the first to employ a hybrid model, which combines both random and fixed effects approaches, in a study of neighbourhood effects. We find independent and non-trivial effects on income of the parental neighbourhood and cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. The intergenerational transmission and exposure effects suggest the need for a more dynamic formulation of the neighbourhood effects hypothesis which explicitly takes temporal dimensions into account. “
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IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor
“We use the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to classify neighbourhoods defined as small areas containing approximately 1500 people. We use the data from all available waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to trace moves between these neighbourhoods, classified into deprivation deciles. We define upward socio-spatial mobility as moving to neighbourhoods with lower levels of deprivation. The focus on residential choices and the outcomes – residential sorting – allows us to measure the fluidity of the British social structure. We show that restricted ability to compete for the better neighbourhoods combines with residence in neighbourhoods with relatively high degrees of deprivation to limit opportunities for social mobility. The analysis shows that education and income play critical roles in the ability of individuals to make neighbourhood and decile gains when they move. There are also powerful roles of being unemployed and being (and becoming) a social renter. Both these latter effects combine to seriously restrict the possibilities for socio-spatial movement for certain groups. The results suggest serious structural barriers to socio-spatial mobility in British society, barriers which are directly related to the organisation of the housing market.”
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Ronald Coase: Interview about New Institutional Economics
“I think the success of the Coase Theorem—because it’s discussed all over the place—is an interesting illustration of what’s wrong with economics; because, if you read “The Problem of Social Cost,” it occupies perhaps four pages. It’s useful. I think it’s useful because you can show, using it, the type of contracts that would have to be made in order to have an efficient economic system. But then you have to introduce, having done that, the obstacles to doing it. Then you see how the system actually works… You’d be concerned with the types of contracts people make in different situations, how the ability to make these contracts depends on the existence of various institutions, of various laws, of the type of educational system that exists, and so on. You would have begun to see what it is that makes possible the types of contracts you’d like to make. You get into the problem. At the moment, that is being completely ignored.”
Daily links 05/07/2013
07-May-13
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“Economists, you see, don’t watch just quantities–the amount of debt a government has issued–but prices. And the prices of government debt are the rate of inflation, the nominal interest rate, and the level of the stock market as people trade bonds for commodities, bonds for cash, and bonds for stocks. And all three of these prices are flashing green: saying that markets would prefer and it would be better for the economy if government debt were growing at a faster pace than under current forecasts.”
Daily links 05/06/2013
06-May-13
Daily links 05/02/2013
02-May-13
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Long-term unemployed face ferocious statistical discrimination.
“What’s becoming clear is that a three-year span of weakness in the labor market is much much much worse for society than a one-year span of weakness. A normal recession disrupts people’s lives, but a long recession destroys them. You lose output, prosperity, family stability, self-esteem, and many other qualities on what looks to be a semi-permanent basis. But instead of recognizing an urgent need to develop a politically tractable strategy for the next time, policymakers seem largely focused on congratulating themselves for having avoided a situation as severe as the Great Depression.”
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“For an event honoring him in 1999, one of his colleagues wrote in an essay, “His tools are eclectic and his toolbox cluttered…. He is trying to depict processes that still defy understanding with the best tools that come to hand from whatever school of analysis.” Gumperz never retreated from the messy world to academic abstraction. He was always interested in the real-world application of his ideas.
“[C]ommunication cannot be studied in isolation,” Gumperz wrote. “It must be analyzed in terms of its effects on people’s lives.”
Gumperz looked around him and saw the invisible infrastructure of spoken language that surrounds us all. If we understand the nature of that infrastructure, his work demonstrated, the walls of language need not divide us.”
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Is your house your pension, or a curse for the next generation? | IHURER Research and Policy Blog
“Over time, the burden of meeting council tax payments has increased for those on low and middle incomes. At the same time, relatively light taxation at the higher end of the housing market appears to have fuelled market volatility, increasing risk for highly leveraged buyers and people with uncertain contracts or income… Our project is a challenging one and requires us to estimate the current value of all domestic (residential) dwellings in England, Wales and Scotland. We will estimate the impacts, on people and local authorities, of a range of scenarios of property tax reform including Council Tax revaluation, and abolition of the Council Tax and Stamp Duty with a view to their replacement by a National Property Tax on residential property.”
Daily links 04/29/2013
29-Apr-13
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66 Behind the Scenes Pics from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK - Imgur
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Carjack victim recounts his harrowing night - Boston.com
“In an exclusive interview with the Globe on Thursday, Danny — the victim of the Tsarnaev brothers’ much-discussed but previously little-understood carjacking — filled in some of the last missing pieces in the timeline between the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier, just before 10:30 p.m. on April 18, and the Watertown shootout that ended just before 1 a.m. Danny asked that he be identified only by his American nickname.
The story of that night unfolds like a Tarantino movie, bursts of harrowing action laced with dark humor and dialogue absurd for its ordinariness, reminders of just how young the men in the car were. Girls, credit limits for students, the marvels of the Mercedes ML 350 and the iPhone 5, whether anyone still listens to CDs — all were discussed by the two 26-year-olds and the 19-year-old driving around on a Thursday night.”
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Road fatality rates vary widely by sex, age and mode of transport. For males aged 17-20, driving is more dangerous than cycling. And cycling is much safer for all age groups in the Netherlands than in the UK.
Daily links 04/28/2013
28-Apr-13
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ingentaconnect Measuring Neighbourhood Effects Non-experimentally: How Much Do A…
“European research attempting to quantify neighbourhood effects has relied almost exclusively on analyses of observational data. No consensus has emerged, perhaps because a variety of statistical procedures have been employed. We investigate this by exploring the degree to which alternative, non-experimental statistical methods yield different estimates of the relationship between neighbourhood income mix and individual work income when applied to the same longitudinal database. We find that results are highly sensitive to the statistical approach employed. Methods controlling for geographic selection bias generally reduce the negative association between low-income neighbours and individual earnings, but substantial differences across models remain. Controlling for both selection and endogeneity produces larger associations and evidence of non-linearity, something that is hidden in models only controlling for selection. All methods suffer shortcomings, so we argue for multi-method investigations to identify robust findings, with instrumental variables and fixed effects on non-mover samples being preferred. In our case, we find a substantial neighbourhood effect, regardless of the method employed.”
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Fiscal Frameworks & Spending Plans | ToUChstone blog: A public policy blog from the TUC
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Kowloon Walled City: Life in the City of Darkness | South China Morning Post
Comprehensive history of Kowloon Walled City, along with some personal recollections of life within it.
Daily links 04/22/2013
22-Apr-13
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The quote from Mann beginning “Societies are not unitary” is important, though difficult to stick to.
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Side one of The Beatles played 100 times over the top of each other - Toffee Milkshake
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Guinean vinyl recordings discography
Radio Africa
Guinean vinyl discography
Compiled by Graeme Counsel -
“The results suggest that there is a higher-floor premium for condominiums in San Diego. Specifically, an increase in the floor level is associated with about a 2.2% increase in sale price. The higher-floor premium appears to be quadratic in price, suggesting that price increases at a decreasing rate above the mean floor level. The authors also find evidence for a penthouse premium, though this effect disappears once “floor” is controlled for in the model.”
Daily links 04/18/2013
18-Apr-13
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“The way I see this work, the authors have an interesting idea and want to explore it. But exploration won’t get you published in the American Economic Review. Instead of the explore-and-study paradigm, Ashraf and Galor are going with assert-and-defend. They make a very strong claim and keep banging on it, defending their claim with a bunch of analyses to demonstrate its robustness. I have no problem with robustness studies (recall that I was upset about some claims about age and happiness because I had difficulty replicating them with new data), but I don’t think this lets you off the hook of having to think carefully about causal claims. And presenting tables of numbers to three (meaningless) decimal places doesn’t help either.
High-profile social science research aims for proof, not for understanding—and that’s a problem. The incentives favor bold thinking and innovative analysis, and that part is great. But the incentives also favor silly causal claims.”
Daily links 04/16/2013
16-Apr-13
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Rand Ghayad on long-term unemployment: The long-term unemployed are discriminated against.
“it turns out that a six-month spell of unemployment leads to a significant decrease in a potential worker’s attractiveness to employers. That means a six-month spell is relatively likely to turn into a yearlong spell or a two-year one…
Back in the 1940s, our Depression-era version of this problem was solved by World War II. When mass conscription is on the agenda, suddenly weak labor force attachment or statistical discrimination against the long-term unemployed isn’t a big deal. But we (hopefully) won’t have a new gigantic war. Consequently, 10 or 20 years from now, we’re going to be poorer than we would’ve been had we responded more effectively in 2009 and 2010 to restore full employment. The failure to adequately and appropriately address the economic short term is proving to be a long-term disaster.” -
And whose fault was inequality? | ToUChstone blog: A public policy blog from the TUC
Brilliant analysis showing that inequality of ‘original’ (i.e. before tax and benefits) income increased by about 20% under the Thatcher government, but inequality of post-tax incomes increased by about 30%. So there was both a structural economic shift towards more inequality and a policy shift towards less redistribution.
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Human Transit: the photo that explains almost everything (updated!)
“”Personal Rapid Transit,” or small demand-responsive buses, or driverless cars that work like taxis, will never, ever, ever substitute for surface transit in high-demand urban settings, such as where all these people want to travel.
Dreamers along these lines may well be right about many suburban areas, where demand is sparse and the land use pattern precludes efficient transit. But when all the people in this picture want to travel, driverless cars may take less space than the cars shown here, but they will still take far more space than a bus would. The scarcity of space per person is part of the very definition of a city, as distinct from suburbia or rural area, so the efficiency with which transport options use that space will always be the paramount issue. ” -
Welcome to Ireland, where mortgage payments are apparently optional – Quartz
“Despite the fact that the Irish government yanked a ton of toxic assets out of Irish banks and put them into a “bad bank” known as the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), and despite the fact that the Irish government has stuffed about €64 billion into the bank’s cash cushion, “the Irish banking system has not yet fully stabilized,” wrote Moody’s analysts in a January report. Short version: Irish banks own a ton of bad mortgage assets. (See the chart to the right.) But these are just the bad loans that we know of. Some think the true position of Irish banks may be even worse.
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Daily links 04/15/2013
15-Apr-13
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ScienceDirect.com - Journal of Urban Economics - Dynamics of urban residential growth
“This paper develops a dynamic model of the urban residential market. Under specific assumptions about market behavior on both the supply and the demand sides it is shown that cities grow by attaining a sequence of short run equilibria. A set of recursive equations is derived and through these the impact of growth on the structure of rents, densities, and consumer welfare is analyzed. The dynamic model explains the decay of the central locations in large old American cities. Housing obsolescence and abandonment arises under special conditions and is reflected in positively sloped rent gradients in central locations. The well-known static result of declining densities with distance from the center is shown to occur only under special conditions such as rising income levels. Directions for further analyzing urban growth, by expanding this dynamic approach, are pointed out.”
Daily links 04/12/2013
12-Apr-13
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Monetary policy: The mystery of stable prices | The Economist
“when inflation is high firms and workers adjust their prices and wage demands often, making prices highly responsive to demand shifts. When inflation is low, by contrast, firms and workers change prices much less frequently, building much more nominal ridigity into the economy.”
Daily links 04/03/2013
03-Apr-13
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The State of China’s Cities – something that concerns us all
Interesting analysis of the English language version of China’s urban development strategy
Daily links 03/31/2013
31-Mar-13
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Mercatus freedom map and the fallacies of libertarianism.
“The much more plausible explanation is that no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota. People attempting to construct some alternate definition of freedom that will better-track the libertarian political program will try and fail to put together a metaphysically workable distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedoms that immediately collapses in the face of air pollution, unsafe driving, lawsuits, etc.”
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How to make a scientific result disappear | Political Methodology
“the smaller the true coefficient, the larger we expect a statistically significant (and positive) estimate of that coefficient to be. The lesson is relatively straightforward: comparatively small relationships are very likely to be overestimated in the published literature, but larger relationships are more likely to be accurately estimated.”
Daily links 03/04/2013
04-Mar-13
Daily links 02/11/2013
11-Feb-13
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Not the Treasury view…: Reflections on the Green Budget
“There is a simple, absolutely standard prescription for dealing with unsustainable deficit resulting from a recession. It is the following. Announce, and commit clearly to, tax and spending measures to deal with the deficit. But ensure implementation follows recovery, not precedes it. That’s what the IFS recommended, and exactly what Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke did in the early 1990s”
Daily links 02/08/2013
08-Feb-13
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Affordable and Luxurious Housing Come Hand in Hand in Vienna
Interesting article about Vienna’s apparently highly successful social housing sector. The key seems to be the city’s ability to buy land and sell it on to developers in exchange for guarantees around affordability and design. This is a hard trick to pull off, and it’s not clear whether they manage it just by spending a lot of money or because some feature of the institutional landscape facilitates it.
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Comparing the residential densities of Australian cities (2011) « Charting Transport
Daily links 02/04/2013
04-Feb-13
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Systemic Risk and Stability in Financial Networks
“We provide a framework for studying the relationship between the financial network architecture and the likelihood of systemic failures due to contagion of counterparty risk. We show that financial contagion exhibits a form of phase transition as interbank connections increase: as long as the magnitude and the number of negative shocks affecting financial institutions are sufficiently small, more “complete” interbank claims enhance the stability of the system. However, beyond a certain point, such interconnections start to serve as a mechanism for propagation of shocks and lead to a more fragile financial system. We also show that, under natural contracting assumptions, financial networks that emerge in equilibrium may be socially inefficient due to the presence of a network externality: even though banks take the effects of their lending, risk-taking and failure on their immediate creditors into account, they do not internalize the consequences of their actions on the rest of the network.”