According to Africans, yes.

Weird. When any group of bigwigs comes along claiming to represent the views of Africans in favour of overseas aid, Bill Easterly and co. at Aid Watch tend to fly into a rage, denouncing the patronising condescension and so forth. But if it's anti-aid bigwigs we're talking about, why that's completely different!

See Terence's post in the comments thread below, though. Actual ordinary Africans, as surveyed by Afrobarometer, seem to think that international donors and NGOs are a very positive presence in Africa.

Andrew Leonard joins the head-shaking at Robert Barro's latest helpful suggestion.

Makes sense:

"This column considers the influence of expectations, of variation in recessions and expansions, and of different components of government spending. It finds that the size of the multiplier varies considerably over the business cycle: between 0 and 0.5 in expansions and between 1 and 1.5 in recessions."

If I'm reading the abstract correctly, this is support for the theory that the 'holdout problem' makes it more costly to reassemble fragmented land due to transactions costs and strategic bargaining costs.

Housing is even more of a bundled good than most people realise:

"In real life, we observe that housing costs are often greater than construction costs, and in many places are significantly greater than construction costs. Most of what you're paying for isn't the shelter component but the access component—housing provides you with regular access to a set of economic opportunities. If you buy a home in New York, you get the roof over your head, but most of the price you pay covers the access to New York's production and consumption opportunities."

So when the value of your house drops, it's probably not the only thing going on:

"This also means that while your investment is losing value, so to is the set of economic opportunities available to you; your potential income declines along with and in association with the loss of value in your investment. To make matters worse, this decline in investment value and potential income is typically combined with rising illiquidity …"

'Map your moves – A visual exploration of where New Yorkers moved in the last decade"

Behold the glory of my creation - a Ryan Avent-only RSS feed for The Economist's Free Exchange blog.

Fine obituary for the great French cyclist and Tour champion.

"Yet as much as the French public adores its cycling stars, there was little love for Fignon. He was remote and brusque and could be willful, even arrogant, never reluctant to snatch victory away from deserving teammates in a race. He struck photographers, and ignored reporters and fans. Journalists awarded him their Prix Citron, the lemon prize for the least likable rider in the 1989 Tour.

“At least I won something,” he later said."

"There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American. It seems pretty clear to me that this is exactly how the conservative politics of American identity works. "

Beautifully illustrated example of how randomness plus small populations make for uncertain comparisons.

Nice to see William Labov interviewed on the subject.

Life sure is tough when you're a billionaire who just wants to distort media, science and politics to suit your own personal whims.

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.

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."

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.

"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."

"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."

Trend in availability of London Cycle Hire bikes, over the last 24 hours, week and month. By Tom Taylor.

"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."

"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."

"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."

An apology that introduces new lies, but still.

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."

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 …

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."

Another, much better, take on 'intergenerational fairness'

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.

Excellent, sobering analysis of where Liverpool stand at the moment.