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The planning system ain’t perfect, says Hana, but it’s not the root of all evil either. All planning regulations are not the same, and some of them - design statements, travel plans, affordable housing - bring tangible improvements in quality of life.
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John Quiggin points out that standard cost-benefit analyses of climate change don’t accord much value to whole eco-systems - $2.5-$5bn a year for the whole climate-sensitive natural environment of the US?
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Spectacular 3D visualisation of GDP by location on the globe. Vividly illustrates Jeff Sachs’ argument that wealth tends to be found in areas that are temperate and near the sea.
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Striking fact of the day “More than one-third of all the public transportation commuters in America live in the five boroughs [of NYC]”. And generally environmentalists should welcome densification in cities.
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Love that headline. The crazy fool in question is Dani Rodrik: “I started to understand that the problems of underdevelopment were not technical problems in the sense of a lack of engineers or a lack of doctors. It was a problem of social organization.”
links for 2007-01-31
31-Jan-07
links for 2007-01-30
30-Jan-07
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Maybe the Sarbanes-Oxley Act hasn’t really chased global financial capital away from New York to London.
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WTO members are supposedly equal before the law, but no African country has yet used its Dispute Settlement Mechanism to initiate a dispute. This article argues that this failure is partly their own fault an partly that of a system that ignores existing p
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Sullivan’s excellent NYT Op-Ed about making New York a city a more enjoyable, pedestrian-friendly place, all annotated with handly links by Streetsblog.
links for 2007-01-29
29-Jan-07
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Food aid can save lives, but can also add to food insecurity. Food aid should be more carefully targeted and part of a wider social safety net. And we should pay more attention to non-’emergency’ chronic hunger, which kills many more.
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In this 2001 review of Shadow of the Sun, Ryle accuses Kapuscinski of factual inaccuracy, embellishment, and worse. Some of it sticks, I think - certainly Kapuscinski over-generalised repeatedly.
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How Britain and the United States gave the nod to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975. On a visit to Indonesia, Kissinger just asked that the invasion wait until he and President Ford had left the country.
links for 2007-01-28
28-Jan-07
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Belatedly, I tip my hat to this Christmas Day post from one of the best, and least known blogs out there, from David Smith of the Affordable Housing Institute.
links for 2007-01-26
26-Jan-07
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Matthew kindly explains to Tim why his ramblings for TCSdaily make no sense. Tim ignores him, because he doesn’t care if he’s wrong, because he got paid for it. Behold the triumph of citizen journalists.
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“What matters most is how well people are doing in absolute terms” says Tyler. But our standards for what is “doing well” are not constant. What seems to be absolute eventually becomes relative.
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saying, “I do care about poverty, but don’t give a damn about inequality,” not only reflects a remarkably narrow approach to morality but also raises issues of inconsistency, given the causal linkages that make inequality and poverty interdependent.
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“malaria … can be effectively combatted with with DDT spraying in people’s bedrooms”. Wrong, as Gary Becker should be able to tell him: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/09/response_on_mal.html
Ryszard Kapuscinski
25-Jan-07
Ryszard Kapuscinski has died. It is terribly sad news, but we are all lucky that someone so gifted as a writer and someone so insanely, recklessly adventurous as a reporter was able to spend forty years doing what he did best.
His books about bad times and ordinary lives in Iran, Latin America, the Soviet Empire and (especially) Africa combined an unblinking scrutiny of human depravity with relentless empathy and compassion. They are full of bizarre and extraordinary events, but he was fascinated more by the strange than by the spectacular, more by moods and personal experience than by the great sweep of history. Even from his numerous brushes with death (nearly drowning off Zanzibar, catching malaria in Uganda, passing out from heat and thirst in the Sahara, to name a few) and other presumably terrifying ordeals he always picked out the beautiful image or the disarming moment of empathy that suddenly puts you right on the spot. He de-mystified ‘exotic’ places or people, bringing home how our culture and our worldview are shaped by our environment, whether it is one of comfort or extreme deprivation. And he loved Africa in particular, with an intensity that is infectious.
Kapuscinski was named “journalist of the century” in Poland (where they read his descriptions of the mad Emperor Selassie as a thinly-disguised commentary on life under communism back home) and I find it hard to think of anyone better from anywhere else. I can’t say his books brought me joy per se - they were too preoccupied with the messy and tragic for that. But they brought me life. Everyone should read them.
Here are obituaries from the Guardian and the Times, and here is a wonderful appreciation from Shefa Siegel: “Kapuscinski did what journalists were invented to do, which is give humanity to those who are different from ourselves”.
links for 2007-01-24
24-Jan-07
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Alex Burger is a very brave man. His account of life in Chad right now is honest, frightening and does not give one much hope for the country’s immediate future.
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Yes, let’s brutalise people on the basis of their religion or skin colour until they learn to respect our values of tolerance and freedom.
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Y’know, I think this might actually be a case of too much information. Global disaster map, updated in real time. Via Chicken Yoghurt.
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Putting adult AIDS patients on antiretroviral drug treatment significantly improves their children’s education and nutrition. Makes intuitive sense, but a great bit of research to put some facts on the theory.
Tierra y Libertad
22-Jan-07
A right-wing think-tank produces another statistical hodge-podge designed to promote their favourite policies. Nothing new there. But looking at the rankings, I can’t help but notice that in the two supposedly most laissez-faire countries in the world, Hong Kong and Singapore, most land is owned by the state and most (Singapore) or at least a very sizeable proportion (Hong Kong) of the population lives in public housing (albeit not quite as we know it in the UK).
As Sock-Yong Phang says of Singapore, this isn’t quite Georgist land-taxation, but it does capture a good chunk of land rents. And the revenues from leases, which are pretty big, help keep the income taxes which Heritage focuses on so low and thus economic ‘freedom’ so high, as well as making public housing of both low cost and reasonable quality available to great swathes of the citizenry.
Should we be surprised that Heritage and other free-marketeers tend to ignore such significant features of these highly successful economies? A charitable interpretation is that they’ve chosen not to highlight the approach of HK and Singapore because it’s not completely clear how much other countries could or should try to emulate it. But I think it’s more likely that when the Singaporean government says of their land planning policy that “Laissez-faire has never been a viable option for us“, it just doesn’t fit very well with the simplistic morality tale of government cutting taxes and getting out of the way of private business which appeals to think-tankers.
links for 2007-01-22
22-Jan-07
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And much of the credit goes to the UN and African Union. So it’s hardly a surprise that the mainstream media and blogosphere have ignored this hugely significant news. Conflicts like Darfur and Somalia are now the exception rather than the rule.
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Steuteville strongly disputes the recent much-linked research which apparently found that suburbanites were more sociable than those in cities. The devil is in the econometric detail, which is beyond me.
links for 2007-01-21
21-Jan-07
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Buddhist economics, the Confucian Ethic, Early Islamic Economics, and much more
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Presentations from seminars on improving play space on housing estates and the link with anti-social behaviour. Low-quality communal space seems to powerfully repel most people, making unfriendly and unsafe places.
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What a great job. These people basically go around asking kids what they want out of a playground, and then building it. The results look brillian. ‘Course, when I was a lad we kicked crushed Coke cans around a car park, and look how well I turned out …
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“a person living in a [US] city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today”
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Copenhagen might just be the best city in the world. Further proof: adjusting traffic lights along 2.5km of main city road to give cyclists cyclists a continuous ride if they travel at 20 km/h.
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Rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for Africa, but not for other developing countries. Without the observed rainfall decline the gdppc gap between African and the rest of the world would be 9% to 23% smaller.
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Interesting paper, good comments from Tyler C, and useful discussion from readers. One says “microcredit in the poorest countries is at best a bandaid; whereas in the countries that are already on the road to growth, [it] isn’t really needed”.
links for 2007-01-17
17-Jan-07
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Good article by Polly Toynbee pointing out how so-called ‘non-jobs’ in the public sector are far more worthwhile than those of the journalists, spin-doctors and think-tank windbags who mock them.
links for 2007-01-16
16-Jan-07
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“[China’s] Ministry of Science and Technology has estimated that 50,000 newborn babies a year die from the effects of air pollution” …
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Ludicrous amount of free knowledge
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Brilliant. Sao Paulo officials feel compelled to clean up their car tunnels after Alexandre Orion creates pointed artworks by selectively scrubbing away the soot.
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Not sure this really makes carbon offsetting worthwhile, but at least it helps identify the complete scammers.
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Subsidising poor families to keep their daughters in school might be the single most effective way rich countries can spend their money for development.
links for 2007-01-15
15-Jan-07
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Discusses evidence from ‘acoustical archaeology’ that the Mayans were able to design structures to create particular sound effects.
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The effect of geography on income
links for 2007-01-14
14-Jan-07
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Reassuringly ungrand ideas for developing Dublin. Makes a good point that the Phoenix Park is “physically and psychologically separate from the city”, and suggests modeling dockland redevelopment on Copenhagen and Barcelona.
links for 2007-01-12
12-Jan-07
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Useful rule of thumb from John Quiggin: “to choose a long-dead person with whom almost everyone has positive associations, then to put forward controversial positions in the name of that person is to be dishonest from the outset”
Lest we forget
11-Jan-07
The Adam Smith Institute’s craven attempt at damage limitation following their ludicrous post about climate change seems to be blowing up in their faces somewhat, which is only right and proper. Tim Lambert picked up my post about my comments on Alister McFarquhar’s outlandish claims being deleted and my IP address blocked, and sent a trackback to the original post. Tim’s being a fairly high-profile blog, this seems to have panicked the ASI completely, as they decided there was nothing for it but to delete the offending post and pretend the whole embarrassing affair never happened.
Alas, as Ian Bertram points out, they reckoned without the all-seeing Google cache, which will hopefully preserve McFarquhar’s thoughts on climate change for the enjoyment of future generations. Just in case that doesn’t work, I’ve reprinted the text of it below the fold here.
links for 2007-01-11
11-Jan-07
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An almost Pynchonially wide-ranging and excessive attempt to explain just one of the many thousand linguistic puzzles in ‘Against the Day’, in a mere 2000+ words.
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Tim Lambert follows up on the Adam Smith Institute’s incompetent denials of mankind’s influence on climate and paranoid attempts to suppress discussion.
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A US perspective, so eminent domain and housing needs in New Orleans post-Katrina figure prominently. Interesting to see that green building is making a big impact on non-residential construction as well as on housing.
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Answer: Maybe. Sort of. We don’t know.
links for 2007-01-10
10-Jan-07
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The threat of bird flu hovers like … well, like an ominous bird of some sort. Extremely drug-resistant TB is “essentially untreatable” and spreading. Much more money is being spent on global health problems, but are we in it for the long haul?
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Notes, presentation and audio from an interesting meeting at ODI celebrating the work of Hans Singer, the pioneering development analyst and theorist who died during the year.
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Presentation to an ODI meeting by Hans Timmer and Richard Newfarmer. One factoid that jumps out at me is the graph showing expected increases in inequality in many countries in future.
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Causes and consequences of large-scale urbanisation around the world. Helpfully debunks some of the misconceptions around urbanisation and emphasises the need for high-quality local governance, which is rare but usually taken for granted where it exists.
links for 2007-01-09
09-Jan-07
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Dubliners spending hours stuck in traffic jams due to the complete lack of alternatives speak with envy of Prague’s public transport system while in Denmark everyone cycles and things seem to work just fine.
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Stick the kids and the shopping in a big box on the front of your bike and away you go. These are apparently all the rage in Copenhagen and not just for the comedy value.
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Includes this fun fact: “Hong Kong - that bastion of free-market capitalism - has no private land ownership at all. Land is owned by the state and leased.”
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Within-China disparities are huge. Shanghai’s Human Development equals Portugal’s, while Guizhou is as bad as Namibia. And high inequality in poor countries means vastly more absolute poverty.
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Reports on the rather large inconsistency between the average person’s description of their own life (doing nicely thank you very much) and their media-fed impression of the state of the nation as one of terminal decline.
Isn’t it interesting how those who believe in a free market of goods and services sometimes seem to prefer command-and-control when it comes to exchanging ideas?
Take that nice discussion I was having about climate change with Alister McFarquhar of the Adam Smith Institute. He claimed to have evidence that most scientists didn’t think man could affect climate, and I asked him for it. He offered Benny Peiser’s ’survey’ of the literature, and I pointed out that Peiser had subsequently admitted he was 97% wrong.
Undaunted, Alister decided that his new conclusive proof was the online survey carried out by Dennis Bray supposedly canvassing the views of professional climate scientists. Again, I pointed out that this was no proof at all, since the survey had been compromised when the access password was posted to the climatesceptics discussion group (of which I believe McFarquhar is a member).*
Now, to his credit McFarquhar was at least trying to provide evidence for his argument, even if it was very, very bad evidence. Alas, just when the exchange was getting interesting, someone at the ASI with too much time on their hands (wait, that’s all of them) decided that even by their standards McFarquhar was starting to look too silly and simply deleted the whole comments thread.**
Look, no more dissent! Hey, sometimes consensus isn’t so hard to achieve after all.
*Thanks to Tim Lambert for helping expose the flaws in both Peiser’s and Bray’s research
**Not only that, they appear to have banned me from even looking at their website with some form of IP-blocking device. Gosh, what a mature and professional bunch of intellectuals they are.