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Reassessing the reassessment of Robert Moses and his impact on New York, Bender concludes that public engagement has improved urban development rather than pointlessly stymieing it, and that we need more democratic involvement, not less.
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Reviewing Paul Collier’s proposals on trade, Kimberly Ann Elliott persuasively argues that the rules and multilateral nature of the WTO give the poorest countries much more power than a bilateralised system of trade rules would.
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Ah, I think this is the guy who’s been writing the sensible, insightful posts at Free Exchange of late. Lots of intelligent stuff on the economics of cities, transport and planning.
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Interesting. Ryan Avent suggests that sprawl actually promotes restrictions on housing development, since it increases traffic congestion, the main reason localities block new building.
links for 2007-09-29
29-Sep-07
links for 2007-09-28
28-Sep-07
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For weeks after 9/11, New Yorkers were inhaling lead, mercury and god knows what else is produced when you vaporize two skyscrapers. They’ll continue feeling the effects for a long time.
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Andrew Rice hits on something when he notes that what Kapuscinski mainly communicated, albeit vividly and in beautifully evocative language, was the experience of mutual misunderstanding.
links for 2007-09-25
25-Sep-07
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Sidney Blumenthal says it’s even worse than we thought: ‘Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today”‘
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Makes me proud to be a citizen journalist, it really does
links for 2007-09-24
24-Sep-07
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“One in eight trees cut down each year worldwide is being destroyed for tobacco production … the 9 million acres being deforested annually for tobacco production account for nearly 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.”
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Generally not getting involved in endless bloody wars is a good thing, but can have the side-effect of encouraging the less thoughtful elements of society to believe that war is a fun and easy thing to make.
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Listen to Brad DeLong’s Berkeley lectures on economic history. I’m listening to number 2 on the ‘discovery’ of the Americas and man, he knows how to go on an interesting tangent.
links for 2007-09-10
10-Sep-07
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Clinton’s massive expansion of tax credits should caused much of the reduction in unemployment and welfare enrollment during the 1990s. In other words, it wasn’t just welfare reform.
links for 2007-09-09
09-Sep-07
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Another good post, this time on the role of access to education in widening US inequality, and the feedback from that inequality through constrained mobility to lower investment in education and ultimately lower growth
links for 2007-09-05
05-Sep-07
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Well lookee here, a trade-off: if we want more social mobility, then we’re going to need less inequality.
links for 2007-09-04
04-Sep-07
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Very elegant, very powerful: “Firms and workers go where productivity is high and, by so doing, tend to further raise productivity, creating an uneven distribution of activity and spatial income disparities.” Worth reading in detail.
links for 2007-09-03
03-Sep-07
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Molly Kinder tells us that the aid-funded eradication of river blindness from West Africa brought 25m hecatares of arable land back into use and benefitted economies by an estimated $3.7 billion.
links for 2007-09-02
02-Sep-07
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Great post (for a change), skewering the Cato Institute’s dodgy statistics on the costs and benefits of rail transport.
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Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s amazing Waldspirale building in Darmstadt.
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Good old ASI, they’ll still be churning out the old-fashioned climate denialism long after everyone else has moved on. Meanwhile, the underground rotation of Adam Smith himself, too dead to protest, continues to accelerate.
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Martin Prowse points out several factors constraining the likely effectiveness of randomised control trials in assessing aid interventions.
Not always with us
01-Sep-07
The Economist blog again:
Many on the left would like to ditch the current poverty measure for a relative standard that indexes the poverty line to, say, 50 percent of the median income, or the means to buy 80 percent of the average level of consumption on a socially determined set of “basic needs”. This would ensure that the poor will always be with us, by definition, even if the meekest among us haul in $1,000,000 per year, or if anti-gravity sky yachts come to be widely accepted as a “basic need”.
This is self-evidently wrong. Using the 50% of median income definition there would ‘by definition’ be no relative poverty if the poorest person had an income of 51% of the median. There is no logical or mathematical reason this can’t happen. There may be practical reasons (the income of some self-employed people can often plummet in one year only to jump again the next) or political ones (opposition to a citizens basic income or higher conventional benefits), and I suspect it is opposition to the political solutions that’s behind this suggestion that relative poverty can’t be eradicated.