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Original posters, advertisements and other promotional material for Citizen Kane. Tagline: “It’s Terrific!”
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Evidence that poverty and other chronic risk factors induce physiological changes, to stress regulatory mechanisms in the cardiovascular and neuroendocrine systems, that appear to be related to long-term health problems
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Evidence from the US suggests that immigration increases wages, but that’s almost exactly cancelled out by higher house prices, leaving owner occupiers as the main (native) beneficiaries.
links for 2007-11-27
27-Nov-07
Route 66 economics
23-Nov-07
I think it’s fairly characteristic of Bryan Caplan that he spends this post on the subject of traffic congestion near Washington slagging off the public for their supposed economic illiteracy rather than really thinking about real-world solutions.
The problem, apparently, is that Route 66 heading east into D.C. turns into one long traffic jam as everyone tries to drive into the city at once. The only and obvious solution as far as B.C. is concerned is “Raise the price when demand is high” using road tolls. But alas, Caplan’s wisdom goes unappreciated again, due (again) to the lamentable stupidity, sorry I mean of course the ‘economic illiteracy’ of the public.
Now, I do believe that driving could probably do with being more expensive in America, and road tolls can be a sensible idea, and they may even be the right solution here. But it is very odd indeed that Caplan’s discussion makes absolutely no mention of an approach which I think many people (economists or not) would suggest - how about some half-decent public transport? Three-quarters of Washingtonians, after all, get to work by driving alone, an insanely inefficient use of road space. And the proportion taking some form of mass transit is much lower in the Washington area than in New York. Why? Perhaps it comes down to a fairly simple contrast between a very comprehensive and a rather patchy transport system. Crudely, New York has the New York subway, with 468 stations, while D.C. has the Metrorail, with 86. Yes, that’s not quite like for like, but the point is that the NYC subway covers a similar area much more densely and, with six times as many carriages, probably with greater frequency.
According to a Washington Post survey in 2005, the Metrorail seems to actually be quite highly regarded by those who use it, scoring well for value and reliability, the problem being, both for Metrorail users and non-users, is that there are too few stations to be convenient. Expand Metrorail (with public support) and / or connect it better to another improved mode such as buses, and many more people would use it instead of driving, so you’ll get less traffic jams. It’s not rocket science, yet either the thought never occurred to Caplan or he’s got some uninformed prejudice against rail.
It’s ironic, then, that he wonders how Ken Livingstone managed to make road charging work in London. Y’know, I think the fact that we have a decent public transport system, so that people didn’t just feel they were being priced out ever getting into the city centre, might have had something to do with it. The fact that revenues from congestion charging get ploughed back into public transport improvements reinforces the point. Maybe politicians and the public have something to teach (some) economists after all.
Lomborg’s latest
20-Nov-07
Congratulations to Bjorn Lomborg, who has managed to get being wrong on climate change down to a fine art-form. Here’s the very first lines of his latest:
It’s possible to see, right now, what global warming will eventually do to the planet. To peek into the future, all we have to do is go to Beijing, Athens, Tokyo, or, in fact, just about any city on Earth.
Well, no. It may be news to Bjorn, but very little of the world’s surface is covered by cities, very little of the world’s animal or plant life lives in cities, and very little of the world’s food is grown in cities. These things matter when we come to consider whether climate change is something we can ‘live with’ to the extent of not doing anything to prevent.
Bjorn’s latest wheeze is to try to convince us that we can adapt our way out of any problems caused by climate change by all going to live in cities and then painting them white to make them cooler. This isn’t completely insane: cities tend to be hotter than their surroundings because of various factors, and increasing greenery and reflectivity can reduce this effect. So we should try it (especially the greening bit, and I guess ‘we’ means the state here, though that bit is unstressed for some reason). However, the evidence that these steps will entirely cancel out global warming as Bjorn implies is thin to non-existent and reliant on the kind of fairly speculative modelling that I thought Bjorn and his acolytes were meant to be terribly sceptical about, what with their keenly analytical minds ‘n all.
Back to my initial point, though, which is that the bits of that Bjorn leaves out of his story are rather important. ‘Climate change’ will be just that - not just a rise in average temperatures in cities, but more frequent extreme weather events such as droughts and storms around the world (which will put agricultural areas under more stress), sea level rise (and accompanying flooding and degradation of freshwater or coastal fisheries) oh and mass species extinction, about half of species assessed for highly plausible temperature rises. Call me sentimental but it’s that last one that really shocks me - we might be responsibly for wiping out half the world’s lifeforms just because we can’t contemplate the really very minor inconvenience of cutting back on the more environmentally reckless aspects of our production and consumption. To put it another way, climate change will be deeply unpleasant for a lot of people, and no that’s not less important simply because most of those people will tend to be poorer than you and far away.
Lastly, Lomborg yet again presents his argument in the form of a false opposition, though this time it’s not fighting malaria we should be doing instead of preventing climate change but painting our roads white. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, since by ignoring the consequences of climate change for agriculture Lomborg is pretty much admitting he doesn’t give a shit about Africans. But there really isn’t a serious trade-off between mitigating climate change and adapting to it. Mitigation helps adaptation because it means we have to do less of it, and adaptation helps mitigation because the more we can cool our cities using greenery and the like the less people will feel compelled to use energy-intensive solutions such as air conditioning.
I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies - Lomborg seems to be more willing these days to hedge his bets with arguments that look a bit like he’s suggesting we actually do something about the problem, though of course without annoying the various think-tanks or media outlets that fling money at him for being so delightfully contrarian. Maybe it’s dawned on him that he’s probably going to be still around when a large number of people turn on him for being so criminally and succesfully misleading about this issue for so long.
links for 2007-11-20
20-Nov-07
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Football nirvana for Liverpool fans - the great team of the late 80s, with Beardsley, Barnes, Aldridge and Houghton running Forest (2nd in the league at the time) ragged. No exaggeration to say they could easily have had twice as many.
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Ooh, handy: The top 47 arguments against AGW and what’s wrong with them.
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Richard Black does his best to find an anti-sceptic bias in mainstream science, but - surprise! - no-one can show him any.
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We’re always told that too much regulation is a big obstacle to growth in Africa, but Vijaya Ramachandran has done the research and finds that “unreliable and poor quality infrastructure is a far greater constraint than red tape”