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Astute views from Jane Jacobs in 1969, then newly arrived in Toronto.
links for 2009-07-29
30-Jul-09
links for 2009-07-27
28-Jul-09
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When Wes Anderson screened Rushmore for a retired Pauline Kael.
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Tyler Cowen on free market healthcare: "It makes a difference whether you view the case against the market as starting with issues of efficiency or distribution and usually those concepts are jumbled together."
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No, grammar schools are not good for social mobility.
links for 2009-07-26
27-Jul-09
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Photographs of wartime Leningrad meticulously and beautifully blended with recent images of the same locations. The past bleeding into the present, as one commenter puts it.
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Krugman, citing Arrow in support: "There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work."
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Excellent post assessing the relevance of C. Wright Mills' "The Power Elite" 50 years on. I would tend to support Leslie Sklair in saying that the relevant power elites are much more transnational today than they were when Mills was writing. Also, the recent Alan Milburn et al report on the increasingly class-ridden professions in the UK suggests that the 'lower' power elite (i.e. the grade down from the very tightly concentrated stratum he was focused on) is more entrenched than ever.
links for 2009-07-24
25-Jul-09
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Kevin Harris on some worrying and unreported trends in alienation and attitudes among young people from mostly deprived backgrounds.
links for 2009-07-12
13-Jul-09
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Mark Thoma reports on Tara Watson's NBER article: "Although this paper has not explored the effect of income segregation on individual outcomes, a number of researchers believe that neighbors matter. A widening of the income distribution affects the prices of housing and neighborhood attributes, making it more costly for low-income families to live near high-income families. Through this price externality, housing markets amplify the effect of income inequality on the well-being of different socioeconomic groups. If neighbors particularly affect the outcomes of children, this mechanism may also strengthen the link between equality in the income distribution and intergenerational mobility."
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Brilliant: "At first I thought it was a really bad chest infection, or maybe alcohol poisoning".
Speed ‘limits’
12-Jul-09
Statistics recently released by the Department for Transport reveal that every day millions of drivers of motorised vehicles commit offences by breaking speed limits which are proven to reduce crashes and save lives. A couple of headline figures:
• Forty nine per cent of cars exceeded the speed limit on 30 mph roads in 2008, while 18 per cent travelled at 35 mph or more. On 40 mph roads, 24 per cent of cars exceeded the speed limit and 9 per cent exceeded it by 5 mph or more.
• Motorcycles (53 per cent), light vans (52 per cent) and four-axle rigid HGVs (52 per cent) were the vehicle types that most frequently exceeded the speed limit on 30 mph roads.
This shouldn’t need repeating, but speeding vehicles are much more dangerous.
• hit by a car at 40mph, 9 out of 10 pedestrians will be killed
• hit by a car at 30mph, around 50 per cent of pedestrians will survive
• hit by a car at 20mph, only 1 out of 10 pedestrians will be killed.
• At 25 per cent above the average speed, a driver is about six times more likely to have an accident than a driver travelling at the average speed.
With 10 people killed and 100 injured by crashes on Britain’s roads every day and HGVs killing cyclists in London with horrifying frequency, you’d think criminality on such a vast scale would prompt a lot of outrage and government promises to address the problem, but there’s been very little of either. Much of this is probably down to the motorist lobby being not just one of the largest but also definitely one of the most aggressively whiny around. It has succeeded in turning speeding into an accepted behavioural norm, ‘just part of life’, but it’s one which has extremely pernicious consequences. There are not just more deaths through crashes, but indirect impacts too, most notably frightening cyclists and pedestrians off the streets and into their own armoured vehicles. This means that actually enforcing speed limits by, you know, punishing people who break them, could make a big contribution to the kind of modal shift we desperately need.
links for 2009-07-11
12-Jul-09
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The impact of public transportation on carbon emissions is far larger when you take into account secondary impacts on distance travelled through the facilitation of higher population densities. If the US used public transit at the rate Europeans do, it would save about 370 million metric tons of CO2, equivalent to 23 percent of surface transportation emissions.
links for 2009-07-06
07-Jul-09
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This is very well put:
"I think there is a argument against the Hayekians which is not very far from the surface of Seeing Like a State and which can be drawn out quite easily. First – Scott makes it clear that the processes of market development and of state imposition of standards goes hand in hand…
Markets – even and perhaps especially Hayekian markets – don’t exist in an institutional vacuum – and the institutions on which they rely are going to shape the extent to which they succeed or fail in making use of local knowledge. In particular, markets that involve interaction between people who don’t know each other (impersonal exchange) require substitutes for personal knowledge and relationships(in the form of mutually understood standards and enforcement mechanisms) … impersonal forms of knowledge that are instantiated in commonly held standards of one sort or another."
In short, the particular has given way to the abstracted, sometimes for good, sometimes not.
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This seems to answer a question that has long bugged me. Evidence of 'cultural' human behaviour first appeared in separate populations long after their ancestors diverged, apparently without transmission between groups. This research points to a threshold effect linked to population density: "High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world … complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people."
It's a story of history explained by geography, psychology and sociology, with relevance for economics too: "Ironically, our finding that successful innovation depends less on how smart you are than how connected you are seems as relevant today as it was 90,000 years ago."
links for 2009-07-05
06-Jul-09
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" tax evasion decreased under the flat tax, but the reform did little to increase real income for taxpayers.
The lesson? Where underreporting of income is widespread, a flat tax can produce a revenue increase, but don't expect massive economic productivity gains.
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How best to measure housing costs for the purposes of price indices?
"mortgage interest rates should not be used to measure the cost of housing … housing costs are best proxied by matching housing units with equivalent rental properties … the cost of living index should not depend on the particular financing method that people use to buy homes. If, for instance, we all inherited a large lump sum tomorrow and paid off our mortgages, then the mortgage interest element of the CPI would disappear (once re-based). However, this would not mean that housing had no cost—the decision to pay off the mortgage is a financial one and the money could have been invested in other financial instruments."
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"Road traffic accidents are one of those overlooked sources of death, insecurity and suffering, particularly in poor countries. According to a report by the Campaign for Global Road Safety, road crashes kill at least 1.3 million people each year and injure 50 million, a toll greater than deaths from malaria. Ninety percent of these road casualties are in low and middle income countries. Britain has a fatality rate of one death per 10,000 vehicles; in Ethiopia and Uganda it is over 190. Each year 260,000 children die on the road and another million are seriously injured, often permanently disabled. By 2015 road crashes are predicted by the WHO to be the leading cause of premature death and disability for children aged 5 and above."
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"There is a very large difference between the Netherlands and the UK in the approach which has been taken to reduce casualties.
Britain has achieved its safety in large part by removing the vulnerable and increasing the safety of crashing motorists. Road designs are such that they discourage cycling, resulting in the UK having amongst the lowest cycling rate in the world. Children are increasingly transported by their parents cars and are comparatively rarely seen on the streets alone. Pedestrians are inconvenienced by waiting for light controlled crossings or take detours behind metal barriers. Many more roads in the UK have physicial barriers along them to prevent cars from crashing, and trees near roads are removed to make crashes safer.
These things have improved overall safety, but at the expense of convenience and safety of pedestrians and cyclists. They have lead to more driving as a result, and an increasingly dangerous situation on Britain's roads for cyclists."
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"The Golden State would be a great place for one’s golden years, if only it were remotely affordable, and if one could get around without a car. But California is having a devil of a time financing new transit and rail infrastructure, and the few places that are transit accessible and walkable are the ones that have held up best amid the housing crunch; those 50% price reductions are coming in places that are useless for those unwilling to hop on a freeway.
You’re going to see this all over the country. A generation that worked very hard to build an urban geography suited to a nuclear family with young children is now getting old. What are they supposed to do with all these four bedroom homes that are a 15-minute drive from a cup of coffee and a newspaper?"
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Ryan Avent: "It’s all well and good to say that unionization has real economic costs, and that x, y, and z are better ways to address issues affecting low-skilled and low-income workers. But if you take those issues seriously, you then have to identify the achievable political calculus that leads to adoption of x, y, and z; otherwise, you’re saying that you do not, in fact, take those issues seriously. Low-skilled workers don’t have the money to press their positions on individual legislative issues. Their political advantage is in their numbers. But how can they utilize that advantage without organizing?
I’d love for someone to identify an elegant and realizable solution to the problem, but until I see one I’m going to be sympathetic to the unions-as-necessary-political-force story."
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"The streets of Greater London are packed with drivers chatting into handheld mobile phones, unlawfully obstructing Advanced Stop Lines for cyclists, breaking the speed limit, and jumping red lights, all activities which attract the bare minimum of police attention (and in the case of ASLs, none whatsoever).
Meanwhile
Somebody in London is stopped and searched every three minutes, according to new figures obtained by BBC London. The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.
Even though it has never caught a terrorist"
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"In economics, the search for simple ultimate laws is impeded by the fact that people’s behaviour is often context-dependent; sometimes we’re rational, sometimes not; often we’re selfish, occasionally not; and so on …
Good economics is not about grand theories. Instead, it consists in looking at small problems one at a time - and in paying huge attention to problems of how to draw inferences about competing hypotheses from noisy data."Yes, but the problem as I see it is that the conclusions can become abstracted from the context of the analysis and thereby universalised. Sometimes this may be legitimate but mostly it isn't.
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An old column but a superb one from Chris Dillow. "financial incentives can be counterproductive if they crowd out altruistic motives … Yes, incentives matter at the margin. But the margin needn’t be particularly wide. And many people aren’t on it." So the insight that incentives matter is true, but often trivial and uninformative.
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Great photos of New York's wonderful Penn Station, destroyed in 1963.
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Some wonderful buildings lost forever and replaced by crap, although in a way it's comforting to know that the demolition of the old Euston Arch in London wasn't out of step with practice across the pond.
links for 2009-07-03
04-Jul-09
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Dave Hill is absolutely right, sadly:
"no big cycling revolution is going to happen here without there being bold infrastructure changes that "the cycling mayor" would never contemplate.
Even my instructor, undoubtedly a prudent and peaceable road-user, said that at times you have to "be a warrior" out there. I can't see that changing much, even if, as some in the cycling community say, motorists in London are becoming more mindful of cyclists' needs. Most of us, I think, don't want travelling round our city to involve the risks and adrenalin of battle."
links for 2009-06-30
01-Jul-09
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"our estimates imply that global climate change would lower the median poor country’s growth rate by 0.6 percentage points each year from now until 2099. Extrapolated over 90 years, the median poor country would then be about 40% poorer in 2099 than it would have been in the absence of climate change …
Our results also inform the older debate over climate’s role in economic development. As noted above, climatic theories of development have a long history and have remained a subject of contemporary debate. Our estimates identify a substantial, contemporary effect of temperature on the development process, not just on important sub-channels but on the aggregate economy. "
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Interesting view on the macroeconomic effects of housing capital gains.
"when people expect housing prices to rise they feel better. They feel better because they have just received an implicit tax cut (sometimes made explicit by falling mortgage rate spreads.) If we rule out the expectation effect we are missing a real effect of rising housing prices. Said another way, rising housing prices and positive attitudes don’t happen to go together and it isn’t just that home prices are rising because expectations are rising. Rising housing prices are driving the positive attitudes."
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"Our estimates suggest that homeowners on average overestimate the value of their properties by 5% to 10%. We also show that the overestimation is primarily due to the large expected capital gains implicit in the self-reported home values, especially since the mid-1980s.
In periods of high interest rates and declining incomes, the buyers are likely to have lower appreciation expectations due to the declining housing prices (see Figures 1 and 2), and end up assessing, on average, more accurately the value of their homes, and even in some cases underestimating it.
All this suggests that in good economic times there is a larger number of buyers who are (eventually) overly optimistic regarding how much their properties are worth."
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"Conventional wisdom has it that for the purposes of US domestic politics it doesn’t make sense to talk about the impact of climate change on the developing world. I’m not so sure. It’s very difficult to imagine Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) wading through the jungles of Vietnam slaughtering villagers and redistributing their possessions to the people of Missouri. It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine her tweeting complaints about Waxman-Markey being unfair to coal-dependent states like Missouri. To an extent, in other words, I think it’s worth raising the ethical stakes around this issue.
Nobody’s quite sure what the solution is for people and countries trapped in severe poverty. But we can be fairly certain that “cause them to drown so we can drive bigger cars” is not the answer."
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“Leiden has a population of only 120,000, yet has supervised cycle parking for 4,500 bikes. Can you guess what the sum total of bike storage facilities are at all of the London terminals put together?” The answer is shaming for the capital's rail chiefs — enough for just 1,200 bikes.
Instead of asking ministry officials to report to him on the situation, Lord Adonis, a rail and cycling enthusiast, got on his bike and spent last Sunday afternoon investigating for himself.