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"the more countries included in a cap, there more "low-cost" opportunities there are to reduce carbon available, which means that the overall price of eliminating a ton of CO2 goes down. That'd be especially true if China were integrated into a global cap-and-trade program—a lot of China's coal plants are unbelievably creaky and inefficient, and it'd be much cheaper to clean them up first than it would be to clean up a more efficient coal plant in, say, Europe. (Eventually, you'd have to address the European plant too, as the overall cap kept racing downward, but there'd be moer time to develop the technology to do so.) An international cap-and-trade regime is much cheaper and more effective than having each country trying to in isolation."
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Ryan Avent nails it: "Sure, in an ideal world leaders would evaluate infrastructure needs and build the things that are worth building, but as Matt well knows, we don’t live in an ideal world. The Olympics can help to align the interests of fractious local governments and increase public acceptance of tax increases. And it can fix the time problem of infrastructure investment. Infrastructure benefits begin appearing years down the road and last for decades beyond that, while many of the costs — the political headaches, the need to put together financing, the disruption of construction, and so on — are relatively immediate. Winning the Olympics ties an immediate benefit to the immediate costs — we’re facing all these headaches, but it’s worth it because we won the Olympics. The games give a short-sighted electorate a reason to invest for the long-run."
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Article about how replacing boarded-up windows with poster-sized photos of the former residents boosted both the internal and external image of a social housing estate. Interestingly suggestive of how strongly social and symbolic identity-construction is.
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Excellent bit of economic geography, showing how market forces can bring about the concentration of 'vice' in city centres and thereby promote inner city decline and racial segregation.
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"This prefix ker- was a clever device to evoke that spilt second before fist lands on jaw, or whatever. It wasn't until I sought it out in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang that I realised just how many variations comic-strip writers had contrived here, from "kerbam!" (a sudden noise or sharp shock) and "kerbang!" (a sudden sharp noise or explosion) to "kerwhop!" (a solid body falling on to a solid surface) and "kerwoosh!" (indicating speedy movement). Some of these definitions are surprisingly precise. "Kerslosh!", for instance, indicates movement through a wet or soft substance, "or the falling of a solid object into such substance, eg viscous mud"; while "kersplat!" indicates a fall on to a soft surface, "especially with concomitant mess, eg a stuntman's dive into a stall of soft fruit and vegetables".
links for 2009-09-28
29-Sep-09
links for 2009-09-27
28-Sep-09
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More or less what you might expect, but still …
"It turns out that a severe regional recession strikingly alters the attitudes and beliefs of individuals growing up there. Recessions do alter perceptions, especially of people between the ages of 18 and 25. Recession-influenced respondents expressed a stronger preference for government redistribution and tended to believe that success in life was more a matter of luck than hard work."
Also, "birth cohorts that have experienced high stock market returns throughout their life report lower risk aversion, are more likely to be stock market participants, and, if they participate, invest a higher fraction of liquid wealth in stocks. In addition, cohorts that have experienced high inflation are less likely to hold bonds. Interestingly, stock market returns and inflation early in life affect risk-taking several decades later. These findings explain why different generations have different investment patterns."
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The impact of more compact development in the US on carbon emissions is never going to be huge, given how slowly the dwelling stock will change, but it's probably bigger than the NAS report estimates. Three main points stand out:
- NAC are assuming a very low rate of replacement of the housing stock, at 0.2% a year, implying that homes are going to last 500 years. This seems way too low.
- The NAS's 'moderate' scenario assumes that 75% of new development will continue to be extremely low-density sprawl. But there is evidence that there is enough supply of sprawled development to soak up demand for a long time to come, and that new development is far more likely to be predominantly compact.
- The NRC's estimate of the impact on VMT from more compact development is too low, because it fails to take into account the effect of mixed use, more pedestrian-friendly urban design and other features that naturally come with more compact development. -
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Anyway, back to my main point. The huge scientific uncertainty about the cost of inaction has obscured a surprisingly strong economic consensus about the economic cost of stabilising global CO2 concentrations at the levels currently being debated by national governments, that is, in the range 450-550 ppm. The typical estimate of costs is 2 per cent of global income, plus or minus 2 per cent. There are no credible estimates above 5 per cent, and I don’t think any serious economist believes in a value below zero (that is, a claim that we could eliminate most CO2 emissions using only ‘no regrets’ policies).
For anyone who, like me, is confident that the expected costs of doing nothing about emissions, relative to stabilisation, are well above 5 per cent of global income that makes the basic choice an easy one."
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Long, excellent article about the genesis and development of London Underground's house font.
links for 2009-09-24
25-Sep-09
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Obvious, but apparently not obvious enough: "Architectural journals and the Sunday supplements tout newfangled houses tricked out with rainwater-collection systems, solar arrays, and bamboo flooring. Yet any detached single-family house has more external walls and roof—and hence more heating loads in winter and cooling loads in summer—than a comparable attached townhouse, and each consumes more energy than an apartment in a multifamily building. Again, it doesn’t really matter how many green features are present. A reasonably well-built and well-insulated multifamily building is inherently more sustainable than a detached house. Similarly, an old building on an urban site, adapted and reused, is greener than any new building on a newly developed site."
links for 2009-09-23
24-Sep-09
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Beautiful bollards resembling stacks of books outside the libarary at Cambridge University.
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Interesting: uses genealogical language trees to improve measures of linguistic 'fractionalization' - languages separated by thousands of years being presumably more different than those more closely related. Presumably this helps us differentiate between the effects of colonialism and conquest on the one hand and 'indigenous' diversity on the other.
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Tyler links to Robert J. Gordon's new NBER working paper on inequality (which features a remarkably opaque abstract), and gets some interesting comments, the median of which is fairly unimpressed and the last of which is the best.
From John Reader’s ‘Africa: a biography’:
The phrase commonly used in modern times by people who feel they have been financially betrayed - ’sold down the river’ - originally meant exactly that: appellants who lost their case at the last court of appeal in the Igbo judicial process risked being sold to slave-traders who would transport them down the river for shipment across the Atlantic.
Such practices were widespread. Francis Moore, who bought slaves on the Gambia in the 1730s, noted that:
Since this Slave-Trade has been us’d, all Punishments are chang’d into Slavery; there being an Advantage on such Condemnations, they strain for Crimes very hard, in order to get the Benefit of selling the Criminal. Not only murder, Theft and Adultery, are punish’d by selling the Criminal for a Slave, but every trifling Crime is punish’d in the same manner.
‘The Black Traders of Bonny and Calabar … come down [the river] about once a fortnight with Slaves; Thursday or Friday is generally their Trading Day,’ William James reported from the Slave Coast in the 1760s,
Twenty or Thirty Canoes, sometimes more and sometimes less, come down at a Time. In each Canoe may be Twenty or Thirty Slaves. The Arms of some of them are tied behind their Backs with Twigs, Canes, Grass Rope, or other Ligaments of the Country; and if they happen to be stronger than common, they are pinioned above the Knee also. In this Situation they are thrown into the Bottom of the Canoe, where they lie in great Pain, and often almost covered with Water. On their landing, they are taken to the Traders Houses, where they are oiled, fed, and made up for Sale.
Reader reminds us that slavery was not just something that was done to Africans by Europeans, but something that was also done by Africans to each other. European slavers had only to turn up to the coast and they could purchase people who may have been brought hundreds of miles from the interior, through a trading system that spread into nearly every part of Africa and altered irrevocably every community it touched. It does not seem too far-fetched to think that the ramifications for what economists call ‘institutions’ in Africa echo to the present.
I wonder whether such subtle but powerful social transformation can really ever be picked up in the kind of cross-country growth regressions that seem to constitute historical analysis in much of economics today. Articles like this and this are fascinating work by skilled researchers, and maybe they go some way towards explaining what happened, but I can’t help feeling that the very neatness of the models involved must leave too much out. I’m probably not explaining myself very well but I wonder whether regression analysis can really adequately capture cumulative, path-dependent social change.
links for 2009-09-21
22-Sep-09
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Even American religious nuts are, slowly, making some accommodation with reality.
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Karl Smith asks some reasonable questions, and seems to come down mostly on the Krugman side of things.
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"The now-rich countries leaped ahead during a long period in which they were more free-trade and free-market"
Shorter Bill Easterly: Everyone's simplistic arguments are wrong except mine!
links for 2009-09-13
14-Sep-09
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I've been uneasy with some of G&G's conclusions on land use and zoning, and I think O'Flaherty is getting at some of the same issues, except from a methodologically and theoretically informed position. It's all a bit beyond me at the moment so I'm saving it for a time when I might understand it.
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Dublin bikes launches today. Only 450 bikes and about 1,000 registered users, but I'm still quite excited. As Darragh Doyle says here, it's all about the change in perceptions of cycling as part of the city's identity.
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Thoughts from Matthew Kahn.
links for 2009-09-12
13-Sep-09
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I'm surprised this is considered in any way controversial.
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"The 7km route will provide a safer environment for commuters accessing the main employment areas of the city, Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey said. However, it will result in the loss of on-street parking."
So it's a win-win! Good news this, it'll be a lovely route when finished.
links for 2009-09-10
11-Sep-09
links for 2009-09-09
10-Sep-09
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"Virtually all school children travel by bike in the Netherlands." And there is no good reason why they could not also do so in the UK.
links for 2009-09-06
07-Sep-09
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"One problem is that "Friedman" is underspecified. There are many Friedmans, including:
1. The Keynesian Friedman of "A Framework for Monetary Analysis"
2. The incredibly rigid financial regulatory straightjacket Friedman of "A Program for Monetary Stability"
3. The pro-bailout Friedman of "The Great Contraction"
4. The late Friedman who concluded that money stock-targeting had not lived up to expectations.
5. The early Friedman who believed that keeping the nominal money stock on a smooth growth path would eliminate any possibility for large disturbances in velocity.These guys are not all consistent, not all the time."
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"Actually, let me put it this way: the economy is a complex system of interacting individuals — and these individuals themselves are complex systems. Neoclassical economics radically oversimplifies both the individuals and the system — and gets a lot of mileage by doing that; I, for one, am not going to banish maximization-and-equilibrium from my toolbox. But the temptation is always to keep on applying these extreme simplifications, even where the evidence clearly shows that they’re wrong. What economists have to do is learn to resist that temptation. But doing so will, inevitably, lead to a much messier, less pretty view."
links for 2009-09-05
06-Sep-09
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Absolutely gorgeous compilation of rare classics from the Mavuthela Music Company, the leading pop label of 1960s black South Africa. Plus an extensive history of the scene, if you're into that kind of thing.
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Excellent interview about sanitation and its discontents, in both rich and poor countries.
links for 2009-09-03
04-Sep-09
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I'm about halfway through the MP3's of these lectures. So far so good, and helped along by the fact that Krugman's delivery sounds remarkably like Woody Allen circa 1968.
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Charles Kenny says Africa is in better shape than you think. Just as there are many competing explanations for why Africa did badly in the 80s and 90s, there's no single explanation for why it's - on average - doing rather better now. But years of accumulated health improvements, a lot of them down to aid funding, have helped a lot. There has been significant progress in security and 'governance' too. Personally, I reckon debt relief has probably helped more than it is given credit for.
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Free Exchange gets it: "if good schools are largely a function of the quality of the students attending them, then there are likely threshold effects where school quality is concerned. Schools with a certain percentage of good students will respond to those students with accelerated curricula, will attract good teachers, will maintain a certain reputation, and so on. Below that level, however, resources will come to be focused primarily on underachieving students. This will drive away better students and teachers and lead to a collapse to a bad school equilibrium … The above arguments would suggest that rather than enjoy the tax benefits of charities, private schools should pay a higher than normal rate, so as to encourage good students to enroll in public schools, thereby pushing those schools toward the good school equilibrium."
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"Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the authors compare public and private schools in 34 countries. They find that public schools systems in countries with strong governments have more equality than their private counterparts, but the situation is reversed in weaker states. When government is weak, centralized control can project only the illusion of equality while actually producing more inequality than “uncontrolled” local schools under bottom-up control."
links for 2009-08-31
01-Sep-09
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"Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth", says John Williamson.
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Will Wilkinson is spot on: "To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality … the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with … most of us have not yet given up on oppressively restrictive, strongly normative conceptions of hetero masculinity. That, I submit, is what stands in the way of a real, um … renaissance for men."
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More on whether wage stickiness was really such a big deal for the onset of the Great Depression:
"Hoover's interventions (a) were too feeble to make the U.S. a more-than-average country in the downward rigidity of its nominal wages, and (b) that at least as of the end of Hoover's term, how deep the Great Depression was in your country had very little to do with whether your internal nominal wages level had fallen far or not.[And] As Eric Rauchway points out, to blame the Great Contraction of 1929-1932 on government interference in the labor market creates a very strong presumption that thereafter the Great Depression should have gotten much worse rather than eased–for the interferences in the 1930s, starting with the NIRA, were much larger deviations from laissez-faire"