Our Word is Our Weapon

As Bernard Manning once said, it's a fucking disgrace.

If you really want to end child poverty, whack up child benefit. Bullying people into working long hours at crap jobs doesn't seem particularly sensible.

"Research released today by the JRF challenges the view that work is a guaranteed route out of poverty.

Conducted by a team at Sheffield Hallam University, this qualitative study examined the experiences and perceptions of work among residents living in six deprived areas in the UK. The report highlights that many people in disadvantaged communities are trapped in a cycle of 'poor work/no work' that fails to lift them out of poverty.

While many of those interviewed saw the value in working, in terms of increased self-esteem and reducing isolation, they gained little financially. Researchers found that poverty-level pay can force those in employment to work excessive hours, harming the quality of their family life. For those out of work, this can act as a disincentive to leave benefits."

Yes, but it's not enforced.

Nowhere does this story mention that the Census already asks for the number of *rooms* in a property, and that asking how many of these are *bedrooms* is therefore hardly much of a change at all.

This is another case of the BBC merrily printing whatever guff political parties come out with on their site, no matter how hypocritical or misleading it is. Why oh why can't we have a better BBC?

Knuckle-walking may have evolved independently in chimpanzees and gorillas, and other cool findings. Watch the video.

The policy question is whether the response to market forces that are making housing more expensive should be to intervene to provide more low-cost housing, or less. Answers depend on your views on local inequality, area effects and peer effects in education and employment, among other things …

Buena idea

As Yglesias says, it really shouldn't be that complicated. "What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious."

Yoram Bauman shows Steven Levitt how to write clearly, persuasively and accurately about climate change.

" nobody I talk to agrees with Levitt and Dubner that efficiency-and-conservation efforts are futile, and that we should shut them down to bet all our chips on geoengineering.

It really does look to me like Levitt and Dubner:

* went to Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures.
* got wowed.
* excitedly wrote up what they heard.
* and then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told there. "

"To conclude, the reasons why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering so much are based on a misreading of the science, a misrepresentation of proposed solutions, and truly bizarre interpretations of how environmental problems have been dealt with in the past. These are, in the end, much worse errors than their careless misquotes and over-eagerness to shock highlighted by the other critiques. Geo-engineering is neither cheap, nor a fix, and the reasons why it is very likely to be a bad idea are ethical and legal, much more than its still-uncertain scientific merits."

Felix Salmon says "the Freakonomists have a history of misrepresenting environmental science"

"… my issue is that they abandon economics at this point as they are mesmorised by the idea we can solve climate change cost effectively. The underlying argument as to why we should pursue this rather than behavioural change is not environmental religion but whether it is possible to put prices on this and get behavioural change. Levitt and Dubner don’t think it is possible. They argue that if you can’t get doctors to wash their hands to stop the spread of infection, how can you expect people to clean up the planet?

But come on. Isn’t the whole point of the Freakonomics project that prices work and behaviour changes in response to incentives? Everywhere else, a few pennies will cause massive consumption changes while when it comes to a carbon price, it is all too hard. My own view is that a carbon price plus some information might have some drastic effects on the behavioural side …"

Bryan Caplan enjoys Levitt and Dubner's 'sceptical' approach to global warming, fails to notice their complete lack of scepticism about geoengineering, and mainly likes the chapter on climate change because of its (crap) attack on Al Gore.

"Geoengineering seems like the easy approach now, because it’s not on the table. There is no hysterical battle between proponents and opponents, no op-ed bickering between scientists and faux scientists, no global debate on who would and should bear which costs associated with whatever solution is agreed upon. But as soon as it became a real possibility, a fierce debate would rage. And, if one major geoengineering solution were tried and it failed, it is difficult to see how another attempt could win support, and at that point, of course, we’d have lost the ability to address climate change by reducing emissions when it would have helped…

anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming."

"So now Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner have a sequel, Superfreakonomics, which includes a chapter on climate change. Do they deploy Levitt's trademark economic techniques to shed new light on old questions? Because that might be useful! Alas, no, there's nothing of the sort. Levitt and Dubner just parachute into the field of climate science and offer some lazy punditry on the subject dressed up as "contrarianism." There's no original research. There's nothing bold or explosive. It's just garden-variety ignorance… In just a few dozen pages, Dubner and Levitt manage to repeat the myth that the scientific consensus in the 1970s predicted global cooling (quite untrue), imply that climatologists are unaware of the existence of water vapor (no, they're quite aware), and traffic in the elementary misconception that CO2 hasn't historically driven temperature increases …"

"But the relative docility of rank-and-file workers on trade issues must ultimately be attributed to something else altogether: the safety nets erected by the welfare state.

Modern industrial societies now have a wide array of social protections ― unemployment compensation, adjustment assistance, and other labor-market tools, as well as health insurance and family support ― that mitigate demand for cruder forms of protection.

The welfare state is the flip side of the open economy. If the world has not fallen off the protectionist precipice during the crisis, as it did during the 1930s, much of the credit must go the social programs that conservatives and market fundamentalists would like to see scrapped."

Extremely weak stuff from Alex Tabarrok.

Look, anyone who thinks that "human activity accounts for just two percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions" makes for a clever argument against anthropogenic global warming is being stupid. The same goes for "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" and the many other misrepresentations and fallacies Levitt and Dubner have produced.

But I suppose Idiocy on this level is the inevitable result of making 'counter-intuitiveness' your journalistic USP.

"Inspector Aspinall told the meeting about a day of City of London spot checks on HGVs, carried out on 30 September 2008 … On this one day, 12 lorries were stopped randomly by City Police. Five of those lorries were involved in the construction work for the 2012 Olympics. All of the twelve lorries were breaking the law in at least one way … The offences range included overweight loads (2 cases), mechanical breaches (5 cases), driver hours breaches (5 cases), mobile phone use while driving (2 cases), driving without insurance (2 cases) and no operator license (1 case). In some cases the drivers were given a warning and in other cases there was a more formal police follow up … Inspector Aspinall said that the London construction vehicle market (skips, cement mixers, construction materials haulage) was very tight and competitive. Shady operators with dubious standards and legality exerted a downward pressure on market prices …"

"STUDY OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to discover whether the relation between income inequality and population death rates within the United States was mediated by the degree of residential segregation between rich and poor… MAIN RESULTS: Results suggest that segregation within urban areas is associated with an additional mortality burden. However, the association between income inequality and mortality in these metropolitan statistical areas was found to be independent of the degree of economic segregation between their constituent neighbourhoods. CONCLUSIONS: Most of the association between income inequality and mortality is not mediated by the effects of greater residential segregation."

"The fact that income isn’t spent doesn’t render it irrelevant. If my income were to balloon to more than a million dollars, my household might not increase its consumption by much. But it’s not as though the additional income would thereby disappear. I could cut back on teaching and devote more of my time to research, or take an unpaid sabbatical. My wife could quit her job and spend more time with our children or do more volunteer work. Or we could invest the money, which might produce considerable additional income in future years.[4] This could help ensure that, among other things, we’d be able to afford to send our kids to expensive private colleges. Or we could retire early. Or simply accumulate assets and pass them on when we die. None of these uses would show up as consumption in the survey data (except the college payments, though that would come some years down the road). But they surely would enhance our well-being."

The editor of the Sunday Express and its health 'expert' Lucy Johnston should be locked up for spreading malicious and false information about vaccination.

Questionnaire about Boris's Transport Strategy, with some fairly leading questions.

A very worthy cause

Matt Yglesias says yes, it is political. "If deflation really gets so out of hand that it plunges us into Depression-like circumstances, that’ll be bad for everyone. But if we have four or five years of near-zero inflation and 9-10 percent unemployment that will be fine for prosperous middle aged people and devastating to the interests of the poor and the young. Conversely, if we have four or five years of modest unemployment with four or five percent inflation, that will be fine for young people and poor people but potentially detrimental to the interests of wealthy people sitting on large piles of savings. Ultimately, I don’t think it helps the progressive cause to ignore the class/ideological elements to this dispute and just pretend to be engaging in a neutral technocratic dispute about the correct application of the Taylor Rule."

The classic 'authoritarian type' in American society looks a hell of a lot like George W. Bush's core support.

"Both cycle hire and superhighway have the feel of being rushed in to suit a political agenda, rather than being part of a sustained plan to boost cycling in the capital especially as other measures, such as cutting back spending on the London Cycling Network, allowing motorbikes in bus lanes and giving power to the boroughs to stop schemes seem to be moving in the opposite direction. I hope I am wrong and that both succeed in generating more cycling, but I suspect that there will have to be a considerable rethink about both projects before they bums on saddles."

Coincidentally, I was just browsing this the other day for some reason, and thinking "bloody hell that's impressive". Clearly a certain bunch of Swedes thought similarly.

"One plausible characterization of her life’s work is that it is about demonstrating the empirical weaknesses of a ‘cute’ economic model (the Tragedy of the Commons) that assumed a role in policy discussions far out of proportion to its actual explanatory power, and replacing it with a set of explanations that are nowhere near as neat, but are far more true to the real world …

Her work implies that both pure marketization and top-down government control can have badly adverse consequences for resource management, because they rob individuals of the capacity to govern themselves, and because they both lead to the depletion of important forms of local collective knowledge … Ostrom stresses repeatedly that even the best functioning markets are undergirded by an array of collective institutions which order people’s market interactions, and that in the absence of such rules, self interested behaviour will have highly adverse consequences."

Mark Easton analyses data on carbon emissions per capita at local authority level.

Stick that in your fact-pipe and smoke it

Cheerio to a true pioneer. Those hot dogs in chili sauce are amazing.

"robotic quiff"

Front rack looks pretty goofy, otherwise very nice at first glance.

Brad's correspondent suggests an analogy between the self-marginalisation of 'freshwater' economists and the postmodernist turn in English departments of the '80s and early '90s:

" 1. In both cases, the people involved maintained, credibly, that you couldn't really assess the work in question without putting a lot of effort into understanding it.
2. In both cases, that required mastering difficult stuff. (In econ, all the math and models; in pomo lit stuff, mastering the literally incomprehensible language in which a lot of that stuff was written.)
3. In both cases, that deterred a lot of people on the outside who were generally puzzled and skeptical, but didn't want to spend years getting into a position in which they could credibly say: yes, this is, in fact, nuts.
4. So in both cases practitioners were largely insulated from criticism they had to take seriously."

Nice catch by Jonathan Dingle: an analysis of the impact of India's huge railroad network on regional trade and welfare.

"In other words, the deficit is no problem, because the same recession that caused it also gives us the means to finance it cheaply.
Of course, things could change; I wouldn’t be surprised if yields do rise in coming years.
But the fact is that, for now at least, bond markets are telling us that there‘s no urgent need for big, quick spending cuts."

LOL at Fox News's polling questions:

"3. Do you think Barack Obama's travel and speaking schedule makes him look more like he is a candidate on the campaign trail or more like he is the president of the United States?

4. Do you think President Obama apologizes too much to the rest of the world for past U.S. policies?

5. Do you think the Obama administration is proposing more government spending than American taxpayers can afford, or not?

6. Do you think the size of the national debt is so large it is hurting the future of the country?"

Tom Vanderbilt is very smart:

"Vanderbilt's discussion brings up what may be a more important if underappreciated cause of most traffic: the lack of an interactive social structure in driving.

"Traffic has a lack of a feedback system," says Venderbilt. "There's no repeat interaction."

So if I never have to see you again on the road, am I really going to be as courteous as I would be if I saw you every day? Most people probably want to think yes, but their actions say no.

Vanderbilt cites the research of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who researches why regular people can be convinced to do terrible or evil things. One of his explanations is a concept he calls de-individuation — the act of disregarding other people as individuals. Vanderbilt draws the connection to traffic, where it's not a person driving a car next to you in traffic, but just a car. It's just a box on wheels — and it's in your way."

Interesting thoughts on how metropolitan house prices act as a filter to people with different levels of productivity and different relationships to the externalities associated with density.

"A lot of the financial innovation of the past thirty years was aimed at regulatory arbitrage. A lot was basically aimed at hiding the ball so as to better be able to mislead people (and in some cases the financial institutions themselves) about where risk lay. And it’s also true that if you look at shifts in the global economy over the long run, innovation has led to more efficient financial markets …

But I think the upshot of this isn’t that we need to be “against” financial innovation but that we need to be skeptical of the claim that any measure to reduce the pace of innovation is likely to bring economic disaster. We should try to stifle innovation aimed at exploiting loopholes in regulations or ripping people off. It’s pretty basic to see that there are good business opportunities in those fields and thus we should expect a lot of innovative activity to be aimed at exploiting those opportunities."

"Without some agreed upon standards we have what amounts to a complexity tax [in] financial markets. That’s a tax produced by complexity, not a tax on complexity… its not that firms refuse to compete by providing consumers the best products – its that they cannot compete in this way because consumers will naturally gravitate towards products which are bad for them.

That is, if you are offering a product that is just the same as the standard vanilla product but has some hidden tail risk then you can necessarily offer it a lower price. This implies that you will dominate the market until the tail event occurs. Thus consumers will be consistently taking on more risk than they realize.

They could simply recoil from the financial market all together. That is, they understand this sort of market for lemons problem and so they refuse to buy at all. However, the costs of doing this are high…"

"We are campaigning to stop HGVs killing cyclists. We want to restrict HGVs in city centres. Cyclists can't share with lethal lorries that do not 'see' them."

Consider yourselves zinged, Englishers:

"It also doesn't help that St George never even set foot in England. There are no historical sites to venerate, because he was never here. This is similar to the never-ending English devotion to the hymn Jerusalem, despite it being a long feedline to a very curt and obvious punchline:

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? No.

And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? Nope.

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? Still a big nooo, I'm afraid.

And was Jerusalem builded here Among those dark Satanic mills? No. It wasn't. Sorry about that. (And it's "built", by the way.)"

A pretty extreme instance of the all-too-common NIMBY opposition to social housing.

Jo Mora's glorious map of Los Angeles

"This paper considers the implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change. It emphasizes that it is not the growth in (urban or rural) populations that drives the growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but rather, the growth in consumers and in their levels of consumption. A significant proportion of the world’s urban (and rural) populations have consumption levels that are so low that they contribute little or nothing to such emissions. If the lifetime contribution to GHG emissions of a person added to the world’s population varies by a factor of more than 1,000 depending on the circumstances into which they are born and their life choices, it is misleading to see population growth as the driver of climate change."

The rationalisation of sugar processing has extended into detailed planning of planting patterns on individual farms to ensure a maximally efficient allocation of sunshine.

"The answer to so many intractable modern problems — obesity, urban congestion, global warming — is cycling. What now feels like an extreme sport should be the default mode of transport. But it has dawned on me only recently that the big fat flaw at the heart of democracy is that politicians will never invest in the long term if voters’ initial inconvenience and expense are not rewarded with results before an election. And it will take years and billions to chip away at the cult of the car, to erect multistorey bicycle parks in every mainline station, to build genuinely super highways for bikes through our towns and reverse years of destructive urban planning."

Sweden - more immigration than you might think.

Mark Thoma: "Republicans worry a lot about the effect that small changes in tax rates would have on economic activity (something there's not a lot of evidence to support) because taxes distort the relationship between effort and reward. But if the rewards have become generally separated from productive effort, particularly the large rewards at the very top of the income distribution where the Republicans argue these incentive effects are the strongest, then there are large distortions in the system that have nothing to do with taxes. That is what Republicans ought to be worried about if they are truly concerned with ensuring that the rewards people receive match their productive effort."