Our Word is Our Weapon

An an analysis of Liverpool's catastrophic season so far. I agree with the lot of it, especially the line "This season has been a confluence of kicks to the crotch, to say the least".

I think Matt is probably correct when he says "The idea of some kind of categorical “climate debt” rather than a general moral obligation to do good short circuits the part where you think about the consequences of your actions."

Unless we can identify the exact people who have most benefitted and who will most suffer from accumulated carbon emissions, and arrange some transfers between them, then 'climate debt' should be a moral imperative for action rather than a justification for government to government transfers in particular. There is a case for government to government transfers, but it isn't this one and it does have to take account of political and operational realities.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to want to personally blame Barack Obama for the outcome of COP15, but it sounds like China and India should get some of the stick too:

"a new fight then erupted in which China bizarrely insisted that Europe lower its targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

Merkel wanted to set a target for developed nations to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, but in the last gasp, China declared this unacceptable. This astonished many of those present: China was telling rich nations to rein back on their long-term commitment. The assumed reason was that China will have joined their ranks by 2050 and does not want to meet such a target …

Due to the leaks, hold-ups and suspicion, China barely budged and the EU refused to raise it sights… European commission president José Manuel Barroso said not one country asked the EU to move up to the higher figure, but counterparts had pulled down EU proposals to set a target for 2050."

Read the whole piece, it's excellent.

"Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations across the country. We look at emissions from driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage. We find that the lowest emissions areas are generally in California and that the highest emissions areas are in Texas and Oklahoma. There is a strong negative association between emissions and land use regulations. By restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions. Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York."

I haven't read Superfreakonomics, so when I saw the following passage apparently taken from the book I was somewhat taken aback:

"So as you leave your friend’s party, the decision should be clear: driving is safer than walking. (It would be even safer, obviously , to drink less, or to call a cab.) The next time you put away four glasses of wine at a party, maybe you’ll think through your decision a bit differently. Or, if you’re too far gone, maybe your friend will help sort things out. Because friends don’t let friends walk drunk."

Even if their figures on the dangers to oneself of 'drunk walking' are correct, and apparently they are not, the moral vacuity on display here is appalling. Something has gone badly wrong inside Steve Levitt's head.

Sigh. Alex Tabarrok not only doesn't understand why this is an exceedingly stupid idea, he presumes that his commenters will dislike it for the wrong reason and then doesn't notice when they try to inform him of his mistake.

Owen Barder: "I believe aid could and should work much better. Living in a developing country, I see all kinds of waste and inefficiency in the aid system that makes me angry. But it makes me angry because I also see how much difference aid makes when it is used well. I would like to see aid becoming much more transparent and accountable, so that it becomes subject to evolutionary pressures to improve.

This means, by the way, that I do not subscribe to the view that the aid system should be regarded as temporary. In the UK we hope that people will be on unemployment benefit temporarily before they are able to get back to work, but we don’t expect the system as a whole to come to an end. So I think that we should expect that at least for our lifetimes, it will be right and necessary that we transfer income from the richest people in the world to the poorest people in the world."

"If aid saves the lives of millions of poor infants, or mothers in childbirth, at roughly the same rate a country can industrialize, then we’ll see an increase in the number of poor people at about the same rate that we increase GDP per person. Unless aid is also spurring faster industrial growth, the growth figures essentially won’t change. The things that aid does well–increasing primary education, saving lives, and leading to a demographic transition (essentially lower population growth–may reasonably take a generation or two to impact industry.

So if aid has been good at saving lives now, but not (in the short term) at spurring industry, then we shouldn’t be surprised that we don’t see take-offs. Rather, in most countries aid might actually lower the short term, measured number."

Galbraith said something similar some time back IIRC

"findings show that increased government grants to charities do not deter greater individual giving. Interestingly, researchers also found no evidence that private individuals reacted to stagnating government aid to developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s by giving more themselves. Nor is there any evidence that individuals have donated less since the sharp rise in government aid since the late 1990s. Indeed, a new model developed by researchers to explain donation trends suggests that a 10 per cent change in household incomes produces about a 10 per cent change in donations, holding other factors constant."

I blogged about similar findings previously: http://blog.ctrlbreak.co.uk/?p=386

What a stupid idea. Free parking = more congestion, more pollution, more illegal parking when people turn up expecting to be able to park and find that they can't, etc.

"Study leader Dr Chris Grundy, a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "This evidence supports the rationale for 20mph zones, not just in major cities in Britain, but also in similar metropolitan areas elsewhere.

"Indeed, even within London, there is a case for extending the currently limited provision of such zones to other high casualty roads."

He estimated that 20mph zones in London save 200 lives a year, but this could increase to 700 if plans to extend the zones were implemented. "

"Results: The introduction of 20 mph zones was associated with a 41.9% (95% confidence interval 36.0% to 47.8%) reduction in road casualties, after adjustment for underlying time trends. The percentage reduction was greatest in younger children and greater for the category of killed or seriously injured casualties than for minor injuries. There was no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent to 20 mph zones, where casualties also fell slightly by an average of 8.0% (4.4% to 11.5%).

Conclusions: 20 mph zones are effective measures for reducing road injuries and deaths."

Not really.

"annual economic growth averaged only 1.6 percent per capita between 1992 and 2007 — low even by Mexican standards until the 1980s.

The authors blame several problems that contributed to the low growth. While those problems are not exclusively Nafta’s fault, the authors argue that they are part of a broader Nafta-based economic strategy that shunned the public sector’s role in promoting growth.

For example, despite the increase in foreign direct investment, domestic investment decreased.

There are several reasons for this. Local companies went out of business because they could not compete with imports. Foreign companies that invested in Mexico did not source from Mexico, and Nafta’s conditions prevented Mexico from requiring local purchases. At the same time, public investment fell because Mexico adopted strict fiscal policies to achieve macroeconomic stability…"

Excellent summary of the debate over RE (randomised evaluation, not religious education) in development.

Adam Posen says (see the text of his speech too):
- Monetary policy is not to blame for asset price bubbles
- Monetary policy tightening will not work against bubbles
- Real estate bubbles cause more economic damage but do nothing for productivity
- We should directly target real estate bubbles with specific countervailing taxes

There was outrage today at the revelation that increasing numbers of journalists are writing for national newspapers while unable to distinguish between levels and rates of change.

Greg Hurst, Edukashun Editor of the Times:

"Statisticians said that the cost of hiring large numbers of support staff to ease teachers’ workloads, combined with falling pupil numbers, in effect cancelled out the benefits of improved exam results. As a result, productivity in the education sector had been on a downward trend for eight years and last year fell to zero."

Zero productivity! That would be terrible, if it actually happened. But it didn't. Instead, lower class sizes gets counted as lower productivity, so the *rate of change* of productivity in education can fall or even go negative as you put more money into the system.

Why oh why can't we have a semi-numerate press corps?

Superb piece about the strange nodes of the internet's physical infrastructure.

Ed Glaeser:

"Fifty-story buildings are an efficient way to deliver plenty of space, but extreme height is far more expensive and a bellwether of irrational exuberance.

Five of the 10 tallest buildings in New York City today were planned at the tail end of the ebullient 1920s and completed in the early 1930s. In their day, they were the tallest structures in the world, but it took more than a decade for the Empire State to stop being the “Empty State Building.” …

Great cities have long been built by great gamblers, and Dubai’s sheik may well be the second greatest city-builder—after the Chinese government— of our age. Many of those gamblers have ended up bankrupt, but their structural legacies remain, providing the space that connects humanity and facilitates the success of our urban world."