Monday, July 31, 2023

Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell have lived, so far as human pleasures are concerned, in vain.

From Music at Night by Aldous Huxley.  The essay is Wanted, a New Pleasure.  1931

It was while disporting myself, or rather while trying to disport myself, in the midst of this apparatus, that I came to my depressing conclusion about the absence of new pleasures. The thought, I remember, occurred to me one dismal winter evening as I emerged from the Restaurant des Ambassadeurs at Cannes into one of those howling winds, half Alpine, half marine, which on certain days transform the Croisette and the Promenade des Anglais into the most painfully realistic imitations of Wuthering Heights. I suddenly realized that, so far as pleasures were concerned, we are no better off than the Romans or the Egyptians. Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell have lived, so far as human pleasures are concerned, in vain. The great joint-stock companies which control the modern pleasure industries can offer us nothing in any essential way different from the diversions which consuls offered to the Roman plebs or Trimalchio’s panders could prepare for the amusement of the bored and jaded rich in the age of Nero. And this is true in spite of the movies, the talkies, the gramophone, the radio, and all similar modem apparatus for the entertainment of humanity. These instruments, it is tme, are all essentially modern; nothing like them has existed before. But because the machines are modem it does not follow that the entertainments which they reproduce and broadcast are also modem. They are not. All that these new machines do is to make accessible to a larger public the drama, pantomime, and music which ha-s e from time immemorial amused the leisures of humanity. 

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none More wonderful than man

from Antigone 
by Sophocles
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts.  

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none
More wonderful than man; the storm gray sea
Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;
Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven
With shining furrows where his plows have gone
Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.

The light-boned birds and beasts that cling to cover,
The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water,
All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;
The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned,
Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken
The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull.

Words also, and thought as rapid as air,
He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his
And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow,
The spears of winter rain: from every wind
He has made himself secure--from all but one:
In the late wind of death he cannot stand.

O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
O fate of man, working both good and evil!
When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of his city then?
Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth,
Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts.

History

 

We used to drink 2-4 times as much alcohol in the past

From When did people stop being drunk all the time? by Lefineder.  The subheading is Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.

Information packed.  

The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), "drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.", looking at reconstructions of beer consumption from the middle ages to the pre-industrial era this was only a slight exaggeration. When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

[snip]

Since modern consumption of alcohol is more diverse, let us put the historical consumption of wine and beer in terms of pure alcohol and compare it to latter rates of alcohol consumption1. When this is done we see that consumption of pure alcohol was at least 2-4 times higher in the past.

[snip]
























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Society is transformed in several ways, Whereas beer expenditure used to consume 12.5% of people’s salary in 1734 in the 1800s it consume only 1-3%. In the English poll tax of 1379-81 we can see that a total of 2.5% of the medieval workforce is comprised of brewers, in 1841 this is reduced to only 0.3 of the labor force.

The answer to the headline question is circa 1800.

The reason for heavy beer consumption has usually been advanced from a health side - water spoils whereas the alcohol in beer keeps down the pathogens.

I have always wondered, though, whether pain control might not also have been part of the answer.  This is especially the case with sailors who were subject to punishing workloads and injuries anad yet kept chugging along.  Being half drunk might actually have been beneficial.

Socio political research is catching up, belatedly, with Norman Rockwell

From The Socio Political Demography of Happiness by Sam Peltzman.  From the Abstract:  

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government. All above differences survive control for other differences.

I am hitting it out of the ballpark.

Married

Well-off 
 
Classical Liberal (Conservative) 
 
Well educated

White

Trusting of others (Christianity)

Interestingly, out of the six significant factors, five of them are a matter of choice, including the most important factors.

So if an progressive autocratic central planner wanted maximize national happiness, what would be his or her advice about the things over which people have control.

Get married.

Work hard and productively.

Stick with tradition.

Go to church.

Get an education and be a life-long learner.

In other words, be a Norman Rockwell painting.  

This is the opposite of what they have been advocating for fifty years.  Either they don't know what they are doing or national happiness is an unimportant objective.  

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

Summer Day and Camel's Hump by Matt Brown

Summer Day and Camel's Hump by Matt Brown













































Click to enlarge.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Measurement of regulatory burden

From Pennsylvanians Are Leaving – But Shapiro, Lawmakers Can Inspire Them to Stay by Nathan Benefield.  

The same old Blue-state story.  People are leaving and not returning.  Wealth and taxable income leaves with them.  The causal factors are cost of living, income taxes, all taxes, crime, difficult business environment exacerbated by excess regulations, etc.  

Benefield does far better than most to flesh out the story with actual metrics.

Many have already left. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Pennsylvania lost about 40,000 residents between July 2021 and July 2022. Only seven states suffered larger out-migrations during the same period.

The out-migration from Pennsylvania is part of a broader southward migration in the United States, as people flee northern blue states in favor of southern red states. Bloomberg recently reported on a massive movement of Americans – lured by “warmer weather, lower taxes, looser regulation, and cheaper housing” – to Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. These six states, dubbed the “New New South,” now contribute more to the national gross domestic product (GDP) than the Northeast.

Of this region’s major cities, Philadelphia is suffering one of the worst exoduses. Between July 2021 and July 2022, Philadelphia lost about 22,000 residents – a 1.4% drop and the largest one-year decline since 1977, according to Census data.

This mass departure hurts Philadelphia’s economy. Based on Internal Revenue Service data, Philadelphia lost $3.8 billion in adjusted gross income from outmigration taking place in 2020ؘ–21.

But Philadelphia has one thing going for itself: at least it’s not New York City. The pandemic was particularly hard on the Big Apple. In 2021 and 2022, New York City lost the most people (more than 400,000 total, or 4.6%); Philadelphia ranked third on this measure in 2022.

New York lost more jobs, too. From February 2020 to April 2021, New York City suffered a 12% decline in jobs – roughly three times the national average. (Comparatively, Philadelphia lost 9%.) New York City has recouped fewer than half of the jobs it lost during the pandemic, leaving the city with a deficit of half a million jobs.

So definitely a real problem and not just mainstream media kvetching.  What caught my eye as out of the ordinary was this.

There is no shortage of red tape for Shapiro and Pennsylvania lawmakers to cut. Pennsylvania enforces 166,219 regulatory restrictions, 22% more than the national average.

That link goes to QuantGov, an outfit who have developed a mechanism for counting the number of regulations in each state.  I don't have any visibility into the strengths or weaknesses of the mechanism but the results align with both my experience and by national reputation.

QuantGov is part of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.  They are by reputation more Hayekian than Keynesian but not particularly politically partisan.  

By state, the usual suspects for too great a regulatory burden which crushes business formation and increases costs are top of the list.









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By geography:

















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Some random thoughts.

There is an unacknowledged set of contexts and path dependencies.

You would expect states with diverse economies to (appropriately) have more regulations than those with a single industry.

You would expect certain dangerous sectors (manufacturing, extractive, hydrocarbon) to attract a greater regulatory burden than otherwise.

You would expect dense states to have more regulations than less dense states.

You would expect older states with longer histories to perhaps have greater burdens.

The number of regulatory burdens may be a crude measure of suppression of the business environment.  Or not.  

The magnitude of the variance (36k versus 404k) is striking and probably predictive.  

Texas seems an odd-man out.  Famous for business dynamism but with the fifth largest regulatory burden.  Possibly because it has an unusually diverse economy (agriculture, extractive, manufacturing, logistics, services, etc.)

But, overall, this seems to fit the stereotypes and matches the outflow states with the destination state.  In other words, states with the largest regulatory burdens have the highest taxes, highest costs, and the greatest loss of population to the least regulated states.  

Of course, this sort of novel measurement and unscrutinized methodologies invites Just So stories.  But it does pass the sniff test.

The French have a genius for elegance; but they are also endowed with a genius for ugliness.

From Music at Night by Aldous Huxley.  The essay is Wanted, a New Pleasure.  1931

Nineteenth-century science discovered the technique of discovery, and our age is, in consequence, 
the age of inventions. Yes, the age of inventions; we are never tired of proclaiming the fact. The age of inventions — and yet nobody has succeeded in inventing a new pleasure. 
 
It was in the course of a recent visit to that region which the Travel Agency advertisements describe as the particular home of pleasure — the French Riviera — that this curious and rather distressing fact first dawned on me. From the Italian frontier to the mountains of the Esterel, forty miles of Mediterranean coast have been turned into one vast ‘pleasure resort’.  Or to be more accurate, they have been turned into one vast straggling suburb — the suburb of all Europe and the two Americas — punctuated here and there with urban nuclei, such as Mentone, Nice, Antibes, Cannes. The French have a genius for elegance; but they are also endowed with a genius for ugliness.  There are no suburbs in the world so hideous as those which surround French cities. The great Mediterranean banlieue of the Riviera is no exception to the rule. The chaotic squalor of this long bourgeois slum is happily unique. The towns are greatly superior, of course, to their connecting suburbs. A certain pleasingly and absurdly old-fashioned, gimcrack grandiosity adorns Monte Carlo; Nice is large, bright, and lively; Cannes, gravely pompous and as though conscious of its expensive smartness. And all of them are equipped with the most elaborate and costly apparatus for providing their guests with pleasure. 

For time approaching, and time hereafter, And time forgotten, one rule stands: That greatness never Shall touch the life of man without destruction.

From The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R. Dodds.  He is quoting his translation of two choruses from the end of Antigone by Sophocles.  Emphasis added

Blessed is he whose life has not tasted of evil. 
When God has shaken a house, the winds of madness 
Lash its breed till the breed is done:   
Even so the deep-sea swell   
Raked by wicked Thracian winds 
Scours in its running the subaqueous darkness, 
Churns the silt black from sea-bottom; 
And the windy cliffs roar as they take its shock. 

Here on the Labdacid house long we watched it piling, 
Trouble on dead men's trouble: no generation 
Frees the next from the stroke of God:  
Deliverance does not come. 
The final branch of Oedipus 
Grew in his house, and a lightness hung above it: 
To-day they reap it with Death's red sickle, 
The unwise mouth and the tempter who sits in the brain. 

The power of God man's arrogance shall not limit: 
Sleep who takes all in his net takes not this, 
Nor the unflagging months of Heaven—ageless the Master 
Holds for ever the shimmering courts of Olympus.   
For time approaching, and time hereafter,   
And time forgotten, one rule stands:   
That greatness never 
Shall touch the life of man without destruction.  
 
Hope goes fast and far: to many it carries comfort, 
To many it is but the trick of light-witted desire— 
Blind we walk, till the unseen flame has trapped our footsteps. 
For old anonymous wisdom has left us a saying  
"Of a mind that God leads to destruction   
The sign is this—that in the end    
Its good is evil." 
Not long shall that mind evade destruction.


History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

The Victory Leaving the Channel in 1793 by Monay Swaine

The Victory Leaving the Channel in 1793 by Monay Swaine















Click to enlarge.

Saturday, July 29, 2023

We need to get the number of guns off the street and the number of criminals off the street.

Driving between errands this morning with NPR playing.  Sounds like there was a mass shooting in Seattle yesterday evening with sixty-some shots fired, two people injured seriously and perhaps half a dozen others lightly wounded.  

There was something about the wording choice or sequence from the reporter or one of the witnesses or a Seattle politician.  The whole set up seemed geared towards your typical gun control spiel so typical of NPR.  No problem so big or small that it can't be solved by taking away natural rights.

But at the last moment there was some comment about a criminal or something along those lines (it was crowded traffic as I was driving and I was focused there.)

They delivered the standard bromide about reducing the number of guns through better gun control but it sort of sounded like:

We need to get the number of guns off the street and the number of criminals off the street.

The second part was not explicit but followed from the set up and once it was inferred, it was hard to ignore.

Which is easier?  Getting guns off the street through unconstitutional regulations or throwing violent criminals into jail?  And if the answer that it would be easier to lock up violent criminals who use guns, then the obvious question is "Why aren't you doing that?"


Artful versus utilitarian communication and AI

From Is there no / any longer a reason / need to learn a foreign language?, part 2 by Victor Mair.  He is quoting a piece by John McWhorter:

In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same.

At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology.

Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable.

And what about spoken language? I was in Belgium not long ago, and I watched various tourists from a variety of nations use instant speech translation apps to render their own languages into English and French. The newer ones can even reproduce the tone of the speaker’s voice; a leading model, iTranslate, publicizes that its Translator app has had 200 million downloads so far.

[snip]

Because I love trying to learn languages and am endlessly fascinated by their varieties and complexities, I am working hard to wrap my head around this new reality. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did. 

An additional thought.

There is an element here of distinguishing the art of communication and the utility of communication.  To master the art of communication, you need much more than simply the grammar and the vocabulary.  You need the history and cultural context.

For utilitarian purposes?  Not so much.  We have always gotten by with inartful (though interesting in their own right) Pigeon languages and patois.  Some of which, like Swahili, evolve into their own formalized languages.

AI infused translation Arts are unlikely ever to be completely artful but they certainly can take us a good ways beyond pigeon languages.  

A spectrum of advantages that allowed them a much greater margin of error and tactical disadvantage

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Hanson Davis.  

In any discussion of military prowess, we should also be clear about  the thorny divide between determinism and free will. Throughout this  study, we are not suggesting that the intrinsic characteristics of Western  civilization predetermined European success on every occasion. Rather,  Western civilization gave a spectrum of advantages to European militaries  that allowed them a much greater margin of error and tactical disadvantage—battlefield inexperience, soldierly cowardice, insufficient numbers,  terrible generalship—than their adversaries. Luck, individual initiative  and courage, the brilliance of a Hannibal or Saladin, the sheer numbers of  Zulu or Inca warriors—all on occasions could nullify Western inherent  military superiority.

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Informational density as a source of anxiety

Capturing a thought to return to.

We are surrounded by First World Problems.  People complaining about minor consequences of living in the safest and most prosperous age for the overwhelming greatest portion of humanity.  Why all the anxiety?

Clearly there is the age old dynamic that those in the establishment (power, commerce, prestige, etc.) will always want to create the appearance of a crisis in order to maintain their beneficiary positions in the status quo.  I think that is a big part of the challenge, if not the largest part.  We've got a lot of people with an incentive to manufacture crises which reinforce (they anticipate) their own position of power, finance, and prestige.  

Think of the Establishment response to Covid-19

Think of the Establishment commitment to an otherwise indiscernible Anthropogenic Global Warming despite the epistemic weaknesses of the hypothesis.  

Think of the Establishment commitment to Department of Education control of public education despite the serial and catastrophic policy failures over many decades.

Think of the Establishment enthusiasm for DEI and ESG despite the absence of evidence of any real problem.

Think of transient Establishment fancies such as Occupy Wall Street, Trans, Nuclear Disarmament, Income Inequality, Housing First, Universal Basic Income, Defund the Police, etc.

So intentional pot-stirring for advantage is very real.  But is that the whole explanation?

I wonder.

Perhaps there is an inadvertent issue as well.  Moore's Law means that we have had five or six decades of truly spectacular technological progress and that progress has strained our social, cultural and legal norms.  I take that as read.

But perhaps there is another element.  

Doubling the number of chip components every two years has an additional implication which is both obvious and perhaps less remarked than it might be.  Obviously, Moore's law means that we all have more access to more information more of the time.  We see that in streaming and smart phones and the internet, etc.  

But think about it in measurement terms and in terms of quotidian transactions.  At each moment of our lives, with every action and interaction, I suspect everything is far more information dense than it once was.  

The concept is most easily seen in the work of Edward R. Tufte in his books starting with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He focuses on simplifying the comprehension of the data displayed while increasing the density of information displayed.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the lived environment.  It is not just that the speed of things has accelerated and that the quantity is greater.  I wonder whether the density of information and inference is also now greater and the trade-offs more transparent and delicately balanced.  Tufte focuses on the trade-offs between density of information and the comprehensibility of that information.  

In the real world, beyond his Flat Land, the trade-offs are greater, usually characterized as trade-offs between Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Or as the Operations Manager in the apocryphal story said to the President of the company, "Faster, Cheaper, Better, pick two."

Since the information density and complexity has come on slowly (increasing every two years but integrating into daily life at a somewhat slower rate), perhaps we have not fully comprehended just how much more nuanced, informationally rich, informationally dense, and consequential normal actions are now which used to be flatter and simpler.

Buying a light bulb - are we being manipulated and exploited by buying high efficiency LEDs that don't last near as long as advertised and contain mercury and have to be disposed of carefully or are we environmental monsters for staying with the old trusted and true filament bulbs?  It used to be a simple economic and quantity decision involving cost and how many bulbs of 40, 60, 75, or 100 watts.  Now, our decision includes all that and the higher upfront costs versus the promised long term returns on efficiency, environmental considerations, status signaling considerations, operational considerations, etc.  

Cars, mortgages, health decisions, recreation, dining, etc.  Almost all transactions involve greater information density and complexity than in the past.  Even buying your groceries.  Loyalty program or privacy?  Cash or credit or debit?  If credit, which card with what reward program?  

Perhaps we are living in a much more information dense and decision consequence rich world than we did and perhaps the consequences, while on balance overwhelmingly positive on average, because of their complexity, threaten greater consequences than we are comfortable assuming.  

Speculation.

Data Talks

 

Tiled Kitchen, 1954 by Harry Bush (1883 – 1957)

Tiled Kitchen, 1954 by Harry Bush (1883 – 1957) 

































Click to enlarge.

Friday, July 28, 2023

The real trouble with old age

From The Summer of a Dormouse by John Mortimer.  

The real trouble with old age is that it lasts for such a short time.

The Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three by Jorge Luis Borges

The Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by William Baer

Already the iron sword of the king has spread 
its bloody vengeance. Justice is done. 
His arrows and lance have found each and every one 
of the insolent suitors who now lie bloodless and dead. 
Despite the efforts of a god to undermine 
this king, Ulysses has returned to queen and realm, 
in spite of storming plots to overwhelm 
his ship, in spite of Ares' cries and murderous design. 
And now, in the warm love of their bridal bed, 
the luminous queen lies sleeping with her head 
on the chest of her king. So where's that castaway 
who during his exile, night and day, would run 
across the world like a wild dog and say 
to monsters that his name was "No One"? 

History

 

A constructive attempt to overcome the hardships of their lives

Essay by Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, 9 August, 2003.  

Respectability is a much-mocked quality, and no doubt it has its drawbacks: but it's opposite, a kind of bohemian anarchy without culture or intellect to redeem it, has no advantages. Besides, the respectability of poor people is moving to behold, constituting as it does a constructive attempt to overcome the hardships of their lives.

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

A Sandy Coastline, 1879 by Ivan Shishkin (1832 - 1898)

A Sandy Coastline, 1879 by Ivan Shishkin (1832 - 1898)







































Click to enlarge.

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Bauer's Law - Foreign aid is transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries

From Turn Off Foreign Aid? by Richard W. Rahn.

Bauer noted that all too often foreign aid simply turned out to be “transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

A country that establishes the rule of law and largely eliminates corruption, allows free markets to operate, establishes free trade, maintains low taxation and government spending, does not excessively regulate, and establishes a stable currency will attract sufficient domestic and foreign investment to grow rapidly, without foreign aid. Countries that do not provide the rule of law and sound economic policies will not grow no matter how much “foreign aid” and development assistance they receive.

The great economic success stories of the last several decades, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, etc., received little or any aid, but they did put in the right policies to attract capital and provide economic growth. The post‐​World War II Marshall Plan in Europe is often cited as the great success of foreign aid. But, in fact, the German and other economic miracles in Europe only began after the Germans and others, despite opposition from the Allied Control Commission, removed their extensive price controls and other restrictions on trade, production and distribution.

Most development economists now realize Bauer and his disciples are correct, and as a result there has been a big shift in the nature of most foreign aid coming from the U.S. government.

De Luscinia / Alcuin: Concerning a Nightingale by Alcuin of York

De Luscinia / Alcuin: Concerning a Nightingale
by Alcuin of York
translated by Maryann Corbett

Jealousy, that’s what it was. It was thin-fingered envy that nabbed you,
stealing away my delight, Nightingale, out of the broom!
Sour as my soul had become, you could fill it with honeying sweetness,
lilting it into my ears, lifting it into my heart.
Come, all you creatures with wings! Let them come from the corners of heaven
adding their grief to my own, singing the song of the muse.
Not much to look at for color, but sound that could carry my heart off:
sound with the breadth of the air poured from your throat’s little strait,
sweetness in dollops and pours and melismas, repeating, renewing,
always a song in your mouth to him who is maker of all.
Everywhere night and its terrible blackness, yet still you were singing,
voice that should still us to prayer, ornament hung on the dark.
Why should we wonder at all at the angels eternally chanting
praise to the Lord of the storm? You could sing endlessly too.

Policy-based evidence-making

From Birth of a Woke Myth by Ian Kingsbury.  The subheading is A new study on mass shootings is a prime example of public health’s growing penchant for policy-based evidence-making.  

Is there any limit to the degree to which “researchers” will discredit themselves to prove their woke bona fides? A new study published in JAMA Surgery suggests not.

The study, “Association Between Markers of Structural Racism and Mass Shooting Events in Major US Cities,” purportedly seeks to understand whether evidence exists that “structural racism” plays a role in mass-shooting events.

To test their theory, the researchers quantitatively examine the correlation between mass shootings and “structural racism.” They define mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people are shot, and they define “structural racism” according to various factors, including the percentage of black population in a major metropolitan area, the proportion of children living in a single-parent household, the violent crime rate, and measures of segregation and income inequality.

The chosen measures of structural racism are the paper’s first obvious shortcoming. Out-of-wedlock birth and violent crime are not phenomena ordained by supposedly pervasive and irrepressible bigotry but regrettable exercises in accordance with free will. “Segregation” and “income inequality”—politicized framings to describe habitation and earnings patterns that differ by race—are much the same, lest someone truly believe that Asians (the highest-earning racial group) are the greatest beneficiaries of structural racism.

The assertion that metro-area demographics are a measure of structural racism is especially problematic. 

Kingsbury takes the study apart.  There seems almost no way that there was any innocent way to have arrived at this empirical and analytical abomination.  The original research comes across as deliberate cognitive pollution.  

History

 

But the cases of dictatorships destroying their economies are even more common.

From Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The “transition” from the authoritarianism of the ruling Communist Party in China, however, is a more difficult problem. Economic growth and development do not automatically confer personal freedom and civil rights. The interplay between politics and economics is complex. Fifty years ago, there was a widespread view that there was a trade-off between growth and democracy. Russia, it was thought, might be able to grow faster than America, but it paid a high price. We now know that the Russians gave up their freedom but did not gain economically. There are cases of successful reforms done under dictatorship—Pinochet in Chile is one example. But the cases of dictatorships destroying their economies are even more common.

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Yes, there are no public policy unicorns

Fascinating.  Richard Florida is the Paul Ehrlich of urban planners.  Always quoted but usually wrong.  But always a bellwether of the bien pensant of public intellectuals.  From What’s the Future of Cities in the Aftermath of COVID-19? by Trey Barrineau.  

Urbanist Richard Florida sees downtowns evolving from destinations for work into “better neighborhoods.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had significant impacts on cities around the world. Many suffered economically and socially, with downtown areas hit particularly hard. Despite that, urbanist Richard Florida says the crisis also created opportunities for municipalities to reimagine their central business districts as more than places for work.

Urbanist Richard Florida says it is critical for cities to transform their central business districts into places that offer a wide range of amenities.

“We are entering a new era,” Florida said during a recent webinar hosted by The Business Journals. “It took us a long way to get here, but it’s finally dawning on people — city leaders, chambers of commerce, advocacy groups, landlords, real estate owners, banks — that we’re going to have to change the way we create our downtowns. We’ve done this a lot over the past century, and I think we can do it again.”

However, cities face many challenges as they enter the post-pandemic phase. The current economic uncertainty, driven by inflation and higher interest rates, is colliding with a profound transformation in how most white-collar businesses run their day-to-day operations. This has significant implications for office markets and the vitality of central business districts.

“Our downtowns are uniquely troubled,” Florida said. “People aren’t going back to the office. Offices have high vacancy rates.”

Several of Florida's weaknesses on display in these passages.  The most important one is his overweening conviction that urban planners are superior to distributed decision-making occurring in the market.  Who is the we in "we’re going to have to change the way we create our downtowns."  Its always central planners.  

Closely related to his faith in urban planners is Florida's routine obliviousness to quality of governance.

Public safety, education, and transportation infrastructure tend to be identified as the most important governance responsibilities by residents.  Florida has nothing to say about about well or badly cities are doing in terms of delivering quality education to attract residents (News Alert - Badly).

Instead he focuses on public safety and transportation where cities are also, surprise, doing badly.

Florida says nearly every city today is facing challenges around safety and crime, both in reality and perception. While crime rates are nowhere near the levels seen from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, they have gone up, and there is a widespread sense that they are getting worse. Cities need to ensure that essential functions such as police and social services are funded.

Another challenge facing cities is the need to rethink transit systems. Many were built decades ago around a 9-to-5 model, which no longer applies in the aftermath of the pandemic. According to Florida, people now use transit for many functions, including leisure, and this means that the systems must be more flexible. Governments will have to make hard choices about how to maintain existing transit infrastructure, and he suggested that many municipalities should consider holding off on big investments for now.

What attracts people to a product, a brand, a place?  Usually some variation on Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Is there any center city whose government is delivering Faster, Cheaper, Better in any fashion of normal measurement?  On virtually every measure in all three categories, suburbs, exurbs and smaller cities and towns do better than large city centers.  

There is no discussion about actions which would lead to better governance or to better policies to create Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Instead, there is the waving of a magic wand.

Florida believes that the key to success for cities is to focus on innovation.

Urban innovation has been Florida's schtick for years but there is a vast gulf between the theory and the practice.  

And even the magic wand of innovation won't fix bad public policy.

Much like in the past, the way forward through the current crisis will require significant investment and innovation. Florida believes that building more affordable housing will be crucial to the success of cities in the future, especially multifamily units that are suitable for families. This means overcoming the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitude that often blocks affordable residential development.

Reducing the cost of housing, the cost of living in a city, fits the Cheaper goal.  But does "building more affordable housing?"  Sounds like the normal Big City corrupt schemes where government money goes into private pockets and produces little of what was intended and none of the imagined benefits.  Building residential units of a size, price and features would certainly be desirable.  But I am pretty certain that is not what is being promised here.  At least, that is not what has ever been delivered anywhere where cities have undertaken to "build more affordable housing."

And the authoritarianism and class disdain which makes City governance so unpleasant and ineffective is right there embedded in the plan.  Whenever you see or hear an authoritarian talking about "the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitude" you know you have someone who is about to advance a proposition which does not make sense, is unlikely to deliver, and will require coercion and suppression.  NIMBY is not a barrier.  NIMBY is a signal that government is not delivering what residents want.

The rub of the interview is that Florida acknowledges that Cities and their governance structures are not currently delivering on Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Further, he acknowledges that Cities are not delivering on Public Safety or on Transportation (commute times).  While unacknowledged, we also know that Cities typically spend an exceptional amount of money to achieve markedly sub bar K-12 results.  Further, Cities are in economic peril.  

“Cities will take a revenue shortfall,” Florida said. “It’s going to be hard to make up the revenue. 

Other than the fire, Mrs. O'Leary, how are things going?  

Under this avalanche of failure, incompetence and bad governance, what can be done?

Apparently more of the same that got Cities into these problems in the first place.  Progressive policy pieties portend poor performance.  

Finally, Florida said that the biggest key to success for cities is to focus on the people who live there. In addition to creating affordable housing and investing in education and training, it also means providing opportunities for everyone, regardless of their background or socioeconomic status. Florida believes that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are not just ethical imperatives but also economic ones.

“You cannot afford to waste any person’s talent,” he says.

If you focus on your residents and what they want, you will ignore building public housing (while focus on reducing the cost of residential building) , ignore doubling down on the already failed public school systems, ignore DEI, and ignore the call for class warfare.

What would work would be to hold K-12 to standards and switch out leadership and teachers till those standards are achieved.  Beef up policing, courts, and the judicial system so that criminals are separated from residents.  Improve governance policies to make them faster, cheaper and better.  Faster building permits.  Faster service at DMV.  Quicker responses to 911 calls.  Fewer regulations.  And so on.  

And overall, a laser-like focus on creating an environment where commerce can flourish with well-paying jobs and consequent tax revenues.  

It is a truism that you can only do one or two things well at the same time.  You can focus on creating a friendly commercial environment and focus on delivering reasonable city services.  You cannot do that minimum and do the other things that progressive policy demands such as reducing income inequality, and subsidizing public housing, and using city employment as a make work scheme, and eliminating incarceration disparities, and decarbonizing the city, and reducing traffic deaths to zero, and forcing recycling, and constructing bicycle paths no one uses, and building mass transit nobody rides, and relaxing education standards so that there are performance disparities, and  . . .

Too many goals.  And too many goals which do not deliver what residents want - Faster, Cheaper, Better and a commerce friendly environment.  

Waving the innovation wand has no effect.  There simply aren't any policy unicorns.  There is simply the hard work of effective governance.  

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Butterflies and Moths, 1965 by John Leigh-Pemberton

Butterflies and Moths, 1965 by John Leigh-Pemberton

































Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Intellectuals despise this theory because it is obviously true

From Second Opinion by Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, 27 April, 2002.

The Americans have a theory that to allow small crimes to go unremarked and unpunished is to invite bigger crimes. Needless to say, Britons of intellectual disposition despise this theory: first, because it is American; second, because it does not address the root of all crime — that is to say, the injustice of our present social and economic arrangements; and, third, because it is obviously true.

The Library by Jack Mitchell

The Library
by Jack Mitchell

The library, the city’s heart,
   Once stood here, long forlorn
Before the city fell apart,
   Before the books were torn

And scattered, rotting leaf by leaf:
   A fragmentary poem
Speaks of the passing poet’s grief
   On meeting some dead tome.

Here Shakespeare’s works once stretched, complete;
   Here every orphaned name,
Audens and Tennyson and Keat,
   Had readers, not mere fame;

Perhaps in some untouched hard drive,
   Defying time’s decay,
The Sonnets may be found alive
   And bless our latter day.

Urban real estate losses due to race riots, civil unrest, and urban planning

From Not Just Tulsa by Howard Husock.  I am leery of the argument he is making but consciously or not, he is shifting a frame I have encountered before.  And that shift in framing is interesting.

What he is effectively arguing is that we should define our category as "all destroyed neighborhoods" and that within that category are going to be race riot destruction (a la Tulsa 1921), self destruction a la the George Floyd riots, and deliberate destruction arising from urban planning.  

There is a lot to argue about in terms of defining the category in that way but it is refreshing to have the definition challenged.  Were we to take these definitions, which of the causal mechanisms for community decline might be the most common, broadest in impact, and most lasting?  It would be interesting to see a rigorous quantification but I am pretty certain it would look something like:

Deliberate destruction arising from urban planning - 50%

Self-destruction as in South Central, Ferguson, and the George Floyd riots - 35%

Race riots - 15%

Post-World War II it is probably more like 75% urban planning and 25% self-destruction.

Where have I seen this kind of reformulation of categories before?  On the fringes of the gun control debate.

There is an argument, which I endorse, that gun ownership was always a critical element in the thinking of the Founding Fathers as a mechanism for constraining centralized government.  They were obsessively, and appropriately, concerned about constraining government.

As Heller made clear, citizens are entitled to the Freedom of self-defense.  Against the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, there are real and tragic consequences to common gun ownership.  Accidents are greater, suicides are higher, and almost inherently, interpersonal violence must be more lethal.

But when you look in detail in the US and across countries, these variances are far more associated with community culture than they are with gun ownership and access.  Some areas which are nearly saturated with gun ownership have exceedingly low gun death rates and correspondingly, some areas subject to the most onerous gun control laws have dramatically high gun death rates.  

In the middle of that whole debate, others have expanded the categories of gun violence to include state action.  In other words, there are deaths from suicide, there are interpersonal gun deaths, and then there are state sanctioned gun deaths.  In the latter category they include officer involved mortal shootings as well as judicially sanctioned executions.  But they also include citizen deaths arising from any State repression as well as, occasionally, deaths from State launched wars.  

The core argument is that a well-armed citizenry is an effect which ensures that State power is constrained from either strong repressive actions or from unsupported martial actions.  Maybe a better way might be to say that with a well-armed citizenry, it is more likely that government actions will comport with the consent of the citizens.

As with Husock's argument, I am leery.  But it is an interesting insight that arises from a not completely unreasonable redefinition of categories.  I don't dismiss the argument either.  

Getting back to Husock's argument, how might it be tested?  I think the strong argument would be that Urban Planning destroys urban communities and economic vitality.  The weak argument might be Cities with higher urban planning requirements and greater regulatory burdens end up with slower economic growth, greater instances of social dysfunction (e.g. homelessness, substance, abuse, etc.), greater resident churn and loss of population, and loss of embedded residential and commercial real estate value.

I suspect that the strong argument actually might have some viability but certainly the weak argument is achievable and seems intuitively likely.

History

 

Extreme cleverness is no safeguard

From By no means roses, roses all the way by Philip Hensher In The Spectator, January 10, 2004.  A review of Browning: A Private Life by Iain Finlayson

These early poems are certainly hard going, and often faintly absurd — for me, a poem-drama like Paracelsus is killed stone dead by the memory of ‘Savonarola Brown’; large stretches of it scan beautifully, saying nothing much at great length. Despite their sophistication, there is a curious naivety about them, summed up by a ludicrous feature at the end of Pippa Passes:

Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Browning, with all his immense learning, was still under the impression that ‘twat’ was the name for an item of nun’s headgear. When the OED, much later in his life, wrote to inquire why he thought that, he kindly sent them a passage from an old poem he’d found —‘They’d talked of his having a cardinal’s hat,/ They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat.’ Which just goes to show — the awful story is passed over in silence by Iain Finlayson — that extreme cleverness is no safeguard.

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Data Talks

 

Social activism is fundamentally incompatible with science and the search for truth

From The Current State of Social Psychology by Joseph Forgas.  Emphasis added

I also think social psychology currently is in a perilous state. Instead of open, fearless and curiosity-driven research that characterised the earlier decades, the quest for knowledge has been increasingly replaced by close-minded social activism, especially in the USA.  At the most basic level, social activism (presuming that there is certainty about what should be done and no more questions are necessary) is fundamentally incompatible with science and the search for truth that requires an open mind and the acceptance of uncertainty and divergent opinions. Social justice movements, virtue signaling and DEI requirements are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of scientific discovery.

I think the insight in bold is true beyond the narrow issue of social psychology.  There are several obvious arenas where the certainty of our social activism has far outstripped both the foundation of our knowledge or even the scope of our research.

Anthropogenic Global Warming from CO2 emissions

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Social Justice

Critical Race Theory

Housing First

Virtually anything to do with K-12 education

All things Trans

Public Health Strictures

Anybody with firm convictions and strident articulations in any of these arenasnis profoundly unserious,  dangerous, and not to be trusted.  It's not just that we don't know, it's that their convictions prohibit them from wanting us to know.