More Assorted Links
1. The CDC explains how to prepare for a Zombie apocalypse. Yes really, the CDC.
2. The Business of Bounty Hunting on Freakonomics radio, includes yours truly and legendary bounty hunter Bob Burton. It’s always interesting to me to hear how easy the professionals Dubner and Ryssdal make excellent radio sound.
3. Matt Yglesias warns (?) us about the Rise of the Robot Proletariat. Is this the beginning?
Scenes from the Class Struggle
Two quotes:
When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.
and
The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don’t perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we’re playing a game as to who has the power.
….I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don’t behave differently.
Surprisingly, both quotes are from Albert Shanker, President of the American Teacher’s Federation from 1974 to 1997. Shanker is quoted in an excellent piece in the Atlantic by Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City’s school system, who argues that his eight years of attempted reforms in New York were undermined by teacher’s unions who continue to operate according to the former rather than the latter philosophy.
Hemp for Victory
During World War II hemp made a brief comeback as an American crop due to shortages of rope-making stock from other countries. Hemp for Victory is a 1942 US Department of Agriculture film that encourages farmers to grow hemp. It opens with a discussion of the ancient history of hemp (canvas derives from cannabis) and then moves into how it is being farmed in Kentucky and other US states to help in the war effort.
The film has an interesting history. For decades the USDA and the Library of Congress denied that such a thing had ever been made but in 1976 Rastafarians delivered a copy to a reporter in Florida.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0xHCkOnn-A
Simple Interventions that Work
Sometimes simple interventions are the best. From research by Glewwe, Park and Zhao.
About 10% of primary school students in developing countries have poor vision, yet in virtually all of these countries very few children wear glasses….This paper presents results from the first year of a randomized trial in Western China that began in the summer of 2004. The trial involves over 19,000 students in 165 schools in two counties of Gansu province. The schools were randomly divided (at the township level) into 103 schools that received eyeglasses (for students in grades 4-6) and 62 schools that served as controls. The results from the first year indicate that, after one year, making eyeglasses available increased average test scores by 0.09 to 0.14 standard deviations (of the distribution of the test scores). For those students who accepted the glasses, average test scores increased by 0.12 to 0.22 standard deviations….
These are rather large effects; similar tests given to children in grades 5 and 6 in Gansu province show that an addition year of schooling leads to an increase of 0.4 to 0.5 standard deviations of the distribution of test scores, which implies that these impacts are equivalent to one fourth to one half of a year of schooling. Thus providing eyeglasses is a relatively low cost and easily implementable intervention that could improve the academic performance of a substantial proportion of primary (and secondary) school students in developing countries.
It’s interesting that many students/parents refused the glasses.
Hat tip to Stephen Dubner who has a good segment on this at Freakonomics Radio.
Assorted Links
1. In defense of flogging by Peter Moskos. I was pretty sure I wrote something like this a few years ago but after a search all I could find was this post on sex and spanking.
2. Google lobbies Nevada to allow Self-Driving Cars. The future isn’t here until suddenly it is. FYI, texting while in the “driver’s” seat would be made legal in such cars.
3. Used car prices are rising so much that many models are selling for more today than a year ago.
4. Conor Friedersdorf’s Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism.
Selling Government Assets
In November of 2008 I wrote:
The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks, AT 2011]. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.
The Obama administration is beginning to implement just such a proposal. Jonathan Easley of Salon summarizes:
The administration has identified a massive asset class worth unloading. The federal government is the largest owner of real estate in the nation, sitting on hundreds of millions of acres of land that takes up about 30 percent of the country’s surface. The value of Uncle Sam’s nondefense real estate portfolio is estimated at $230 billion, and it carries a maintenance cost of around $20 billion a year.
If Congress moves ahead on the White House’s recommendation, 60 percent of sale proceeds from properties the White House has deemed excess will go to paying down the deficit, with 40 percent to cover costs on other government-run facilities. In addition to the one-time cash from the sale, the government can begin generating tax revenues on land that was previously an expense.
The first set of assets proposed to go on the auction block are mostly empty or little used warehouses, office buildings, barracks and other properties, quite a few of which are now scheduled to be demolished. The total acreage up for sale is very small so Easley greatly exaggerates when he says the proposed sale is Obama’s “libertarian turn,” but heh, it’s a start.
Illiteracy and Testing
Here is Matt Yglesias who is always sensible and worth reading on education policy:
Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy is that I think a lot of middle class liberals implicitly underestimate the extent of really bad learning outcomes. Take this report (PDF) from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund which notes “that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations” and also that “within the tricounty region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%.”
Under those circumstances, I find it difficult to be seized with worry that schools are going to be ruined by teachers “teaching to the test” too much. It is true that school districts that have started taking testing more seriously now need to step up and also take the possibility of outright cheating more seriously. But the fact that huge numbers of kids are passing through school systems and not learning basic literacy drives home the fact that districts also need to take checking to see if the kids are learning anything more seriously. That means tests, and since it’s good to be able to compare different schools to one another that means standardized tests. It’s a limited tool, it shouldn’t be the sole criterion on which the effectiveness of anything is measured, but it’s also an important one.
Electric Roads
Here is an interesting idea.
…what if the energy storage burden was shifted from our overworked cars to the road?
…Electric vehicles, or EVs, could pick up small amounts of electricity as they drive over charging pads buried under the asphalt and connected to the electrical grid. Researchers say that a continuously available power supply would allow EVs to cut battery size as much as 80 percent, drastically reducing vehicle cost.
“Basically you get power directly from the grid to the motors as the car moves,” said Hunter Wu, a Utah State researcher who was recruited from The University of Auckland in New Zealand, where the technology was pioneered, to further develop the concept. “You can travel from the West Coast to the East Coast continuously without charging.”…
The Military Industrial Complex
From Wired:
John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”
The Lost Eden of Childhood. Not Lost. Not Eden.
Jim Manzi warms to Paul Krugman’s nostalgia:
It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it. The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.
Who doesn’t look upon their childhood with wistfulness for what has been lost? Exile from Eden is one of the oldest stories on record. But don’t mistake personal narrative for reality. When Manzi says “we all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows.” He isn’t talking about African Americans. And was the idea of having or being help, really “from a different time”? Again, not for African Americans. In 1950 more than 40% of African American women in the labor force were domestic servants. (Moreover, given these numbers a back of the envelope calculation suggests proportionately fewer homes with maids today.) See also Megan McArdle on Manzi’s vision and women staying at home.
Growing up in Northern Virginia, my children experience far more ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual diversity and equality than just about any child growing up outside of a commune did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Has childhood freedom been lost? No. Childhood freedom hasn’t been “lost,” it has been taken away by parents. As a child, I too was free to play in the woods but then again my parents didn’t buckle me up in the car, either.
Has safety decreased? It is true that one of the most horrible things we can imagine, homicide, is up. For kids aged 5-14 homicide mortality went from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1950 to 0.8 per 100,000 in 2005. Overall, however, kids are much safer today than in the 1950s. Accident mortality, for example, is down from 22.7 per 100,000 in 1950 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2005 (see Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for more details). Maybe buckling up and ocean supervision isn’t so bad. Maybe parents today worry too much. Probably some of both.
There have been big improvements in accident risk since even my childhood years. I remember those idyllic summers of the 1970s earning a few extra dollars mowing lawns–80,000 amputated fingers, hands and mangled toes and feet every year back then and just 6,000 today. Would I even let me kid use a mower from the 1970s? Disease mortality is also way down, from 36.6 per 100,000 in 1950 to 8.6 per 100,000 in 2005. For good or for ill, parental fears have increased even as risks overall have fallen.
There is nothing wrong with a bit of personal nostalgia but when nostalgia is taken for reality it biases our thinking in counter-productive ways. One wonders, for example, what those who look back longingly at the freedom of their childhood would say about Lenore Skenazy and her free-range kids. Skenazy let her fourth-grader take the NYC subway home alone. Would Manzi applaud Skenazy for giving her kids the same freedoms he had? Or would he denounce her, as many parents did, for something tantamount to child-abuse?
Natural Gas
The graph is from Peter Tertzakian who notes:
To put this in perspective, 1,000 Tcf of natural gas contains the equivalent energy to 166 billion barrels of oil – a staggering amount considering that the discovery of 10 billion barrels of conventional oil these days is a rare occurrence, worthy of many headlines…
Estimates of recoverable shale gas have doubled in just the past year and shale gas is only part of the supply with the total being 2,552 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of potential natural gas resources in the U.S. alone. Per unit of electricity, burning natural gas results in significantly fewer carbon dioxide emissions than coal. It is possible, however, that fracking may leak more methane to the atmosphere so the net climate benefit is unclear, at least given current methods of development.
Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
The Price Elasticity of the Demand for Oil
Kevin Drum, Megan McArdle, Jim Manzi and Stuart Staniford are all worried by an IMF report that has very low price elasticities of oil such that “a 10 percent permanent increase in oil prices reduces oil demand by about 0.7 percent after 20 years.” Three quick notes.
First, do note that the IMF estimates are below others in the literature which estimate an elasticity of 0.2 to 0.3, meaning that a 10% increase in price would reduce demand by 2 to 3 percent, still small but three times the IMF estimates. Moreover, the US estimates tend to be higher still in the range of 0.4-0.5. All of the estimates are certainly low so we are not going to solve the climate change problem overnight with a tax on oil. I’m not sure where the surprise is, however. Oil is necessary for civilization–given today’s technology–so people aren’t going to give it up easily.
Second, as Ryan Avent notes, a smaller elasticity makes a better case for taxing oil and reducing labor taxes. Moreover why the focus on oil? What matters for climate change is total carbon and there are likely to be many carbon users with high elasticities relative to oil, which has special properties.
Third, this all depends on substitute technologies. In the past, there were few good substitutes for oil. If there are more good substitutes in the future then the elasticities will get larger. We do know that as the price of oil increases so does energy innovation (as measured by the number of energy patents).
(Less) High Speed Rail
The Chinese government has reduced speed on its high speed rail line over concerns about safety, the rail ministry is in debt to the tune of $271 billion dollars, its charismatic leader, Liu Zhijun, was fired for embezzlement, and cheaper buses are turning out to be more appealing to typical travelers. Charles Lane at the Washington Post has the story.
Liu exploited the communist leadership’s fascination with bigness and national prestige….
In 2004, the State Council signed off on Liu’s plan to build the world’s largest high-speed-rail network by 2020. The first leg, a 72-mile stretch between Beijing and Tianjin, would open in time for the 2008 Olympics.
Word went forth that state-owned banks and local governments were to give Liu all the money, land and labor he required. When Chinese journalists found that Liu’s ministry was using cheap, low-quality concrete, creating a safety hazard, the Communist Party’s propaganda department quashed the reports, according to a January piece in the South China Morning Post.
Students and other humble citizens greeted the first fast trains with complaints about high ticket prices. They crowded aboard buses instead.
Oh well, at least the train didn’t go to Ordos.
By simple virtue of its size, China’s government can spend huge amounts on marvels monuments but monuments don’t pay the bills. Communism set China back so far relative to its capabilities that catch-up growth can still drive it forward, even with a poor allocation of capital, but a cutting-edge economy requires more efficient (even if imperfect!), capitalist allocation.
Happy Easter
From KurtFML.
The State of the Union
I can understand, although not agree with, wanting to penalize firms for “sending jobs overseas.” I am stunned, however, that the Obama administration’s National Labor Relations Board is trying to penalize Boeing for sending jobs from the state of Washington to the state of South Carolina.
AP: The NLRB complaint filed on Wednesday quotes public statements by Boeing executives saying they put the plant in South Carolina in part to avoid future labor disruptions. The government complaint says this amounts to discriminating based on union activity.
Politicians in South Carolina (mostly Republicans, natch) are not surprisingly outraged but, to its credit, even the Seattle Times editorializes against this move so its hard to see how this will stand. Nevertheless, it’s a bad signal.
Addendum, hoisted from the comments: Jeff Smith: “Perhaps a special tax on Colorado is in order?”