Category: Current Affairs
Will American mass transit make a comeback?
Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the United States last year, including the seven cities that serve the majority of riders, with losses largely stemming from buses but punctuated by reliability issues on systems such as Metro, according to an annual overview of public transit usage.
…Researchers concluded factors such as lower fuel costs, increased teleworking, higher car ownership and the rise of alternatives such as Uber and Lyft are pulling people off trains and buses at record levels.
I know, I know — if only we would spend more money, do it better, and so on. An alternative and really quite simple hypothesis is that mass transit is largely a 20th century technology, it is being slowly abandoned, and in the United States at least its future is dim. The more you moralize about the troglodyte politicians and voters who won’t support enlightenment, the harder it will be to give that hypothesis an analytically fair shake.
And what about the D.C. area?:
Metro’s ridership dropped by 3.2 percent. The trend was largely driven by a 6 percent decline in bus ridership. Dramatic losses to subway ridership, including a 10 percent decline in 2016, had appeared to level off by 2017, when the total number of trips fell by about a percent and a half.
Metro has said about 30 percent of its ridership losses are tied to reliability issues, with teleworking, a shrinking federal workforce, Uber and Lyft, and other factors to blame for the rest.
Here is the full WaPo story by Faiz Siddiqui.
Will there be a trade war with China?
No. That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Keep in mind that the U.S. is a relatively large buyer in many markets; in economic lingo, it has some monopsony power. So if it cuts back purchases of, say, Chinese toys, China cannot simply reroute those now-surplus toys and sell them to Canada or Indonesia at the same price. This gives the U.S. significant power in trade conflicts. And China cannot throw around its weight as a buyer in similar fashion because it does not import on the same scale.
The Chinese don’t have that many ready American targets for economic retaliation. Aircraft are one of the major U.S. exports to China, where market demand for domestic flights is rapidly growing. Beijing has a backlog of about 400 orders with the Boeing Co. It could try to switch some or all of those orders to Airbus SE, but that would mean delays. Airbus would also know it could increase its prices and the Chinese would have to pay. As a buyer, China doesn’t have as much leverage in this market as it might appear.
The U.S. has many more targets when it comes to restricting foreign investment, as there is plenty of Chinese capital that would love to flee. The Chinese government already limits the activities of the big technology companies and many other U.S. multinationals in China, so they don’t have as many extra sticks in this regard.
The reality is China has margins for responding to the U.S., but they are mostly not in the economic realm.
I thank Ray Lopez for a useful email conversation related to this column.
Opioids are not mainly an economic phenomenon
Overall, our findings suggest that there is no simple causal relationship between economic conditions and the abuse of opioids. Therefore, while improving economic conditions in depressed areas is desirable for many reasons, it is unlikely to curb the opioid epidemic.
That is from Janet Currie, Jonas Y. Jin, and Molly Schnell in a new NBER working paper.
Very good sentences (about Facebook)
It is telling that two of the greatest ethical scandals to have hit Facebook in recent years both involved academics…
That is from a very good William Davies piece in LRB, via an anonymous correspondent.
Iranian “CyberAttack” Threatens Elsevier Not USA
Here’s what Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said when announcing charges against a group of Iranian “cyber attackers”:
“We have worked tirelessly to identify you,” Berman said. “You cannot hide behind a keyboard halfway around the world and expect not to be held to account. Together, along with our law enforcement partners, we will work relentlessly and creatively to apply the legal tools at our disposal to unmask and charge you. We will do all we can to bring you to justice. While the defendants remain at large, they are now fugitives from the American judicial system.
So what are these horrendous people being charged with? Stealing unreleased scripts of Game of Thrones and a bunch of academic articles. I am not making this up.
…members of the conspiracy used stolen account credentials to obtain unauthorized access to victim professor accounts, through which they then exfiltrated intellectual property, research, and other academic data and documents from the systems of compromised universities, including, among other things, academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books.
(That is from the press release and here is the earlier press release on GOT, with which this has been combined in many news accounts. The full indictment is here).
In other words, the Iranians were running something like Sci-Hub, the website that some of you have probably used to bypass publisher paywalls to read articles linked to on MR that you haven’t paid for. I don’t defend such actions but neither do I want the federal attorney working tirelessly to identify you. As crimes go this is a yawner.
Indeed, since Sci-Hub is already used in Iran, one wonders how useful the additional Iranian hacking was. A few companies are also listed as targets, although they turn out to be publishers, a stock image company, two online car companies etc. A few government agencies are thrown in for good measure although that appears to be window dressing.
The federal attorney claims the hacking (hacking not attacking) cost billions which they estimate because:
Through the course of the conspiracy, U.S.-based universities spent over approximately $3.4 billion to procure and access such data and intellectual property.
That’s just DoJ making up some number to make them look good. The direct losses in this scheme almost certainly amount to zero, bupkiss, nada. Universities certainly haven’t lost anything – the data was copied, not taken. The publishers might have lost a bit, but even then it would only be the revenue they would have got from papers that would have been bought if they hadn’t been copied. A useful estimate of the size of that loss still being zero, bupkiss, nada.
Frankly, this is a joke of an indictment. But headlines like “US Charges 9 Iranians With Massive Cyberattack” are certainly fortuitously timed for new national security designate John Bolton and others who want to take a hardline on Iran.
Why an American third party remains unlikely
Donald Trump would not be President today if he had tried to mount a third-party candidacy rather than running as a Republican. Bernie Sanders would not be a national leader if he had just stayed in third-party politics in backwater Vermont rather than caucusing with the Democrats and contesting for control of the Democratic Party. So the existing parties are a shortcut to power for ambitious politicians. The parties are porous to those ambitions. In the process, they take on new influences, and new policy priorities.
So it’s really remarkable when you reflect back on what the Republican Party was at its founding and look at what it is today. And the Democratic Party as well. They’ve literally exchanged places. The Republican Party was a Northern party that was for African-American rights, high-taxes, and internal improvements.
That is by Frances Lee, the entire symposium is interesting. Christopher Caldwell tells us: “The Democrats have become the party of sexual morality.”
From the new spending bill, arts funding is going up
ARTS FUNDING: It goes up despite Trump’s attempts to slash. NEA and NEH funding climbs $152.8M each. National Gallery of Art gets $165.9M; John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts receives $40.5 million. All increases over last year.
Here is a link. In the meantime, here is some tech and Facebook advice from Twitter.
The state and culture that is Utah
SALT LAKE CITY — So-called free-range parenting will soon be the law of the land in Utah after the governor signed what appears to be the country’s first measure to formally legalize allowing kids to do things on their own to foster self-sufficiency.
The bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert announced Friday that he’d signed, specifies that it isn’t neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car. The law takes effect May 8.
Utah’s law is the first in the country, said Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term free-range parent. A records search by the National Conference of State Legislatures didn’t turn up any similar legislation in other states.
Here is more, bravo. Via Interfluidity.
In tech, we fear what we can’t control
That is the topic of my new Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Like drones, driverless cars possess some features of an especially potent scare story. They are a new and exciting technology, and so stories about them get a lot of clicks. We don’t actually know how safe they are, and that uncertainty will spook people above and beyond whatever is the particular level of risk. Most of all, driverless cars by definition involve humans not feeling in direct control. It resembles how a lot of people feel in greater danger when flying than driving a car, even though flying is usually safer. Driverless cars raise a lot of questions about driver control: Should you be allowed to sleep in the backseat? Or must you stay by the wheel? That focuses our minds and feelings on the issue of control all the more.
And:
The recent brouhaha over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (read here and here) reflects some similar issues. Could most Americans clearly and correctly articulate exactly what went wrong in this episode? Probably not, but people do know that when it comes to social networks, their personal data and algorithms, they don’t exactly feel in control. The murkiness of the events and legal obligations is in fact part of the problem.
When I see a new story or criticism about the tech world, I no longer ask whether the tech companies poll as being popular (they do). I instead wonder whether voters feel in control in a world with North Korean nuclear weapons, an erratic American president and algorithms everywhere. They don’t. Haven’t you wondered why articles about robots putting us all out of work are so popular during a time of full employment?
We are about to enter a new meta-narrative for American society, which I call “re-establishing the feeling of control.” Unfortunately, when you pursue the feeling rather than the actual control, you often end up with neither.
Do read the whole thing.
Markets in everything, probably more where this came from edition
Mr. Sarkozy, 63, was taken into custody in Nanterre, northwest of Paris, after answering a police summons, according to a French judicial official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with department policy…
The suspicions behind this case first emerged in 2012, when the investigative news website Mediapart published a report suggesting that Mr. Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign had received up to 50 million euros, or nearly $62 million at current exchange rates, from the regime of Colonel Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan strongman who was killed in 2011. Such support would have violated France’s strict campaign finance laws, which cap spending and prohibit foreign funding.
Here is the NYT account. Here is my earlier post on Gerhard Schröder.
Public Choice Outreach Conference!
The 2018 Public Choice Outreach Conference, a crash course in public choice for students planning careers in academia, journalism, law, or public policy will held June 9-10 in Arlington VA. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates are eligible to apply. Students majoring in economics, history, international studies, law, philosophy political science, psychology, public administration, religious studies, and sociology have attended past conferences. Speakers include Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Shruti Rajagopolan and many others.
You can find an application and more information here. If you are a professor please invite your students to apply.
Here are some quotes from past attendees of the Outreach Conference:
It was so useful to hear such varied and intriguing aspects of public choice thought. The other members of the conference were fantastic to meet and now I’m sure we all have so many new paper ideas and updated perspectives on our original interests, thank you!
Clara Jace, Creighton University
I found the conference insightful into many different topics. What I think was most unique about the conference was the diversity of ideas, theorems and most importantly, ideas for solutions to these prevalent problems. I think my favorite part of the econ conferences is how quick presenters are to say “I don’t know” to questions and proceed to give the analytical reasoning for both sides of the argument instead of giving a BS answer that may or may not be true. Overall, I have loved this conference.
Jalee Blackwell, West Texas A & M, School of Business
Wow, this conference was absolutely exceptional. It provided some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Econ lectures and conversations I have ever had the privilege of engaging in. The opportunity to have one on one discussions with some of the world’s leading minds in these fields was truly an eye opening, educational, and inspiring experience that I won’t soon forget.
Daniel Corley, University of Texas School of Law
The wisdom of Ben (Stratechery) Thompson
It seems far more likely that Facebook will be directly regulated than Google; arguably this is already the case in Europe with the GDPR. What is worth noting, though, is that regulations like the GDPR entrench incumbents: protecting users from Facebook will, in all likelihood, lock in Facebook’s competitive position.
This episode is a perfect example: an unintended casualty of this weekend’s firestorm is the idea of data portability: I have argued that social networks like Facebook should make it trivial to export your network; it seems far more likely that most social networks will respond to this Cambridge Analytica scandal by locking down data even further. That may be good for privacy, but it’s not so good for competition. Everything is a trade-off.
Here is the link to the longer piece, to get them regularly you have to pay, definitely recommended, now more than ever.
True sentences about SB 827
California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 827 — a sweeping approach to solve California’s housing crisis by having the state government preempt local zoning ordinances and allow for greater density near rapid transit stations and high-frequency bus stops — is one of the most important ideas in American politics today.
Here is more from Matt Yglesias.
Tanzania fact of the day
Since coming to power in the country of 55m on the east coast of Africa in 2015, Mr Magufuli, nicknamed “the bulldozer” from his time as roads minister, has bashed foreign-owned businesses with impossible tax demands, ordered pregnant girls to be kicked out of school, shut down newspapers and locked up “immoral” musicians who criticise him. A journalist and opposition party members have disappeared, political rallies have been banned and mutilated bodies have washed up on the shores of Coco Beach in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. Mr Magufuli is fast transforming Tanzania from a flawed democracy into one of Africa’s more brutal dictatorships. It is a lesson in how easily weak institutions can be hijacked and how quickly democratic progress can be undone.
…The main lesson of Tanzania is that constitutions which concentrate power in the presidency can quickly be subverted.
Here is more from The Economist.
The electoral campaign that is Russia
It’s early March, two weeks before Russia’s polling day, but the presidential election season is already in full swing in Chubulga, a reindeer-herding settlement in north-eastern Yakutia. It’s an hour’s flight to the nearest village, which is itself a further two hours from the nearest asphalt road and 5,000km east of Moscow.
With a population of just three, this district is unlikely to turn the electoral tide. But with election officials desperate to raise turnout and show support for current president Vladimir Putin, no expense has been spared.
So they sent a team of election officials by plane, plus some trudging through the snow. And this:
Results differ across regions. Some areas allegedly concoct results to show their loyalty to the Kremlin: Putin regularly polls above 99 per cent in Chechnya. In major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg, Putin is so unpopular among the middle class that he wins less than half the vote, despite accusations of voter fraud. In Yakutia, Putin’s last election return of 69 per cent was typical for Russia’s far-flung provinces. But the region’s vastness means that the key is maintaining the 75 per cent turnout. As a result, officials have to go further than anywhere else to show democracy in action.
Here is the FT story by Max Seddon, via BaldingsWorld.