Category: Uncategorized

Alan Ehrenhalt is skeptical about the new Tysons Corner development, as am I

by  Tyler Cowen in

Some bits from his new book:

The original transit plan…was to place the subway line underground.  That didn’t happen….So rail transit will come to Tysons in the form of a seventy-foot-high elevated track along Route 123 [TC: does he mean Route 7?], with disembarking passengers required to go down to the street and then climb back up a bridge to get to the plaza and the towers.  It’s not exactly the best way to signal the presence of an urban village.

…the hardest part…is the grid…retrofitting seventeen hundred acres of suburban asphalt with a network of walkable streets will be an enormous challenge…The plain truth is that nobody has ever done this before — not on the scale that is being called for at Tysons Corner.

…The residential, retail, and office developers had all delayed their plans for the new walkable city,  a casualty of the national bank lending crunch and a glut of suburban office space.  But the county board had just reaffirmed its support for the entire project, residential towers, gridded streets, and all.

Ehrenhalt does suggest that Tysons has a very good chance of succeeding as “retrofitted suburbia,” but not as a “green pedestrian oasis.”

Here is my previous post on the Ehrenhalt book.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Is this a golden age for inventors?  And what is the asteroid-mining business plan?

2. Is this a golden age of Hunger Games econometrics?

3. Should gamblers be made to stand?

4. “The fundamental question is: “Why is government’s share of the voluntary donations market so damn small?” “, more here.  Furthermore “There are plenty of redistributionist goals which do not require concerted collective action or threshold levels of contribution.”

5. Shout it from the rooftops! (some results about auction pricing)

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Will cellphones be able to see through walls, and other barriers too?  Via Chris F. Masse.

2. Update on the elite Grayling humanities school.

3. The Guardian on An Economist Gets Lunch, by Oliver Burkeman, “This column will change your life,” and a lengthy review from Kyle Smith at The New York Post; “Cowen’s special sauce is rationality, which is why this may be the first food book I have ever made it through.”

4. Economies of Scope?

5. The violence of Montreal snow removal, and replicating three years’ worth of articles in psychology journals, and one economist’s guide to politics in China.

Veronique de Rugy on *An Economist Gets Lunch*

by  Tyler Cowen

On the (superior) French parental approach to children and food:

Growing up, my parents would mostly ignore my wishes when it came to food — or anything else for that matter. I wasn’t forced to eat blue cheese at every meal, but I had to try it once in a while, like I had to try every new food they put on the table. My mom fixed one meal for the whole family and if you didn’t like it, well, tough luck because that’s what was on the menu that night. As a result, my sister and I ate very diverse meals (most of them without particular enjoyment). This practice may not guarantee that children will grow into adults who can eat anything but it certainly makes it easier for parents (Having tried both ways with my children, I can confirm that point too!).

And in summary:

Finally, I can imagine that this book will annoy a serious portion of the “foodie” community as, in the end, I read it as an awesome statement about the democratization of great food, not to mention a serious exercise in debunking the idea that high-quality food is reserved for a rare elite willing to invest lots of money in eating.

There is more here.

*The Occupy Handbook*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have an essay in that book co-authored with Veronique de Rugy.  Other contributors include Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, David Graeber, Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, Ariel Dorfman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jeff Sachs, and Nouriel Roubini, among others.

Our essay is an…outlier…in the volume.  Here is one bit:

Wall Street has contributed to some very real problems, but the core issues for poor Americans are often health care, education, and the cost of renting an apartment of buying a house.  The best way to improve living standards and increase options for future success is to move toward greater competition and accountability in each of those areas, areas that usually have little to do with the financial sector per se.

Our goal is to propose an alternative vision for what OWS should focus on.  You can buy the book here.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. I want to praise Robin Hanson, yet I also want him to become more trendy with the trendy people.  Sometimes I think he already is trendy, yet he is certainly not shallow.  What to do?  Here is Robin’s CBA for uploads.

2. Will Disney manage to do away with lines?

3. The geographic flow of music: which cities lead in terms of listening habits?  Oslo, for one, and Montreal, Atlanta for rap music.

4. Ask a Korean, on Korean food, from a self-proclaimed “Korean food Wahhabbist.”

5. Corruption in the Chinese military.

Two tweets from Dani Rodrik

by  Tyler Cowen in

The first is:

Josef Joffe is precisely wrong: Europe’s crisis IS about macroeconomics — not microeconomics: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/germany-reformed-its-social-model-europe-can-too.html

I would say it is about the connection between microeconomics and macroeconomics.  I understand full well that Sweden is doing fine (despite a very recent slowdown), but I do not get why so many Keynesian economists are so reluctant to condemn the legal and regulatory policies, and rent-seeking practices, of the eurozone periphery.  Stronger nominal aggregate demand is called for but it cannot make everything there fine.

The second is:

Unfortunately Argentina’s government has been giving unorthodox policy a bad name by associating thuggish behavior with it.

I would say this correlation is no accident, and that there are credibility reasons why many economically small countries are so reluctant to break with consensus approaches and international agreements.  An Ireland trying to mimic Iceland would have had a very tough time of it, and it remains to be seen which country has the stronger long-run prospects.  Moisés Naim put it well:

Argentina suffers from high inflation, slowing economic growth, ballooning subsidies, price controls, capital flight, decaying infrastructure and a less than welcoming environment for foreign investors.

Perhaps the good news is this:

It has had limited access to the international financial system since defaulting on its debts in 2001.

We should expect unorthodox approaches and thuggish behavior to be correlated, even if there is no causal connection between the two.  If you then think of the choice variable as “political culture,” rather than “policy today,” that suggests unorthodox approaches are not nearly as good as they may seem upon first glance.