Overturn Euclid v. Ambler
An excellent post from Maxwell Tabarrok at Maximum Progress:
On 75 percent or more of the residential land in most major American cities it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home. 95.8 percent of total residential land area in California is zoned as single-family-only, which is 30 percent of all land in the state. Restrictive zoning regulations such as these probably lower GDP per capita in the US by 8–36%. That’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars per person.
The legal authority behind all of these zoning rules derives from a 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. Ambler realty held 68 acres of land in the town of Euclid, Ohio. The town, wanting to avoid influence, immigration, and industry from nearby Cleveland, passed a restrictive zoning ordinance which prevented Ambler realty from building anything but single family homes on much of their land, though they weren’t attempting to build anything at the time of the case.
Ambler realty and their lawyer (a prominent Georgist!) argued that since this zoning ordinance severely restricted the possible uses for their property and its value, forcing the ordinance upon them without compensation was unconstitutional.
The constitutionality claims in this case are about the 14th and 5th amendment. The 5th amendment to the United States Constitution states, among other things, that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The part of the 14th amendment relevant to this case just applies the 5th to state and local governments.
The local judge in the case, who ruled in favor of Ambler (overturned by the Supreme Court), understood exactly what was going on:
The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped area of 16 square miles in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life … Aside from contributing to these results and furthering such class tendencies, the ordinance has also an esthetic purpose; that is to say, to make this village develop into a city along lines now conceived by the village council to be attractive and beautiful.
Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.
Read the whole thing and subscribe to Maximum Progress.
My podcast with Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek
Lots of fresh material and debate, they question me, lots of philosophy, here are the links. And this is a new podcast from Peter and Kasia, Lives Well Lived, further interesting episodes are on the way.
Who uses ChatGPT?
By Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard:
We study the adoption of ChatGPT, the icon of Generative AI, using a large-scale survey experiment linked to comprehensive register data in Denmark. Surveying 100,000 workers from 11 exposed occupations, we document that ChatGPT is widespread, but substantial inequalities have emerged. Women are 20 percentage points less likely to have used the tool. Furthermore, despite its potential to lift workers with less expertise, users of ChatGPT earned more already before its arrival. Workers see a substantial productivity potential in ChatGPT but are often hindered by employer restrictions and the need for training. Informing workers about expert assessments of ChatGPT shifts workers’ beliefs but has limited impacts on actual adoption.
Here is the link to the full paper.
Be there or be square!
Here is the link.
Mark Zuckerberg on open source AI
Wednesday assorted links
Cuba Libre! Part 2
In April I posted, following an excellent piece by Martin Gurri, that 4% of Cuba’s population had recently escaped. The Miami Herald now reports, based on official Cuban data, that 4% was a large underestimate.
A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
…It was a somber moment that capped a week of National Assembly sessions in which government officials shared data revealing the extent of the economic crisis and the failure of current government policies meant to increase production, address widespread shortages, deal with crumbling infrastructure and tame inflation.
Most seriously food production has collapsed:
Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.
Pork production fared even worse. The country produced barely 3,800 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 149,000 tons in all of 2018. Almost every other sector reported losses and failed production goals.
And yet
…Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced several new restrictions on the island’s private sector (!!!)
Raul Castro is 93. I am betting that his death or something similar will signal a new revolution. Is the US prepared for an open Cuba?
France faces glut of unwanted Olympics tickets
The number of unwanted Paris Olympics tickets available for resale has hit more than a quarter of a million, as lack of demand increases concerns just days before Friday’s opening ceremony that many athletes will compete against a backdrop of empty seats.
The number of listings rose to 270,465 on Monday, up from about 180,000 a month ago, a Financial Times analysis of the official resale site shows. The most expensive offers on the resale site are for the opening ceremony, with the best seats priced at €2,970.
Note:
Tickets must be resold at face value.
Ahem. Here is the full FT story.
Kamala Harris economic record
As a presidential candidate, Ms. Harris proposed replacing Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts with a monthly refundable tax credit worth up to $500 for people earning less than $100,000. The policy, known as the LIFT the Middle Class Act, was unveiled in 2018 and aimed to address the rising cost of living by providing middle-class and working families with money to help pay for everyday expenses. She framed it as a way to close the wealth gap in the United States.
In 2019, Ms. Harris proposed increasing estate taxes on the wealthy to pay for a $300 billion plan to raise teacher salaries. In what was billed as the “largest federal investment in teacher pay in U.S. history,” the plan would have given the average teacher in America a $13,500 pay increase.
…Ms. Harris wanted to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 35 percent, which is higher than the 28 percent that Mr. Biden had proposed.
And:
Ms. Harris made affordable housing a priority during her tenure in the Senate and her presidential campaign, but took a different approach. She proposed the Rent Relief Act, which would have provided refundable tax credits allowing renters who earn less than $100,000 to recoup housing costs in excess of 30 percent of their incomes.
To help the poorest, Ms. Harris also called for providing emergency relief funding for the homeless and for spending $100 billion in communities where people have traditionally been unable to get home loans because of discrimination.
And:
Ms. Harris, who served as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, has also focused heavily on consumer protection. In 2016, she threatened Uber with legal action if the company did not remove driverless cars from the state’s roads.
After the 2008 financial crisis, she pulled California out of a national settlement with big banks, leveraging her power to wrest more money from major mortgage lenders. She later announced that California homeowners would receive $12 billion in mortgage relief under the settlement.
Here is the full NYT piece by Alan Rappeport.
One of my favorite Stravinsky pieces
Introducing Llama 3.1
Read about it here, use it here. Here is some video. Bravo!
Tuesday assorted links
1. James Scott was working on rivers when he died.
2. Jonathan Swift, microfinance pioneeer.
3. Which messages induce people to favor greater taxation of billionaires?
4. “Our results suggest that further subsidizing health care for elderly homeowners, the majority of older Americans, would increase moral hazard costs without increasing access to needed care.” In fact, I would even consider moving in the opposite direction…
5. About Dry Grasses is very good, perhaps the movie of the year.
Does Income Affect Health? (an RCT)
This paper provides new evidence on the causal relationship between income and health by studying a randomized experiment in which 1,000 low-income adults in the United States received $1,000 per month for three years, with 2,000 control participants receiving $50 over that same period. The cash transfer resulted in large but short-lived improvements in stress and food security, greater use of hospital and emergency department care, and increased medical spending of about $20 per month in the treatment relative to the control group. Our results also suggest that the use of other office-based care—particularly dental care—may have increased as a result of the transfer. However, we find no effect of the transfer across several measures of physical health as captured by multiple well-validated survey measures and biomarkers derived from blood draws. We can rule out even very small improvements in physical health and the effect that would be implied by the cross-sectional correlation between income and health lies well outside our confidence intervals. We also find that the transfer did not improve mental health after the first year and by year 2 we can again reject very small improvements. We also find precise null effects on self-reported access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and several other measures related to preventive care and health behaviors. Our results imply that more targeted interventions may be more effective at reducing health inequality between high- and low-income individuals, at least for the population and time frame that we study.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
What I’ve been reading
James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries. Eccentric, published long ago, not correct, yet full of vitality and insight. So many of the key pieces of the West already were in place by that time. So recommended, this one just has been reissued. How was the Giotto chapel in Padua possible? Parsival? This book gives you a start on those questions.
Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America 1934-1971. Yes, it made me order and want to read the first volume as well. This is likely the best biography of Stravinsky and his musical times.
Rochelle Gurstein, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art. On the importance of classics, and common standards for classics, if art is going to challenge and improve us. The book is also sufficiently appreciative of Canova, one of the most impressive artists of all time but somehow these days underdiscussed.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, offers a scientific look at how fatherhood and raising children changes the minds, bodies, and behaviors of men.
Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between. I’ve been following this issue for a long time, so I don’t feel I learned much from this book. But for most people, especially younger people, it is a very good introduction to the longer history.
Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation, France at War 1942-1945. Too detailed for my purposes, so I stopped reading it. But this volume seems to be a major historical achievement, and a must read for at least some subset of humans.
Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road. This is the British novel that now everyone there is reading and talkinig about. A “cast of characters” and “biting portrait” sort of thing, reflecting modern Britain, most of all London, today. I read about fifty pages, found it highly engaging, and then decided the rest would be a waste of my time.