Results for “air pollution” 129 found
Assorted links
1. My quasi-debate with Greg Mankiw (Korean language account, imagine a dialogue between Average is Over and his JEP essay on inequality). There is more here, and here, both in Korean. There are brief excerpts in this Korean news video.
2. Robert Graboyes on supply-side innovation in health care.
4. Trauma as a major medical issue in Africa.
5. Which are the world’s worst cities for air pollution? More provincial than you might think.
6. Can a famous jeweller become a great philosopher? By the excellent Oliver Burkeman.
7. Michael R. Strain reviews Average is Over at National Review.
Assorted links
1. More on the Morlocks of Singapore.
2. Who are (were) the top American communists?
3. Long profile of Leszek Kolakowski.
4. How badly are the formal arts hurting?
5. Will the Chinese attempt to clean up air pollution result in much higher carbon emissions? And debt in China and what they are doing about it.
China estimate of the day
A government policy to promote coal use in Northern China has cut the life expectancy of some 500 million people by more than five years, on average.
That comes from a big new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which used a quasi-natural experiment to quantify the health effects of air pollution from coal use.
From Brad Plumer, here is more.
Beijing notes
It is a gargantuan, imperial city, and while there is always a walking path the point of walking is not always clear. “The Middle Kingdom does Dubai.” There is no need to tell me about all the parts of the city which do not look like Dubai, I have seen many of them, and furthermore Dubai has such parts as well.
An iPad, plus Baidu access to Chinese characters, makes it easy to ask questions of strangers. Hardly anyone speaks even minimal English. It is less harried than I had expected. The sky rarely appears, at least in late July. The contemporary art district, 798, is worth more than one visit. I am not interested in seeing the Great Wall. My hotel, rather than having a “Medical Devices” conference, has a meeting on “Australian Property Holdings.”
The main problems here are the air pollution, and that no one, including taxi drivers, seems to know how to get anywhere. The rate of change is high and many people are from the provinces, so there is a real information gap.
The main upsides stem from what scale enables. Even if you have been to many places, Beijing will manage to astonish you.
Most of all, I am struck by how Taiwan is more Chinese than is China.
Government is raising the value of a life
The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.
The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.
The article is here. If the goal is to give current people what they want, arguably this makes sense and perhaps it does not go far enough. Death is…BAD. If the goal is to maximize real gdp per capita, or most other macroeconomic indicators, it makes sense to value human life at replacement cost (and here) and this policy change does not make sense. I'm not arguing for either standard and indeed I think they both lead to absurdities. Instead the point is this: theoretical ordinal welfare economics and applied welfare economics, as represented by wealth measures, do not coincide as much as many economists like to think. This gap becomes increasingly important as health care and safety provision increase, relative to the size of the economy as a whole.
What the Chinese have done is to neglect health care investments (until very recently) and basically maximize gdp growth. They wanted to have fewer people anyway, so why spend money to keep ailing people around? We find this horrible when presented in such explicit terms, and yet we admire their achievement of the end of growth maximization.
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?
Where should you wish to visit in a hurry?
Here is the reader request:
A friend remarked that on his trip to Cuba, the inclusion of modern buses imported from China had started to erode the charm of the vintage car culture we associate with the island. This is one factor, among many (including the possibility of the embargo being stopped), that made her travel to the island before it changed too much.
What other countries (or cities) are undergoing signficant change and will be presumably very different in a few years from now? Which ones would you travel to if you had the chance now before they underwent that change?
Here is my list of places to visit in a hurry:
1. Cuba
2. Bali, Laos, and Cambodia, which are all losing traditional culture.
3. Any wildlife or game reserve.
4. Yemen (maybe too late already?)
5. Tibet and possibly Bhutan
I can't bring myself to put North Korea on that list.
Here is my list of places which will only get better to visit:
1. China (air pollution will diminish, reading MR might become easier)
2. India (pollution will diminish, sanitation will improve)
3. Greece (someday will be cheaper)
4. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia: they don't have much old stuff anyway and what they do have will be preserved. The U.S., in contrast, was interesting in the 1950s (or the 1920s) in a way these places were not and many aspects of that period are being lost.
What suggestions do you have? Iraq definitely belongs to one list or the other, we just don't know which.
The world’s 25 dirtiest cities
Here is the article, here is the top of the list:
1, Baku, Azerbaijan
2. Dhaka, Bangladesh
3. Antananarivo, Madagascar
4. Port-au-Prince (pre-quake? I believe they are now uncontested #1 or will be soon.)
5. Mexico City
Most of the rest are in Africa. If I did the ranking, Mexico City would do much better than number five, since air pollution isn't as bad as the lack of sanitation in cities such as Conakry (a mere #19). And why does Bangui (CAR) get such an idyllic photo? Nor does Google offer up any nasty photos of the place.
Hat tip goes to the essential Rachel Strohm, Twitter feed here.
My preferred exile
A loyal MR reader requests the following:
If you were exiled from the United States and had to go live semi-permanently in some other country, which country would you choose?
Another reader asks:
Let's say you had enough cash (would 10 million do it?) and needed to disappear. Where would you go? Option one, you only spoke English. Option two, you could endow yourself with any language(s) you wished.
Secondary question: would 10 mil be enough?
$10 million would be enough, thank you. Toronto or even London would be obvious choices but then it's not interesting so let's restrict it to the non-English speaking world. And I'm assuming the choice is for me alone, otherwise it boils down to how altruistic I am.
I pick either Berlin or Cologne, the latter for its central location in Europe. In either city there would be plenty of art and music, lots of smart people to talk to, access to other good locales, and the near-certainty of public order, yet with bearable winters and good health care. The key question between the two would be whether I need my Germany to be on the Rhein and conquered by Romans.
Germany may seem like an odd choice but I prefer northern Europe yet don't want a small country or a very cold country and England is out by assumption. The Mediterranean world would not be grundlegend enough for me, not for permanent residence.
Buenos Aires and Mexico City would be tempting, and more fun than Deutschland on any given day, yet I couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on either one. I can't stay up late (B.A.) and I don't like horrible air pollution (D.F.). As much as I enjoy seeing the children and the families, the Spanish-speaking world is best to roam through.
Asia has too much population density for my taste.
Would I really rather live in Braunschweig than Barcelona?
Is there a silver lining for Mexico?
To be sure, tourism to Mexico is devastated and the country will suffer many economic problems (yes, real business cycle theory still is relevant these days). But is there any upside?
I hesitate to speak too soon but I'm actually somewhat impressed by how the Mexican government, at least at the national level, has responded. There have been many failures of Mexican health care systems at local levels but keep a few things in mind: a) some of the problems lie with citizens who won't go see doctors, or who won't go see non-shaman doctors, b) too many Mexicans self-administer antibiotics, and c) when there is so much air pollution it is harder to discover flu cases, especially in the midst of flu season there. Nonetheless Mexican reporting systems seem to have discovered an unusual flu fairly promptly.
Once the national government discovered what is going on, they acted decisively and without undue panic. There has been very little denial, a common feature in the early stages of health crises (how long was it until the U.S. government acknowledged AIDS?). No one is treating the Mexican federal government like a banana republic or a basket case or thinking that the Canadian government would have done so much better.
Am I wrong? Could this episode in the longer run bring Mexico closer to the community of developed nations? Might Mexicans now be more likely to self-identify with a government that is at least partially competent?
Time will tell.
Assorted links
1. Property rights and air pollution
2. Pirate headlines (humor)
3. 2666, the perfect book review (now that I’ve read the book)
4. Update on the quest for the Netflix prize, interesting throughout
5. Triumph of the small countries; Israel just displaced Armenia for top position in the Chess Olympiad; Russia and the United States lag behind. The standings and major contestants are here.
Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance
The new issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (registration, but easy and free) is very interesting. Here is one proposal, from Jason Bordoff:
Drivers who are
similar in all respects–age, gender, driving record–pay roughly the
same premiums whether they drive 5,000 or 50,000 miles per year, even
though the likelihood of a collision increases with each mile. This
“all-you-can-drive” pricing scheme imposes significant costs on
society: more traffic accidents, congestion, air pollution, greenhouse
gas emissions, and dependence on oil.…the effect of PAYD on miles traveled and gasoline
consumption would be significant: a 6.5 percent reduction under
conservative estimates, and others suggest the reduction could be as
high as 10 percent. To put that in perspective, it would take an
81-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax to achieve a 6.5 percent
reduction in miles driven.
Monitoring costs seem workable, at least in principle with computerized odometers, so why don’t companies do this?
China estimates of the day
Pollution is more globalized too:
Bruce Hope, a senior environmental toxicologist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, estimates that global sources contribute 18 percent–more than four times the local share–to Oregon’s air pollution. Increasingly, the ozone on the west coast will be determined by China. In California, for example, some researchers believe at least one-third of California’s fine particulate pollution–known as aerosol–originates from Asia. These pollutants could potentially nullify California’s progress on meeting stricter Clean Air Act requirements. In May 2006, University of California-Davis researchers claimed that almost all the particulate matter over Lake Tahoe was from China. The great irony is that these pollutants are mainly due to the burgeoning demand of U.S. and EU consumers for cheap Chinese goods–which is driving the Chinese economic development. Some estimates cite that 7 percent of China’s CO2emissions are due to production of U.S. imports.
Here is the source, the pointer is from Robin Hanson. Concerning the last sentence, if you haven’t already seen it by now, here is Hal Varian’s piece on where the iPod is made.
Why do people in New York City smoke so much?
I was up in NYC for only a few hours, but it struck me once again. Manhattanites smoke much more than the people in northern Virginia. I can imagine a few hypotheses:
1. Social networkers head to Manhattan, and social networkers smoke.
2. In Manhattan it is more important to signal you are cool.
3. Air pollution is higher, so the marginal health cost of smoking is less.
4. New York is colder, and that makes cigarettes more enjoyable.
5. The "artsy" variable is doing most of the work; of course this is related to #1 and #2.
6. NYC life is more stressful, and smoking calms some of these people down.
7. Many of them are poseurs, and these smokers don’t have such valuable human capital.
I’d bet first on #2, and also on #7, but I don’t have a good theory that will explain the rest of the cross-sectional evidence.
The Work Vacation
I am toying with a new concept, namely The Work Vacation. Pick some exotic locale and bring your laptop. Write your book and blog as usual. Go out every now and then to see some sights. In essence seeing sights replaces the time at home you would spend doing chores and taking care of family.
I find the idea of The Work Vacation appealing. I am convinced many people don’t find their vacations that much fun in the first place. ("What are vacations for anyway?," I can imagine Robin Hanson’s voice echoing in my head.) People are losing the feeling of flow, and of accomplishment, from their workplace. Often they argue more with their spouses when together all day. They feel stress at coping with regular decisions and unfamiliar languages (of these, only the loss of work and flow describes me, I might add, but that is significant).
Perhaps many people take vacations for social reasons, to accommodate their spouses, to signal what kind of person they are, for memories, or to check countries off a list. A Work Vacation would accommodate (some of) these motives to considerable degree.
I love Indian cities, but if only for reasons of air pollution, I don’t want to spend most of the day outdoors running around. And many interesting and worthwhile parts of India don’t have many tourist sites but are still worth a bit of time.
Natasha finds the concept of The Work Vacation deeply distressing. First, it suggests I can leave home without abandoning work. Second, it implies it is permissible to work on vacation.
Surely the Coase Theorem can solve these problems.