Results for “department why not”
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Which of our public policy institutions are working well right now?

Chad R. asks me:

Which of our public policy institutions are working well right now?

It seems there are plenty of takes about *why* our institutions are under extreme stress, but precious few about which are still working properly.

The Supreme Court comes to mind…

I say plenty of them are working well:

1. The CBO remains independent and effective, even though I think they are treating the health care mandate incorrectly and overestimating its impact.

2. As for the courts, they remain powerful and effective.  But note: while I strongly disagree with Trump’s travel ban, some of the lower courts overstepped their bounds by taking away too much power from the executive, relative to law.  It’s as if the courts have become too strong — perhaps optimally so — in a kind of overshooting model.

3. The Senate.  Even though one party controls all branches of government, a variety of bad health care bills have come to naught, and that is after many earlier votes to repeal Obamacare.  It is less clear to me how the House is working, but that’s why we have bicameralism.  I don’t care how stupid you might think the process is, so far it is generating acceptable results.  Yum, yum, yum, I just love that democracy!

4. The media as investigators have been excellent, though as summarizers of what is really going on I see their performance as much weaker, due to selective reporting.

5. Think tanks: the lack of Trump infrastructure at this level has raised my estimate of think tank importance.  That said, I am not sure how many think tanks are influencing policy right now, but if nothing else the inability to have or assemble a good think tank is indeed important.

6. The bureaucracy, for the most part, including the Fed.  Admittedly, some parts of the bureaucracy, such as the State Department, are being throttled by the Executive branch.

What’s not working well?

I say the executive branch and the White House.  Destroying or limiting the value of alliances is one of the easiest things for a blundering president to do.  I also see a significant opportunity cost from not having a legislation-oriented, detail-savvy White House.  Still, they are doing a good job on regulatory reform and an excellent Supreme Court appointment has been made.

Most of all, the appointments process is not working well, some of that being the fault of the Senate too.

The main lesson?  American government isn’t quite the train wreck you might think, and I haven’t even touched on the states, counties, and cities.

My Conversation with Jill Lepore

Here is the transcript and podcast (no video).  Jill and I discuss Mary Pickford, Dickens in America, why the early United States did not blossom culturally, Steve Bannon as a character from a 19th century painting, what the Tea Party got wrong and right, H.G. Wells, her working class background, Doctor Who and Gilligan’s Island, Elizabeth Bishop, what Americans don’t like about New England, Stuart Little, how she got her start as a secretary at HBS, and many other topics.  Highly intelligent throughout, though note it is not easy to excerpt.  Here is one good bit:

COWEN: You’ve argued at times that people overestimate the connectedness of the present with the American past. It’s not just that the past is a foreign country as Peter Laslett suggested, but it’s indeed stranger in some sense. If we could undo those mistaken intuitions about, “Oh this is like the 1960s” or “This is like Andrew Jackson,” whatever the analogy may be, what’s a concrete example of how that could improve our understanding of the current world?

LEPORE: I like to think about it in a different structural way. That completely understandable desire to find a historical analogy is just like to take an accordion and compress it.

COWEN: Yes.

LEPORE: They make then just like now. So, “Oh I know, Trump is just like Andrew Jackson. It’s the same move. He’s appealing to the people. He’s unwilling to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court. He’s overriding Congress in order to get the mandate.” Whatever it is that you want to say about those two people. And that seems to me really quite kooky.

A different move that I find much more edifying and historically defensible is to pull open the accordion and stretch it open as far as you can, so you can see the distance between now and Andrew Jackson, the distance between Trump and Jackson, and try to understand what happened between those two characters and those two presidencies that helps us to see transformation. It’s a little bit like some of the controversy over how to interpret the Constitution. Because originalism, to me, is like squishing that accordion all the way together. “What would James Madison think?” is the question that originalists want to ask. Whereas I want to know what happened between when Madison thought that and here where we are now. And that’s a very different kind of constitutional interpretation.

In 1987, when it was the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, there was a lot of hoopla. It was right after the Robert Bork nomination, and then originalism was very much the priority of the Reagan justice department under Edwin Meese, and there’s a lot of conversation about the filial piety of a bicentennial. And this is an exciting thing to think about, that 200th anniversary of the Constitution.

Thurgood Marshall, as you know, the first African American Supreme Court justice who’d argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 — he was asked, “Are you going to participate in the hoopla, the bicentennial hoopla of the Constitution?” He gives this incredibly powerful speech in which he says, “No. You know what I’m willing to celebrate, not that document, which was flawed. Let’s just understand the ways in which it was flawed. I will celebrate the 200 years since, the 200 years of struggle to make good on the promises of that document.” And it’s that kind of thinking, that kind of historical thinking that contributes to our popular culture and to our discussions of the relationship between the past and the present, more than that desire to really collapse things and say, “Oh it’s 2008; this is just like 1932.” It’s not. It’s really not like 1932.

And:

LEPORE: I remained somewhat befuddled by how a lot of things happen in the world.

Recommended…

Claims about American smiles

It turns out that countries with lots of immigration have historically relied more on nonverbal communication—and thus, people there might smile more.

For a study published in 2015, an international group of researchers looked at the number of “source countries” that have fed into various nations since the year 1500. Places like Canada and the United States are very diverse, with 63 and 83 source countries, respectively, while countries like China and Zimbabwe are fairly homogenous, with just a few nationalities represented in their populations.

After polling people from 32 countries to learn how much they felt various feelings should be expressed openly, the authors found that emotional expressiveness was correlated with diversity. In other words, when there are a lot of immigrants around, you might have to smile more to build trust and cooperation, since you don’t all speak the same language.

People in the more diverse countries also smiled for a different reason than the people in the more homogeneous nations. In the countries with more immigrants, people smiled in order to bond socially. Compared to the less-diverse nations, they were more likely to say smiles were a sign someone “wants to be a close friend of yours.” But in the countries that are more uniform, people were more likely to smile to show they were superior to one another. That might be, the authors speculate, because countries without significant influxes of outsiders tend to be more hierarchical, and nonverbal communication helps maintain these delicate power structures.

That is from Olga Khazan, file under “speculative”!  Via Conor Sen.

*The Dynamics of War and Revolution*, by Lawrence Dennis

Dennis was actually the first stagnation theorist I read, at about the age of eighteen, due to a recommendation from Walter Grinder.  His strength is to tie stagnationist claims into the political economy of war.  This is from 1940 (book link here), I hope it is no longer relevant:

The importance of clearly understanding the dynamic and purely unmoral function of change cannot be exaggerated at a time like this when the major problem is stagnation.  America’s problem of unemployment could be solved by rebuilding America or going to war with Japan.  The war with Japan is more likely.  Why?  The answer is that our social philosophy recognizes a need for national defense but not for social dynamism.

And:

…stagnation in any culture is far more normal or usual than what we have been accustomed to think of as progress.

I found this interesting:

A civilization must exalt a tradition of heroism.  This it may do in war or pyramid building.  Liberalism never glorified heroism in theory but, in its frontier empire-building days, it exemplified heroism in its practice.

You can read Dennis as an extension of the Henry George model, except he is more bullish about population growth and adds the variable of war.  In the George model, there are increasing returns and so city life becomes crowded and the scarce factor of land captures the social surplus.  Think San Francisco or Singapore.  Dennis assumes diminishing returns, and so the frontier is usually more potent than the city, if only a frontier can be kept open and alive.  But that is hard to do because it runs against the natural desire of so many human beings for stasis, and thus capitalism tends to evolve into a kind of socialistic fascism.

Dennis, by the way, had an interesting life.  Unlike most “alt right” writers, he was half black, but his skin was pale so he was able to pass for white.  (In fact he started life as a child preacher, touring the south, accompanied by his African-American mother.)  He spent some of his energies trying to convince his “fellow travelers” to support civil rights for blacks, but without much success, and he also was desperately afraid of being unmasked.

Early in his career, he was accepted into mainstream American intellectual life and hung out with elites, rising to the top through the State Department and Wall Street.  As the 1930s passed, he became more extreme and the center became more hostile to fascist and semi-fascist ideas, especially if bundled with tolerance for potentially hostile foreign powers.  His career had a long downward trajectory, and during World War II he was tried for sedition, though he got off and later died in obscurity, after a final gig as a critic of the Cold War.  Gerald Horne wrote a very interesting biography of Dennis.

It’s time for some game theory, United Airlines edition

I agree the man should have left the plane in the first place, the police should not have used violence, the CEO should have apologized right away, United (possibly) should have known earlier it needed to transport the employees, and a bunch of other things.  Perhaps United should have mimicked Ryan Air and charged people fifteen euros (or much more!) for dragging them off the flight.  But let’s put that behind us and consider some analysis:

United policy says:

The priority of all other confirmed passengers may be determined based on a passenger’s fare class, itinerary, status of frequent flyer program membership, and the time in which the passenger presents him/herself for check-in without advanced seat assignment.”

There is also an exception for disabilities.

From the passenger’s point of view, this operates like randomization, as customers were told “the computer will decide.”  An alternative of course is to eliminate the random shuffle and require cash payments to passengers no matter what, waiting until someone volunteers to give up his or her seat at the required high price.

One problem with using money to buy people out of queues is that it encourages more upfront queuing to begin with, and that involves negative externalities for passengers as a whole.  In any model of stochastic demand and fixed capacity in the short run, demand will sometimes be too high, and I don’t know of many retail markets that rely on price alone to ration quantity.  Given that reality, I am not sure why everyone is insisting the airlines should do things this way.  If Nordstrom starts to run out of their blue cooking pots on the day of the sale, so be it, they don’t raise the price toward the end of the day as supplies dwindle.  Paying $5 to each denied pot-buyer just ensures they are more likely to run out of pots the next time around.

You could spend many moons debating whether price-only solutions to short-run shortages lead to higher or lower upfront prices (and thus higher or lower deadweight loss) than price + quality adjustment solutions to short-run shortages.  As far as I know, this question hasn’t been settled, and quality adjustment is well-known as a means of enabling more upfront price discrimination.  If nothing else, it pushes more people into business class.  The subtler mechanism is that the airlines have plenty of reasons to favor their more loyal customers, if only because of market segmentation, and this is one of them.  The market segmentation effects brings more collusion, and higher prices, but the price discrimination effect tends to boost output.

To consider possible analogies, let’s say it was a queue to buy concert tickets, with more people in line than seats for the show.  One option is to give cash to those who can’t get tickets, rather than just turning them away, but I’ve never heard anyone argue this would be efficient.  The cash payments are a tax on product supply and also they encourage too much queuing in the first place.  Instead we send some people home without tickets, even if they have waited in line for a long time.  In essence, randomization is one factor behind who is sent home without a ticket, because no arrival, when deciding whether or not to show up, knows exactly how many other people will have been prior in line.  Don’t be surprised if the airlines sometimes use a similar system.

As Garett Jones points out, sometimes the ATM runs out of cash and you don’t get any bonus afterwards.  There are plenty of other examples.

Maybe United should allow for a secondary market for the doctor to stay on the plane by buying flying rights from some other passenger, one who wouldn’t take the United offer but who might take the doctor’s better offer.  That idea is worth consideration, though arranging the contract could be tricky unless the passengers belong to a common system with pre-arranged arbitration in place (Facebook could run it?  PayPal?)  With tickets this kind of resale works smoothly through StubHub and the like.  (By the way, once the guy proclaimed he was a doctor going to see his ailing patients, did any of the other passengers offer to get off instead?  Hmm…)

The “re-accommodation” seems much worse to many people because the doctor already was seated.  An endowment effect argument therefore might require that the airline use a full auction once seats are taken.  That would increase the incentive of the airline to spot demand-supply imbalances in advance of boarding, and it might well be a good idea.  On the other hand, the presence of an endowment effect can help make “removal” an especially effective pre-emptive demand tax in world-states of potential excess demand.  The more you hate being removed from your seat, the fewer people have to be removed to achieve a greater S-D balancing ex ante.  Furthermore, the highest valuation buyers will make sure to be loyal buyers, which presumably is what the airline wants.

The cynical, who have studied randomization in optimal tax theory (that is not I, I love human rights too much and spent my youth reading the Salamancans), would even say that the higher value are the trips, and the more people fear being manhandled, the more it makes sense to use stochastic pain as a deterrent for overbooking.  Think of it as a way to increase the degree of ex ante price discrimination, and limit cross-buyer externalities, at minimal cost in terms of actual output.

Finally, the United episode gets at a more general problem with algorithms.  Even if the selection of seat loser is “truly random,” it will not always look random to the outside world.  The bumping of the doctor has been a huge event on Chinese social media, and how many of those Chinese are thinking that the doctor was bumped because he was Chinese.  The international loss of reputation here is significant, and it damages the United States as a whole, not just United as a brand name.  In essence, individual companies under-invest in perceptions of fairness, and reliance on “truly random” algorithms can make this worse rather than better.  A deliberate human chooser might well have done better, if only by knowing that a public defense of the choice would have been required, and that might have nudged United back toward the full auction or some other solution.  In essence, companies may be oversupplying “reliance on randomness,” not taking the collective negative externality into account.  Counterintuitively, relying on algorithms can increase perceptions of unfairness, and many of the costs of unfairness come on the perceptions side, even if “the true model” is making choices using a fair process.

Two other factors are worth considering.  First, due to social media it will be increasingly difficult to write and enforce retail contracts with legal meanings very different from their “common sense” meanings.  Maybe I’ll write a separate post on whether that will raise or lower transactions costs, but I suspect a bit of both.

Second, given that the stock of United tanked after the incident, now airline customer service will improve rather rapidly.  In the long run of course that will translate into higher prices too, so the net effect of this shift will prove regressive.  The more you complain, the more you are redistributing wealth — through the medium of preferred price-quality configurations — away from lower earners and toward the wealthy.

I’m not saying that the United rules are efficient, either generally or in this particular case, but I do see many people not even willing to ask the question of under what conditions they might be efficient.  And that is indeed to correct way to start on analyzing this problem.

Addendum: This is also a story of price controls, on that let’s turn the microphone over to Air Genius Gary Leff:

More importantly, United didn’t do it because Department of Transportation regulations set maximum required compensation for involuntary denied boarding (in this case 4 times the passenger’s fare paid up to a maximum of $1350). So they’re not going to offer more than that for voluntary denied boardings, especially since the violent outcome here wasn’t expected and the United Express gate agent had no authority to do more.

Voluntary dining in hospitals

Label this not The Department of Why Not but rather The Department of Why?

The Howsers are far from the only regulars at the Castle Creek Cafe, located inside Aspen Valley Hospital. It’s a popular breakfast spot for city workers. It also feeds people on both sides of the law; police officers visit daily, and the cafe delivers to inmates at the local jail 7 days a week. The cafe makes a point of welcoming community members with no hospital affiliation. And its menus, made available to view a month at a time, include items like herbed farro pilaf, corn soufflé, and panko crusted cod. We’re a long way away from institutional slop. [TC: speak for yourself, buster!]

The Howsers discovered the cafe, which Mary calls “the best kept secret in Aspen,” after having some tests done in the hospital. She says, “Never in my wildest dreams did I think hospital food could be tasty!” The experience has even inspired them to check out restaurants at other hospitals.

One Colorado hospital restaurant that should be next on their list is Manna, within Castle Rock Adventist Hospital.

I am sorry people, but I am going to stick with theory on this one.  No data will be sampled, unless you count this enthusiastic description from Tim Davis as evidence of sorts:

“Their menu has real gourmet style food you would expect from a high priced restaurant, but sold to you at a much more affordable price,” he says. One dish is maple glazed duck confit, consisting of a maple glazed duck leg served with swiss chard and spätzle, for $9. The grilled Thai cabbage steak, with marinated cabbage, spicy lime dressing, and shishito pepper, is even cheaper. Their burger buns even come adorned with a monogrammed M.

A further advantage is that the staff don’t push you out the door to leave, in addition the dining rooms are spacious and somber.

Mises was right about the a priori!

Here is the article, with further testimonials, and for the hat tip I thank Steve Rossi.

Tenure traps and how to avoid them

A philosophically-minded MR reader writes to me:

Tenure ought to be an occasion to explore radically new intellectual paths, ones not pre-approved by one’s field and ones that could, perhaps, do something to bridge the chasm between academic and non-academic intellectual life–and yet as a matter of fact what seems to happen is that people either stop working altogether or continue barreling down the groove they wore themselves into to get tenure.  (You mentioned this issue in a post last year: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/does-tenure-encourage-risk-taking.html)  But I want to hear more.

So: why does this happen, how can we prevent it at the University/ departmental level, and, most of all, how can we prevent it at the personal level?  (Keeping in mind that most of us are not cognitively capable of processing information at the speed to go your route!)   The idea that we are incentivized to keep working by the prospect of being promoted to full Professor seems silly, given the increased administrative responsibilities.

Related problem: as one moves up the tenure hierarchy, the administrative responsibilities tend to fall disproportionately on fewer and fewer people,  b/c there are lots of deadbeats. I repeatedly see the few responsible people overwhelmed with administrative tasks which they refuse to delegate to those they know will not take them seriously.  (And I observe these responsible people are disproportionately women, even in a field–like mine–that is disproportionately male.)

I have a few suggestions, all feasible but only a few are practical:

1. All schools should copy the committee obligations policy of the school, within their quality tier, that has the fewest committee assignments for faculty.  Yes this can be done.

2. I don’t know how to operationalize this one, but on average give women half the committee assignments that men have.  That still won’t equalize the total work burden (women on average work harder per committee assignment), but it is a start.

3. Study your lecture preparation, and experiment with cutting parts of it out.  See if that matters.

4. Each year take at least one trip to a place you didn’t think you wanted to visit.

5. Go to some Liberty Fund conferences.

6. Refuse to have colleague lunches based around local politics, politics, small talk, sports (unless of the analytic variety), and campus gossip.  Just don’t do it.  Also avoid lunches with too many people attending.

7. Of the five or so smartest people you hang out with (family aside), try to ensure that no more than half of them are in your department.

8. Change the ratio of foreign-to-domestic TV shows you watch, in favor of the foreign.

9. Hang at least one piece of non-cheery art on your wall that will remind yourself of an ever-pending death.  Change its angle every now and then, or better yet change the picture, so you don’t get too used to it and stop noticing it altogether.  If need be, supplement this with Brahms’s German Requiem.

10. Write a periodic blog post, if only a secret and non-published one.  If you don’t find this process is going well, ask yourself what is wrong.

11. Worry if no one thinks you are crazy.  Supplement this with actually being crazy.

12. What else?

Medical Spending Variation: 1/2 Patients, 1/2 Places

In Miami, health care providers spent about $14,423 per Medicare patient in 2010. But in Minneapolis, average spending on Medicare enrollees that year was $7,819, just over half as much. In fact, the U.S. is filled with regional disparities in medical spending. Why is this?

One explanation focuses on providers: In some regions, they may be more likely to use expensive tests or procedures. Another account focuses on patients: If the underlying health or the care preferences of regional populations varies enough, that may cause differences in spending. In recent years, public discussion of this issue has largely highlighted providers, with the implication that reducing apparently excessive treatments could trim overall health care costs.

But now a unique study co-authored by MIT economists provides a new answer to the medical cost mystery: By scrutinizing millions of Medicare patients who have moved from one place to another, the researchers have found that patients and providers account for virtually equal shares of the differences in regional spending.

“We find it is about 50/50, half due to patients and half due to places,” says Heidi Williams, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Economics, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings.

That’s MIT News ably summarizing the new Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and Williams paper, Sources of Geographic Variation in Health Care: Evidence From Patient Migration (ungated).

If the half of the variation that is due to place is inefficient (which could mean too low or too high but probably means too high given that the medical care curve is flat) then this puts an upper limit on the gains from standardization but still a quite high limit.

By the way, Finkelstein and Gentzkow are both recent John Bates Clark Medal awardees and Williams is a MacArthur “genius award” winner. Perhaps I should have titled this post, assortative co-authoring.

India’s Demonetization–What is Next?

Devangshu Datta has a good run down of the basic facts of India’s demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes:

About 85% of all currency in circulation has just been turned into coupons that can only be exchanged in specific places. These notes can be converted into currency again only with identity proofs (which hundreds of millions don’t have) and the additional hardship of standing in many queues for many hours.

Over half of India’s population doesn’t have any sort of bank account at the moment and about 300 million don’t have basic ID such as Aadhaar either and hence, cannot access the banking system at all. About 130 million Indians have mobile wallets (about 25 million have credit cards) and there are maybe 550-600 million debit cards in circulation. So access to cash is very, very important for average Indians.

…India is a cash economy. Well over 90% of all transactions are done in cash.

So how is India responding? Lineups at banks and ATMs are long. Tourists at the Taj Mahal have had minor troubles because ticket collectors aren’t accepting the demonetized notes. Demand for gold is up giving some jewelers a temporary albeit welcome windfall. Perhaps most telling is that at Zaveri Bazaar in Mumbai old notes were going at a 60% discount–that is a very heavy discount and indicates that the demonetization is, as I argued earlier, working as a tax on the black market. Other sources, however, indicate that discounts can be had for as low as 20%. Discounting, however, is illegal and the government is cracking down.

What, however, is the point? As Amit Varma argues:

…most truly rich people don’t keep their wealth in the form of cash, but in the form of real estate, gold, deposits in foreign bank accounts and other benaami investments. They will be largely unhurt…it is the poor who will be hurt the most by this.

And Ajay Shah notes:

Controlling corruption is not about blocking access to a non-traceable store of value. There will always be precious metals, US dollars, bitcoin, and jars of Tide…. Solving the problem of corruption requires deeper changes to institutions.

I see this as the main point of the exercise (quoting Datta):

The Income Tax and Excise Departments’ ability to gather data will increase exponentially. So will their discretionary powers, when they can query people who pay large sums in cash into their accounts.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. A key point is that only 1% of India’s population pays income tax–India would be a libertarian paradise if it had a libertarian government but it doesn’t. As a result, what low income tax payments mean is that India is forced to raise money in less efficient ways and to govern through regulation. Some of the only people who pay tax, for example, are those working in large multinational corporations but those are precisely the high-productivity sectors that need to grow.

India’s dilemma is that its high productivity sectors are taxed while its low-productivity sectors aren’t, so valuable resources are trapped in low productivity sectors. Modi knows this and if he is serious then his surprise demonetization will be followed by more efforts to bring India’s informal sector into the formal sector, leveling the playing field, and increasing total wealth.

AddendumMostly Economics has a discussion of two early demonetization in India, one in 1946 and one in 1978, both were focused on the larger bills unlike the current demonetization.

Facts about Jane Jacobs

1. Jacobs was born in Scranton, PA, but moved to NYC in 1932 and as early as 1935 she had published some of her impressions of the city in a multi-part series in Vogue magazine.  Earlier, she had written poetry for the Girl Scouts’s magazine, American Girl.

2. She published a 1941 book on the intellectual foundations of the American Constitution, with Columbia University Press under her maiden name Jane Butzner and the title Constitutional Chaff.  At about the same time her manuscript was being accepted, she was kicked out of Columbia for taking too many extended studies classes, and not allowed admission to Barnard.

3. In 1940 she wrote an article based on her study of the embossed acronyms on manhole covers.

4. She then worked as writer during WWII for the Office of War Information and the State Department.  Before Pearl Harbor, she had been an isolationist.

5. Henri Pirenne’s work on medieval cities was one of the biggest influences on her.

6. In the 1940s, she also worked for a metals industry magazine, and smoked a pipe in her office.  They started to wonder whether she was a troublemaker.

7. She married an architect in 1944, then taking the name Jacobs.  They enjoyed bicycling and sociometry together.  She had sons in 1948 and 1950.

8. Alger Hiss had been her superior at the State Department, and in the late 1940s Jacobs was investigated for possible Communist ties, in part because she had tried to apply for a visa to Siberia, using Hiss as her contact.  She stated in response that she abhorred communism and favored radical decentralization.

There is much more!  But that is a taste from the new and excellent Becoming Jane Jacobs, a runs-up-through 1972 biography by Peter L. Laurence, definitely one of the best books of the year.  This is the biography of Jacobs I have wanted to read for forty years.

Addendum: There is a new Jane Jacobs movie coming to the Toronto film festival.

Friday assorted links

1. The economics of cyberextortion.  Piddling returns, maybe the cost is low too.

2. Japanese weeping stones.

3. What is it that former CEA economists all agree upon?

4. Department of Why Not?: artillery to fight forest fires.  And report reveals staggering scale of iguana problem the culture that is Cayman.

5. Can driverless cars handle Pittsburgh bridges?

6. Turkish stocks higher today than a year ago.

7. Frank Ocean’s favorite films.

The Japanese Zoning System

In Laissez-Faire in Tokyo Land Use I pointed to Japan’s constitutional protection of property rights and it’s relatively laissez-faire approach to land use to explain why housing prices in Japan have not risen in past decades, as they have elsewhere in the developed world. A very useful post at Urban kchoze offers more detail on Japan’s zoning system. Here are some of the key points.

Japan has 12 basic zones, far fewer than is typical in an American city. The zones can be ordered in terms of nuisance or potential externality from low-rise residential to high-rise residential to commercial zone on through to light industrial and industrial. But, and this is key, in the US zones tend to be exclusive but in Japan the zones limit the maximum nuisance in a zone. So, for example, a factory can’t be built in a residential neighborhood but housing can be built in a light industrial zone.

…[the] Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning.

…[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail everything to have a decent city. Because if they forget to zone for enough commercial zones or schools, people can’t simply build what is lacking, they’d need to change the zoning, and therefore confront the NIMBYs. And since urban planning departments, especially in small cities, are largely awful, a lot of needed uses are forgotten in neighborhoods, leading to them being built on the outskirts of the city, requiring car travel to get to them from residential areas.

Meanwhile, Japanese zoning gives much more flexibility to builders, private promoters but also school boards and the cities themselves. So the need for hyper-competent planning is much reduced, as Japanese planning departments can simply zone large higher-use zones in the center of neighborhoods, since the lower-uses are still allowed. If there is more land than needed for commercial uses in a commercial zone, for example, then you can still build residential uses there, until commercial promoters actually come to need the space and buy the buildings from current residents.

In addition, residential means residential without discrimination as to the type or form of resident:

…In Japan…residential is residential. If  a building is used to provide a place to live to people, it’s residential, that’s all. Whether it’s rented, owned, houses one or many households, it doesn’t matter.
This doesn’t mean that people can build 10-story apartment blocs in the middle of single-family houses (at least, not normally). As I mentioned, there are maximum ratios of building to land areas and FAR that restricts how high and how dense residential buildings may be. So in low-rise zones, these ratios mean that multifamily homes must also have only one to three stories, like the single-family homes around them. So in neighborhoods full of small single-family homes, you will often see small apartment buildings full of what we would call small studio apartments: one room with a toilet.>

In short, as the author concludes, Japan’s zoning laws are more rational, more efficient and fairer than those used in the United States.

More details in the post. Hat tip: Sandy Ikeda.

Might CRISPR prove to be regulatory arbitrage?

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that it will not regulate the cultivation and sale of a white-button mushroom created using CRISPR

In this case, no foreign organism’s genetic material was introduced into the food, and that makes all the difference. If Yang had tackled mushroom browning by adding bits of genetic code from another organism, it would have been subject to USDA scrutiny as other non-browning produce has been. Until recently, genetic modification required the insertion of foreign viruses or bacteria, but CRISPR is more advanced than that. Because of that loophole, it’s not under the USDA’s jurisdiction. The EPA only regulates GMOs designed for pest control, and the FDA considers all GMOs to be safe. That leaves this non-browning mushroom cleared for take-off.

Scientists are excited. Anti-GMO advocates are disturbed. The public will probably continue to be more confused than anything else.

Here is the Rachel Feltman piece.  For the pointer I thank Cleveland Cavaliers fan Philip Wallach.

Don’t murder markets in everything

But when Holmes was released from prison last year, officials in this city offered something unusual to try to keep him alive: money. They began paying Holmes as much as $1,000 a month not to commit another gun crime.

Cities across the country, beginning with the District of Columbia, are moving to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because early indications show it has helped reduce homicide rates. [TC: that is Richmond, CA]

But the program requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law enforcement even as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to spend tax dollars.

…And yet, interest in the program is surging among urban politicians. Officials in Miami, Toledo, Baltimore and more than a dozen cities in between are studying how to replicate Richmond’s program.

…five years into Richmond’s multimillion-dollar experiment, 84 of 88 young men who have participated in the program remain alive, and 4 in 5 have not been suspected of another gun crime or suffered a bullet wound, according to DeVone Boggan, founder of the Richmond effort.

And how is this for bizarre?

Boggan believes that travel is another key to the program’s success. He sets aside $10,000 per fellow for trips that are often the first time participants have left the state or the country. But fellows must agree to partner with someone they have either tried to kill or who attempted to kill them.

“Wild, right?” Boggan says. “But they get out there and realize, ‘Hey, this cat’s just like me.’ ” Boggan’s measure of success: No fellows who have traveled together have been suspected in subsequent shootings against one another.

File under Department of Why Not?

Here is the full story, fascinating throughout, via Michael Rosenwald.

Being drafted during the Vietnam War also hurt your descendents

A decade after their military service, white veterans of the draft were earning about 15 percent less than their peers who didn’t serve, according to studies from MIT economist Josh Angrist.

Now, new research suggests that the draft did more than dim the prospects of that earlier generation: The children of men with unlucky draft numbers are also worse off today. They earn less and are less likely to have jobs, according to a draft of a report from Sarena F. Goodman, an economist with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Adam Isen, an economist at the Treasury Department. (A copy was released by the Fed in December, but research does not reflect the opinions of the government.)

The researchers have not nailed down how, exactly, any of this is happening, nor why the disadvantage appears to be over twice as potent for sons than for daughters. But the work is valuable for showing how the circumstances of one’s parents can have lasting repercussions. This is one way that inequality persists through the generations.

That is from Jeff Guo at Wonkblog.