Results for “pollution” 203 found
Indoor air pollution
Perhaps the most pressing environmental problem in the world is indoor air pollution, which kills 2.8 million people each year, just behind HIV/AIDS. The pollution is caused by poor people cooking and heating their homes with dung and cardboard. The solution is not environmental (to certify dung) but rather economic, helping these people build enough wealth to afford kerosene.
That is by Bjorn Lomborg, in Foreign Policy, July/August issue.
Two caveats. First, the best figure I can find appears to be 1.6 million lives; here is a WHO statement on the phenomenon. Second, the people die because the smoke renders them more susceptible to pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. But their poverty makes them more susceptible for a number of reasons. I doubt if the marginal product of the smoke can be isolated clearly; see this study. Nonetheless this is a very very serious problem that does not receive much attention.
Friday assorted links
1. Yancey Strickler’s Artist Corporations project, and TED talk here.
2. Debates over the degree of heritability.
3. Matching potential partners based on browser history.
4. USG currently runs about 240 grocery stores, through the military, and operating at a loss.
5. “The risk premium on New York City’s debt barely budged following the election results.” (Bloomberg)
6. Turnover in Iranian military leadership.
9. North Carolina legislature votes to ban minimum parking requirements. More here.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Particulate matter local air pollution from road transport is much less due to petrol exhaust than most people think. More is due to brake, tyre, and road wear.” There is some disputation going on here, but at the very least there is something directionally correct in this point.
2. Milei gives Hayek’s Fatal Conceit to the Pope.
3. Walton heirs to start a new STEM-focused university in Arkansas.
4. Mathematicians encounter o4-mini.
5. What will happen to the federal GSA art collection? (NYT…I am, by the way, happy to auction it off).
Emergent Ventures India, 10th cohort
From Shruti Rajagopalan:
Emergent Ventures India, Cohort 10
Tanish Patare, 15, is a high school student in Mumbai and has won consecutive gold medals in the Science Olympiad Foundation’s National Science Olympiad for the last seven years. He received his grant for general career development.
Shreepoorna Rao, 22, an IIT Madras graduate passionate about aerospace, founded a crypto DeFi aggregator startup in 2021. He has developed patented drone-based robotic arms and medical delivery drones capable of flights up to 300 km carrying 500 g payloads. He received his EV grant to build a UAV with a 5-meter wingspan.
Soni Wadhwa, teaches literature at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, and curates PG Sindhi Library, a digital archive of post-partition Sindhi literature in India. Her research explores the development of Sindhi literature, within Indian literature more broadly. She contributes regularly to Asian Review of Books, and Digital Orientalist.
Rakshita Deshmukh, is beginning her PhD in Neuroscience at IIT Kanpur, studying the impact of N3 sleep on adaptive decision-making and anxiety using EEG. She received her EV grant to present her research on N3 sleep’s effects on anxiety-induced learning at MIT.
Manoj Ramaiah, 24, received his EV grant to build Ariima DeepTech Circle, a talent cluster connecting postdocs and PhDs with industry, startups, and investors for translational research. Manoj is passionate about the history of science, particularly Asian and Indian, and dedicated to introducing first-generation graduates to startups.
Munna R. Shainy , 24, is a neurotech enthusiast specializing in developmental and affective neuroscience. He received an EV grant to attend the COGNESTIC 2024 Summer School at the University of Cambridge.
Basedcon, by Neil Shroff (26), Shruthi (30), Akash (27) and Yash (25), hosts conferences on unpopular but significant ideas in Indian tech, culture and society. The grant supports global expansion and micro-grants connecting ambitious Indians worldwide.
Nithilan Ravikumar, 17, for general education and career support including participation at the International Physics and Philosophy Olympiads. He actively pursues research in physics, explores the future implications of AI, and holds cybersecurity certifications
Parth Patel, holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering and is passionate about robotics. He received an EV grant for career development and is currently applying to graduate programs.
Ramya Prakash, 16, to pursue electronics and robotics and for general education and career development.
Tamzid Rahman, 16, is a social entrepreneur dedicated to eliminating child mortality caused by blood shortages in Bangladesh. He received an EV grant to develop and scale BloodLink, a peer-to-peer blood donation app and database.
Varsha Korimath, 16, is a highschooler in Belagavi, Karnataka. She is a National Tinker Champ member and a Pratibha Poshak scholar. She has authored a book, conducted tinkering workshops, and participated in the ATL Tinkerpreneur Bootcamp. She received an EV grant to support her STEM education and general career development.
Rajsuthan Gopinath (21) and Shanjai Raj (19) for building end-to-end legal AI agents through their startup Airstrip AI. Their current project develops an intelligent AI business lawyer democratizing access to legal resources.
Zubin Sharma, a social entrepreneur, founded Project Potential in rural Bihar. His EV grant supports research into innovative talent identification and acceleration strategies for high-poverty regions with limited resources and institutional support, particularly outside India’s tier-1 cities.
Sumuk Hegde, 22, for developing an automated beach-cleaning robot that detects, segregates, and disposes of waste.
Tithi Paul a master’s student in Environmental Pollution Management (Ecotoxicology) at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, and develops algorithms using zebrafish fin patterns to assess water safety. She received an EV grant for travel to present her work at international conferences.
Sachin Raghunath Pachorkar is a professor specializing in entrepreneurship and corporate governance. He founded Project Bandhan, generating tribal employment through bamboo crafts, and established Kumbhathon to address logistical challenges of the Nashik Kumbh Mela using technology. He received an EV grant for STEM education initiatives in rural and tribal schools.
Surya Maddula, 17, for developing an open-air active noise cancellation system through his startup Whisperwave.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, fifth cohort, sixth cohort, seventh cohort, eighth cohort, and ninth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Make Sunsets: Geoengineering
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it pushed some 20 million tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere reducing global temperatures by ~0.5°C for two years. Make Sunsets is a startup that replicates this effort at small scale to reduce global warming. To be precise, Make Sunsets launches balloons that release SO₂ into the stratosphere, creating reflective particles that cool the Earth. Make Sunsets is cheap compared to alternative measures of combating climate change such as carbon capture. They estimate that $1 per gram of SO₂ offsets the warming from 1 ton of CO₂ annually.
As with the eruption of Pinatubo, the effect is temporary but that is both bug and feature. The bug means we need to keep doing this so long as we need to lower the temperature but the feature is that we can study the effect without too much worry that we are going down the wrong path.
Solar geoengineering has tradeoffs, as does any action, but a recent risk study finds that the mortality benefits far exceed the harms:
the reduction in mortality from cooling—a benefit—is roughly ten times larger than the increase in mortality from air pollution and ozone loss—a harm.
I agree with Casey Handmer that we ought to think of this as a cheap insurance policy, as we develop other technologies:
We should obviously be doing solar geoengineering. We are on track to radically reduce emissions in the coming years but thermal damage will lag our course correction so most of our climate pain is still ahead of us. Why risk destabilizing the West Antarctic ice sheet or melting the arctic permafrost or wet bulbing a hundred million people to death? Solar geoengineering can incrementally and reversibly buy down the risk during this knife-edge transition to a better future. We owe future generations to take all practical steps to dodge avoidable catastrophic and lasting damage to our planet.
I like that Make Sunsets is a small startup bringing attention to this issue in a bold way. My son purchased some credits on my behalf as an Xmas present. Maybe you should buy some too!
Tuesday assorted links
1. Skepticism about the beauty premium?
2. “On a cellular level, younger generations seem to be aging faster than their forebears.” (speculative)
4. William Stanley Jevons and eclipses (NYT). And an Amtrak train ride across the country is less carbon-efficient than flying (NYT).
5. The ascent of high school wrestlers.
6. A short video on how the Great Pyramids may have been built.
7. Was more spent on eclipse tourism than on the Taylor Swift tour?
My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.
She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?
ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.
At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.
So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.
COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?
ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”
Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.
Interesting throughout.
My interview with Sam Matey
He is a podcaster who mainly does transcripts. Our discussion was largely but by no means entirely about climate change, here is one excerpt:
Sam: And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They’re building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I’m feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.
Tyler: I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it’s very far from a national priority with any party that I’m aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there’s a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn’t, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.
So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.
And:
Sam: I agree that there’s not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?
Tyler: It makes sense, but keep in mind there’s also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it’s a bigger requirement than is often imagined.
Again, I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic either. I’m genuinely uncertain.
And this:
Tyler: Maybe, but there’s two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we’ve already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I’m very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There’s so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there’s this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there’s this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.
In the latter part of the dialogue we talk about Morocco, Kenya, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the productivity crisis in Canada, among other issues. Will Buddhism rise or fall in influence? And what does it mean to suggest that books are overrated?
Do recessions benefit our health?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The human and economic costs of recessions are deep and well-documented. They can also have real health benefits, however, and seldom are they expressed so starkly as in this sentence in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.”
…Overall, the paper notes, age-adjusted mortality in the US fell by 2.3% during the Great Recession. The finding, from professors at MIT, the University of Chicago and McMasters University, broadly tracks previous research showing that that mortality rates rise in good times and fall in hard times.
And:
One answer is related to air pollution, which is lower in recessions, typically because of reduced economic activity. The benefits of lower pollution levels persist long after the recession — at least 10 years, according to the researchers’ estimates. Air pollution reduction accounts for more than one-third of the mortality benefits from the Great Recession.
And all of this:
The data do provide some additional clues. Except for cancer, for example, all major causes of mortality fell during the Great Recession. Decreases in cardiovascular-related deaths accounted for about half the mortality gains during that time. Furthermore, the mortality benefits were concentrated among Americans without college degrees. You might think that some of these improved health outcomes were due to people losing their stressful, low-paying jobs, but unemployment can be pretty stressful too.
For a 55-year-old, according to the paper’s estimates, about one-quarter of the economic costs of the Great Recession were countered by these mortality gains. So the Great Recession was still a very bad event — just less bad than we used to think. That is especially true for less educated Americans, who were hit harder by unemployment but also reaped the mortality gains.
At the top end of the age distribution, Americans aged 65 and older didn’t lose much from the Great Recession, in part because so many were already retired or working only part-time (in some cases, they were ensconced in jobs they were not going to lose). The researchers estimate that those over age 60 were also better off, on net, from the Great Recession.
Worth a ponder. Here is the original paper by
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
*Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics*
The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word. Here is one bit:
Marriage in rural Ireland is, I suggest, inhibited by anomie, expressed in a lack of sexual vitality; familistic loyalties that exaggerate latent brother-sister incestuous inclinations; an emotional climate fearful of intimacy and mistrustful of love; and an excessive preoccupation with sexual purity and pollution, fostered by an ascetic Catholic tradition. That these impediments to marriage and to an uninhibited expression of sexuality also contribute to the high rates of mental illness among middle-aged bachelor farmers is implicit in the following interpretations and verified in the life history materials and psychological tests of these men.
And:
In the preceding pages I have drawn a rather grim portrait of Irish country life, one that differs markedly from previous ethnographic studies. Village social life and institutions are, I contend, in a state of disintegration, and villagers are suffering from anomie, of which the most visible sign is the spiraling schizophrenia. Traditional culture has become unadaptive, and the newly emerging cultural forms as yet lack integration. The sexes are locked into isolation and mutual hostility. Deaths and emigrations surpass marriages and births.
Recommended. This seminal book, republished and revised in 2001, but originally from the 1970s, would be much harder to write and publish today.
How to travel in India
An MR reader asks me:
….what have you found to be nonobvious activities with high return on time invested in India?
Perhaps it is all obvious, but here is my list:
1. Make sure you visit a bunch of smaller temples, not just the famous, very well known sites.
2. Never turn down a trip, or side trip, to any particular part of India. Never say “Nah, it is not interesting there.” Because it is.
3. Along those lines, try to see many different parts of the country. Think of India as more culturally diverse than say Europe.
4. Most of the typical “sights” are overrated, the best sight is India itself. I enjoyed the (Indian) visitors to the Taj Mahal more than the Taj itself.
5. The very best food is often in mid-tier restaurants, smallish, often with lines, find out when you should arrive. There isn’t a good enough reason to risk street food, given the quality available elsewhere, though in many other countries I do recommend street food.
6. Try to visit residences from all income classes.
7. Noise pollution still matters.
8. You cannot expect people to be on time, or to be able to avoid social pressures to join situations, spend more time somewhere, see another family member, and so on.
9. Unless you have been to India very recently, the infrastructure is much better than what you might be expecting from a previous trip.
10. India has the world’s best hotels, and many of them are less expensive than you might think, especially in off-season.
11. When choosing when to visit, do look into issues of heat, monsoon, and air pollution, before making concrete plans.
What else?
Unintended Geoengineering
In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:
Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”
By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.
The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.
SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited
Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.
The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.
Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.
“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”
King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”
Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:
The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.
Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.
Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.
…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.
Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.
Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.
Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:
Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of the US’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.
…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.
Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.
Thinking about congestion pricing in terms of the quantity dual
Ask a YIMBY person: “What about the extra traffic from all those new people moving in? Won’t the ambulance arrival times be slower? Won’t the air pollution be worse? Won’t….?” and you will get a reassuring answer that a) yes there will be some problems but they can be managed by other means, and b) the external benefits of new arrivals will outweigh those problems.
Fair enough.
But then ask that same YIMBY person: “What about the extra traffic coming from all these out-of-NYC visitors?” …and you will get a very different answer. “Tax them!”
So the basic view, at current margins, is “residents good, visitors bad.”
Maybe! But, to follow up on the recent debate, that differential treatment is never justified. What if a guy starts visiting a girlfriend in the East Village — by car — for one night every two weeks? Then he is a visitor to be taxed. Say the relationship goes well, he is there 2/3 of the time, and he rents a space for his car in her apartment building garage and uses it periodically. Is he then “a resident”? Are his per hour externalities for the world then suddenly so much more positive? (Does he stop spitting on the sidewalk?)
Again, maybe, but you can see the a priorism embedded in the standard “YIMBY plus congestion tax” mix of proposals. Somehow the differential views on residents and visitors do not need to be justified.
If you wish, think of the cars issue in terms of quantity allocation. There is only so much space for cars in lower Manhattan. How much of that space do you wish to allocate to residents with cars or to visitors with cars? (This question can hold whether you are doing the allocating with prices, with planning, or by some other method.)
If you favor YIMBY plus a congestion tax, in essence you think resident car use is better than visitor car use.
But how do you know that? Repeating to me on Twitter that pollution is bad, traffic in NYC is too slow, externalities are present, and so on is a non sequitur that does not address the question.
Alternatively, you might think visitor car use is better at the margin. Then you might place bigger taxes on cars garaged in lower Manhattan, and lower the tolls on the George Washington Bridge.
I don’t see a good a priori case against the visitors. Maybe there are diminishing returns to being exposed to the genius of NYC, and at the margin we want to encourage the dad who drives from Westchester County with his 15 year old son to see a concert at the Village Vanguard, to get the kid excited about the saxophone. Or maybe there are increasing returns to being exposed to the genius of NYC (you have to soak up book wisdom at the Strand for twenty years running), which would then cut the other way.
We do observe a lot of people living in NYC for a few years when they are younger, and then leaving for saner pastures. But they move there to be moved and inspired for a while. That suggests there is some temporary nature to the net benefits from the exposure to NYC. We also see more generally, for political economy reasons, that status quo urban policies tend to favor residents and punish visitors to an undue degree. And, if we stick with the pro-YIMBY intuitions and reallocate more road resources toward residents, do we not have to worry about the traffic, noise, and congestion from the required extra construction? These arguments don’t prove any conclusion, but they do suggest there should not be an a priori bias against reallocating some traffic space away from residents and toward visitors.
The point here is to have consistent views across YIMBY and a congestion tax. And if you think we should reallocate vehicle space more toward residents and away from visitors, please make a comparative argument to that effect. Repeating observations about crowding and externalities is not an argument on either of these questions.
Addendum: For an extra point, “throughput” and “demand” are not the same.
I’ve been seeing this error frequently. Congestion pricing may well increase throughput, which is how many users get through a road or some other chokepoint in a discrete period of time, say an hour.
It is much harder for congestion pricing to increase overall demand. For instance, at a zero explicit price the ride takes much longer but overall more people will travel through than if you charge them $20 to do the trip. That said, the $20 price may well increase throughput, but if it decreases demand there is still an opportunity cost from the policy. Don’t use the possibility of higher throughput to argue the congestion toll does not have costs for many of the visitors (of course some visitors will gain due to heterogeneity effects).