One more interesting note (related to previous discussions here and here) on how we under- and over-estimate various risks in life:
In 1999, in Interlaken, Switzerland, 21 adventure tourists on a guided canyoning trip (a sport (see above) that combines rock climbing and white-water rafting ... sans the raft) died when they were caught by an unexpected flash flood. A paper analyzing the causes of the tragedy for the Australian adventure tourism industry found, among other things, that numerous factors can influence whether we under- or over-estimate the risks of any given event or venture.
The authors quote sources that say, as I would expect, that one factor is "one's perceived control of the event." We overestimate the risks of things we feel as if we don't control. But the authors note an important exception to that: we tend to underestimate the risks of activities that we undertake as part of a group--especially when we're tempted to "abandon responsibility to another in a group":
Paul Krugman reflects on the demonization of cities and the people who live in them.
Basically, the accusation is that anyone with a good word
for urbanism must just hate the American lifestyle.
[T]he same thing is true about pro-sprawl
commentary ... Conservatives
really, really hate on Portland; examples here and here.
Aside from the tendency to engage in factual errors, the hate seems
disproportionate to the cause. But it's an aesthetic thing:
conservatives seem deeply offended by anything that challenges the
image of Americans as big men driving big cars.
Me, I like dense urban areas. But I'm a pointy-headed intellectual. And bearded, too.
This trend is not new.
A disdain for cities and the diverse, open-mined people (like Krugman) who gravitate to them has long been a rallying point on parts of the right. Long before their forays into foreign policy, neoconservatives were railing against cities. Edward Banfield's tellingly titled, The Unheavenly City offered an incredulous chapter on "Rioting for Fun and Profit." Early essays in the Public Interest sported snappy titles like "The City as Reservation" and "The
City as Sandbox." Not to mention so-called "benign neglect" which argued that cities should be left to rot and run-down so that land could become cheap enough to entice large-scale suburban-style retrofitting.
The anti-urban strain continues today, as Krugman notes. Ironically, its persistence is what's really anti-American - anti-American economy that is, making it ever more difficult to leverage the powerful role played by cities and urban areas in innovation and economic growth for long-run economic prosperity.
This is some of the creepiest portraiture I've seen in some time. The website says that, "children we ask to much of, to be perfect, like dolls." A description of the work:
'[T]he puppet show' is a new photographic work by Italian studio Winkler+Noah. 30 portraits of children aged between two to eight years old were taken and transformed into dolls by subtle retouching. the studios' statement was 'the best present we can give to children is to let them be children'.
Richard Florida points
to a familiar article about "blipsters" -- "black
hipsters." Which is funny, now that I think of it, because the original
hipsters were known as "white negroes".
Nearly a decade earlier, in 1948, Anatole Broyard, published
"A Portrait of the Hipster" in Partisan Review. I can't find an online version, but here's how one writer describes it:
Broyard attempted an analysis and a
definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his
view, been welcomed by intellectuals who "ransacking everything for meaning,
admiring insurgence... .attributed every heroism to the hipster.,,."
But Broyard
was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels ... In Broyard's words: "The hipster promptly
became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero." And he added that the hipster
life-style "grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It
became a boring routine. The hipster - once an unregenerate Individualist, an
underground poet, a guerrilla - had become a pretentious poet laureate."
Of course,
what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his
fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a
sham.
More than 2,000 car dealerships across the country will be closing their doors in coming months. Planetizen
- my favorite urbanist site - recently asked its readers what should be
done with all that space. Here are the top five vote-getters as of May
21:
Ask the local residents about what the community needs (222 votes)
Urban gardens (200 votes)
Create walkable, vibrant places and improve current communities (138 votes)
Farmers' markets and local events (126 votes)
Solar and wind energy park/vehicle charging stations (102 votes)
As someone who has lived with serious mental health problems, I can relate to the sister your reader writes in about. It's important to understand that every one of us has the innate desire to not be different. Many mental illnesses don't begin to manifest until early adulthood - so you've spent your life as a normal human being and now you're crazy. Right, who's going to accept that? Even if you've always had a mental illness, you just want to be normal. This is why almost every individual with mental illness goes through a period of abandoning medication - it's just much easier to think "I don't need this because the hard times which caused it are over" or "Now I'm cured". In my experience it takes a "bottom" so to speak to realize that you do need to be medicated and arrive at acceptance.
American photographer Thomas Allen constructs witty and clever dioramas using figures cut from the covers of old pulp paperbacks. Using salacious pulp art drawing’s of the ’40s and ’50s that covered books such as ” I Married a Dead Man” and ” Marihuana Girl’, Allen constructs one set of pictures up close while obscuring another, and in the process creates a different context. Each piece is given a brand new storyline, though never quite strays from their cheeky origins.
A new British study
finds that the most pirated pop songs on the internet are those that
already top the charts. Instead of giving rise to a "long tail" where
small indie acts broaden their appeal online, the study found that
digital technology - and music pirating - simply work to reinforce the
fat head of mass appeal. From the BBC's summary:
There was little evidence that file-sharing sites helped
unsigned and new bands find an audience ... It suggests file-sharing
sites are becoming an alternative broadcast network comparable to radio
stations as a way of hearing music.
Bryan Caplan dismantles the argument that we should stem Hispanic immigration because such immigrants tend to be more Democratic:
Almost 70% of American voters under the age of 30 voted for Obama. Why isn't anyone calling for the deportation of America's youth, or limits on fertility to raise our average age? The reason, presumably, is that people realize that this would be a grotesque over-reaction. Even if young voters are making America a little more socialist, the "cure" of mass exile is far worse than the disease. Libertarians should view arguments against Hispanic immigration in exactly the same way. Even if Steve Sailer were completely correct about the political consequences of Hispanic immigration, they're a small evil compared to the massive injustice of immigration restrictions.
How in the world does
genocide get such little attention? Do a google search of the Dish
with the term Burma and you get 160 hits. Compare how other issues are
treated by the Dish: the value of Buddhism, for example, is given an
extended discussion with multiple viewpoints. Andrew (though hardly alone) has not opined as to the
fate of several of the tougher, nonmilitary responses which were
introduced in Congress and left to die in committee. Most notable was
the Darfur Accountability Act which passed
unanimously in the senate but, following a visit to Washington D.C. by
Salah Gosh (the reported engineer of the genocide) was killed in the
House without even a discharge petition. How does such a momentous
story get ignored by everyone save a couple of human rights outlier
journalists (the most mainstream coverage it received was in
Harper's)? But what I think is more telling is the difference in tone
on the Dish between torture and genocide.
Peter Leeson, who has a new book out on piracy, explains that putting guards on commercial ships could increase deaths and costs:
Armed guards will of course defend against pirate attacks, potentially leading to fire fights that could jeopardize innocent sailors’ lives. The prospect of having to battle for their prizes will deter some pirates. But others will remain undeterred. And for the remaining industry, armed guards’ effect may very well be to increase the dangers that piracy poses rather than reducing them.
In 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave predicted a soon-to-be-realized work revolution, made possible by new technology, that largely eliminated offices and city traffic. He wasn't alone. Repeatedly, as the Internet has evolved and communication technologies have improved, the obituary of the traditional office has been written, and rewritten. And yet, anyone who's tried to navigate rush hour traffic in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco .. or any other American city ... can attest to the fact that quite a few people, actually, are still traveling to and from offices at approximately the same time each day.
Why is that? Surely, with email, audio and video conferencing, Blackberries, iPhones, and file sharing, we can communicate perfectly adequately with our co-workers, without having to be in the same physical place or space.
Maybe not.
This 2003 eve-of-census review by the InnoVisions Canada (a telework consulting organization) concluded, among other things, that one of the reason the oft-predicted "home work revolution" hadn't panned out as expected was that companies still prefer "face time." Telecommuting and flex time were being used--just not in "the way the more sensational headlines foretold," explained the head of the Canadian Telework Association.
Ezra Klein addresses Suderman's post from last week:
I wonder whether our brains aren't becoming less like indexes and more like librarians. The situation isn't quite as Peter presents it: The key skill isn't knowing where to find information. It's knowing where to find where to find information. It's understanding connector terms and knowing the relative specialties of different search engines and finding the best aggregators and possessing ninja-level skills with Nexis. We don't need to learn to think like Google. We need to learn how to help Google think.
I was very unhappy to read the post from a pediatric emergency physician claiming that 75 percent of his patients do not need to be in the ER. This is a widely perpetuated myth that is completely unsupported by any data. The CDC in 2008 issued its yearly report (pdf) on emergency department visits and found that only 12 percent of ER visits are for non-urgent reasons.
That number has dropped every year. And yet the public, the press and far too many policymakers continue to perpetuate the myth that ERs are overcrowded because of people who do not need to be there. Most people who come to the ER are sick
and have no place else to turn. It's not pretty, but that's how it is.
In an earlier post on how to cope with uncertain times and changes, I noted that sometimes, alternate routes or destinations can turn out to be way better than the original goal or place you expected or set out to reach.
Case in point: this piece by Micah Toub in the Globe and Mail about attempting to navigate Los Angeles by bicycle, instead of by car. Following the advice of urban bicycling experts who've learned how to navigate safely around LA's legendary car traffic--and traffic jams---he ends up exploring back roads he normally wouldn't travel ... and finding treasures and colors in the city he never noticed before. Even if it takes him a little bit longer to get from point "A" to point "B." Worth a look.
MapScoll links to a series of "new and improved" maps of Big Five personality types from the expanded (Canadian) edition of my book Who's Your City?. Based on data collected by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his collaborators, these new maps ignore state and national boundaries and include the U.S. and Canada.
My last entry described a simple pattern in which the expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve and borrowing by the Treasury Department to finance soaring government debt--measures resulting from the depression--create a risk of inflation, which impels corrective action that can trigger a recession that would thus be an aftershock of the current depression. I need to be more precise about inflation, and in particular to avoid an implication that zero inflation is the summum bonum that the government should be striving to achieve.
In fact we may need inflation as one of the weapons to fight the depression, and this for two reasons. The first is to prevent deflation. Deflation, the opposite of inflation, refers to the situation in which the purchasing power of money increases because the ratio of money in circulation to the quantity of goods and services being sold decreases. Between 1930 and 1933, the dollar deflated at a rate of about 10 percent a year. This meant that on average if a product cost $1 in 1929, it would cost only 90 cents in 1930.
Deflation decreases economic activity by rewarding hoarding; in a deflation, money you put under your mattress will be worth more in a year just as if it were earning interest, but it will not contribute to consumption or investment because it is not being spent. To attract buyers in a deflation, sellers must reduce prices (otherwise the real as distinct from nominal price of their goods will rise), which increases deflation by reducing the ratio of money in circulation to goods. And deflation increases indebtedness in real terms, because people who contracted debts before the deflation began or was anticipated pay interest, and repay the principal of their debts, in dollars that are worth more.
Time magazine's cover story this week is a predictive look at how "the way Americans work" is going to change over the next 10 years. "Throw away the briefcase: you're not going to the office," it proclaims. "There's no longer a ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there's a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path." One essay within the piece even uses the virtual world online game "World of Warcraft" as a model for how intensely competitive company work teams will operate, 10 years from now.
First. Any time I read or hear anybody saying "this is how future events are going to play out," I instinctively backpeddle. Remember the new economy that wasn't ever going to end? Or the new world order of peace that was in ascendance ... right up until September 11, 2001, when suddenly it wasn't, anymore? Budget surpluses? Housing as a great and booming investment?
Jonah Lehrer, among the best science bloggers out there, points tothis piece by NPR:
...for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a "NOW!" That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at least as regards toe-touching). This, of course, could apply to all kinds of lower-extremity experiences -- cold or heat against the skin, tickles, rubs, hitting a soccer ball -- the list goes on and on.
Google has developed a nifty new algorithm to identify employees who are most likely to leave the company. Discoblog explains:
Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on
its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical
formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to
quit.
No surprise, Google insiders are keeping quiet about the details of
the algorithm, though they will say that it has already "identified
employees who felt underused," a key precursor to telling your boss to
shove it. Meanwhile Laszlo Bock, the company's head of HR, told the Wall Street Journal that the algorithm helps the company "get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave."
Perhaps it's fashionable to bash uber-successful companies. I visited Google twice for book talks - once at their Silicon Valley headquarters, and also at their NYC office. I've been to a lot of high-tech companies, leading-edge manufacturing plants, and the trendiest of creative enclaves, but Google still blew me away. The digs were great, and employees (at least the ones I met) appeared smart, challenged by their work, and genuinely engaged in what they were doing. Not to mention, the algorithm seems pretty useful and reasonable to me.
Over the past week, I've discussed the role of class in economic
performance, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But what about
happiness?
There is considerable debate over the happiness of nations.
The Easterlin paradox
suggests that there is little or no relationship between a country's
economic development and its level of happiness in comparison to
others. An influential paper
by economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson contradicts the
Easterlin paradox, finding a clear relationship between economic
development (measured as GDP per capita) and happiness. In other words,
countries that increase their wealth become happier, and countries that
increase their wealth more than other nations become happier than
others.
But what about the effects of class on happiness? Are societies in
which a greater share of workers are members of the creative class on
balance happier than those with large working class populations?
A wax figure of US President Barack Obama is seen at The Wax Museum at
Fisherman's Wharf May 21, 2009 in San Francisco, California. The wax
figure of President Obama traveled across the San Francisco Bay to the
wax museum aboard the USS Potomac, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
presidential yacht. (By Justin Sullivan/Getty)
The American Lung Association's State of the Air report on America's most polluted cities is out. Here's a summary (pointer via Planetizen).
Six out of ten Americans live in urban
areas where air pollution can cause major health problems ... Despite
America's growing "green" movement, the air in many cities became
dirtier during the past 12 months. The research names Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles and Bakersfield as the most polluted US cities. The report finds that air pollution hovers at unhealthy levels in
almost every major city, threatening people's ability to breathe and
placing lives at risk ...
[There] is a straight line between the the CIA interrogation program at Abu Ghraib, moving like a game of telephone. At each stage, an important safeguard or restriction assumed at an earlier stage — the techniques apply only to the CIA; the techniques are to be used only on Geneva-exempted enemy combatants; the techniques are to be applied only by interrogators — breaks down. Not once do you have to assume that the Bush administration’s principals wanted abuse to happen to reach this conclusion. This is why the law exists, after all: to prevent unintended consequences by well-meaning individuals that veer off into horror. Redefining the law on torture leads to what a 2004 Pentagon investigation called the “migration” of so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques — even if that investigation didn’t have any mandate for discovering that the origins of those techniques came from CIA programs approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Given the right changes, perhaps the United
States can develop with the productive long view in mind, and maybe its
human talent can be spread more equitably. "When you have more
financial engineers than computer engineers, you know that the
brightest minds have gone into something where, probably, the margin
was excessive," he had told me earlier. "Maybe some of these bright
people are going to do something entrepreneurial, more creative, or go
into government. I think that's actually a good change. The transition
is painful, but the result may be good."
Universal Music Group, the world's largest recorded music company,
is once again trying to adapt to the new world of digital music. It's
created a new venture named Vevo in partnership with Google, according to the Wall Street Journal. Vevo aims to generate increased advertising revenue from streaming music videos.
But the enormity of the creative destruction
sweeping the industry goes far beyond the iPod killing off the CD.
The Gang of Four's Dave Allen argues that we are seeing the "end of the album"
- a construct initially created by the limitation of vinyl technology
in 1930 - as the organizing principle of musical production. He sees
this as potentially liberating for musicians - or those musicians that
can adapt. Industry veteran Bob Lefsetz predicts a return to the pre-LP
era, when artists constantly pumped out singles and toured. He even
draws a comparison to the way that Toyota has succeeded by building a
reputation for reliability gradually through word of mouth.
Jim Manzi responds to Ryan Avent. In my humble opinion, Jim has the upperhand –partially because Ryan is forced to argue beyond the legislation in question and consider how W-M will impact future climate bills and international negotiations on climate change. That line of attack inherentaly has more variables and uncertainties. But you won't find a better, or more civil, pro and con debate on the Waxman bill. I encourage you to read both posts.
I used to be a conservative Republican like you. I am now a conservative Democrat. I think our government is overbearing in many instances. In the case of marijuana, it's missing out on a large amount of tax revenue if the stuff were legalized and regulated like alcohol. Doing that would rid our prisons of many tokers and small time drug users, cut our prison and judicial costs significantly and increase our tax base. This would be especially true in California. Yet the insanity persists!
What really annoys me these days is at age 64 I think I have earned the right to smoke a joint once and a while without being exposed to the risks of our stupid drug laws. I ought to be able to go down to some local reputable dealer who pays taxes on the stuff and buy a joint once or twice a year, go back home and smoke it while I put a steak on the barbeque.
Another writes:
I'm a 27-year-old programmer who lives in the Bible Belt. By the time I got my first professional job at a small company, I'd been smoking marijuana for a year. I took great pains to hide this from my coworkers and parents because of the social stigmas attached to marijuana. But I eventually found out that over a third of my coworkers got high on a regular basis. They came from different educational systems, different sociopolitical backgrounds; conservatives, liberals, college graduates, middle-aged professionals, CEOs, programmers, accountants, and secretaries. Even, I discovered, my parents.
Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues, gave impassioned testimony last week to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs about the violent war against women being waged, still, in eastern Congo. Testimony reinforced yesterday by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, in a column titled, simply, "After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist."
No sane person in the world would argue against the notion that a terrible travesty is being conducted against women in not only the Congo, but Liberia, Sudan, and other African conflict areas. Eastern Congo has the highest rate of violence against women in the world, at the moment. As many as 70% of the women and girls there have been sexually assaulted or mutilated, according to some estimates. The numbers boggle the mind.
We should do something, Ensler says. I agree. Wholeheartedly.
In the wake of news that Mei, the National Zoo's female panda, is not pregnant after all, FishBowlDC's Matt Dornic points to a series of condolences posted by superfans:
"To sweet, beautiful Mei: I'm so sorry that you didn't have another cubbie. I don't know what you're feeling or what you've been going through but we love you Precious Mei."
"I so wanted her to be a mother again - FOR HER SAKE, NOT MINE - so that she could express her natural, wonderful mothering instincts she showed with Tai, so she could cuddle a little cubbie in her arms and express her emotions of caring, warmth and love."
"Tai sorry you won't be getting a baby bruder or sister dis year. Boy you sure are one miracle widdle baby cubbie growed up to be almost four years old."
"Fanks fow bwekfass, Auntie Teweetza (whymes wif Peetza)! Happy Wenzday, UB and Tai, and all his aunties!"
The U.S. unemployment rate is nearly nine percent but varies widely by gender, race, and also by state and metropolitan region. The unemployment rate is up in 44 of 50 states, according to new BLS estimates released yesterday. Last month, 106 U.S. metros reported jobless rates of 10 percent or more, while 90 had rates below seven percent, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Greater Detroit posted the highest rate for large regions (those with a million or more people), 14 percent. Ten other regions posted rates in excess of 10 percent. The lowest levels of unemployment were found in greater New Orleans, 3.3 percent and Oklahoma City, 5.6 percent. Greater Portland, Oregon saw the largest jump in its unemployment rate (+6.5 percentage points), followed by greater Charlotte (+6.2 points) and greater Detroit (+6.0 points).
Writing over at Economix, Ed Glaeser previously identified the effects of manufacturing economies and human capital (the share of people with a bachelor's degree or above).on the unemployment rate. But how do these factors and others effect the change in the unemployment rate? So, Charlotta Mellander and I decided to take a look the effects of human capital and the occupational or classstructure on the change in the unemployment rate over the past year or so.
I work as a designer and painter for 2D/3D animated television for a major network. The series I currently work on is a huge property, with a to-die-for Nielson rating. Two weeks ago, our staff was informed that after three years, they are canceling our show. The very next week, our show hit #1 for all of pre-school programming, and we were also rated as "Hot Pick" by TV guide.
"The problem that we have with this president is that we don’t know [Obama]. He was not vetted, folks. … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office. 'Oh gee, wouldn’t it be neat to do that? Gee, wouldn’t it make all of our liberal guilt just go away? We can continue to ride around in our limousines and feel so lucky to live in an America with a black president.' Okay that’s wonderful, great scenario, nice backdrop. But what does he stand for? What does he believe? … We just don’t know," Michael Steele.
Nearly 70 million Americans of all races and backgrounds elected Obama. Then 91 Republican insiders elected Steele. Total coincidence.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a man who makes his living selling new and used business jets. Which is to say, a man with the economic prospects of someone selling flood insurance in a drought. Business jets are not exactly a booming business at the moment. I asked how bad things were. "Bad," he admitted. "But you know how 50 is the new 40 and pink is the new black? Well, I think 'enough' is the new 'plenty.' And I'm just thrilled to be doing 'enough.'"
It's a thought that would resonate with quite a few people, these days. But there's good as well as bad news on that front. The bad news is, many of us are having to adapt to a new standard of plenty. The good news is ... we're far better at adapting, and adapting to less, than we often fear.
