Friday, September 24, 2004
Sprawl and Health
The sprawl-causes-obesity silliness has become a growth industry and we now have the inevitable sprawl-and-health follow-up. Life is too short to dwell on these but the latest research from RAND will surely get a lot of press play. It may even make "60-Minutes."Sprawl is bad for your physical well-being -- although the authors could not establish links between sprawl and mental health.
Where to start? When the authors score "sprawling sites", they mean MSAs -- like LA county with hundreds of neighborhoods. Characterize all these with a single score?
Be that as it may. Among the control variables, it seems sensible to include how long respondents have lived in these hellish conditions -- a week, a year, a decade? I could not find anything that might even be a near-proxy.
Studies like these are funded by groups that insist that they know what "livable communities" are. They typically are not the ones that most people choose to live in.
We all know where that discussion leads.
The researchers should consider that suburbanization and life expectancy have both been increasing for many years. Surely, suburbanization causes long life.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Doomsday, Horse Manure and Urban Planning Conferences
By now, we all know that long-run forecasts are a fool's errand and that all of the doomsday forecasts have been wrong. We also know that they keep on coming.Historian Stephen Davies recounts "The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894" in the current issue of The Freeman (some of contents on-line but, unfortunately, not Davies' piece). All urban non-pedestrian traffic was horsepowered and the stuff kept piling up. "In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day ... " And, "Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure."
Even better is Davies' reports that, "In 1898 the first international urban planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output."
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
World Car-Free Day
It is hard not to like the WSJ's coverage of today's big non-event, World Car-Free Day. The piece says it all. Here it is:"Honk if You Hate Cars"
"You may not know it from all the traffic, but today is officially "World Car-Free Day." As for all those environmental enthusiasts who intend to mark the moment by parking their Beamers and hybrids for the next 24 hours, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is issuing a little challenge.
Car-Free Day started with local activists more than a decade ago and has since grown into an official event for governments world-wide. The goal is to hang up the car keys for a day and contribute to building a fossil-fuel-less paradise by biking, walking and rollerskating about town. Many European cities will offer free or reduced-rate bus and commuter train service, while some U.S. places (Berkeley, California, for one) will shut down a section of the city to cars for the afternoon.
"And yet promoters have been perplexed to discover that several hundred fewer locales are taking part this year than did the 1,300 in 2003. Maybe it's because one test drive with a car-free world is inconvenience enough. Which gets to CEI's request that supporters of Car-Free day take part in a little "sincerity test." How hard is it, after all, to hide the garage door opener for one sunny afternoon when you've had months to plan?
"The real test, says CEI, is for all those participating in today's experiment to make it as real-world as possible. The group suggests that participants make their car-free trips today come rain or shine, carrying several bags of groceries, toting a baby if they have one, and to be sure to include a nighttime trip. This is, after all, how the world's love affair with the automobile began."
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Sustainability
The legacy of Julian Simon roars on. Bjorn Lomborg's work is well known, the World Bank and others are chiming in with relevant international data findings (Sunday's post) and a new book edited by Terry L. Anderson, You Have to Admit It's Getting Better (Hoover Press) delivers recent research that adds still more. The authors suggest that the data show that sustainability is here. We are on the path.One of the chapters (by Robert E. McCormick) even shows that net carbon emissions are subject to an Environmental Kuznets Curve. Economic growth eventually gives us a "race to the top."
Just when the NY Times Book Review had retained Al Gore as book reviewer for a book that stuck to the dim view.
Interestingly, my colleague Martin Krieger, in his "What's Wrong With Plastic Trees" was remarkably prescient about the sustainability mantra in 1973.
Yet, Martin could not have known, no one could have predicted what I discovered when I accompanied my friend Matt Ramsey to his school's Winter Sing, just a couple of years ago. Most of the the schmaltzy Christmas stuff had been replaced by songs about recycling!
I can only imagine what gets taught to these (and many other) kids throughout the year.
I did send Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw's Facts, Not Fear: Teaching Children About the Environment to Matt. The good news is that I can follow up with Krieger, Simon, Lomborg and many others.
Monday, September 20, 2004
People and Places
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." So goes the old joke.Now, researchers at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, in their Update on Urban Hardship, find that, in the years 1970-2000, St. Louis showed the most improved Intercity Hardship Index Score while Los Angeles' ranking declined the most.
Theirs is an index that combines six attributes: unemployment, dependency, education, income level, crowded housing, and poverty (see the report for precise definitions).
Trouble is that the place-prosperity vs. people-prosperity distinction highlights the fact that, over time, it is best to consider the fortunes and misfortunes of real people, rather than places (or quintiles, or deciles or such).
And to compare places, it is best to look at where people and capital are choosing to move. Those rankings never match the ones revealed in the study. That is the insight of the old joke.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Doing Business
The World Bank's "Doing Business in 2005" includes estimates of how much a country's annual economic growth would gain by going from the being among the worst regulated to joining the least regulated: 2.2%. This is substantial and would compound quickly, making a big difference in some of the world's poorest places -- which have some of the world's worst regulations, including plenty of outright corruption.Governments that have been kept in power by conventional aid programs, just as Peter Bauer predicted, are the most likely to add to the cost of doing business -- and more the problem than the solution.
Nevertheless, it's very good that the World Bank has finally discovered the obvious.
The IMF insists that macro-economic "reforms" go with its bail-outs. Much better to focus on what look sensible micro-economic reforms.
