Friday, November 05, 2004
Patio Man and the Election
Re those red and blue counties again, some weeks ago, I posted the changing big-cities' shares of the U.S. population for various census years, 1900-2000. Those data showed an urbanizing population to about 1940 and a suburbanizing population since then. Exurbanizing-suburbanizing is probably more accurate.The county-level employment data that I have only goes back to 1970. The decentralization story holds there too. Most commuting is now suburb-to-suburb.
I receive posts from a planners' listserv and the red-voting-county-exurban-suburban connection is a hot topic.
I assign David Brooks' "Patio Man and the Sprawl People" to my real estate development students. Patio Man is Brooks' exurban-suburban everyman, sketched with humor and insight. Yet, the humor derives from recognition and self-recognition. What the pundits (and politicians) are going to have to get used to is that the Patio Man demographic is growing -- and it does not conform to the hard-right ideologue image that pops up in all of the great-divide "culture wars" talk.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Home Rule
Red states--blue states misses the point. The LA Times shows a map of red and blue counties -- along with a county-level population density map. The red counties tend to be low-density counties -- just as David Brooks pointed out on the Jim Lehrer news last night and just as he noted after the 2002 results.These voters are not simply evangelicals but a large and growing slice of America. People tend to move to smaller communities (and to private comunities) because home-rule is their best hope for property rules (including zone changes) that they trust. Neighborhood change is a source of risk and home-rule is a form of insurance.
Regional planning advocates have not been listening. No surprise that in Oregon they have just been repudiated by (it appears) 60% of the electorate that supports Oregon's Prop 37. If regional land use rules diminish property values, the owners have to be compensated. What a concept!
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
They Only Have to Win Once
The current Forbes includes a round-up of "Thoughts" re politics, including John Kenneth Galbraith's "Politics consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."Wendell Cox tipped me to the Florida vote on high-speed rail; by a 2-1 margin, voters repealed a state constitutional requirement that high-speed rail be built.
Voters wisely saw that the amendement made no sense in the absence of a constitutional rule that requires people to ride high-speed rail.
Tripping around the net, however, I see that voters in Maricopa County, Austin and Denver voted to build more rail transit.
They only have to win once. In Phoenix, for example, rail transit initiatives had lost many times. When the stakes are big enough, however, the advocates simply re-group after each loss. Because they know that they only have to win once.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Mega-Projects Around the World
Bent Flyvbjerg et al. "Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition" provide international data on these undertakings.Having read their papers over the years, I had not yet seen the book. The JEL's reviewer, Peter Forsyth, notes that the authors' surveys show that, "Out of 258 projects across the world, 90 percent experienced cost overruns, and the average overrun was 28 percent. In a survey of 210 road and rail projects, actual demand for the projects was 39 percent less than the forecast average, though actual demand for road projects was 9 percent higher than forecast."
Once the boosterism boils, analysis and thought go out the window. The green-based romance re trains lives on. The reality of auto use is resisted. Cost-benefit analysis is abused, misused or not used.
Preparing for a class on the topic, I am told that Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser's "A Primer for Policy Analysis" is the best. Yet, it is practically silent on the real problem.
Truth in advertising would insist that the subject matter is not for the timid. To be effective, CBA cannot be practiced by green-shade backroom types. The opposite is true. A new and adventurous breed that finds ways to work like "Cost-Benefit Practitioners Without Borders" seems to be the only way to rescue the field from irrelevance.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Markets and Elections
The election is tomorrow, the stock market has been gaining for a week, Bush leads in the Iowa Electronic Market. People who put their money where their mouth is are usually the best source.Writing in the Spring, 2004, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Paul W. Rhode and Koleman S. Strumpf investigate "Historical Presidential Betting Markets."
"Wagering on political outcomes has a long history in the U.S. ... the market did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling."
To the extent possible, the authors examine historical markets and conclude that they met (almost) the formal conditions for efficient markets.
Yet, the rise of scientific polling by itself did not curtail presidential betting markets. In addition, there was the increasing availability of other betting options as well as anti-gambling sentiment and legislation that sought to disqualify election bettors from voting.
Yet, now that there are more equity owners among the general public than ever, the public may be more sophisticated about futures markets than through the 20th-century.
It is the learning that comes via wealth acquisition that really concentrates the mind.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Look Like America
Last Monday (10/25), the WSJ carried Harvard Prof. Ruth Wisse's op-ed, "John Kerry U". Here is the jist:"Last spring, I was surprised by a call from the Harvard Crimson asking me to comment on my contribution to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. His inquiry was prompted by the disparity he'd discovered in donations by Harvard faculty of about $150,000 for Kerry to about $8,000 for Bush. (The figures have since chnaged but not the percentages.) I could have filled the whole issue of the paper with reasons for supporting Bush over Kerry, but as we both knew, the real story was the 'herd of independent minds' -- the image is Harold Rosenberg's -- charging through the academy.
"The Federal Elections Committee couild not have foreseen that when it required employment information on political donations over $200, it would expose the scandalous uniformity in a university community that advertises its diversity. The Sacramento Bee reported that the University of California system gave more to the Kerry campaign than any other single employee group, and that Harvard was second with only 15,000 employees to the UC's 160,000. Campus bloggers computed the percentages of Kerry contributions over Bush: Cornell 93%, Dartmouth 97%, Yale 93%, Brown 89%."
Other sources have noted that adding Greens and such to the Democrat total while adding Libertarians to the Republicans leaves the ratios unchanged.
One of the mantras of the left, of course, is that admissions and hiring ought to create groups that "look like America."
When it's convenient.
