Is geography destiny? -- walkability

[following up on this post and this one]

In comments, Joseph pointed out that, while I had argued that the stereotypes about LA (and by implication, other cities) were exaggerated, I hadn't addressed the larger question of location affecting lifestyle.

Does choice of city have a big impact on lifestyle? Certainly, but it may not be the impact you expect. Before I got to LA, I thought it would be something like Atlanta, a dense center of urban culture and activity surrounded by miles of faceless ring cities, but LA doesn't really have a center. What you normally think of as urban activity (screenings, plays, concerts, speakers, art shows, dining, night spots and places to hang out, etc.) is spread out over the four thousand plus square miles of LA county.

This leads to an odd paradox: LA is one of the most and least walkable cities you'll find. The city is filled with great neighborhoods where you can live or work without a car. You can walk or pedal anywhere you need to go. If, however, you want to experience more than a tiny portion of the social and cultural life of the city you have to have access to a car and accept the fact that a significant part of your life will be spent on the freeways.

Another Education Post

Dana Goldstein:

The fact is that where such programs exist, they are oversubscribed--parents don't seem to mind sending their kids out-of-district (sometimes just a 5 minute drive away) into a town where they do not enjoy political representation when the result is a better education.

I think this direction is non-controversial. However, this scenario assumes one of two things:

1) There are more students in the district which is accepting students. As the United States funds a lot of education out of local property taxes, this may create less resources per student in the destination district (and ways to try and balance this out are quite tricky)

2) Some students need to be sent the other way. If the perception is that going the other way leads to a lower quality education (even if untrue in fact) then that could be an issue.

In the second case, I suspect that the lack of representation will be a much bigger issue (as it makes it hard for parents to engage the new district to try and remedy issues that are seen as concerns).

LA, NYC and other imaginary places

from Penelope Trunk (via Joseph):

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

I've been living in LA for a few years now and I have a pretty good read on the town. I can show you the trendiest parts of Silver Lake, the funkiest parts of Venice and the toughest parts of Watts. I can take you to the best taco stand in East LA and get you a milk tea with or without boba at four in the morning. I can introduce you to such diverse characters as rocket scientists, a mystic knight of Oingo Boingo, and Frenchy from the original run of Grease on Broadway.

Like I said, I've got a pretty good read on this town and I can tell you that the LA that you hear about doesn't exist. What does exist are little slivers where you can find passable facsimiles of the LA of an Aaron Spelling show, where you can see toned and tanned people who look like what you thought people in LA looked like.

What LA gives people like Trunk is a fantasy, a chance to convince themselves that life is like a TV show and they belong in the cast, but the only way to maintain that fantasy is to tune out or simply avoid almost all of Los Angeles, and that's a shame because it's a helluva town.

If you turn on the dome light, the whole thing explodes

There has been a lot of talk from the right recently (Megan McArdle is on the case) on the potential problems electric cars can have with cold weather. Most of the commenters seem to have rolled the Volt in with this group which seems strange for a plug-in hybrid. The comment that really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph from the Washington Post's Charles Lane:

The exact loss of power these cars would suffer is a matter of debate, partly because no one has much real-world experience to draw on.* But there would be some loss. Running the heater to stay warm, or the car radio to stay informed, would drain the battery further.

Nerd that I am, the idea of significantly draining a hybrid's battery by running the radio reminded of the Simpsons' episode where a truck was so delicately balanced on the edge of a cliff that Homer was able to shift it back on the road by tuning the radio. I suppose it's possible but I wouldn't call it likely.



* Actually we do have real world experience thanks to the good people at Consumer Reports who tested the car under just these conditions and found the EV range dropped to the low end of what GM claims but the mileage running in standard hybrid mode remained remarkably good. This information is also available on Wikipedia.

Is geography destiny?

From the comments in Megan McArdle:

It is totally unsurprising that ground zero for the locavore and electric car movements is northern California, where you can find anything you want, from cacti to chunks of glacial ice, within a couple of hundred miles. And where the climate is such that electric cars don't face battery-killing subzero nights, don't need to run big heater loads during winter driving, and don't require big air conditioner loads half the year.

and from Penelope Trunk:

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

The panic about New York was unnecessary, though. After ten years of living in NYC, when I imagined leaving, I thought I could never leave because the cultural opportunities are so amazing. The expertise people have in NYC is so vast and varied and I thought I’d never get that anywhere else.

When I left NYC I didn’t care about looking perfect everywhere I went. I didn’t care about the kind of car I drove. I was a New Yorker.

I have been thinking about this issue after visiting Northern California for the first time last week. Like Seattle, it seems to be an exceedingly pleasant place to live and seemed to be very walkable. But it lacks the freezing winters of the mid-west and the stifling summers of the south-east. Maybe it is just easier to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle there?

So I wonder just how important geography really is determining lifestyle? I am not sure but maybe the answer is that it is a lot more important than I might have previously thought.

Depressing thought of the day

From Jon Chait:

Basically, the optimal number of Fox News-like propaganda outlets is zero. But I suspect the next most optimal number is two, not one.

I worry not so much that this statement is wrong but that it is correct and that there will be a push to a local optima.

Just when you thought it was gone for good -- more thriller blogging

I had previously complained about the ads for James Patterson's books using the word 'unputdownable.' I would not have thought they could get worse, but they have.

The latest has Patterson say directly to the camera "New York has never had a great detective hero until Michael Bennett in Tick Tock."

This is a strange comment for a couple of reasons. First, New York has had its share of memorable fictional detectives from Nero Wolfe and Mike Hammer to Bernie Rhodenbarr and Matthew Scudder. The last two are the creations of Lawrence Block, whom Stephen King named the only writer who come close to replacing John D. MacDonald (a quote that still embarrasses Block). Block, who is still putting out books in his seventies, has received wide critical acclaim, particularly for his pitch-black Scudder novels and is one of those writers other writers tend to single out for praise.

Which, in a way, brings us to the second odd point: Patterson's suggestion that he's the man to fill in the gap. Patterson is not one of those writers other writers tend to praise while critics have mostly ranged from the brutal to the Lincolnesque.*

Perhaps Patterson is using this ad as a chance to slap down some of his critics (including Block's admirer, Stephen King).

Or of course this could just be a way of selling more books.





* "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

Blog-snark as a high art

As only a Brit can do it.

Raising tuition

I have quite a bit to say about this post from Richard Posner but no time to say it at the moment. I'll try to get back to this but in the meantime feel free to start without me.

In any event, there is no case at all from an overall social standpoint for subsidizing students who would pay full college tuition, without the inducement of a subsidy; the subsidy does not induce students to obtain a college education who otherwise would not because they could not afford to; it is a windfall to their families. Private colleges recognize this. They charge very high tuition (though not high enough to cover all their costs—but they have other sources of funds, such as alumni donations), but grant scholarships or loans to students whose families can’t afford the tuition. Charging low tuition to everyone, as public colleges do for residents of the state in which the college or university is located), does not make economic sense; it merely as I said provides windfalls to families willing and able to pay the full tuition. As Becker points out, this results in regressive redistribution of income, because families that can pay full tuition are wealthier than the average taxpayer, who pays for the costs of public colleges that tuition doesn’t cover.

Brad DeLong needs to watch more TCM

If he did, the next time he saw a story about Microsoft's online losses he would realize they were simply following this time-honored business model (relevant quote at the end of the clip, but watch the whole thing).

Paul Krugman has no shame

No honorable man would use this title, even if the topic is core inflation. Even Shakespeare would have said this one goes too far.

Student Loans

I came across this article by following one of the commentators in the discussion section on Andrew Gelman's blog (it was the same discussion that Mark was recommending). Protoscholar is discussing financing graduate school and makes a very good point:

The last option, to be avoided if at all possible, is student loans. The U.S. government makes it incredibly easy to take out student loans to pay for school, but these things will haunt you for decades to come. Remember that they are not GIVING you money, they are LOANING it to you. You have to pay it back someday. If a starting assistant professor makes $50,000, it isn’t worthwhile to get the degree and graduate with twice that in loans.

Remember; loans cannot be gotten rid of with bankruptcy and have the potential to ruin your credit, your chance of buying a home, your ability to rent a place and a lot more. Figure out the cost/benefit of taking out loans. What is your starting salary likely to be? Are you stuck working for a university or can you go into private industry for a few years and make a pile of money that can be used to pay the loans off? Is your field notoriously underpaid? Think about these things before accepting the loans or plan on slaving to pay them off for a long, long time to come.

I wish more students would think about issues like this. Even with assistantships and so forth, it is difficult to complete graduate school without acquiring some debt (as life can bring up all sorts of surprises that cost money). Plus, it can be hard to live like a hermit for many years, especially if the school you are going to is in a large city (with the consequent expenses).

But I see a lot of graduate students finish with a surprising amount of debt; even if the degree is very marketable this can be a dangerous way to start life off.

The curious case of Dr. Glaeser

Edward L. Glaeser is smart guy. Despite being in his mid-forties, Glaeser has already made a number of important contributions to economics. He has been a fixture in the Boston Globe and has recently joined the lie-up of the New York Times' Economix blog (slogan: "explaining the science of everyday life."). All of which makes this recent column on population shifts all the more inexplicable.

The article is classic "ice cream causes murder" analysis. In order to get the desired conclusion, you have to ignore numerous confounding factors and discard a number of alternative hypotheses that better explain the data and even then you have to be selective with your metrics and graphs (or at least the labeling) to maintain even the appearance of credibility.

Joseph has already discussed this at some length but just to review, percent change can be tricky to work with, particularly when dealing with state populations which can vary by well over an order of magnitude. Add to this the matter of population density -- certainly a concern when talking about home prices but notably absent from Prof. Glaeser's post.

Let's take Glaeser's comparison of California and Texas. If we look at percent population change as he does, Texas does much better but Texas has more land and fewer people. If we look at absolute change, the results are much closer and if we take density into account with something like change by area, California may actually come out ahead. (Glaeser's use of California is also interesting in other unintended ways, but more on that later.)

If you look at this table from Wikipedia, the role of population density becomes harder to ignore and Glaeser's case becomes harder to buy. Consider these two paragraphs:

"More generally, population isn’t moving to high-income areas. The four fastest-growth states were Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho (in order of growth), all of which have earnings below the national average.

"Our richest states, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, grew by 4.9, 4.5 and 3.1 percent, respectively, far below the national average. People are not following the money."

Could available land be playing a role here? Probably. Nevada, Utah and Idaho are among the ten least densely populated states in the union. Arizona is is in the next ten. By comparison, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts make up three of four most densely populated.

Glaeser's response to this point (in a related post) doesn't really help his case:

"Why is housing supply so generous in Georgia and Texas? It isn’t land. Harris County, Tex., which surrounds Houston, has a higher population density than Westchester County, N.Y."

To people with even a passing familiarity with these two areas, the fact that Harris County is more dense than Westchester County is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that someone would say that Harris 'surrounds Houston.' For most purposes, Harris IS Greater Houston. The city does include two other counties but Harris contains all but a fraction of the metropolitan area's population.

In other words, the county that includes Houston is more dense than a suburb of New York.

But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Glaeser's prime example:

"My interpretation of Red State growth is that Republican states have grown more quickly because building is easier in those states, primarily because of housing regulations. Republican states are less prone to restrict construction than places like California and Massachusetts, and as a result, high-quality housing is much cheaper.

"There is a strange irony in this: more conservative places do a much better job in providing affordable housing for ordinary Americans than progressive states that are believed to care about affordable housing.

"Progressive states, of course, have other objectives beyond affordable housing, and some involve blocking building. California environmentalists have been fighting construction for more than 40 years, and regulations in Massachusetts are barely less intrusive."

According to Glaeser's hypothesis, California should be scraping the bottom, particularly given that, as mentioned before, the metric being used tends to understate the growth of highly populous states. And keep in mind that he previously used Oklahoma as one of his examples of Red State growth. Oklahoma's growth rate was 8.7%. California's was 10%. That puts California slightly above the national average. (You'll notice that, unlike the other states discussed, California's actual growth rate does not appear in the article, nor is it labeled in any of the graphs.) California also beat a number of McCain states in the region of Oklahoma and, being a good ol' Arkansas boy myself, I can tell you that if a lack of building codes and environmental regulations were driving immigration, the whole area would be packed.

[To get a good picture of what's going on here, take a few minutes to look at this helpful interactive map. Pay close attention to the red states in the center of the country like Missouri.]

Population density alone does a good job explaining population shift patterns (considerably better than Glaeser's hypothesis). Add in the growth of the Hispanic population (something any competent demographic analysis should include) and it does an excellent job. And when you lay on top of that the expected impact of Katrina (how much of Texas' growth was diverted from the anemic Louisiana?) and the Nevada real estate bubble, the map we see looks almost exactly like the map we would expect.

If you don't want to use population density and the growth of the Hispanic population, how about the graying of America? Traditional retirement migration patterns look a lot like what we're seeing here and I'll bet we can come up with a few more explanations that outperform Glaeser's hypothesis.

George Polya once observed* that, when given a theory, scientists and mathematicians tended to look for cases that contradicted the theory while almost everyone else looked for cases that confirmed it (others had made similar points before he did, but I'm a Polya fan). Glaeser's approach here falls into the 'everybody else' category. He went looking for confirmation and he found it, but his theory maintains the appearance of validity only as long no one looks for contradictory evidence.

Perhaps Economix needs a new slogan.



*Quoting from memory so I may have to revise this later.

When bad things happen to good technologies

Roger Ebert has a follow-up to the letter he published from Walter Murch on the various reasons why 3D remains a bad idea (previously discussed here). This time the subject is Maxivision48, a technology that, according to Ebert, "produced a picture four times as good as conventional film."

It's an interesting counterpoint, an innovation that has been getting great reviews from independent experts for a dozen years but can't seem to get any attention from the industry despite what seems to be a sound business case.

Better late than never...

Via Andrew Gelman, here's an excellent post that made many of the same points that we've been making about lottery-based analyses here at OE (and beat us to the punch by several months).