More on Joseph the unclear

This is Joseph.

As a follow-up to this post, there is a guest post on Mathbabe pointing out how painful the new technology of monitoring is.  Consider:

A huge issue right now is surveillance. Inward-facing cameras that keep a constant watch on the driver may soon become the norm. Swift Transportation (the largest carrier in the U.S.) began installing them in all its company-owned trucks a few months ago.

Most OTR drivers are allowed to drive up to eleven hours per work shift and seventy hours every eight days. Their actual driving hours frequently reach these limits. That’s a lot of time to be in front of a running camera, never knowing for sure who might be watching you.

And also this piece:

Most OTR drivers are paid by the mile—the more miles they drive, the more money they make. This provides a strong incentive to use all eleven driving hours per work shift. With paper logs, if a driver needs to exceed the limit by a few minutes to get to a safe place to sleep (versus stopping after say ten hours, possibly sacrificing some pay), they can. With ELDs this same scenario might force the driver into choosing between (1) sacrificing pay, (2) sacrificing overnight safety by stopping wherever, or (3) recording a logging violation to get to the safe place.

Now you might think that these rules protect drivers but:

The hours-of-service rules never said anything about time of day until a new rule was introduced in 2013 requiring two 1 AM to 5 AM periods in every thirty-four-hour rest break (such breaks reset hours driven to zero). Strong industry resistance caused this rule to be suspended in December 2014.

The reason I am quoting this so extensively is that it makes it perfectly clear where the issue are with the industry.  For example, how much can the in-cab camera improve productivity?  Being constantly watched by camera isn't a fun experience and it's hard to see how it actually increases productivity by enough to make it work the psychological effects.

The driving time rules seem naive in a work with unexpected traffic issues.  One would need to work less than eleven hours to be certain of never being caught in a traffic jam and being unable to reach the next rest stop.  The lack of time of day rules seem to also suggest that the rules are not being designed in the interest of the drivers.

So the question I have is why these things are introduced without any compensating increase in compensation (presuming that these are productivity enhancements).  And if they don't improve productivity then why are they being done?

This is a question I would like to understand better.

Quote of the day

Ezra Klein:

Take spending cuts. It's table stakes in a Republican primary to talk about how you'll cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. The GOP's policy apparatus loathes both programs and considers their long-term cost to be among the most pressing economic threats facing the nation. Any Republican candidate who wants to be taken seriously by Republican Party elites needs to show they understand the urgency of cutting Social Security and Medicare spending.

One problem? Republican voters don't understand the urgency of cutting entitlement spending. In fact, they oppose cutting entitlement spending. More Republicans want to increase spending on Social Security and Medicare than decrease it. They think keeping entitlement benefits at current levels is more important than reducing the deficit.

Trump is the only Republican running who actually agrees with the GOP base on this one. "They're gonna cut Social Security. They're gonna cut Medicare. They're gonna cut Medicaid," he said on Fox & Friends. "I'm the one saying that's saying I'm not gonna do that!"

 It is very conventional to assume that the high polls garnered by Donald Trump are due to his more extreme statements.  But in a world where "everyone" in politics agrees that social security needs to be cut, maybe that is the source of his popularity.  After all, the median voter may or may not be impacted by a lot of the policy changes.  But lots and lots of people will be impacted by a later retirement on less money.

So one interpretation of the polls might be that the Overton window has been shifted on this policy so far that it makes it possible for an outsider to show up.  Even Democrats, like the current president, have been considering cuts to these programs. 

This fits well with other recent discussions on this blog.  After all, just protecting some popular programs might actually be what voters wants, and this would drive the elites crazy (as they are all convinced retirement is silly -- which it may well be when you have a high pay, fulfilling job). 

More naked emperor reporting -- at this point, the NYT is just trolling us

If they knew I was alive, I'd think they were just screwing with me. I post something on how Trump highlights the mainstream press' naked emperor problem and the very next day the New York Times (the ever reliable epicenter of this sort of thing) publishes a minor classic of the genre.

Trump’s Economic Muddle
by Steven Rattner, AUG. 14, 2015

DONALD TRUMP’S economic views may not have garnered as much attention as his misogynistic statements, but they are equally unpalatable, evincing a lack of understanding of basic economics that is startling for a billionaire businessman.

While Mr. Trump has not provided specifics much beyond the “Make America Great Again” slogan featured on his often-present baseball cap, strands of Trumponomics have trickled out amid the stream of braggadocio and ad hominem attacks on his critics.

And what bizarre views they are — a curious mélange of populism and hard-right conservatism, inherently contradictory perspectives that often lie far outside the boundaries of accepted economic thought.

Rattner casts his net wide and deep, going all the way back to the late nineties to find these unpalatable comments (rather surprising given that Trump's normal speaking style resembles a sitcom version of Tourette syndrome) and he defines the term rather broadly to include not just the wrong but also the inconsistent. This inclusive approach give Rattner lots of ammo for his attacks on Trump, most of which are completely valid, and yet, in the entire piece, doesn't supply a single example of an unreasonable or extreme position DT holds that is in any way out of line with the rest of the Republican field.

With the possible exception of protectionism (which in this case probably has more to do with xenophobia than economics), every major criticism that Rattner makes about Trump would be more valid about some other viable GOP candidate. Groundless complaints about debasing the currency (everyone does know there's another Paul running, right?). Climate change denial/skepticism (Hell, even Kasich has jumped on that bandwagon).

As for numbers that don't add up, let me refer you to Jonathan Chait:

But there’s a weakness in basing your economic message on pulling a crazy number out of thin air: Another candidate can always pull an even crazier number out of thin air. And now Mike Huckabee has done it. The obvious choice would be to one-up Bush by promising 5 percent growth. But Huckabee, thinking two steps in advance, probably realized that if he went with 5 percent, another candidate could still leapfrog him. So he went with 6 percent growth:

Huckabee, the winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, who is running as an economic populist, said 6 percent growth or more — notably upping the ante over Jeb Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth — would be possible through what he calls the Fair Tax, a type of national sales tax. Economists have expressed skepticism at Mr. Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth, so Mr. Huckabee’s 6 percent plan may cause even more raised eyebrows.

The beauty of this is that Bush can hardly call Huckabee’s promise unrealistic or made-up, without having to concede his own promise is also unrealistic and made-up, just less so. Bush has no grounds to argue against Huckabee here. Think about it. You walk into a caucus, you see 4 percent growth sittin' there, there's 6 percent growth right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

There are a couple of examples in the New York Times piece where Trump takes positions that set him apart from the rest of the contenders, when he acknowledges the potential advantages of single payer health care or suggest devaluing the dollar, but those are issues when Trump is actually more moderate than his peers. Based on Rattner's own standards, Trump is, at worst, average on economic issues and might well be the leper with the most fingers.

Rolling back the Civil Rights Movement one school district at a time

Exceptionally good and important reporting from the Tampa Bay Times.

Failure factories
Aug. 14, 2015 By CARA FITZPATRICK, LISA GARTNER and MICHAEL LaFORGIA

In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

Today thousands of children are paying the price, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

They are trapped at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose — five neighborhood elementary schools that the board has transformed into failure factories.

Every year, they turn out a staggering number of children who don’t know the basics.

Eight in 10 fail reading, according to state standardized test scores. Nine in 10 fail math.

Ranked by the state Department of Education, Melrose is the worst elementary school in Florida. Fairmount Park is No. 2. Maximo is No. 10. Lakewood is No. 12. Campbell Park is No. 15.

All of the schools operate within six square miles in one of Florida’s most affluent counties.

All of them were much better off a decade ago.

Times reporters spent a year reviewing tens of thousands of pages of district documents, analyzing millions of computer records and interviewing parents of more than 100 current and former students. Then they crisscrossed the state to see how other school districts compared.

Among the findings:

■ Ninety-five percent of black students tested at the schools are failing reading or math, making the black neighborhoods in southern Pinellas County the most concentrated site of academic failure in all of Florida.

■ Teacher turnover is a chronic problem, leaving some children to cycle through a dozen instructors in a single year. In 2014, more than half of the teachers in these schools asked for a transfer out.
       
At least three walked off the job without notice.

■ All of this is a recent phenomenon. By December 2007, when the board ended integration, black students at the schools had posted gains on standardized tests in three of the four previous years. None of the schools was ranked lower than a C. Today, all the schools have F ratings.

■ After reshaping the schools, the district funded four of them erratically. Some years they got less money per student than other schools, including those in more affluent parts of the county. In 2009, the year after resegregation, at least 50 elementary schools got more money per student than Campbell Park.

■ Other districts with higher passing rates are doing far more to aid black students, including creating special offices to target minority achievement, tracking black students’ progress in real time and offering big bonuses to attract quality teachers to high-minority schools. Pinellas does none of those things.

The full article is quite long but well worth your time.

I'd also recommend this NPR interview with the reporters.

Yes, it is possible to lose money doing this

'Fantastic Four' Could Lead to $60 Million Write-Off for Fox



Whenever a corporation uses this much money this quickly and this publicly, there is an inevitable wave of second guessing. Lots of people will tell you they saw it coming all along. Some of them may even be telling the truth, but, viewed from sufficiently high up, there is no obvious explanation for how this film turned out so badly, either critically or financially. It was based on Marvel characters; the hot young cast was coming off or going into high profile projects like Whiplash, House of Cards, and the Rocky reboot Creed; it did not go wildly over budget; as far as I know there were no major disasters that beset the production.




(It's true that studio execs started getting nervous late in the game, but being able to spot a disaster 100 plus million into the process doesn't actually help.)

Going into this, movie studios had developed the attitude that they had finally arrived upon a safe formula for producing blockbusters. It was a costly formula and you had to have access to a relatively small set of established licensed characters, but within those constraints, you were more or less guaranteed a steady stream of huge hits .

As mentioned previously, this is not the first time Hollywood has convinced itself that it'd found the secret to success:

There's an old and very common saying in Hollywood that the biggest money-losing film ever was the Sound of Music. The joke here is that though the film did rather well...

Upon its initial release, The Sound of Music briefly displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time; taking re-releases into account, it ultimately grossed $286 million internationally. Adjusted to contemporary prices it is the third highest-grossing film of all-time at the North American box office and the fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

... The films it inspired lost a lot of money. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Music was just the last of a string of hit musicals in the early Sixties ( West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins) but it was the biggest and it suggested an upward trend and, to the extent that it was responsible for what followed, it might well justify that money-losing title. 

The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian's Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon,* Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.

I don't want to push the analogy with comic-book movies but there are similarities, particularly regarding the budgets and the stories executives told themselves to justify them. 

We are probably still a ways from Song of Norway and Mame, but FF is not going to be the last superhero film to lose money. (My superpower is acknowledging the obvious.)

* This film is included under protest. I refuse to make fun of any musical that stars Lee Marvin.

Symbiotic relationships, non-aggression pacts and naked emperors

I did a post a while back arguing that Fox News was partisan rather ideological. I didn't get very far into the obvious ethical concerns associated with having a major news and entertainment conglomerate in partnership with one of our two major political parties. Fox is able to maintain this symbiotic relationship and still keep up at least a facade of independence and respectability partially because most of the mainstream press has entered into an unspoken but remarkably well-observed non-aggression pact with Fox and the Republican Party.

Writers for papers like the NYT still criticize conservatives, but only in measured and indirect ways. They won't come out and say that an emperor is naked. Instead, they come up with all sorts of ways of saying sheer and flimsy and overly revealing.

This system has worked fairly well as long as their subjects have met them halfway. Even bomb-throwers like Ted Cruz kept up at least enough pretense of seriousness that the journalists could maintain some plausible deniability.

The problem with Donald Trump is that he doesn't give journalists any cover. He isn't actually that ideologically extreme compared to the other GOP candidates on most issues (if anything, he's to the left of the field on health care, monetary policy and the Iraq war). His comments about immigrants and support of birtherism are clearly designed to appeal to racist elements in the party, but it's not like we haven't seen other racist candidates recently and the press was remarkably OK with it.

Over the past couple of decades, the press has gotten stunningly good at not noticing things they don't want to notice. You can get journalists to ignore all sorts of lies and bigotry if you just give them an out, but that's just the thing Trump refuses to do. His whole campaign up to this point has depended on being as memorable and entertaining as possible, the ultimate reality show villain in what is arguably the ultimate reality show.

There have been other naked emperors on the stage recently but they've all played it at least a little coy. Trump is basically running around, grabbing his crotch, shouting "Hey, baby, do you want a piece of this?" then skipping away singing "I'm naked, naked, naked."

The press can't ignore Trump's behavior, but if they want to maintain any credibility and consistency, they really need to stop ignoring a lot of other candidates' behavior as well.

Mark Thoma and the Sesame Street MOOC

I've been arguing for a while that we should broaden our thinking about MOOCs. Apparently some folks at NBER are thinking the same thing.

From Mark Thoma:

Interestingly, one of the first MOOCs that attempted to address the educational needs of preschoolers has hardly been studied. As economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine noted in recent research at the National Bureau of Economic Research: "In essence, Sesame Street was the first MOOC. Although MOOCs differ in what they entail, Sesame Street satisfies the basic feature of electronic transmission of online educational material. Both Sesame Street and MOOCs provide educational interventions at a fraction of the cost of more traditional classroom settings."


Their research attempts to do two things: examine whether MOOCs can improve educational outcomes, and assess the degree to which early intervention programs can promote student success later in life.


When Sesame Street was first introduced more than 40 years ago, it was broadcast on PBS stations using UHF technology. This type of transmission doesn't produce a very strong signal. As a result, reception was poor for some households, and about a third of them couldn't get the signal at all.


Thus, how far a household was from a transmission tower (this was pre-cable) determined how good the reception was. The hypothesis is that children who grew up further from transmission towers and unable to watch Sesame Street wouldn't do as well in subsequent grades, and would do worse in the job market once they finally graduated.

The results are encouraging. The researchers found a significant impact of the Sesame Street MOOC on educational attainment in the early school years. "This effect is particularly pronounced for boys and black, non-Hispanic children and those living in economically disadvantaged areas."


However, when the analysis is extended to labor market outcomes (children were tracked to see what types of jobs, etc. they eventually obtained), the researchers couldn't find evidence of "substantive improvements in ultimate educational attainment or labor market outcomes."


Although the improvements brought about by Sesame Street appear limited to the elementary school years -- eventually the effect wears off -- this research still has two important messages.


First, early childhood intervention and the availability of universal prekindergarten programs do help prepare students from disadvantaged backgrounds for elementary school education. That's a key finding.


Second, MOOCs appear to work. The cost of providing Sesame Street was "around $5 per child per year (in today's dollars)," the researchers found, far less than other means of providing the same education.

When the channeling of information goes awry

As a corporate statistician, I cut my teeth on targeted marketing and discriminatory pricing and I still tend to think in terms of different messages for different segments of the audience, particularly when I read something like this (from the New Republic). 

Conservatives have joined the fight with relish, under the not-insane assumption that Planned Parenthood’s allies would lose the ensuing public opinion battle, creating an opportunity for the right to advance pro-life causes, or (more feasibly) to punish Democrats. What they’ve done instead, using ghoulish propaganda, is convince myriad religious conservatives that Planned Parenthood is making a business of harvesting baby flesh, and that something must be done to stop them. Against the backdrop of the presidential primary, this is turning a public relations nightmare for Democrats into an intractably escalating political crisis for Republicans.

...

Anti-abortion zealots are now demanding that Republicans in Congress refuse to appropriate money for government operations unless Planned Parenthood’s funding is abolished—a new test of Republican pro-life bona fides. To force Congress’ hand, they’re admonishing Republican presidential candidates that the anti-abortion vote will only follow those who support the shutdown effort. The purpose of Erick Erickson’s above tweet, alerting the candidates to his question days in advance, is to eclipse the instinctual aversion many of them will have to promoting a government shutdown, and get as many of them on the same page as possible.

When working from a customer database, marketers frequently try to divide consumers into three basic groups:

Those will not buy your product no matter what kind of marketing you use;

Those who will always buy your product regardless of what kind of marketing you use;

And those who can be moved from the non-buying to the buying camps with the proper approach.

These distinctions become particularly important when talking about things like price cuts and coupons, but even with traditional marketing, you can see the disadvantage of spending money on either the first or second groups.

It looks like we have something similar here, albeit a bit more complex. I would argue that, in terms of political issues, a party would like its opponents to be a zero on the passion scale, but would prefer for its supporters to be an eight or nine out of ten. Eights and nines are maxed out in terms of showing up to vote and giving you money but they are less likely to demand extreme positions that cost serious political capital compared to the tens .

And obviously you want to persuade the persuadables.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

"Since John Harvey Kellogg gave C.W. Post his first enema" [Now with working link}

Check out the new post over at the food blog that discusses an assortment of flakes ranging from the cereal kings of Battle Creek to the nuts of Silicon Valley to this guy:

On Monday, software engineer Rob Rhinehart published an account of his new life without alternating electrical current -- which he has undertaken because generating that current "produces 32 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than any other economic sector." Connection to the power grid isn’t all Rhinehart has given up. He also doesn’t drive, wash his clothes (or hire anyone else to wash them) or cook anything but coffee and tea. But he still lives in a big city (Los Angeles) and is chief executive officer of a corporation with $21.5 million in venture capital funding.

That corporation is Rosa Labs, the maker of Soylent, a “macronutritious food beverage” designed to free its buyers from the drudgery of shopping, cooking and chewing. In the 2,900-word post on his personal blog, Rhinehart worked in an extended testimonial for Soylent 2.0, a new, improved version of the drink -- algae and soy seem to be the two most important ingredients -- that will begin shipping in October.

There is nothing more dangerous than a data-driven system designed and administered by people who don't understand statistics

 From the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss

 A veteran teacher suing New York state education officials over the controversial method they used to evaluate her as “ineffective” is expected to go to New York Supreme Court in Albany this week for oral arguments in a case that could affect all public school teachers in the state and even beyond.

Sheri G. Lederman, a fourth-grade teacher in New York’s Great Neck public school district, is “highly regarded as an educator,” according to her district superintendent, Thomas Dolan, and has a “flawless record”. The standardized math and English Language Arts test scores of her students are consistently higher than the state average.

Yet her 2013-2014 evaluation, based in part on student standardized test scores, rated her as “ineffective.” How can a teacher known for excellence be rated “ineffective”? It happens — and not just in New York.

...

Testing experts have for years been warning school reformers that efforts to evaluate teachers using VAM are not reliable or valid, but school reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, have embraced the method as a “data-driven” evaluation solution championed by some economists.

Lederman’s suit against state education officials — including John King, the former state education commissioner, who now is a top adviser to Duncan at the Education Department — challenges the rationality of the VAM model used to evaluate her and, by extension, other teachers in the state. The lawsuit alleges that the New York State Growth Measures “actually punishes excellence in education through a statistical black box which no rational educator or fact finder could see as fair, accurate or reliable.”

It also, in many aspects, defies comprehension. High-stakes tests are given only in math and English language arts, so reformers have decided that all teachers (and, sometimes, principals) in a school should be evaluated by reading and math scores. Sometimes, school test averages are factored into all teachers’ evaluations. Sometimes, a certain group of teachers are attached to either reading or math scores; social studies teachers, for example, are more often attached to English Language Arts scores, while science teachers are attached to math scores. An art teacher in New York City explained in this post how he was evaluated on math standardized test scores and saw his evaluation rating drop from “effective” to “developing.”

A teacher in Florida — which is another state that uses VAM — discovered that his top-scoring students actually hurt his evaluation. How? In Indian River County, Fla., an English Language Arts middle school teacher named Luke Flynt told his school board that through VAM formulas, each student is assigned a “predicted” score — based on past performance by that student and other students — on the state-mandated standardized test. If the student exceeds the predicted score, the teacher is credited with “adding value.” If the student does not do as well as the predicted score, the teacher is held responsible and that score counts negatively toward his/her evaluation. He said he had four students whose predicted scores were “literally impossible” because they were higher than the maximum number of points that can be earned on the exam. He said:

    “One of my sixth-grade students had a predicted score of 286.34. However, the highest a sixth-grade student can earn earn is 283. The student did earn a 283, incidentally. Despite the fact that she earned a perfect score, she counted negatively toward my valuation because she was 3 points below predicted.

...

Affidavits of numerous experts supporting Lederman have been filed — including from Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond — and you can see them here. Oral arguments are scheduled to be heard Wednesday, Aug. 12. Should Lederman successfully challenge the New York teacher evaluation system, state officials might have to revamp it.

And you thought they were kidding

Comment would be superfluous. 

Joseph is unclear

This is Joseph.

There was a lot of confusion on this post.  This was my lack of recent writing practice.  So the sequence was:

~2010: Truckers have flexibility and ~$50 K salary
Micro-monitoring is introduced to improve efficiency
~2015: Truckers have constant monitoring, no flexibility, and a $50K salary

It's also the case that any monitoring system will, because it is based on general rules, be incorrect for a lot of specific situations.  For example, sitting in a traffic jam instead of having a longer rest break and then driving later (because the breaks are timed). 

Now the reason for monitoring is mostly about increasing productivity (safety improvements are also a form of productivity increase).  Either the system improves profits or it doesn't.  If it doesn't improve profits enough to increase salaries then maybe it is a bad idea?  If it is possible to increase salaries with the higher efficiency, then why is it so hard to consider sharing the benefits of increased productivity?  In particular, why is reducing the training requirements of the workers the path to increased safety?

Mark pointed out that we are seeing the same thing with UPS drivers. 

Increasing productivity is good but so are working conditions.  If there are huge gains made from this type of monitoring (like one sees in a call center) then it only makes sense to share these with the workers, who will then be able to see the monitoring as a source of higher wages.  You can imagine the "make $60 K with monitoring" versus "make 50K without" being a great way to make people decide they are willing to put up with the hassle of being tracked by devices that can't always convey complete information. 

Retirement age

I missed this issue when it was raised about a month ago but it is a rather good point:

Raising the retirement age is a strange prescription for countries suffering from mass youth unemployment. When I made that observation on twitter the other day, I got a lot of pushback from people accusing me of a "lump of labor" fallacy. But please note, I didn't say that countries suffering from mass youth unemployment should lower the retirement age. What I said is that if you have a country -- Greece, say, or France -- where youth unemployment is very high, it's strange to decide that raising the retirement age is the cure for your economic woes.

I am also always a touch mystified as to why this policy prescription is quite so popular to deal with actual economic crises.  It is not that you cannot set the retirement age too low (you sure can), but that it does seem counter-productive to always seek to increase it when there is a shortfall in demand and high unemployment.  Does it make sense to pump out money to people who can spend it (retirees) and generate new employment among the young (who produce services to the retirees). 

What I think I really want to see is some sort of evidence that the existence of retirement programs hurts national productivity in an important way.  What is the alternative?  Can people really work into their late sixties and early seventies across a wide range of professions? 

Plus, these programs allow us to have experiments in other programs -- like a 401(k) plan -- without leaving people destitute if they prove to be bad policy.  In this sense, social security acts as a sort of innovation insurance, to allow us to try and improve retirement programs.  That seems like a feature to me. 

Parking requirements

This is Joseph.

Okay, I read this article on Mike the Mad Biologist's site and I wanted to comment because I think the author is completely missing the implications of the piece.  Consider:

But at Velo Apartments—a new, 171-unit, fully leased building located at 3635 Woodland Park Avenue North in Seattle's Fremont area—just 100 out of 128 parking stalls have been rented, according to Rob Hackleman, associate development and asset manager for Mack Urban, which developed the building. Using the estimated $20,000-to-$50,000 per-stall calculation, that's about $560,000 to $1.4 million worth of unnecessary parking spaces. Ironically, Velo Apartments is marketed as "bike-friendly," with "bike-focused amenities" and close access to the Burke-Gilman Trail. The development's logo includes an old-fashioned bicycle, and its website states, "Your Ride Starts Here." Hackleman said five unused parking stalls were converted to create more bike storage because the existing bike storage wasn't enough to meet demand.

I work in Seattle with a lot of young professionals.  Many of them bike commute.  I struggle to find any without cars.  My wife and I share a single car.  This is actually the most common pattern among those with low rates of car ownership.  So why are stalls going unsold? 

Because on street parking is free.  Drive around Fremont and try to park.  I dare you.  Especially on an evening or weekend.  I avoid things I really like in Fremont because bus service is terrible and it's simply impossible to park.  Side streets tend to be three cars wide -- you can end up facing another car with no room to go around because both sides of the street are completely full of cars.  Driveways are often blocked (another reason one might not want to pay money to have one).  If many people pay > 30% of their salary on rent they may be economizing by trying not to have to pay for a parking stall.

Now Seattle wants to increase density.  But the state of Washington keeps cutting public transportation.   So how are people supposed to get around?  Biking is a nice idea, but the weather isn't always that good and many people may be elderly or disabled.  It is scary to be on a Seattle bike trail if you are not a fast rider. 

The real reason that costs are suddenly rising is a not a policy that has been in place since the 1950's.  It is that more people are moving to Seattle, often for well-paying jobs, and increasing the demand for housing.   This isn't a complicated issue.  Now, how one handles it might be.  But I would suggest that the place to start is figuring out a sensible transit policy.  But Seattle is the fastest growing city in the United States -- does it not make sense to decide how we are going to handle transit.  I would love more bike lanes (which, to be fair, is happening) and better transit services.  But I want to see a plausible way for this to happen (given it is the state that keeps cutting public transit) before I think that we should make the parking issues worse! 

As for bike lanes, the current city trick to make them work is to get rid of the on-street parking (to make it two lanes, a turn lane, and two bike lanes).  One might suspect that simply doing more of this (and making biking safer) could well lead to fewer unrented stalls. 

It is not that I think that parking requirements, as is, are necessarily optimal.  But it is worth thinking about these issues. 

Growth fetishists are an optimistic lot

The other day Marketplace did a long segment on investors' obsession with growth in the tech sector. It was well done and more balanced than most reporting in the area (financial journalists tend to get very starry-eyed on the subject), but the show's best quote on the topic was buried deep in an entirely different piece.

This growth shows no signs of slowing. This year Shake Shack made its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at $21 per share. That number has tripled since then, with even higher peaks in the interim. The company says it plans to build only 450 locations, but investors are already predicting bigger expansion.

 I really wish I had a transcript of the interview -- this summary doesn't capture the disconnect that comes through in the actual conversation -- but you can still see the problem here. The CEO (who comes off as quite sharp in the interview) says they have a hard limit on growth because expanding too quickly would severely damage the brand.

In the murky world of investing, this is the closest you will get to a clear boundary. Senior management has publicly committed to it repeatedly and it is baked into the business model, but analysts have gotten so good at creating these wishful thinking feedback loops that even
CEO of the company in question can't disrupt the flow.