Friday, October 22, 2021

Moving on from historical grievances

This is Joseph.

In my youth I lived in the SE of the United States. It was not uncommon, at least back then, for people to bring up ways that the confederate states had been treated poorly during the civil war. For example, I lost count of the number of times people had comments about General Sherman's march to the sea and the costs to civilians in that military operation. This led me to ponder how long is the expiration date on historical grievances. 

Here are some examples to consider:
  1. How much should Britons hold against the English for the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England?
  2. Should we still hold the modern Russians to account for the Ukraine famine? 
  3. When can the citizens of Ireland decide that it is ok to forgive the era of British rule? 
  4. Is Schleswig-Holstein something Denmark should still be bitter about? 
  5. Are the war crimes of Julius Caesar in Gaul an issue for modern Italians? 
I deliberately picked examples of white European warfare, to make the question clearer. Does it depend on whether the state still exists? There is a pretty good argument that the English monarchy is still around whereas the USSR is not, but one thinks that the Holodomor has a greater influence on modern ideals of injustice than the Anglo-Saxon invasion. 

Now, I want to be very precise. This is the expiry date on historical injustice, not the continuing legacy of these injustices. So, for example, African-Americans who were held in slavery prior to and during the Civil War have distinct claims about civil rights violations that occur up to the present day. 

Part of the problem is trying to decide between groups and individuals. For example, if the goal of an affirmative action campaign is to redress injustice by balancing a University Faculty that can go quite wrong. People hired under this policy are not the persons who suffered the injustice and people who lose opportunities are not the ones who benefited from past discrimination. Now this is not a reactionary argument under false colors, affirmative action is a powerful tool for introducing diversity, which is a positive good in public institutions and, in my opinion, is the correct justification for implementing it. [I happen to be a big supporter]

The reason I ask is that if we don't have an expiry date on injustice then we end up in a world of perpetual grudges. Again, this doesn't mean that compensation for ongoing effects of these historic episodes is not appropriate (it is) but that the discussion should be focused on the ongoing consequences. In this sense, we can probably accept that there is little lingering effect (at least that could be identified and compensated) from Julius Caesar's war crimes in France, no matter how ghastly they were. And, before I get straw manned, this is about the descendants of people who were involved with crimes and not the people themselves. Nazi concentration camp guards are war criminals and should be treated as such. If you find somebody who was involved in the siege of Alesia on the Roman side then I would be quite interested in having the Hague get involved with determining an appropriate consequence. But it has been 76 years since the end of World War 2 and only about 9.5 million Germans were even born before this date (out of 84 million) and some of these must be immigrants -- to what extent is the typical German teenager culpable? Now, again, ongoing actions count separately so a teenage holocaust denier is causing ongoing harm and should be considered appropriately. But to what extent should the sins of ones ancestors be considered? 

So this is my question to the general audience. How far removed should a historical event be before there is a statue of limitations? Or are we doomed to hold grudges against people for what happened with their distant ancestors? 


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Thursday, October 21, 2021

Thursday Tweets

As long as he doesn't try to write about California, he's always welcome.



I dug through the original tweets to see if this was meant ironically but apparently no. It seems that movie star's son turned Twitter celebrity really does feel that lack of two-day delivery to Sun Valley represents societal failure. 




Another reminder that people who complain about being canceled really mean they're being criticized, having their points questioned, or just not being adequately praised.



I realize that the observation itself is fairly obvious, but something about the conciseness of this list brought home just how much this describes the guiding principles of conservative media.



Even more than the LA Times Russ Mitchell, E. W. Niedermeyer is the essential journalist on the Tesla beat.

This one is especially important.




Autonomy tweets.



"How hated is Ted Cruz?" has become one of the great standbys of American political humor.


What's going on with the far right and the Catholic Church could well be the most interesting story in politics.


1981 is not that long ago.


A lot of people call this wage growth, but that's not important right now.

Following the links in the first paragraph, the "critics" seem to be Trump and Fox News. Though they did single out conservative media, the authors probably should have mentioned that the NBC article cited ("'Not by accident': False 'thug' narratives have long been used to discredit civil rights movements") makes almost exactly the same point as the MC article, giving much of the WP piece a bit of a dog-bites-man vibe. The important story here (briefly mentioned) is how mainstream media sensationalism and conservative media disinformation. If you're interested, here are my real time notes.


One doesn't know where to start...
But this is a good place to stop.

Who would have thought the guy who came out against women's suffrage would turn out to be bad for democracy?

There are surprisingly few tweets on survey design.

But quite a few on gerrymandering...


And polarization.


It's the expression that sells it.

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Wednesday, October 20, 2021

I'm sure that Tesla fans will welcome having a leading AI researcher working with NHTSA...

 


Three...

Two...

One...














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Tuesday, October 19, 2021

The trouble with posting your review five years before the book comes out is that you tend to get left out of the conversation.

I know some of you are going to quibble about this not actually being a review of Bobby Duffy's The Generation Myth, arguing that this is just an old post pontificating on some topics vaguely related to the subject of the book, but isn't that pretty much the standard for reviews of these big think pieces?  

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2016

Among living Americans, there are only two "generations"

 "The ________ Generation” has long been one of those red-flag phrases, a strong indicator that you may be about to encounter serious bullshit. There are occasions when it makes sense to group together people born during a specified period of 10 to 20 years, but those occasions are fairly rare and make up a vanishingly small part of the usage of the concept.

First, there is the practice of making a sweeping statement about a "generation" when one is actually making a claim about a trend. This isn't just wrong; it is the opposite of right. The very concept of a generation implies a relatively stable state of affairs for a given group of people over an extended period of time. If people born in 1991 are more likely to do something that people born in 1992 and people born in 1992 are more likely to do it than people born in 1993 and so on, discussing the behavior in terms of a generation makes no sense whatsoever.

We see this constantly in articles about "the millennial generation" (and while we are on the subject, when you see "the millennial generation," you can replace "may be about to encounter serious bullshit" with "are almost certainly about to encounter serious bullshit"). Often these "What's wrong with millennial's?" think pieces manage multiple layers of crap, taking a trend that is not actually a trend and then mislabeling it as a trait of a generation that's not a generation.

How often does the very concept of a generation make sense? Think about what we're saying when we use the term. In order for it to be meaningful, people born in a given 10 to 20 year interval have to have more in common with each other than with people in the preceding and following generations, even in cases where the inter-generational age difference is less than the intra-generational age difference.

Consider the conditions where that would be a reasonable assumption. You would generally need society to be at one extreme for an extended period of time, then suddenly swing to another. You can certainly find big events that produce this kind of change. In Europe, for instance, the first world war marked a clear dividing line for the generations.

(It is important to note that the term "clear" is somewhat relative here. There is always going to be a certain fuzziness with cutoff points when talking about generations, even with the most abrupt shifts. Societies don't change overnight and individuals seldom fall into the groups. Nonetheless, there are cases where the idea of a dividing line is at least a useful fiction.)

In terms of living Americans, what periods can we meaningfully associate with distinct generations? I'd argue that there are only two: those who spent a significant portion of their formative years during the Depression and WWII; and those who came of age in the Post-War/Youth Movement/Vietnam era.

Obviously, there are all sorts of caveats that should be made here, but the idea that Americans born in the mid-20s and mid-30s would share some common framework is a justifiable assumption, as is the idea that those born in the mid-40s and mid-50s would as well. Perhaps more importantly, it is also reasonable to talk about the sharp differences between people born in the mid-30s and the mid-40s.

There are a lot of interesting insights you can derive from looking at these two generations, but, as far as I can see, attempts to arbitrarily group Americans born after, say, 1958 (which would have them turning 18 after the fall of Saigon) is largely a waste of time and is often profoundly misleading. The world continues to change rapidly, just not in a way that lends itself toward simple labels and categories.
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Monday, October 18, 2021

Either this is interesting or I'm doing something wrong

This seems to be a good time to remind everyone following this thread that I have no expertise whatsoever here. I work with numbers for a living and I've lived in California for a while and I've made a real effort to explore the state, but other than that, my knowledge of this topic is limited to what I could glean from following the news and doing a few searches on Google, Wikipedia and Census.gov.

My lack of expertise makes me especially nervous when I come across something that is, for lack of a better word, interesting.










For instance, if I am looking at the right numbers, the vacancy rate for SF is and has long been much higher than San Jose or Oakland (or, while we're on the subject, LA or Fresno), despite having the highest housing prices. 


Other places I've checked follow the expected and presumably causal pattern of shortage, low vacancy, high prices (for example, I get 4.5% for Fresno). Only SF seems to break the pattern. 

Are these number the best way of tracking vacancy? Am I getting the math right? Take a look at the Census data for cities you're familiar with. Are they behaving the way you'd expect?

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Friday, October 15, 2021

Weekend video miscellanea -- housing and transportation edition



One of the challenges of LA housing and infrastructure has always been that much of it has to be done on a forty-five degree slope. Back in the streetcar era, housing developments relied on networks of stairs (making life very demanding for some postal workers even to this day). The most famous of these was immortalized by Laurel and Hardy in The Music Box (1932)





And since the Central Valley has been caught up in the housing bubble, this is a good time to throw in a reference to the camp classic named after the place, The Big Valley which was basically Bonanza if Douglas Sirk had been the show runner.


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Thursday, October 14, 2021

What we were talking about in 2015 was the possibility of basically this...



 By December, the Republicans were finally facing the reality of an impending Trump nomination. They realized they had lost control of a movement they had created through decades of cultivating outrage and anxiety through propaganda and disinformation. There was talk of desperate measures to stop him but they never got anywhere in large part because Trump had the power to devastate the GOP through either running as an independent or simply telling the party's base to stay home. 

Almost five years later, the situation is remarkably similar, but cranked up to the next level. Trump has essentially cinched the nomination three years before the election and is now explicitly calling for a vote boycott if the Republican establishment doesn't go to extreme lengths to defend him. 


MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2015

Distracted by the large flock of black swans

[I'm rushing this out and scheduling an early posting because, as previously suggested, Jonathan Chait is writing a very sharp series of post along these lines and I'm afraid he's is going to beat me to the punch.]

In recent years, a large part of the foundation of the GOP strategy has been the assumption that, if you get base voters angry enough and frightened enough, they will show up to vote (even in off year elections) and they will never vote for the Democrat (even when they really dislike the Republican candidate).

Capitalizing on that assumption has always been something of a balancing act, particularly when you constantly attack the legitimacy of the electoral system ("The system is rigged!" "The last election was stolen!" "Make sure to vote!"). With the advent of the Tea Party movement, it's gotten even more difficult to maintain that balance.

I don't want to get sucked into trying to guess what constitute reasonable probabilities here – – I'm just throwing out scenarios – – but it certainly does seem likely that, if he doesn't get the nomination and does not choose to run as an independent, Trump will still make trouble and things will get ugly.

Keep in mind, Trump's base started out as the birther movement. They came into this primed to see conspiracies against them. Now the RNC has given them what appears to be an actual conspiracy to focus on.

I don't think we can entirely rule out the possibility of Trump calling for a boycott of the vote to protest his treatment but even if it doesn't come to that, it seems probable that, should we see a great deal of bitterness and paranoia after the convention, the result will not help Republican turnout.

What kind of magnitude would we be talking about? It's still too early to say and even if it weren't, I wouldn't feel qualified to speculate, but it would be an interesting conversation to follow among political scientists.

At the very least, the possibility of something big happening down-ballot, though perhaps still not likely, is more likely than it was in the days before Trump.

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Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Urbanism

This is Joseph.

One piece of the housing cost piece that is complicated is that a lot of the YIMBYs are also urbanists. For example, look at strong towns. This is the view that density allows us to create more efficient infrastructure and get rid of automobile dependence. 

At some level this is a very logical proposition. Putting in place common infrastructure for a city, like sewer pipes, is always going to benefit from high density. It is also true that places that are walkable are attractive and interesting, which gives this idea a lot of appeal. 

Now it is true that the incredible benefits of car traffic does have a lot of infrastructure costs. Things like fast transportation and convenient parking are expensive commodities to resource. Just look at the budget for Winnipeg, a mid-sized Canadian city. Road costs are nearly three times the cost of public transportation and, even post-pandemic, the roads are not lightly congested. 

However, there is another option that could be explored to reduce housing costs: sprawl. This is an attractive option in places like Southern Ontario (see this discussion on Twitter). But if you want to resist sprawl and projections indicate that you will need one million new homes in the next ten years then the options are "build up" or "build out".

Now, my sympathies tend to be with the urbanists. But I also lived without a car as a responsible working adult. That said, if you want to do this transformation, there is a LOT of planning that needs to be reconsidered. In Canada there are a lot of services directed by the government: it is hard to pick where you have daycare or a medical appointment. Try having twice weekly medical appointments with > 1 hour bus rides each way (and buses are unreliable and appointments are unforgiving of being late). This could be fixed but it isn't a matter of just tinkering with density but rethinking cities from the ground up. 

This doesn't mean that it is infeasible (Europe has great examples) but that this is two intellectual ideas (density and housing costs) quietly linked. It is like when people are anti-carbon but also anti-nuclear -- it could be a sensible position but the second half of the idea needs to be defended on its own merits. 
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Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Tuesday Tweets





































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Monday, October 11, 2021

Eleven years ago at the blog -- on a completely unrelated note, I've been thinking about how the hyperloop will revolutionize commuting

Or maybe flying cars, but definitely one of the two.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

The cusp of coolness

One of the most popular genres of science writing since at least the age of Edison has been the "cusp of coolness" story, where the writer breathlessly tells us how some futuristic development is about to revolutionize our lives.

Here's the latest entry:
Although it may sound more sci-fi than sci-fact, a commercially developed jetpack is actually being eyed for mass production, with plans to eventually release it to the public. Let that sink in for a second. Jetpacks are real, and you might be able to buy one someday soon. Or at least see them among the skies.
I don't think we'll need the full second since jet packs have been around for between fifty and seventy years and you've been able to buy them for much of that time. The Germans had a prototype in WWII (Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent write-up on the subject). By the mid-Sixties they were flying over the World's Fair and showing up in Bond movies (yes, that was an actual Bell Rocket Belt).

But despite consuming countless man-hours and numerous fortunes (and prompting at least one kidnapping*) over what is now more than half a century, progress has been glacial. Jet packs are and will probably remain one of the worst under-performing technologies of the post-war era.

"Cusp of coolness" stories are annoying but they can also be dangerous. They give a distorted impression of how technological development works. Columnists and op-ed writers like John Tierney (whose grasp of science is not strong) come away with the idea that R&D is like a big vending machine -- deposit your money and promptly get what you asked for.

It's OK when this naive attitude convinces them to clear out space in their garages for jet packs. It's dangerous when it leads them to write editorials claiming that the easiest way to handle global warming is by building giant artificial volcanoes.


*from Wikipedia:
In 1992, one-time insurance salesman and entrepreneur Brad Barker formed a company to build a rockeltbelt with two partners: Joe Wright, a businessman based in Houston, and Larry Stanley, an engineer who owned an oil well in Texas. By 1994, they had a working prototype they called the Rocketbelt-2000, or RB-2000. They even asked [Bill] Suitor to fly it for them. But the partnership soon broke down. First Stanley accused Barker of defrauding the company. Then Barker attacked Stanley and went into hiding, taking the RB-2000 with him. Police investigators questioned Barker but released him after three days. The following year Stanley took Barker to court to recover lost earnings. The judge awarded Stanley sole ownership of the RB-2000 and over $10m in costs and damages. When Barker refused to pay up, Stanley kidnapped him, tied him up and held him captive in a box disguised as a SCUBA-tank container. After eight days Barker managed to escape. Police arrested Stanley and in 2002 he was sentenced to life in prison, since reduced to eight years. The rocketbelt has never been found.
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Friday, October 8, 2021

Housing costs

This is Joseph. 

It is without doubt that something is wrong with the housing market. The fundamentals do not change so rapidly over a short period. I think there are two dominant narratives.

One, is that something is wrong with supply. The sources of housing supply are complicated with issues ranging from zoning to cost of building materials. This source of housing shortage is ever popular to discuss, as everyone knows some municipal building or zoning rule that they consider daft. But supply can't be the only driver -- San Francisco has a 9.6% gross vacancy rate and 8,000 homeless persons (>5,000 unsheltered).

Two, is that there is demand caused by low interest rates/asset inflation. Like all forms of investment, it is vulnerable to bubbles, irrational exuberance, and the general problem of searching for yield that tend to become severe in times of high income inequality. Issues of affordability of land certainly go back to the Roman Republic and were a big factor in the rise of Caesar. 

But the truth is all sorts of places (like London, Ontario or Fresno) are showing rapid cost increases in housing, both rent and purchase prices. These sustained increases seem to be require a fairly strong driver that explains why now and not before. These housing prices have led to an increases in unsheltered persons and a resulting crackdown on things like camps. 

Sometimes the answer is the less complicated one. Real estate, via mechanisms like REITs mean that we are mixing a human necessity (shelter) with an investment class. The recent crisis accelerated income inequality, even overseas, which means that one obvious problem is that you have aligned incentives to make investors want yield. Some of this comes from the exceptionally low interest rates from the central banks but I wonder to what extent you have influential people making nudges in a thousand little ways to preserve asset values.

The bad news for this explanation is that there is no happy ending. An increase in interest rates would be a huge blow to leverage home owners whereas a drop in rates is a huge recession event (right after the stagnation in productivity caused by pandemic inefficiency). 

Rome shattered and become an empire. France beheaded the rich. At best you have the consequences of a huge asset bubble popping, in an asset class that nearly everyone is highly exposed to.

We need somebody to prove me wrong. 

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Thursday, October 7, 2021

Does building where the prices are highest always reduce average commute times?

It's late and I don't have time to do this justice, but I do want to take a minute and get it in the housing thread, because it concerns a claim that shows up a lot, implicitly and explicitly. 

Before the housing crisis reached a boil, the main argument offered by the NYT/Vox YIMBYs was based on the carbon footprint of people driving long distances to their jobs. We might push back on their estimates of the impact of the commuting (particularly in an age of remote work) compared to other green policy changes, but there's no question that having fewer cars on the road driving less would be an environmental win. Nor is there any question that far too many people are forced to make horrifying commutes because they can't find affordable housing closer to major employment centers. 

But can we go further and treat housing choice as a simple, straightforward trade-off between commuting distance and affordability? Probably not. There's quite a bit of research around this question that I hopefully will have time to get into later, but for now I've got some interesting counter-examples that are especially relevant to our ongoing discussion. 

From the American Community Survey, here are commute times for those who do not work from home. [quick caveat, I'm not familiar with ACS data so it's possible I'm missing something]:


Keep in mind that SF isn't very big and SM is tiny (with a reverse commute). Driving over twenty minutes from anywhere in the latter and more than thirty minutes from anywhere in the former will take you to or through neighborhoods with lower housing costs. If we're looking at a trade-offs between distance and price, this should almost never happen, certainly not the majority of the time.

This isn't hard to understand. SF and SM are tremendously desirable places to live (not my cup of tea, but even I see the appeal). It's not surprising that people are willing to pay more and tolerate slightly longer commutes to live there, but if you accept that this is what's happening, some interesting consequences follow.

Of the people in the Bay Area and LA who would like to live in SF and SM respectively, the vast majority do not work in those cities. If you increase housing capacity in these popular places and hold the desirability constant, we would expect to see acceptable commute times going up. That suggests that some people who had previously considered a forty-five or sixty minute commute a bit too much will change their minds.

And environmentally speaking, that's a really bad outcome. 

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Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Sure the money was small time by today's standards, but did Theranos have lions and tigers and iceless ice?

Surprised no one's made a movie of this fellow.

Keith Johnston writing for the LA Times. 

Success came quickly for Bourgeois, who had a talent for donning new hats when opportunities arose. He had begun his career in Europe as a cinematographer for Pathé Frères, jumped in front of the camera when a production needed an actor willing to do a dangerous stunt and learned to train animals with the help of the nature documentarian who directed his first films. Bourgeois’ first picture for Universal was a riotous two-reel comedy, “Joe Martin Turns ’Em Loose.” A series of collaborations with Marstini followed, with Bourgeois credited as actor, writer or director and his wife as the star.

...

Yet no private correspondence survives that explains why Bourgeois turned away from filmmaking. Geoffrey Donaldson, a seminal Dutch film scholar, once asked Bourgeois’ second wife about it, but she was unable (or unwilling) to disclose more, other than to say he had “lost interest” in film, preferring to work in the steel business — go figure. All that’s known is that by spring 1916, a restless man with a gift for reinvention found himself working as one of many filmmakers at a large Hollywood studio, with a reputation for animal abuse, a history of injuries and, perhaps, a broken marriage.

...

On March 2, 1916, the fashionable Café Bristol, on the ground floor of the Hellman Building at 4th and Spring streets downtown, debuted a new attraction for Los Angeles: a skating rink. Skating was already enormously popular, and cafe rinks were a fad in New York and Chicago. But they were expensive. The Bristol’s 24-by-50-foot surface required a $10,000 ammonia refrigeration system.


Bourgeois, finger to the wind, sensed an opportunity. Among his many skill sets was some knowledge of chemistry. Though his education record is unclear, a 1907 document from a train crossing the U.S.-Canadian border indicated he worked as an electrician in Manitoba. He told acquaintances that he’d received a deferment from service in the Belgian army during World War I because the U.S. Navy was interested in an alloy of his invention, although no record of this exists. In April 1916, he claimed to have invented “iceless ice.”

“Mr. Bourgeois claims that this composition cannot break, unless deliberately chopped up, it cannot wear out and it cannot melt, unless put on a fire,” The Times reported. “The composition is laid down in liquid form and ‘freezes’ over, or hardens, in twenty-four hours.”

Bourgeois secured investment to convert a roller rink and car dealership at 1041 S. Broadway into the Palace Ice Rink. The grand opening was to be attended in July 1916 by the mayor and feature L.A.’s first game of ice hockey. The entrance was constructed to resemble a huge iceberg. Inside were shops that would sell candy, ice cream, cigars and soft drinks.

Vendors paid Bourgeois hefty deposits to secure places in the venture. Cashiers could get a job if they paid $100. Dozens of skating instructors lined up to offer lessons to wobbly Angelenos. Bourgeois needed $17 from each of them to purchase a uniform.

Contractors, still busy through the summer, were paid almost entirely with checks that bounced. The builders sought out Bourgeois to find out how his ice was supposed to work, but he couldn’t be reached. A vendor named Jacques Levi reported him to the authorities, and a warrant was issued for Bourgeois’ arrest on Aug. 4, by which time he, his stenographer and his investors’ money were on their way to Yuma.

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Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Housing Metaphors

Crabs Trade Shells in the Strangest Way | BBC Earth

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Monday, October 4, 2021

Monday Tweets










Marshall is, as usual, right. The coverage of of this story has been extraordinarily bad.













OAN keeps talking ABOUT the recall. "Officials are finishing up the ballot count," different anchors reading the same script said at both 5 and 7am ET. But they're not admitting what AP, CNN, and everyone else reported last night: The recall failed. Newsom prevailed. (4/7)

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 15, 2021

























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