Category Archives: Web Article Review

refugee cities

This post makes a case for establishing cities for refugees rather than “camps”.

Second, the world now has 60 million refugees. That is a number roughly the size of six Belgiums, Hungarys, or Swedens. If they were to create their own country, it would be the size of France. In the face of such staggering numbers, commitments to take thousands or even tens of thousands of people will do almost nothing to alleviate the misery of millions.

Rather than conflating the issues of refugees and terrorism, politicians and policymakers should be addressing each separately. On the question of refugees, Western countries should take in as many as their populations can assimilate, demonstrating a willingness to make good on the universal values they profess for both moral and political reasons.

But the world also needs far bolder solutions than twentieth-century approaches like limited asylum quotas and “temporary” refugee camps. In particular, it is time to embrace the prospect not of camps but of cities – places where up to a million refugees of any particular nationality can live safely and learn how to build a better future.

This reminds me a little of Paul Romer’s “charter cities”. The idea was to create entirely new city states focused on economic growth that people from anywhere in the world could opt into, provided they agreed to certain norms of behavior. I find the idea compelling, although Romer’s attempts to realize it on the ground in Honduras ended up on the rocks. You can argue that Singapore developed somewhat along these lines, although it was not founded based on this ideology (in fact, it was not even founded voluntarily, but just sort of cast adrift.)

car dealers sabotaging electric cars

The New York Times says car dealers are actively subverting peoples’ attempts to buy electric cars, even when they really want them. One reason they cite is that electric cars need less service like oil changes, and dealerships actually make a lot more money from service than from sales. This may be a rational explanation. But part of the explanation may also be that people can get sucked into longstanding institutional cultures even when they are highly irrational. I face this quite often in my work, and I have faced it around the world – groups of people can be incredibly motivated to defend the status quo, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that there are better ways, and even when the people in question are young, intellgient, well-educated and well-intentioned. Sometimes the facts just do not matter. I don’t have the answer to this, if you do please let me know.

The Man in the High Castle

Amazon is making a series about The Man in the High Castle, a 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick.

The Man in the High Castle is Dick’s alternative history story, based on a chilling hypothetical: What if the Allies had lost World War II? The action takes place on American soil in 1962, almost a generation after the war. Back when the novel was written, that was the present day. Now it’s a period piece, but that somehow makes it even more evocative.

It’s not the country we remember from the ’60s. It has been divided up by its conquerors, with the Nazis ruling the East, the Japanese ruling the West, and a strip of desolate neutral zone around the Rocky Mountains.

Both sides of the Rockies are police states, but in different ways — and there’s a resistance, an underground, working to topple the oppressive governments in charge. One of the weapons used by the resistance is a psychological one. Film canisters contain what look to be vintage newsreels, but show an alternate history that we recognize as our own: the Nazis losing, the Japanese surrendering, and America and England emerging triumphantly.

Dick is a sort of master oblique story teller – the book is like a series of short stories about the lives of fairly ordinary people, with extraordinary events occurring in the background that you learn about only gradually. It forces you to fill in the details of the story yourself using your imagination. Or you can watch the TV show where someone else does it for you. Of course, this has been done before. We can Remember it for you Wholesale (aka “Total Recall”) and Minority Report were both short stories where all Hollywood writers had to do was fill in some details. It’s really worth reading through a collection of Dick short stories, such as Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. A couple of my favorites are Autofac and Second Variety.

 

the Paris climate summit

Thomas Sterner at The Economist says that there really is a near-consensus among economists on how to reduce carbon emissions.

Economists keep on repeating: all you need is a price on carbon. This is true in one narrow sense: had there—by some (peak-oil or other) magic had there been a high price on carbon then the world economy would just adapt and we would hardly notice—just like we have “adapted” to expensive gold and titanium.

But the problems are practical and political.

The problem lies in how to design the institutions and instruments that create that high price when the market does not. Subsidies must be removed, fossil fuels taxed (or subjected to permit trade) and all countries need to agree on the details in a way that all find “fair”. In Copenhagen, people hoped for a treaty that kept warming below two degrees and an agreement that was generous in giving poor countries more of the remaining space.

One idea is for a decentralized system where individual countries each create carbon markets, then link them later.

The negative attitude to heavy UN negotiations is so strong that some welcome a more “decentralised architecture” of the climate negotiations and policymaking. Some claim we do not need an agreement. It is sufficient for each country to have an individual target and permit trading scheme and then all the permit schemes could be linked together. Linked permit markets would exhibit all the advantages to trade and circumvent the need for an international agreement.

It sounds like the strategy is to set relatively low, realistic expectations for this summit and then meet them. You can say that doing something is certainly better than doing nothing. You could also say that whatever we do will be too little, too late to solve the problem. Our deeply flawed species has failed this test and we are going to suffer the consequences.

domestic terrorism

Outgoing Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter said

“Domestic terrorism is international terrorism,” Nutter said. “There is really no level of distinction between the violence that goes on, on the streets of America on a daily basis and the episodic acts of international terrorism that also take place — primarily in cities…”

“Citizens around the world feel unsafe because of international terrorists … those same feelings exist for many in (American) communities,” Nutter said. “These criminals are terrorizing our citizens and that same level of fear of violence, the death of citizens, the destruction of property, are the same. In many cities across the United States of America on a weekend, you very well could have six, eight, 10 people shot.”

He called for a stronger relationship between federal and local officials to address American violence with the same sense of urgency and priority given to global terrorism.

Well, let’s think about how this is and isn’t true. There seem to be two ingredients that lead to violence, whether on an American street or in the Middle East. One is young men with something to be angry about, and time on their hands to do something about it. The second is a culture of violence that makes it okay to act on those angry impulses. I think you need both of these things. So to de-escalate, you need to understand and address peoples’ real grievances, keep them busy by providing economic opportunity, and gradually work on changing cultures than glorify violence.

If you just go by body count, gun violence in American cities is much worse. As Nutter pointed out, a body count of 200-300 per year from gun crime is typical in cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Nationwide, the body count due to murder is 15,000 per year or so. But you can put that in the context of about 30,000 suicides and 30,000 deaths by motor vehicle. So that’s a lot of violent death. If you really wanted to prevent the most violent deaths, you would tackle some of these sources rather than international terrorism, or even the domestic crazies who occasionally gun down students, children, theater and church goers.

But there is the unexpected shock aspect to terrorism, whether international or just some nut in a theater. The gun violence and car crashes on our streets are so familiar they don’t shock us any more, even though they kill orders of magnitude more people every year even compared to 9/11. After 9/11 the United States started two wars of choice and spent over a trillion dollars. This seems to have escalated the violence rather than reducing it.

I’m not suggesting international terrorism doesn’t have to be dealt with. It has to be monitored and disrupted. There is the risk that an extremist group could get their hands on a nuclear or biological weapon, and then the body count would be shocking indeed and it could seriously disrupt nations and economies for a long time.

protected bike lanes now!

Helmets don’t do anything. We want protected bike lanes now!

What the researchers failed to find was any connection between helmet laws and bike-related hospitalization rates. That held true whether they looked at all cycling injuries or just traffic-specific injuries. Surprisingly, it also held true when they narrowed in on body parts protected by a helmet: the brain, head, scalp, skull, face, even neck. Since helmet laws don’t necessarily mean compliance, they looked at helmet usage, too, and once again found nothing.

The point is not that helmets do nothing or that you shouldn’t wear them. If you fall off your bike and hit your head, it’s obviously much better to have a helmet on. At a personal level, if that’s what it takes to get you riding, by all means, helmet up. But at the local government level, it’s time to recognize that other safety measures have far greater public health benefits—in particular, well-designed infrastructure that separates riders from general traffic.

Richard Florida on where we live

Richard Florida has an interesting survey on why people in the UK choose to live where they live. Some results are not too surprising. People tend to stick close to where they grew up and close to friends and family when they are younger, then gradually disperse as they get older. Housing cost is a big driver in middle age, then people get a little more choosey about type of housing and proximity to nature in older age. A couple things were surprising though – being close to work, schools and public transportation were all relatively unimportant.

I am very different than these people. Being able to live car-free is an over-arching driver for me. For me this is the only ethical choice, but I also believe it is the obvious choice for mental and physical health. Practical car free living also means being within walking distance of my job, stores and restaurants, and ultimately a decent elementary school although that’s not a factor for my family quite yet. So I picked the closest neighborhood that meets these criteria and has a housing cost I could afford. A little bit of gardening space is important to me, but that is surprisingly easy to find. Great parks, playgrounds, public squares, and easy access to Amtrak and the airport are icing on the cake. I don’t get in a car more than once a month or so, but car share, taxis and Uber are all there when I need them. I think bicycling is a wonderful way to get around on streets that are designed to be safe for it, but our U.S. street designs are not safe so I don’t do it much.

Georgescu-Roegen

From Wikipedia:

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu (4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, where he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen’s work was seminal in establishing ecological economics as an independent academic subdiscipline in economics…

He was a protégé of the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter. His own protégés included foundational ecological economist Herman E. Daly and Kozo Mayumi who further extended Georgescu-Roegen’s theories on entropy in the study of energy analysis…

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, described by the Library Journal as “…a great seminal work that challenges economic analysis”, is a wide-ranging technical and philosophical exposition which promotes the case that economic activity can not be adequately described without taking into account the implications of second law of thermodynamics. It notes that the discovery of the second law in the mid nineteenth century resulted in the downfall of the mechanistic dogmas of Classical Physics. Whereas the equations of Newton‘s Laws of Motion were symmetrical with respect to time, the new law introduced the concept of irreversibility. Although the processes of living organisms appear to violate the second law, Schroedinger demonstrated in What is Life? that there is no inconsistency – organisms feed on low-entropy sources of energy to build and preserve their complex structures, and dissipate the energy in a higher entropic state. It argues that social and economic endeavours are an extension of these biological processes and are governed by the same principles.

job posting

It appears I might be qualified for this job posting:

Astronaut candidates must have earned a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution in engineering…

Check!

An advanced degree is desirable.

Check!

Candidates also must have at least three years of related, progressively responsible professional experience…

Check!

Astronaut candidates must pass the NASA long-duration spaceflight physical.

D’oh!

Larry David is Bernie Sanders

Larry David’s Bernie Sanders is perfect. In fact, all the Saturday Night Live political personalities are pretty funny right now. Which is a probably a bad sign for our country. It’s just not that easy to parodize boring responsible grownups without a lot of weird personality quirks – think Obama, Romney, Gore. Oh, and then there is Ben Carson…

I’ve got a friend in Jesus…