Category Archives: Web Article Review

Are the U.S. Great Lakes cities really our best climate haven candidates?

This article in Planetizen says maybe not. But I think it is all relative, and they may be the best the U.S. has to offer. Cities mentioned in this article are Buffalo, Duluth (MN), Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Marquette (MI), Minneapolis, and Toledo.

Here are strikes mentioned against the region, with my thoughts in brackets:

  • invasive aquatic species [sad for aquatic ecosystems and sport fishermen, maybe not a big risk to human wellbeing. Great Lakes fish are not a big source of food that I know of, largely due to legacy industrial pollution. In other words we have already poisoned the ecosystem to a degree that we can’t and don’t rely on it as a major food source.]
  • nutrient pollution from farms and sewage [something I have expertise in, and yes it is a big issue. Agriculture is the much bigger issue because it is massive and essentially unregulated. The article focuses on untreated sewage overflow, which everyone can agree are gross, but treated sewage is the bigger player when it comes to nutrient pollution. People are just another big population of animals, and yes we have better wastewater treatment than the cows and pigs but removing nutrients to the degree needed is very expensive and has not been a historical focus. BUT see my comments above regarding sad for the ecosystem and water-based recreation, not an existential threat to humans. Water-based recreation certainly adds economic value, and I am not discounting this, just again saying not an existential threat.]
  • more intense storms [big issue, with daily tragedies unfolding around the country and world. This region is not immune, but certainly not uniquely vulnerable relative to others.]
  • wildly fluctuating lake levels. [This one is interesting, because the levels in the lakes depend on the seasonal balance of runoff and evaporation, which can fluctuate quite a bit. It’s similar to coastal flooding and sea level rise issues, but on a different time scale. To me, seems like a problem if you are very near a waterfront or in a very low lying area. Certainly an issue, but seems less scary/more manageable than a category 5 hurricane hitting your city with the energy of a nuclear weapon, and/or the slow but irreversible rise in sea level.]
  • pressure to divert water across basin boundaries to areas with groundwater depletion, population growth, and pollution issues. [This region has a strong international legal framework for resisting this pressure. Political pressure chips away at it, but the framework exists and the situation is much better than areas in the southeast (Florida-Georgia) and southwest (basically everywhere from greater Phoenix to greater Las Vegas to greater Los Angeles) that are much more water scarce and lack this strong framework. We have a similarly strong framework for the Delaware basin serving greater New York, New Jersey, and greater Philadelphia, and again not perfect but we do much better than areas without such a framework.]
  • Canadian wildfires [yes, big issue. Very bad for the atmosphere and certainly a short-term health hazard for humans while it is ongoing. Things like this are affecting many regions, and I would rather be inconvenienced in Chicago than scared to death in LA I think.]
  • Adaptation, resilience, and infrastructure investment may be lagging behind regions affected by more acute coastal flooding and fire crises. [Maybe, but no evidence for this is provided. Comparing my native Philadelphia to what I saw and heard on a recent visit to Milwaukee, I’m not sure I buy this.]
  • More extreme winter weather [mostly an inconvenience, but sure some people will die especially if power outages happen during extreme cold. Most areas of the country are dealing with extreme, cold, heat, or both. Is the electric grid in the Midwest in worse shape than other regions? Again, I don’t see this as a unique vulnerability.]

So my verdict is there is no perfect climate haven, but this region still seems like it might be the best the U.S. has to offer. You could point to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine I suppose, but those are not major economic centers unless you count them as part of greater Boston, which is going to face severe coastal issues. In the Midwest you have greater Chicago and greater Toronto, which I see as too big to fail.

https://www.planetizen.com/features/135561-great-lakes-cities-are-touted-climate-refuge-reality-much-more-complex

what’s new in shipbuilding?

We hear that the United States is woefully behind China and other Asian countries, and maybe even Europe, in ship-building. So is it labor cost, labor skill, outdated technology, or some combination that is causing this? Here are a few things being tried at the Philadelphia shipyard, which has recently partnered with a South Korean firm:

The facility builds one and a half ships a year; Hanwha plans to outfit it with “smart yard technology” to speed up manufacturing so it can churn out as many as 10 ships annually and raise sales tenfold, to over $4 billion a year by 2035.

Hanwha’s subsidiary Hanwha Ocean is among the largest shipbuilders in South Korea. Its yard in the country’s southwest produces 40 ships a year…

At the shipyard, Hanwha is bringing in technology from its Korean facilities, including computer-aided design, welding robots and virtual-reality training models. Under a model it calls “cobots,” robots work alongside workers like computer-aided manufacturing and design coordinator Kyle Pernell, with human workers in charge of operating, repairing and programming the robots.

This article is positive, but I remember seeing another article saying that this facility is having trouble finding U.S. workers who are, well, trainable and willing to do this work.

what government policies ACTUALLY increase economic growth?

Wishful thinking and “starve the beast” ideology do not increase the growth rate of a national economy. There are some things that do, according to people who study the evidence (known as economists, although to be fair, some of them are also influenced by ideology if not wishful thinking). According to this Planet Money episode, policies that have been shown by evidence to increase economic growth include:

  • Building housing in cities with numerous and increasing jobs. I always thought of housing as more of a quality of life issue and not something that actually constrains growth, but this makes logical sense. Urban areas (central cities and their suburbs) are where most of the national economy’s growth happens, because they are where most of the workers and innovative ideas are. Available jobs attract people who want jobs, and this can happen faster than the housing market can grow, pushing up prices. At some point, constraints on housing can actually become constraints on growth. People seem to be focusing mostly on the federal government tail trying to wag the municipal government dog in terms of zoning codes, but I have a couple more thoughts to add. First, excellent transportation infrastructure effectively enlarges the housing market that provides access to a given job market. If I could buy a fixer-upper row house in Baltimore and take a bullet train to Manhattan, I would effectively be part of the Manhattan housing market. Our country does not have this (although Baltimore and New York City are connected by some of the best rail our country has to offer, the time and expense of that commute would not be reasonable.) Excellent communication infrastructure also helps, since many professional jobs are now remote or hybrid. Finally, there are technological advances to be made in the construction industry, which has been dead in terms of productivity growth for decades. The big one being talked about is much more factory manufacturing of modular components. Get this figured out, and you can either move some U.S. construction workers to much more productive factory floors, or you can consider allowing immigrant workers in to do these jobs at lower wages, or you can invest in factories in Central and South American economies, thereby relieving some immigration pressure on our borders. Then move it all by electrified freight rail. These are different political choices, but all economic wins. Beyond this technology, I think there are huge gains to be made on construction sites in more efficient risk-based scheduling and logistics, technology-assisted inspections of progress (with drones and cameras), and project controls (AI watching videos of the progress and comparing exactly what is happening on the ground to exactly what was planned, then advising humans on real-time adjustments to the schedule and logistics to manage risk and keep the project on track).
  • Cutting taxes on corporations generally increases growth, because the corporations will invest at least some of the savings in capital goods, work force training, and research and development. But my thought is, why not give them the tax breaks ONLY if they invest the savings in these things, which are also investments in our national economy.
  • Similar to housing, I have always thought of health care as more of a quality of life service and basic human right a benevolent government overseeing a growing economy should be providing to its citizens. But the podcast points out hard evidence that health care investments, particularly for children and low income people, have an economic payoff in terms of reduced health care costs and increased earning (and tax-paying) potential later in life.
  • Allowing in highly skilled immigrants benefits the economy.
  • Investing in the electric grid yields a greater payout in terms of lower energy costs than whatever is invested.
  • Research and development, in things OTHER THAN weapons and war, yields a big return to the economy. Investing in weapons and war crowds out more productive investments the government could be making.
  • The particular webpage covering the podcast doesn’t talk about education, but I know I have seen elsewhere that investments in childcare and education yield big benefits, particularly early childhood education.

So: housing and construction productivity; health care; childcare and education; research and development; incentives for corporate R&D, capital investment, and work force development; transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Raise $1 in taxes, invest it in these areas, get back more than $1, and you could theoretically give the dividend back to the person who gave you the dollar, and everybody wins. Way too rational for our so-called political economy. And this doesn’t include rational risk management, like making sure those urban areas where most of the economic activity and housing are do not get destroyed by floods and fires.

climate change vs. volcanoes

Climate change is scary. Earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are scary. But these disasters are unrelated, right? Not so fast, says the Guardian. Losing ice in places like Iceland, South America, and Antarctica changes the pressure on underground magma chambers and can trigger eruptions. And apparently there are “at least 100” active volcanoes under Antarctica.

There is no discussion of how all this will affect the secret Nazi and alien bases under Antarctica.

ranked choice voting

Ranked choice voting seems like a good idea, especially for those of us who liked Al Gore, and don’t like the consequences we are living decades later of that election being stolen (yes, I said it out loud). Then again, for those of us who also liked Bill Clinton, there is the question of whether ranked choice voting would have changed the outcome of that one.

Anyway, here is a long, wonky article in the context of New York City politics, saying ranked choice voting does indeed work well most of the time. In a small number of cases it can result in a “Condorcet violation”, where the ultimate winner is not one a majority of voters would have chosen in a head to head matchup.

It still seems to me much better than the system we have, with nearly insurmountable barriers to entry for all but the two large parties, and party insiders and wealthy donors largely determining the two often mediocre choices that are put before the rest of us. The biggest downside I see is that with people so suspicious of even a very simple system of counting votes, a more complicated system will lead to even more mistrust among the public, and even more ability of bad actors to exploit that mistrust. Of course, one alternative would be open, ranked choice primaries followed by an old fashioned, non-instant runoff. But even there, many variations are possible, like having primaries with a large number of candidates whittle the choices to three or four, which are then on the general election ranked choice ballot. Having just two candidates in the general might risk a choice between extremist candidates, where three or four might allow that true compromise candidate to emerge.

undersea energy storage

This idea seems to make a lot of sense. When the wind is blowing, you can use excess energy from an offshore turbine to pump water out of an underwater tank. When the wind dies down, you open a valve and water pressure will push water back into the tank, turning a turbine in the process which can generate electricity. This way, you can generate electricity whether the wind is blowing or not. You have the problem of maintaining equipment in the marine environment and transporting the electricity to shore, but since you have an offshore turbine you have presumably solved those problems. I don’t know that this idea is enough to make offshore wind turbines a great option where they otherwise wouldn’t be.

On land, it seems like you can accomplish something similar with a basic water tower. Use wind or solar energy to pump water up there when you have excess electricity, then drain it down to turn a turbine when the wind is not blowing. If you have a hill, you can put a reservoir up there and run pipes to it rather than building the water tower. Maybe you can use a your water tower or reservoir both for water supply and energy storage, but the turbine itself is going to dissipate some of the energy you need to create water pressure in your pipes, so there are some physics and economics to consider.

https://www.zmescience.com/future/sinking-giant-concrete-orbs-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-could-store-massive-amounts-of-renewable-energy/

the Minimal Quality of Life Index

Something called the Ludwig Institute has put together something called called the Minimal Quality of Life Index, which they say tracks the true cost of living in the U.S. better than other measures. It shows that costs for working parents in particular have just become crushing. And this feels right to this somewhere-above-the-median working parent. If politicians are listening to economists using more traditional measures that do not capture how real voters are experiencing the cost of living, this may explain some of our problems.

Is AI speeding up computer programming efficiency?

Yes, by about 25% according to a serious look at the hard evidence by some heavy-weight academics (MIT, etc.)

The Effects of Generative AI on High-Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers

This study evaluates the impact of generative AI on software developer productivity via randomized controlled trials at Microsoft, Accenture, and an anonymous Fortune 100 company. These field experiments, run by the companies as part of their ordinary course of business, provided a random subset of developers with access to an AI-based coding assistant suggesting intelligent code completions. Though each experiment is noisy, when data is combined across three experiments and 4,867 developers, our analysis reveals a 26.08% increase (SE: 10.3%) in completed tasks among developers using the AI tool. Notably, less experienced developers had higher adoption rates and greater productivity gains.

“Intelligent code completions” kind of matches my own experience with how I have found AI most helpful so far – as software help. Whether it is helping with obscure code syntax or complicated nests of drop-down menus and check boxes, AI makes it much faster to find the exact thing you are looking for. This should in theory give workers a bit more time for planning and creative thinking, but predictably the market wants us not to do our jobs better, but to do them barely adequately as fast as possible. And what passes for “barely adequately” erodes over time while “as fast as possible” gets faster. Which I suppose is efficiency on paper.

One question is whether this is more like the automated loom, which sharply reduced the demand for textile workers, or the cotton gin, which sharply increased the demand for (involuntary, brutalized) workers by removing a bottleneck in the process. Early signs seem to point to the former, but all this will take time to play out.

Biden and the “shovel ready” problem

This Politico article from May 2024 does a good job summarizing Biden’s legislative achievements and then gets into a central problem that seems to be facing our country in recent decades – implementation is very, very hard. And because it is very hard, politicians who promise they can deliver substantive, tangible results often have trouble demonstrating clearly that they have delivered what they promised.

Now, I think Biden was a great president with substantial accomplishments, for about three years. I think his legacy, unfortunately, is likely to be determined by that last year. He should have announced in early 2023 that he was going to retire gracefully at the end of his first term, and allowed a full Democratic Party primary to play out. If that had happened, maybe we would be exactly where we are today, after a Kamala Harris nomination and close loss. And maybe we wouldn’t – maybe she would have nominated and run a more organized, successful campaign that reached an extra 2% of voters. Or maybe a more dynamic leader would have emerged. Anyway, that is not what happened here in this particular universe which is real as far as we can tell. So let’s talk Biden.

Biden had four major legislative accomplishments. The dollar figures below include what was appropriated (approved/required to be spent) by Congress plus tax breaks:

  1. the 2021 pandemic relief package (“American Rescue Plan”) – $45 billion
  2. the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure investment law (aka the “no catchy name” act?) – about $840 billion
  3. the 2022 “CHIPS and Science Act” – maybe $60-70 billion? (Politico has done a decent job laying out the numbers in graphics and text but it is still not perfectly clear)
  4. the 2022 climate and energy-focused “Inflation Reduction Act” – about $500 billion, largely through tax breaks?

The Politico article paints a picture of Biden being frustrated after he expected to spend the last couple years of his term at ribbon cuttings taking full political credit for accomplishments produced by these bills. I think a few things have happened here.

First, implementation is slow. Realistically, investing a trillion dollars productively is going to take time, and it is probably good for it to take time. Good investments require planning, and planning takes time. Well planned, slow and steady investments in infrastructure, research and development, and manufacturing capacity seem like a great idea to me in the real economic world. In my rationally planned infrastructure fantasy world, well-thought-out, frequently updated comprehensive plans would exist at the metropolitan area scale with construction projects queued up for bid as soon as funding can be found. The real world is not like this, but an idealistic vision can provide a direction to steer our ship. Funding would come more from the private sector when unemployment is low, and more from the government when unemployment ticks up and private credit is tight. There also has to be money and a plan for operation and maintenance of whatever is built, which is also politically unsexy. All of this could be legislated, but it would have to be done in advance as an automated rule, rather than requiring Congress to react in real time to the business cycle, which it can’t do.

Second, implementation is hard, and it seems to be harder in our country than it needs to be. There is a lot of debate on the reasons, but it is some combination of labor cost/scarcity, capacity/competence of domestic firms and workers, lack of competition, slow productivity growth in certain industries (particularly construction), and corruption. There are policy options to address all of these, but either they are politically inconvenient (like more visas for guest workers or allowing foreign firms greater access to our markets) or our politicians don’t understand them.

Third, at least some slow and steady implementation definitely happened, and Biden had trouble taking political credit for it. A November 2024 NPR article talked about this. The ribbon cutting press release strategy just didn’t get much media attention at a time when the public was more focused on disappearing household disposable incomes. Arguably, maybe, the administration wasn’t savvy enough with modern communication styles and tools to get the public’s fragmented attention. Or more ominously, maybe the public’s attention is so fragmented it can’t be gotten with any kind of rational, positive message. I am also thinking back to the 2021 stimulus, when my household disposable income definitely increased due to the stimulus package. This was done so quietly and invisibly as a tax credit directly to my bank account (which I had used to pay my taxes electronically), I barely noticed it. This was economic brilliance at a time when people really needed the help, and it may have saved our country. Politically, maybe the Democrats should have had party operatives knocking on my door and handing me a check. Or maybe they should have done that with some randomly chosen fraction of people and made sure they had the media in tow.

A final thought – since implementation is hard and slow, a lot of Trump’s agenda is trying to throw up obstacles to implementation of Biden’s trillion dollars. He will probably thwart some but not all of it. So Biden’s positive legacy will continue to play out.

the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test

Results of this international comparative test show worldwide drops over the past 20 years, with accelerations since the pandemic. We should note the scale of the graphic, yet the trend is clear. Poverty, distracting devices, and mental health are offered as potential explanations. East Asian countries and city-states do best in math, and the United States sits a bit below the average. Our close cultural cousins the UK and Canada do notably well, while Australia sits just a hair below the average. It’s interesting that the worst performing students in the US seem to do better than the worst performing students elsewhere. Could this be because of the things we actually do right, like get kids to (a) school regardless of income and give them some calories while they are there?