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…

on leadership…

It seems to be out of fashion, but I always find it interesting when people try to draw social parallels between people and animals. This reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which spends hundreds of pages on ants and termites, and after I worked my way through it I actually feel more of an affinity for these creatures and the complex mini-civilizations they have built.

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and theoretical work on leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions. We categorize patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). We find that human leadership exhibits commonalities with and differences from the broader mammalian pattern, raising interesting theoretical and empirical issues.

 

how to think about human capital

Here is a Morningstar study on how to think about your personal human capital in investment and retirement planning decisions.

Financial assets such as stocks and bonds are only one component of an investor’s total economic worth. Other assets, such as human capital, real estate, and pensions (e.g., Social Security retirement benefits) often represent a significant portion of an investor’s total wealth. These assets, however, are frequently ignored by practitioners when building portfolios, despite the fact that they share common risks with financial assets. This paper provides evidence that industry-specific human capital, region-specific housing wealth, and pensions have statistically significant exposures to different asset classes and risk factors. Through a series of portfolio optimizations we determine that the optimal allocation for an investor’s financial assets varies materially for different compositions of total wealth. These findings suggest that narrowly focused portfolio optimization routines that ignore human capital and outside wealth are insufficient, and that a holistic definition of wealth is necessary to build truly efficient portfolios.

Richard Thaler

Here’s a Vanguard interview with Richard Thaler on what behavioral economics is all about.

Losses have about twice the emotional impact of an equivalent gain. Fear of losses (and a tendency toward short-term thinking—I’m sneaking in a third one here) can inhibit appropriate risk-taking.

For example, investing in the stock market has historically provided much higher returns than investing in bonds or savings accounts, but stock prices fluctuate more, producing a greater risk of losses. Loss aversion can prevent investors from taking advantage of the long-term opportunities in stocks.

The second bias that causes a lot of trouble is overconfidence. Most people think they are above-average investors, and as a result they trade too much and diversify too little. Overconfidence can also lead people to invest during what appears to be a bubble, thinking they will just get out faster than others. Research shows that the more individuals trade, the lower their returns. Not surprisingly, men suffer from this problem more than women.

package delivery robots

Here come the package delivery robots. I don’t know that this couldn’t work in a quieter urban residential neighborhood. This would work great on several narrow streets I have lived on in Philadelphia, where post office and UPS/FedEx trucks typically double park at the nearest intersection (often blocking crosswalks, fire hydrants, bike lanes, etc. because there aren’t other options) and then walk in. Urban areas can take a number of forms other than high rise towers and central business districts, which is what (most likely suburban living) authors of articles like this always seem to be picturing.

October 2015 in Review

What did I learn in October? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-15):

  • Events leading to the current war and refugee disaster in Syria may have been set in motion by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (-2)
  • Drone strikes are not as surgical as we have been led to believe. Also, post-2001 CIA torture was a thing. (-2)
  • Herman Daly suggests that zero interest rates cause us to misprice (basically, ignore the costs of) environmental degradation. The only thing worse than zero interest rates is negative interest rates. I continue to puzzle over the links between the money supply, interest rates, natural capital and environmental degradation. I don’t have the puzzle figured out yet. I will let you know as soon as I do. (-1)
  • When trees die it makes people sad. (-1)
  • The Bank of England warns that ” once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.” (-3)
  • The IMF is warning of more slow growth ahead, especially in developing countries. The reasons? “low productivity growth since the crisis, crisis legacies in some advanced economies (high public and private debt, financial sector weakness, low investment), demographic transitions, ongoing adjustment in many emerging markets following the post crisis credit and investment boom, a growth realignment in China—with important cross-border repercussions—and a downturn in commodity prices triggered by weaker demand as well as higher production capacity.” (-2)
  • Stephen Hawking is worried about inequality and technological unemployment. Work sharing is one possible way to deal with it. (-1)
  • Corrupt Russian officials appear to be selling nuclear materials in Moldova. (-3)

Positive stories (+9):

    • Thanks to Pope Francis, Philadelphians got to experience a weekend with no cars, and it was awesome! Norway is a bit ahead of us on this. (+3)
    • There is some evidence that Uber is modestly reducing rates of car ownership. (+1)
    • Japan might have self-driving taxis as soon as next year. Self-driving shuttle buses are operating right now in a California office park (+1)
    • I learned that Norbert Wiener was one of the fathers of modern automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He was concerned that his ideas could be misuses, and refused to take corporate or military money to advance them. (+1)
    • Viktor Glushkov was a Soviet computer science who developed an idea for a cash-free, computer-controlled economic system. Seriously, it was an interesting idea even though in retrospect things didn’t work out so well for the USSR. There could be some elements we could consider today now that we actually have the computer technology he lacked back then. (+1)
    • Elephants seem to have very low rates of cancer. Maybe we could learn their secrets. (+1)
    • There may be some hope for a global carbon pricing agreement. (+1)