Rich and Strange Aeons

Oil state prudence and sovereign wealth funds: Norway vs. Alberta, also a look at how Norway's fund invests. I liked the Albertan complaining that Norway is a relatively small country: yes, but it has more people than Alberta... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund/article25973060/?click=sf_globefb

Debunking the fear about EMPs http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/24/the-empire-strikes-back/

Portugal, optimal currency area, and labor mobility: fiscal union trumps labor mobility in importance. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/the-downside-of-labor-mobility/
Who cares about reserve currency status? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/international-money-mania/

First we export pollution to China via outsourcing, now they export it back to us via air movements: http://www.sgvtribune.com/environment-and-nature/20150810/air-pollution-from-china-undermining-gains-in-california-western-states

Trees and bus stop waiting time perception http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/08/trees-can-make-waiting-for-the-bus-feel-shorter/401135/?utm_source=atlanticFB

How the US 'justice' system abuses bail: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/the-bail-trap.html?smid=tw-nytmag&_r=0

Vampire squid: not a squid. (Or vampire, durr.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/06/23/vampire-squids-arent-vampires-or-squids/

Real paleo diet might have evolved around carbs. Oops! http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/science/for-evolving-brains-a-paleo-diet-full-of-carbs.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Privacy Badger, an EFF alternative to the supposedly more commercial Ghostery browser plug-in. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/privacy-badger-10-blocks-sneakiest-kinds-online-tracking

Metaphorically. Or abstractly, anyway.

There's all this news about Greece's debt crisis and Syriza apparently capitulating to the austerians[1], which is pretty depressing. But, as a reminder, Greece's GDP is 20% below peak. Unemployment is nearly 26%, and 60% for youth. While the EU fiddles over debt, the economy is burning -- human capital, the basis of developed economies, is atrophying. Or leaving. No one has a plausible proposal for fixing this on the euro, which has become basically a gold standard for eurozone countries, with all the problems thereof. AFAICT, hardly anyone is even talking about it as a problem.

And Spain, with 4x the population, is nearly as badly off, with unemployment over 22%. They're making their interest payments though, so no one cares. And we may hear even less from them thanks to a new gag law on political dissent. As a Spaniard I know tells us, Franco simply died, Spain didn't really purge the fascist influences from itself.

Still has a ways to go to catch up to Hungary though, which last I heard had gone pretty much full fascist, with a constitutional hardball coup d'etat.

In the UK, the Lib Dem collapse and plurality voting allowed the Tories to get a solid seat majority, even with hardly any more votes (just as the Tories did in Canada, with the Liberal collapse -- same vote percentage even, about 40), and Osborne's using that to double down on more austerity -- big welfare cuts -- without even the excuse of kowtowing to external creditors.

I don't have as many details, but the Nordics I know seem to think they've been swept by neo-liberal if not anti-immigrant parties, and that the Scandinavian welfare state is in deep danger.

[1] Coinage of 'austerity' and 'Austrian', as in school of economics. Expansionary austeriy has pretty much no support from economists, and is as intellectually respectable as Creationism, anti-vaxxer thought, and global warming denial, but clung to by many European leaders.

2014 article on how the US poor and middle class are falling behind their counterparts in social democracies. Low-tax, low-service policies are bad for almost everyone, who knew?
Assume ellipses between almost all the paragraphs below, I'm excerpting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html

"After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.

A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Median per capita income was $18,700 in the United States in 2010 (which translates to about $75,000 for a family of four after taxes), up 20 percent since 1980 but virtually unchanged since 2000, after adjusting for inflation. The same measure, by comparison, rose about 20 percent in Britain between 2000 and 2010 and 14 percent in the Netherlands. Median income also rose 20 percent in Canada between 2000 and 2010, to the equivalent of $18,700.

But other income surveys, conducted by government agencies, suggest that since 2010 pay in Canada has risen faster than pay in the United States and is now most likely higher. Pay in several European countries has also risen faster since 2010 than it has in the United States.

Americans between the ages of 55 and 65 have literacy, numeracy and technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group. Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia and close to those in Italy and Spain.

Top executives make substantially more money in the United States than in other wealthy countries.


But both opinion surveys and interviews suggest that the public mood in Canada and Northern Europe is less sour than in the United States today.

“The crisis had no effect on our lives,” Jonas Frojelin, 37, a Swedish firefighter, said, referring to the global financial crisis that began in 2007. He lives with his wife, Malin, a nurse, in a seaside town a half-hour drive from Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city.

They each have five weeks of vacation and comprehensive health benefits. They benefited from almost three years of paid leave, between them, after their children, now 3 and 6 years old, were born. Today, the children attend a subsidized child-care center that costs about 3 percent of the Frojelins’ income.


Even with a large welfare state in Sweden, per capita G.D.P. there has grown more quickly than in the United States over almost any extended recent period — a decade, 20 years, 30 years. Sharp increases in the number of college graduates in Sweden, allowing for the growth of high-skill jobs, has played an important role.

And tax records collected by Thomas Piketty and other economists suggest that the United States no longer has the highest average income among the bottom 90 percent of earners.

Economics profession swings left http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-07/economics-stars-swing-left

Cracked on prostitution myths. Anecdotal, but consistent with studies I've read and possibly linked to in the past. http://www.cracked.com/article_21862_5-ways-life-as-prostitute-nothing-like-you-expect.html

Pew on the religions of Asian-Americans. Christian 42%, 26% none, 14% Buddhist, 10% Hindu. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/
As a group, they range from the least religious unaffiliated to the most evangelical Protestants. Majority of Korean-Americans are Protestant; I think back in South Korea only 25% are Christian, with 50% having no religion.

Idea on why Charlie Hebdo was attacked:
http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html
"France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination."

Westeros-world map updated for Worlds of Ice and Fire http://awoiaf.westeros.org/images/1/10/WorldofIceandFire.png
GRRM deconstructing war, dark Daenerys (spoiles for whole series https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/untangling-the-meereenese-knot-part-iv-a-darker-daenerys/ )
Dornish vengeance (ditto) https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/water-gardens-and-blood-oranges-part-iv-it-ends-in-blood/

no to Boston Olympics
http://m.thenation.com/blog/194529-dear-boston-its-protest-time-say-hell-no-olympic-games
http://www.nobostonolympics.org/

experience of black atheists http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/black-atheists-representation/

Attack on Titan/Frozen AMV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXR0WIbubB0

Saudi Arabia and 9/11 http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/new-questions-raised-about-u-s-saudi-relationship-1.2890528

America's poor vs. those in other rich countries http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/01/05/america_s_poor_vs_the_rest_of_the_world.html

Look at the red line.



From 1974-1986, high prices, with cliffs on both sides. Ignoring the OPEC (and post OPEC?) shenanigans, I eyeball $20-25/barrel before 1974, and $25-30 from 1986 to 2002. Some higher, some lower, but mostly in that range. Since then, though... can't quite call it a steady climb, since there's the huge swing around 2008, and the line of the past few years looks disconnected from the previous line. That said, it does look like a robust and ongoing increase, with current real gas prices being at least 3x the 1990s average, and 5x the 1960s average. And the price has roughly tripled in roughly 10 years. If the trend continues, we could expect maybe $180/barrel in 2020, or $270.

It seems a failure of governance, and cultural self-preservation, that this graph isn't more widely known or salient. Granted, people care more about pump gasoline prices:



which have been a lot more stable, and quite low in the 1990s. That said, they've climbed rapidly since -- competitive with OPEC crisis peaks, and higher than historical levels since the 1930s.

"The average price of a gallon of gas from 1918 to the present is $2.60 in June 2013 inflation adjusted dollars."

The site also compares oil and gas prices directly



Looks like gas prices haven't kept up with crude oil prices, suggesting either a coming crash in oil prices, a rapid catchup in gas prices to $7-8/gallon, or some mechanism keeping them separate now.

---

Some other inflation charts while we're here: college costs (up nearly 3x since 1985, if I divided things properly), electricity (only since 1990, but once again 2000-2002 was a golden age of low prices, but the variation is about 10%) and gold (as I type this, gold is $1220/oz; we could still see prices fall nearly in half.)

Apparently there's been a big yet unheralded decline in homelessness in the US, despite the economy, and both Bush and Obama can take credit: the former for a housing-first policy that aimed at providing permanent housing before treatment, the latter for the stimulus. Also, multiple studies show that between arrests and ER visits, homeless people cost $30-45,000 a year, when it'd be $10-16,000 to house them with case worker support.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-astonishing-decline-of-homelessness-in-america/279050/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html?_r=0
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/24/3418140/charlotte-homeless-study/
Residents of Moore Place collectively visited the emergency room, an
expensive but not uncommon way homeless people access health care, 447
fewer times in the year after getting housing, the study discovered.
Similarly, they spent far less time running afoul of the law, with the
number of arrests dropping 78 percent.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/27/3441772/florida-homeless-financial-study/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/05/2579451/colorado-homeless-shelter/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/02/05/3228801/osceola-county-homelessness-criminalization/
An average permanent supportive housing unit in Osceola County costs
$9,602 per year, which includes $8,244 for rent and utility subsidies
and $1,358 for a case manager (with a case load of 30 clients). In other
words, each supported housing unit costs the county 40 percent less than
what they’re currently paying to put homeless residents in jail.

Power law problems when instead of a bell curve of normality, you have a
few outliers who are most of your problem -- a few really bad LAPD cops,
a few chronically homeless people who cost tens if not hundreds of
thousands of dollars, a few highly smoggy cars. managing the middle
doesn't help: most of the cops don't need mild training, and it doesn't
help the hard cases; you need to just get rid of them. It's cheaper to
simply house the hardcase homeless people and give them case workers.
Annual smog tests are mostly not needed or cheatable, vs. on-road
testing.
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2006-02-13#folio=096

Parking spaces as something which are rented, the smallest unit of land commonly used; analogy to Henry George's land tax. "Between 5 and 8 percent of urban land is devoted to curb parking."

(Edit for math error below)

Quoting George directly: "The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses."

( Read more... )

Whoever maintains this is a master of Venn Diagrams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_European_Bodies

Ever wonder about Nobel prizes per capita? Wikipedia provides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita
Switzerland once again kicks ass, followed by the Nordics and Austria. And, at less statistical significance... East Timor.
Relatedly, a map of Nobels by continent: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/15/the-amazing-history-of-the-nobel-prize-told-in-maps-and-charts/

Speaking of Switzerland and the Nordics, I may have linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio before.
...why am I studying Spanish, again? German or Norwegian seems more ratonal...

There's a proposed new inequality metric, Palma ratio: ratio of the income of the top 10% to that of the bottom 40%; apparently the middle 40-90% almost always get 45-55% of the income. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/26/wonkabroad/
Related map http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/09/27/map-how-the-worlds-countries-compare-on-income-inequality-the-u-s-ranks-below-nigeria/

Terrible street-road hybrids, called stroads: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/01/dangerous-street-design-spreading-through-suburbs/8033/

If you read the webcomic Freefall, I have some links putting Friday's strip in context: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?701166-General-Webcomic-Discussion-Thread-II-quot-I-have-no-reaction-to-the-current-page-quot&p=17673946#post17673946

Repealing the 17th amendment (direct election of Senators) has been a big conservative cry. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/02/conservatives_17th_amendment_repeal_effort_why_their_plan_will_backfire.html points out that if you actually believe in federalism it's a terrible idea: state legislators choosing Senators doesn't make Senators beholden to state governments, it makes state elections all about the Senate. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates? Those were about the Senate -- but there was no popular election in those days; instead those debates were trying to sway the state legislative elections, that would in turn choose the Senator.

Consensus: minimum wage increases reduce poverty http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/04/economists-agree-raising-the-minimum-wage-reduces-poverty/?tid=up_next

Obama's failure, undercutting his own base
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/05/the-group-that-got-health-reform-passed-is-declaring-victory-and-going-home/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd

Medicaid expansion most of Obamacare coverage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/06/medicaid-is-obamacares-biggest-success-but-neither-side-wants-to-talk-about-it/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd

ECB sabotaging eurozone
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/07/eurozone_inflation_tumbling_does_the_ecb_care.html

US not best health care system infographic
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/07/think-america-has-the-worlds-best-health-care-system-you-wont-after-seeing-this-chart/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd

unemployment facts
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/07/the-senate-is-debating-unemployment-benefits-here-are-seven-things-they-should-know/?tid=up_next

US poverty programs suck
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/07/obamacares-launch-was-bad-but-many-programs-for-the-poor-are-worse/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd

book: Social Democratic America
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/07/social_democratic_america_lane_kenworthy_s_book_is_great_but_it_s_not_about.html

Chris Christie closed road lanes in political retribution
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/nyregion/christie-aide-tied-to-bridge-lane-closings.html?hp&_r=1
Christie a bully
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/08/chris-christies-problem-is-that-hes-really-truly-a-bully/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd

One of my social circles is busily debating rent control. Well, arguing over it, really, there's not so much debate as moral divide. On one side are the lay economists, on the other side the people who think it's self-evidently good to protect current tenants and sock it to landlords, who cares what economists say?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_States has some actual public good arguments in favor of rent control, as well as the standard arguments against, the key one of which I wish to illustrate.

Imagine 100 units, and 100 tenants, renting at some price. Now imagine 100 more people wanting to move in. What happens?

Case 1, fixed housing supply and flexible prices: you've got 200 people bidding for 100 units, rents soar, poor people leave as their leases expire, and soon only the richest 100 live in the area. Poor people are forced to move, neighborhood character may be lost. Sum up as only the rich live here.


Case 2, fixed housing supply and rent control: Existing tenants aren't directly affected. But when one does leave, there's now 100 outsiders, plus any insiders who want to move within the area, bidding for that one apartment. Vacancy rents *soar*. Other effects: landlords skimp on maintenance hoping to drive controlled tenants out; landlords seek ways to take illegal bribes; prospective tenants offer illegal bribes to be considered out of the 100+ applicants; landlords seek ways to evict tenants, or to convert apartments to condos they can sell. Friends who want to move might try to unofficially live in each other's apartments (an official swap would allows rents to rise), while landlords will seek to police and prevent such behavior. Landlords will favor 1 or 2 BR apartments, to minimize the chance of a lease being chained from tenant to tenant as could happen with a multi-unit house. Current tenants are protected while they stay but are prevented from moving within the area, and may not be able to afford to do so.

That's assuming the modern form, where rents can be raised when someone moves out. If rents are absolutely controlled then you avoid some bad effects but worsen others, particularly the slovenly maintenance and bribery, or at least landlords using arbitrary means to select from the hordes of applications they get. Like taking the highest credit rating, or the richest looking people, or the whitest.

Sum up: only the extremely rich can move in and there's a black market in housing. Existing tenants are favored, new ones like college or grad students are screwed. Someone who goes away for a few years probably can't come back.


Case 3, flexible housing: people build new housing to match demand, rents stay tied to the marginal cost of adding new housing, which eventually becomes the cost of adding a floor to a new high-rise design. Alternately or in parallel, housing sizes shrink; one can add housing by subdivision as well as by building after all, unless zoning laws require minimum sizes. Rent control is irrelevant in proportion to how fast housing can be added. Side effects: green space and/or sunlight may diminish as buildings spread and climb like trees. Infrastructure gets fully utilized or even overburdened; new infra is well worth building. The number of people you can meet in walking distance grows. Your area becomes more like such hellholes as NYC, London, Paris or Tokyo.

Sum up: people actually get to live where they want to at affordable prices.


Rent control is a bandaid that shifts power from landlords (kind of) to existing tenants, at the expense of everyone else, and the expense of social mobility. Freeing up housing markets -- getting rid of Euclidean zoning, minimum sizes, floor aspect ratios, parking requirements, and just keeping safety and noxiousness regulations[1] -- actually solves the problem. But it doesn't have an attractive sound bite, especially to leftists who treat markets and developers as tainted things rather than processes providing things they want.

[1] I'd be tempted to make building codes include noise isolation requirements. More market friendly would be public evaluation of apartments for noise (and energy efficiency, while we're at it), allowing landlords to compete on such metrics without the asymmetric information problem (aka you don't know if they're telling the truth or even have a clue when they tell you it's quiet).


Adding: I don't see landlords as parasites. Or rather, there's ambiguity: landowners are largely parasitic on the increase in land value created by society; building owners provide useful services in maintaining the buildings I stay in. Of course most building owners own the land the building's on, so there's a mix of functions. I'm also friendly to high land value taxes to capture the social increment in land value. But you *still* need to free up the provision of new housing. Land value taxes would just transfer land rent to the government, they wouldn't make it easier or cheaper for people to live in the area.

Late edit: I had rent control back in San Francisco. Large 1BR started at $950 in 1998, crept up a bit in the next 4 years. Nice. But if I wanted to move back now it might cost me $3000. Not nice. And I'd stayed there the whole time it might be $2000 now; 'losing' $12,000 per year per apartment would probably gall a landlord. And why do apartments cost $3000? Because there's been hardly any housing built on the whole west side of the Bay Area, city or Peninsula, despite a huge dotcom boom, because of selfish and shortsighted local building restrictions. A big chunk of SF is the Sunset district, an ocean of one story houses on garages. It's insane.