By Mike Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay. Indeed, the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.
From Planet of Slums .
By Mike It’ll be no surprise to my regular readers that I’m a bit skeptical when people praise “the market” (by which is usually meant “powerful companies that do not operate in anything resembling a real free market”), but there is a case when leaving things to private business is clearly better than leaving it to government: When an issue has become so gummed up with politics that a simple profit-and-loss approach can cut through the bullshit.
An example: The drug Accutane is (was?) an acne drug (so it was taken by teens) and it caused horrific birth defects. Faced with the problem of keeping teens not pregnant, the drug company (Roche) created a pregnancy prevention program for girls and women taking the drug. I bring it up because I worked on it and it was admirable—clear, correct information presented frankly, with barely a mention of abstinence. After all, Roche had no incentive to screw around; every baby born with Accutane birth defects was bad press for the drug. And the program was successful: There were very few pregnancies among Accutane patients.
This is pretty definitive proof (if more proof were needed) that the government’s politically motivated “abstinence-only” sex education is wrongheaded: When a private company’s profits depended on preventing pregnancy, they didn’t waste their time talking about abstinence. The market spoke, and in this instance (because the company had the right incentives), the market was right.
That’s the thing, though: the market is only worth listening to when its incentives are right—when companies are being paid to honestly evaluate what we want to know.
Now let’s look at hydrofracking. Blindly relying on the market won’t help here, of course: fracking companies are paid if we say yes to fracking, which means they’ll say it’s safe whether or not it really is.
But what about insurers? Insurers have the right incentives: when they insure frackers, they make money if the process turns out to be safe, and they lose money if frackers wind up having to pay for poisoned wells and sick babies.
So this news is important: Nationwide, one of the country’s biggest insurers, has decided that it won’t even try to insure frackers. In the company’s own words:
We do not have a comfort level with the unique risks associated with the fracking process to provide coverage at a reasonable price.
If fracking was as risk-free as its advocates say, Nationwide would be rushing to insure frackers. It’s rushing in the opposite direction.
The market has just spoken about the risks of hydrofracking. They’re very real.
By Mike From yesterday’s New York Times:
“[I]f your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”
Spot on.
By Mike
The book exists!
I have an actual, physical copy in my hands!
You can pre-order it on Amazon!
That is all.
By Mike Came across this quote, from Rexford Tugwell:
“If we lack purchasing power, we lack everything…. There is just one thing to do: Take incomes from where they are and place them where we need them.”
Tugwell was one of FDR’s “brain trust”; he was speaking of the depression of the 1930s, but he could have been speaking about today.
Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p451. Manchester adds, “To save the country by saving the banks, he [Tugwell] added, was like trying to revive a dying tree ‘by applying fertilizer to its branches instead of to its roots.’”
By Mike Our quote of the day comes from Alexis de Tocqueville:
“We so soon become used to the thought of want . . . that an evil which grows greater to the sufferer the longer it lasts becomes less to the observer by the very fact of its duration.”
Quoted in Henry George, Progress and Poverty.
By Mike So, apparently Allen West has “heard” that 80 House Democrats or so are members of the Communist Party. Specifically, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You know, liberals.
A strange choice of words.
Allen, if you’re reading this, here’s a guide to how conservatives like you refer to liberals, depending on when you’re doing it:
Until 1917: Anarchists
1917-1925 or so: Bolsheviks
1926-1932: Anarchists
1933-1945: Dictators
1945-1989: Communists
1990-2000: Liberals, but said with a smug, vicious sneer, like you’re saying “pedophiles.”
2001-present: Terrorists.
Seriously, Allen, what’s so hard about that? Did you not get an eleven-year-old memo?
Get it right next time, please.
By Mike Here’s some of good news (a bit old now): A boycott by scientists made Elsevier (publishers of many science journals) back off its support of the evil Research Works Act.
From the article:
The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research. Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away..
In another life I’m a medical writer, and while some medical journals provide all or some of their articles for free, others only make them available to subscribers, or charge ridiculous amounts for every article. And yes, Elsevier is the big villain here–when you see the Elsevier logo, you know that you’re not getting access to anything except the abstract.
Well, you might say, so what? Elsevier is a business; one couldn’t demand that Time or the New Yorker provide content for free (although in real life they do), so why demand it of Elsevier or other science publishers? If the New Yorker decided to charge thirty bucks for 24 hours of access to a single article, who would we be to say that it shouldn’t?
The answer, obviously, is that Time and the New Yorker pay for their content. In science, researchers provide their research for free, and reviewers review for free.
Yes, journals do editorial work (although less than they used to in my experience grumble grumble), and yes, science journals still print hard copies. But on the other hand, they also make money from ads. And, these articles can literally mean the difference between life and death. And these days, without science journals scientists would still find ways to get their results out (in fact, they are doing that very thing now, hence the possibility of a boycott).
So really, although science journals once served a function, now they simply sit between creators and consumers of their product, paying the creators nothing and charging monopoly prices from their consumers. (Sort of like the music companies, come to think of it.)
So here’s hoping that the boycott continues, and that scientific content, at least, becomes free.
By Mike Here’s a chart showing the Club of Rome’s 1972 predictions for the future, as given in Limits to Growth, and how things have worked out since then. Pretty accurately. Frighteningly accurately.
I’ll take the liberty of reprinting it, for those who don’t want to click on the link. It’s copyright etc. the Smithsonian magazine.
The Club of Rome was, notably, not Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb at around the same time. Ehrlich said that the world was already in a crisis of scarcity brought on by population growth. He famously lost a bet to one Julian Simon, who believed the opposite–that more humans meant more chickens, not fewer, and that we would see abundance in the future, not scarcity. (Ehrlich bet on the prices of commodities going up, Simon bet they would go down; by the 1980s, they had gone down.)
Ehrlich’s lost bet became famous, and was used to discredit everyone who said, hey, maybe resources aren’t unlimited.
Which is a shame (using the definition of “a shame” that means “something that may very well kill most of us”). Unlike Ehrlich, the Club of Rome argued that, although growth could continue for some time longer, we would hit limits in the near-to-medium future. They predicted, among other things, an economic collapse followed by population decline in 2030.
As of 2000, as the link above shows, we were not exactly on schedule, but close.
I’m not sure why the chart in the link isn’t brought forward to 2010; the data must exist now.
EDIT: The data are old, it turns out, because the analysis is several years old. I violated my own principle of always going back to primary sources before giving an opinion.
Also, the Club of Rome gave several predictions based on different assumptions. The scenario that’s played out so far has been the “business as usual” scenario. As opposed to, say, the “everybody becomes sane and actually starts to deal with these problems” scenario, which must have seemed at least achievable in the 1970s.
Finally, this is testable: If the model is correct, we should be looking at a decline in industrial output within a few years, followed by a decline in global food per capita soon after.
By Mike From Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“If all Americans want is security, they can go to prison.”
Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, page 745
He said that in the 1950s; he no doubt didn’t mean it to be a prediction.
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