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Space Debris, Governance, and the Economics of Space with Alex Salter Nov 05, 2016

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What follows is an edited transcript of my interview with Alex Salter about the economics of space. The first half deals primarily with the issue of space debris, while the second half deals with the possibility of private governance in space. There's something in this episode for everyone to enjoy, so I hope you'll listen, read, and share it with your friends. Petersen: My guest today is Alex Salter of Texas Tech University. Alex, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Salter: Thanks very much for having me. Petersen: Our topic today is the economics of space. Alex has written two papers on the subject. The first is entitled, "Space Debris: A Law and Economics Analysis of the Orbital Commons." The second is, "Ordering the Cosmos: Private Law and Celestial Property Rights." So Alex, let's start by talking about space debris. What is it and why does it matter? Salter: So space debris is basically junk in space that no longer serves any useful purpose. So as you can imagine, since the first piece of space debris launched up in 1957---which was the rocket body from Sputnik I---a lot of orbits around the Earth, especially low Earth orbit, have become kind of cluttered with space junk. And the reason it gets cluttered is because no one has an incentive to clean it up. It's a problem because a lot of this stuff is big enough and moving fast enough that if it strikes something like a communications satellite, it can take it out. So the probability of a collision right now that will cause serious damage is currently low, but there are a lot of worries among scientists who study the problem that as debris occasionally collides with more debris, you get a sort of snowballing effect of the clutter. So if we're going to get a handle on it, it needs to be earlier rather than later. Petersen: I think intuitively it seems like the sky is so big and satellites are so small that we'd never have to worry about collisions. So why is that not the case? Salter: So there's obviously quite a bit of room up there, but the problem is that some orbits are more valuable than others. In particular, geosynchronous orbit, which is I think 36 thousand kilometers above the Earth, is a really valuable place for specific satellites. And also low Earth orbit is a valuable place for specific satellites. Now, there's still a lot of room there, but it's significantly restricted. If my communications satellite is taking up a particular orbit, your satellite can't be in the same place. So there's only so much of it to go around, and again, what we're really worried about is debris colliding with something, which creates more debris, which can collide with more stuff. We're really worried that snowball effect, which is sometimes called the Kessler syndrome after the scientist who first wrote about it. Petersen: So the odds of a single collision might be low, but given one collision, it becomes much more likely that we'll have two and three and four---a chain reaction of collisions. Salter: Exactly. So right now the probability of collision is pretty low over the life of a satellite, for example in low Earth orbit, it's no more than one in a thousand. But conditional on getting hit, that can cause a pretty serious business disruption and economic losses, and as you said, given that one increases the likelihood of all future collisions, it's kind of like a positive feedback loop. So that can get pretty nasty pretty quick. Petersen: Have there been any collisions in the past? Salter: There have been many collisions in the past. I think the most notable one was actually intentional. In 2007, China performed an anti-satellite test, where it purposefully took out one of its old satellites that was no longer useful. And it created, I think, about a hundred and fifty thousand new pieces of space debris with that one anti-satellite test. So I'm not aware of any instances of grave, private sector disruptions caused by space debris collisions, but honestly unless there's some means of cleaning this stuff up or it de-orbits on its own, it really is only a matter of time. Petersen: So, you make a distinction in the paper between access to orbit and particular orbits. Can you explain what those are? Salter: Right. So access to orbit is basically getting your payload up into space. If you have a communications satellite, it's getting it to the orbit you want. And economically that has the characteristics of a public good. The standard definition of a public good in economics is anything that we like which is not rivalrous in consumption and non-excludable. So if I consume one more unit of it, that doesn't stop you from consuming more. And also non-excludable, the second part, means it's costly or very difficult for me to stop other people from enjoying that. So both of those characteristics fit getting a satellite into your desired orbit---going through space to get to where you want to go. Once your satellite is in position though, a particular orbit has the properties of what we call a common-pool resource. It's rivalrous---if I have it you can't also have it---but it's also non-excludable. I can't really stop you from using it. As orthodox public finance theory will tell you, sometimes the provision of those goods, public goods and common-pool resources, are difficult because if they're non-excludable you can't stop people from enjoying the benefits and so that limits the incentive for producers to make the stuff in the first place. Petersen: Right, so in order to prevent someone from launching a satellite into your orbit, you'd have to somehow police every potential launch site on the globe, which of course we can't do. And that's what makes it [non-excludable]. Salter: It's incredibly expensive and therefore not really feasible. Petersen: Right, so from reading your paper I know other researchers have looked at this problem and they suggested taxing people who create space debris. So do you want to comment on that suggestion, and maybe what are the pros and cons of taking that approach? Salter: Sure. Let me first start by saying that the case for a corrective tax here stems from the fact that we have a common-pool resources problem, or a public goods problem. Nobody owns orbit, and so nobody really has an incentive to worry about how clean it is. If I'm launching a communications satellite, I don't really worry that I'm also imposing a cost on other potential launchers with my useless rocket body. So if everyone thinks that way, then the debris problem becomes unmanageable. So there is a textbook rationale for some correction to what we call this external cost in economics. Because nobody owns orbit or access to orbit, nobody has an incentive to care for it or clean it up. At least not as much as we would like. So the argument for a corrective tax is basically, we want to bring the private costs of polluting space more in line with the social costs of polluting space. So if you tax a polluter, someone who's contributing to space debris, you raise the expensiveness of creating debris. And as economic theory will tell you, when something gets more expensive, all else being equal, people will do less of it. That's the theoretical argument for what's called a Pigouvian or corrective tax. The problem here---and this is not specific to space debris, this is specific to all taxes correcting external cost problems---is that you don't really know how big to make the tax in order to get to the efficient amount of pollution mitigation. And even if you did, you have to take political economy considerations into concern. Corrective taxes are not run and operated by benevolent social planners. They're typically run and operated by bureaucracies, and bureaucrats have their own incentives to which they respond. And the incentives facing politicians and bureaucrats may not be the same as incentives for contributing to social efficiency or maximal wellbeing. Petersen: Right, so we might worry that the body that determines the tax on potentially space-junk-producing private actors might be less concerned with the externality and more concerned with their own revenue and so set the tax not at the social-welfare-maximizing point but at the revenue-maximizing point. Salter: Right, that's one potential worry with that sort of a solution. Again I want to emphasize, though, that's in the abstract. It's still very very difficult---in fact I would even say impossible---to know what the right size of the tax should be. I think that there is an inherent knowledge problem that sometimes gets overlooked at the expense of the incentive problem that you just talked about. Both are very important, and they're related, and they complement each other in terms of the critique, but they are distinct problems. And public policy has to be able to present credible solutions to both of those problems if we're going to argue that a corrective tax would improve social welfare. Petersen: Right, so you launch a satellite, maybe you leave a piece of large debris like a rocket body, but you also create a risk that the satellite will explode or be hit by something and create a snowball effect of more debris. It's really hard to compute the net cost because you not only need to know how likely is it to create more debris and how likely is that debris to impact something. You also need to know the value of the future satellites the debris might impact, which means forecasting the future of space and the future of the economy and all these things into the deep future. Have other researchers at least tried to tackle this problem? Are there some attempts? Salter: There have been some attempts, and as you noted, any estimate is going to be very imprecise because there's a lot of variables moving in the background. But you could look at scientific studies that estimate the damage to useful communications satellite or other valuable space equipment from a collision can range anywhere from 20 to 200 million. That's a reasonable interval for estimating the damages if you count not just the initial collision but also the potential snowballing which can destroy other things. And you can also look at what private companies are doing right now to get an appreciation of the magnitude of the problem. For example, if you're a communications satellite launcher you can buy insurance for your communications satellite. In 2011, market premiums for these kinds of space risks totalled about 800 million dollars. And also in 2011 there were about 600 million in claimed damages. So private actors are spending a lot to insure themselves against risks such as these and that in combination with some of the scientific studies can help build your intuition for understanding that we're talking about a lot of money here: a stream of valuable services into the future which can be risked by space debris. Petersen: So we do have a ballpark estimate, but nothing so precise that we could set an optimal Pigouvian tax even if we had a government that was benevolent enough to try to reach that optimum. So in your paper you suggest alternatives to the Pigouvian route. In particular you suggest potential private solutions. So what private solutions are there to reduce the creation of space debris? Salter: That's a really interesting question because the standard response that economists would give to externality problems seems impractical here. Usually when you have an externality problem, a public goods problem, the solution is to create property rights. Property rights align incentives so if we create property rights to a common pool resource, that will cause people to take better account of the effects of their behaviour on others. But how do you really create a property right to something like an orbit? Is it a specific volume of space? How big is it? Under what conditions can somebody else move through it when your satellite is not in that orbit? I think in this case we have to take seriously the idea that creating property rights to orbit and to access to orbit is simply too costly. It's not feasible given the costs and benefits of the situation. I think the most promising way forward in this particular issue is using market mechanisms to mitigate the problem. So in order to talk about market mechanisms I need to do a little background on international law. There's this treaty, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which basically says among other things that nations retain jurisdiction over the stuff they put in space. Now that's important because if debris is big enough to be tracked, we can tell more or less who made it. So if you have, for example, a piece of Chinese space debris, it's technically contrary to international law for a US organization to go up there and do anything without the Chinese' permission. So if the US wants to do something it has to take care of its own space debris. If the Chinese want to do something, they have to take care of their space debris. Given that constraint, I think one potential is for the US government to auction off contracts to go and mitigate this stuff. Another potential is instead of auctioning off contracts to go remove it, auctioning off a contract to debris itself. One thing that's not often realized about space debris is that a lot of that stuff is valuable metal, material, that's already in orbit. The most costly part of space commerce is actually getting stuff out of Earth's gravity. So if you have debris that's currently up there that can be re-used, perhaps at a later date for in-situ manufacturing and repairs, then that's a valuable asset. Firms should be willing to pay for that. So I think we need to look at market mechanisms within particular nations to address this problem until and unless we can get a more favourable framework in international law. Petersen: So something big like a rocket body has a lot of scrap metal that you don't have to burn fuel to get it there because it's already there. That's really interesting. So it could be a resource in itself. But then there's the issue of much smaller debris, something that isn't a resource in itself. A paint chip or a little fragment of debris that is not useful and is more of just a pure hazard. How would you deal with that? Salter: That's extremely difficult. I'm not sure that there is a good solution to that right now. My guess is there has to be a technological solution in the sense of just developing thicker plating for spacecraft. Because a lot of that stuff is so small that it can't be tracked, but it's still big enough that if it hits you, you're going to be in trouble. I think that the only way to really be safe against something like that is just to wait for material to get more robust. And that's obviously not going to solve the problem but it's going to mitigate it. Petersen: It's too bad. In science fiction they would just say "raise shields" and it would be dealt with, but I guess we can't do that. Salter: That's another imaginative technological innovation and maybe something like that will be feasible some day. There's an actual technological literature on this, of people thinking up contraptions and devices for going out and removing specifically that kind of debris, but none of them are economically feasible and I think most of them aren't even technologically feasible at this point. We just can't even make the stuff apart from economic considerations. Petersen: So there's a future in building technology to deflect or remove tiny bits of debris from Earth orbit. I don't know if you saw the…

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Re-thinking the U-Curve of Inequality with Vincent Geloso Nov 01, 2016

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What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Vincent Geloso. Petersen: My guest today is Vincent Geloso of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. Vincent, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Geloso: It's a pleasure to be here. Petersen: So the paper we'll be discussing today is titled "A U-curve of Inequality? Measuring Inequality in the Interwar Period" which Vincent has co-authored with John Moore and Phillips Schlosser. The paper casts doubt on the claim from, most notably, Thomas Piketty and others that inequality fell from the 1920s to the 1960s and rose thereafter. So, Vincent let's start by discussing the inequality literature prior to this paper. What is this U-curve and where did it come from? Geloso: The U-curve is probably the most important stylized fact we have now in the debate over inequality and the idea is that, if you look at the twentieth century, there's a high point of inequality in the 1910s, 1920s and then from the 1930s onwards up to 1970s, it falls dramatically to very low levels and re-increases thereafter, returning to 1920s-like levels of inequality. So the U-curve is the story of inequality in the twentieth century. It's mostly a U.S. story because for other countries it looks less like the U-curve than an inverted J. So it's higher in the 1920s, it still falls like in the U.S. but really increases much more modestly than the United States in places like Sweden, or France, or Canada. But the general story is that there was a high level of inequality at the beginning of the century well up to the mid-second-half of the twentieth century and it re-increased in the latter years and then we have been on a surge since then. Petersen: So, a lot of this is coming from Thomas Piketty, who of course wrote the surprising bestseller "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Could you talk a little bit about where his data came from? Geloso: Okay, by the way, this is where there's a failing on my part which I think I always find funny; an anecdote to tell about Piketty. I'm originally from Quebec, so I am a French-Canadian, I speak fluent French. His work started coming out in French first and I initially started to write elements of the paper we're discussing today back when it was only in French. And then I told myself, "There's no point, it's only a French book, nobody reads French. What's the point of writing a paper about a book that no one will read?" Biggest mistake of my career, I guess, not writing that paper before. But anyways, besides that, his entire argument is based largely on his most influential paper---which I think was published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics---which was using tax data. So, the records, the fiscal statistics to create measurements of income inequality in the United States and the advantage of that is that since the income tax started in 1910s you've got a long, long period of measurement of income inequality with the same source. So it's a great advantage because a lot of the people before like Kuznets, like others had to use residual estimates, different sources, they were amalgamating different sources together and it was always a problem because you couldn't create one homogeneous time-series of inequality. You could get a rough idea and there's a few papers---for those who read economic history stuff---there was a paper by Lindert and Williamson in the 70s in research in economic history and you can see their first graph in that paper was a series of different measures of inequality. They were all pointing to the general similar shaped curve but they were all from massively different statistics, different sources. So one was the 50:10 ratio of earnings, another one was a measure of income, the other was wages and they are all different measures, they are not perfect. You can get a good idea, a rough idea but you cannot have a continuous time estimate which is what Piketty innovated by using the tax-wealth with Emmanuel Saez, recreating this long continuous trend in data from 1917 to the modern day. And they keep updating it regularly to include the new data on a yearly basis. Petersen: So tell me about tax avoidance. How does that affect things? Geloso: Okay, this is where the existing data that all the different sources had---Piketty made advancement. Rather than having variance across different sources, he was eliminating that variance. But there's still an issue of variance within a source. So it's not because you have used a homogenous source that the quality of the data contained within the source is consistent. There's actually quite a lot of variance in data quality because of the way the tax system was done. So a lot of the debate today for the data for today has been---has there been such a large increase in inequality as Piketty and Saez and Atkinson and others have been pointing out? And the reason for that was largely because, as Alan Reynolds, as Joel Slemrod, and a few others have pointed out, the tax changes of the 1980s were so large that people shifted the way they reported income. They changed the way they reported tax liability. What used to be classified as corporate income became classified as individual income, and so you get an artificial increase because of a way the tax system has changed. And this is why a lot of people say, as soon as you correct for the effect of changes in tax reporting behavior, you actually get a much more modest increase of inequality. But that's from 1980 to today with a massive tax change in the 1980s. If you go back further in time, to the interwar period the tax changes are much more dramatic. In 1913, the tax rate was 7%, went up to 15% in 1916 to 73% until 1921, went back down to 24% by 1929, went back up to 79% by 1939. Imagine, that's a lot of movements in the way taxes will affect behavior and it will affect reporting behavior. So, will you report, will you be as honest as you would be when you're filing taxes at 79%, as you are when you're filing taxes at 24%? So you're getting---because of these massive changes in tax regimes that are happening over very short periods of time---these massive changes affect the quality of the data set that Piketty is using for the left side of his U-curve. The left side of the U-curve is probably inaccurate to a very high level because of tax avoidance, and this is where the economists in general failed to talk to historians because there's a few papers out there that did measure---especially in the Journal of Economic History---that did measure changes in reporting. So changes in tax avoidance occur basically to a large level by the top incomes, as Gene Smiley argues in the Journal of Economic History, for example, which Piketty has never cited neither Saez, neither anyone in the debate. And he did corrections, so he checked: Okay, when a tax rate went down from 73% to 24%, did people change their reporting behavior? Did more rich people start to report incomes? And the answer is 'yes.' And as soon as he started doing corrections for that to control the "artificialness"---if that's a word---of the tax changes on affecting the level of inequality, he actually finds that the 1920s have a much lower level of inequality because of the reduction in tax rates and there was very little upward trend, especially when we're comparing with the Piketty, with the Mark Frank data, with the Kuznets data and it shows that as soon as you adjust for tax avoidance the left side of the U-curve flattens dramatically and it looks more like an L---an inverted L---or a J, but it doesn't look at all like a U-curve and that's just tax avoidance for the 1920s. The increases in the 1930s in tax rates would have had the opposite effect where people would have reported less income. So, the level of inequality in the 1920s is overestimated in Piketty and it's underestimated for the 1930s. So you're kind of flattening the entire interwar period as soon as you consider the one issue of tax avoidance. And there are estimates out there in the Essays in Economic and Business History by Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn. Smiley's article in the JEH, which has been ignored in the literature, but which did check that people at the top of the income distribution are generally very sensitive to changes in tax regime in the way they report their tax liability. Petersen: So, today they would do that by maybe registering---having their money in the Cayman Islands or Ireland or the Isle of Man, their tax shelters abroad. Was the avoidance different in the 1920s? I expect it would be harder to enforce taxes given that the income tax was so new and there were all these changes and they didn't have electronic records, or how did it work? Geloso: You're thinking of avoidance in a very negative term which is the illegal part, which is what has somewhat permeated the public debate and I have this reflex myself. I think of avoidance always in that way. But avoidance is sometimes just planning your taxes, your sources of income, differently. One example would be---and it's not really applicable to our case---parents can put their kids on company payroll because it's cheaper dollar for dollar relative to giving them an allowance from after-tax personal income. So, people can change their behavior in their way to get money, in the way they report their income. So you can pass corporate income as a personal income or personal income as corporate income. You can deduct expenses one way or another. And one way or another it comes to affecting the quality of the data set. And it does matter, because if you look at the 1980s when there was a rapid change in the income tax rate, which was much more important a change than the change in the corporate tax rate, it led people to change the type of incorporation they were in, so they became S corporations, so corporations that were not subjected necessarily to the corporate income tax. So, it affected the way people reported, classified their income and it appears artificially the income inequality statistics. The 1920s' equivalent was municipal bonds. Municipal bonds were assets that delivered incomes but they were not subjected to taxes so this was like a tax shelter that was completely legal and that rich people used in dramatic amount to reduce their tax liability. So, when people think of tax avoidance it's generally this idea that people just reorganized their classification of income to make sure they have the smallest liability possible and in a situation like that, what you get is a much different level and trend of inequality because of the changes in tax regimes that induce changes in tax reporting behavior. Petersen: So is Piketty not adjusting for this at all? He's just taking the tax data at face value? Geloso: He's trying some stuff but he gets a lot of the tax history quite wrong and what alerted us to this is that Gene Smiley's paper, which is not in an obscure journal, it's in the Journal of Economic History which is considered a top tier journal in the profession of economics---it's not AER, it's not QJE, but it is a very respectable journal. And Smiley's article is also very cited. There's a large number of citations of that paper and Piketty just ignores it. And you skim through his book and the discussion is always brushed aside and these effects of changes in tax regimes is always minimized as if it was not important. But tax avoidance is only like a fraction of the problem, because if you look, there's another issue that's much more dramatic than tax avoidance. Alone the issue of tax avoidance, if you take Smiley's stuff, changes the narrative dramatically but that's just our first shot in this debate with me, John, and Philip. It's our first shot, the second shot is that filing requirements were nowhere close to what they are like today. And actually this is something funny, the idea of Piketty is that you can create a series assuming tax compliance for a country that was founded on a tax revolt which is---for a historian---kind of a weird assumption built in the way he does his history part. And if you look at it, one of the example is that you look at the changes in wages of people---wages for unskilled workers, wages for mining workers, for agricultural workers---they do not evolve at all like his bottom 90% of income behaves, it behaves actually very differently. So, in our paper we show that the quality of what's at the bottom of the income distribution is dramatically different, so wages go up much faster than the income of the bottom 90%. And this is wages. So, you think what, maybe hours are going down? No they're not in the 1920s and 30s---well in the 30's they're going down---but in 1920s hours are actually staying stable and in some industries are actually slightly increasing. So you should not see what Piketty's data suggest, which is that there was stagnation in the income of the bottom 90%. There was declining unemployment, there was rising wages and hours remaining relatively stable. It's impossible to reconcile these facts with those of Piketty without considering that there might be problems in the way people filed their taxes. And this is where the entire thing breaks down and you look at, for example, the number of tax filers that were actually there. And you look at that as a percentage of the American population, up to the 1930s---so until the Second World War---there's never more than 6 or seven 7 percent of population that files in tax reports. Petersen: And you'd expect it to be the wealthier people too, who are filing right? Because you have people below a certain income, they don't file income tax, right? Geloso: Exactly. This wouldn't be a problem if your distribution of people behaved equal to the distribution of the general population and the movements were the same. It wouldn't be a problem. The thing is when you look at the number of adjusted tax returns which is what Piketty and other people like Estelle Sommeiller or Mark Frank do. They try to re-correct this issue of a very small number of tax reports that were actually filed in and they get an idea---and this is figured too, I think, in our paper. There's a steady upward trend in the number of adjusted tax units but when you look at the actual number of tax units it moves so much. It goes up and down and it doubles in the span of two years, then it reduces by half in the span of another two years and these are such large movements in the number of tax units that it's hard to see that this might be a representative sample of the American population. Differences in reports and such changes in our reporting---and the number of reports I should say---suggest that there is actually a problem in the quality of the data. And this is where we're saying that if you combine this with the observation that wages were increasing, unemployment was falling, and that hours were more or less stable, and that you add this fact of the massive changes in tax returns, you can easily question the quality of the data from the 1920s and the 1930s. This is where we're coming in and we're saying, no, the people who reported taxes were very volatile. They were rich people who reacted to changes in income taxes. Lower income individuals also were very much tax resisters. There's an entire story told by David Beito. I think it's with University North Carolina Press. He has a book on tax resistance in the United States during the 1920s and 30s and there's actually a large documentation of anti-tax leagues that have massive memberships of common in…

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How Land Use Restrictions Make Housing Unaffordable with Emily Hamilton Oct 21, 2016

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What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Emily Hamilton about land use regulations' effects on affordable housing. Petersen: My guest today is Emily Hamilton. She is a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Emily, thanks for being on Economics Detective Radio. Hamilton: Thanks a lot for having me. Petersen: So, Emily recently wrote a paper titled "How Land Use Regulation Undermines Affordable Housing" along with her co-author Sanford Ikeda. The paper is a review of many studies looking at land use restrictions and it identifies four of the most common types of land use restrictions. Those are: minimum lots sizes, minimum parking requirements, inclusionary zoning, and urban growth boundaries. So Emily, could you tell us what each of those restrictions entail? Hamilton: Sure. So, starting off with the first, minimum lots sizes. This is probably what people most commonly associate with zoning. It's the type of Euclidian zoning that separates residential areas from businesses and then within residential areas limits the number of units that can be on any certain size of land. And this is the most common tool that makes up what is sometimes referred to as Snob Zoning, where residents lobby for larger minimum lots sizes and larger house sizes to ensure that their neighbors are people who can afford only that minimum size of housing. Petersen: So it keeps the poor away, effectively. Hamilton: Exactly. And then parking requirements are often used as a tool to ensure that street parking doesn't get too congested. So when cars first became common, parking was really crazy where people would just leave their car on the street, maybe double parked, or in an inconvenient situation near their destination. And obviously as driving became more and more common and that was just an untenable situation and there had to be some sort of order to where people were allowed to park. But street parking remained typically free or underpriced relative to demand. So, people began lobbying for a parking requirement that would require business owners and residential developers to provide parking that was off streets so that this underpriced street parking remained available. But that brought us to today where we often have just mass seas of parking in retail areas and residential areas, which are paper focuses on. Parking substantially contributes to the cost of housing, making it inaccessible in some neighborhoods for low income people and driving up the cost of housing for everyone who has been using the amount of parking that their developer was required to provide. Petersen: So that's one where you can really see the original justification. And it makes sense, if you have a business and a lot of people are parking and it spills over onto the street then maybe that's an externality. And it seems reasonable for you to have to provide parking for the people who come to your business, especially if a lot of them are driving there. But we push that too far, is what I'm hearing. Hamilton: Exactly. Yeah, it does seem reasonable but the argument in favor of parking requirements tends to ignore that business owners have every incentive to make it easy to get to their business. So, in many cases there's not necessarily an externality because the business owner providing the parking has the right incentive to provide enough to make it easy for their customers to get there. The externality really comes up when we think about street parking and Donald Shoup---probably the world's foremost expert on parking---has made the argument that pricing street parking according to demand is a real key in getting parking rules right. Petersen: So, on to the next one. What is inclusionary zoning? Hamilton: Inclusionary zoning is a rule that requires developers to make a certain number of units in a new development accessible to people at various income levels. Often inclusionary zoning is tied with density bonuses. So, a developer will have the choice to make a non-inclusionary project that is only allowed to have the regular amount of density that that lot is zoned for. Or, he can choose to take the inclusionary zoning density bonus which will allow him to build more units overall including the inclusionary unit and additional market-rate units. Typically, units are affordable to people who are making a certain percentage of the area median income, so people who might not have low income but who are making not enough to afford a market rate unit in their current neighborhood. Petersen: Okay, so that's sort of forcing developers to build affordable units that they then will probably lose money on, so that they can build the market rate units that they can make money on. Hamilton: Exactly. That's how cities make inclusionary zoning attractive to developers is by giving them that bonus that can allow them to build more market rate housing. In other cities, however, inclusionary zoning is required for all new developments so it really varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction how it's implemented. Petersen: So the fourth land use restriction you mention is urban growth boundaries. What are those? Hamilton: So Oregon is the most famous example in the US of implementing an urban growth boundary. And what it is, is basically a state law that requires each city to set up a boundary around its edges, where for a certain amount of time no housing can be built outside of that boundary. And the idea is to gradually expand the city's footprint over time to allow the suburbs to expand a little further, but to restrict that suburban development using the boundary for some time period. Other examples like London's urban growth boundary I believe are permanent, so there are certain areas that can never be developed. Petersen: So I believe we have something like this in Vancouver. We have farmland in the metro Vancouver area which---for context this area is one of the most overheated high-priced housing markets in the world---and we have this land that's just zoned for farms. And a lot of the time people don't even bother to plant crops, they're just holding the land for the day when eventually it can be rezoned into housing. So I looked it up before we went on and some of these plots are $350,000 an acre, which of course is not reflective of just how productive they are as farmland but of how productive they would be when they are eventually rezoned. Hamilton: Exactly. Yes, very similar to Oregon's program. And a lot of empirical studies have been done on Portland's growth boundary because researchers can easily look at the block that are selling on either side of the boundary to see whether or not it's affecting land prices and several studies have found a very clear effect of the boundary in driving up the price of the land. Petersen: And in Vancouver, the city is very reluctant to rezone. So, people are constantly applying and being denied but you know it's like winning the lottery having your bit of useless farmland rezoned to super high value housing. And people are just holding on to those dead lands in the hopes of winning that lottery which is kind of---it's a bizarre outcome. Hamilton: It is. And urban growth boundary supporters often frame it as environmental regulation that's going to protect this open space. While encouraging people to live in more dense and transit and walkable friendly neighborhoods, but it's not as if Portland is free of other types of zoning rules. So at the same time it has this urban growth boundary it also has a lot of traditional zoning rules that limit the potential to build up while the growth boundary is limiting the potential to grow out. So it's coming from both directions. Petersen: So, just how costly do economists think these regulations are? What kind of estimates do they have? Hamilton: So, I think some of the most compelling estimates look at the macroeconomic effect of these rules. Because typically the most binding zoning rules are also in the most productive cities, where there's the highest level of demand for people to live. Because these are where the best jobs are as well as the best urban amenities, a lot of people want to live here. One study looking at this macroeconomic effect found that the three most productive cities which are New York, San Francisco, and San Jose---I should clarify; this is just looking at the effective growth within US---if those three cities lowered the burden of their land use regulation to that of the median American city it could result in a 9% increase in the level of US GDP. So, these rules are having just an enormous effect on economic growth. Not to mention the very substantial effect they have for individuals and making it difficult or impossible for people to afford to live in their desired location. Petersen: So, you know, San Francisco that's where Silicon Valley is. And so we think of it as a place with super high productivity---tech workers working at Google---and yet with their housing market being one of the most restricted. So not only is there the loss from the housing market itself, that you could sell a lot of housing there and that would increase GDP by itself, but also there are people living in less productive areas doing less productive jobs, who could come and work for Google. But they can't because they've been priced out of the market. Is that where most of the effect comes from? Hamilton: That's right. Yeah, I think the effect is also certainly at that top-end of the market where we're seeing all kinds of blog posts and articles about a person making six figures at Facebook who can't afford the Bay area. So those people might choose to go live in say Denver, or Austin, or a city that still has plenty of great jobs but isn't as productive as San Francisco or San Jose. But then we also see this down the income spectrum, where people who are in the service industry, say waiting tables, could make much more in San Francisco then they can in Houston, or wherever they happen to live. But their quality of life is much better in some of less productive cities because of the cost of housing and other areas of consumption that higher real estate costs drive up. Petersen: One thing I've heard about a lot of these Californian coastal cities---I think it was Palo Alto---where not a single member of the Palo Alto Police Department lives in Palo Alto because you just can't live there on a policeman's salary, so they all have to commute in every day and then commute out every night. Hamilton: Yeah, and for some of these hugely important needed services it just makes the quality of life of the people in those industries so much worse than it would be if they could afford to live closer to their job. Petersen: Right. So, to summarize the labor market mobility of the United States in general has been greatly restricted by these land use restrictions. Even though the land use restrictions are local, this has an effect on the national economy. Hamilton: Exactly right. And we can see this in the data where income convergence across areas of the country has greatly slowed down since the 1970's when these rules really started taking off. Petersen: You argue that the costs of these restrictions fall primarily on low-income households so can you talk through how that happens? Hamilton: Sure. It happens in two ways. First off, you have the low income people who are living in very expensive cities and these people might have to endure very long commutes---you talked about the police officer in Palo Alto who can't live anywhere near his job. Not that police officers are low income, but just as an example that illustrates the point. Or they have to live in very substandard housing, perhaps a group house that's just crammed with people maybe even illegally, in order to afford to live anywhere near where they're working. Petersen: Yeah, I was going to say I thought those group houses were illegal from these very same land use regulations, but I guess people get around it. Hamilton: Yeah, a lot of US cities have rules about the number of unrelated people who can live in a house. And certainly those rules are sometimes broken. That, I think, is clear to anyone who's spent time in an expensive city. You know, people have to live in these less than ideal conditions and waste too much of their time commuting in order to make that work. But the unseen version of it is the person who lives in a low-income part of the country and would like to improve their job opportunity and quality of life by moving to somewhere more productive, but they simply can't make it work so they stay in that low-income area without meeting their working potential. Petersen: There was a study by David Autor---I think I cited it in a previous episode and got the author name wrong but it's definitely David Autor---and it was looking at the shock, the trade shock that hit United States when it opened up trade with China in the early 2000's. And it basically showed that a lot of parts of the country just never recovered. So, if you worked in particular industries---I think the furniture industry was one that was basically wiped out---and if you worked in a town next to a furniture factory and that was your job, not only did you lose your job, you lost all the value in your home because the one industry in the town is gone. And you can't afford to move to one of the booming industries like Silicon Valley or in another part of the country because they've so greatly restricted the elasticity of their housing supply. And that's not all, Autor's paper basically just shows that it took a very long time to recover from the shock and a lot of places didn't recover at all. But I really think that housing is part of that picture if you're trying to figure out why the US economy can't respond to shocks like it used to in the 20th century. That has to be a big part of the picture. Hamilton: Definitely. And that trend, as far as people being able to leave these depressed or economically stagnant areas, this also comes out in the income's convergence as we talked about earlier. Petersen: So, the other part of that, I saw in your paper, was not only are poor people hurt but rich people who already own homes have seen those home prices rise. So it's affecting inequality at both ends of the spectrum, correct? Hamilton: Right, Bill Fischel at Dartmouth has done a lot of work on why it is that people lobby so hard in favor of rules that restrict development. And he terms it as the Homevoter Hypothesis, where people who own homes have a huge amount of their wealth tied up in their home and so they are in favor of rules that protect that asset and prevent any shocks such as a huge amount of new development that could result in a decline in their homes value. I think you talked about that in your episode with Nolan Gray on trailer parks. Petersen: Yeah, we talked about William Fischel's Homevoter Hypothesis. So the essence of that is that people vote in local elections, and they lobby to restrict the supply of housing in their neighborhood, and that increases their wealth by, you know, increasing the land values in that area. How do you deal with that when there's such an entrenched special interest everywhere to push up land prices? Hamilton: I think that's the hugely difficult problem. And at the same time as we have the challenges with the Homevoter system that Fischel plays out, we have a lot of federal policies that encourage homeownership as not just a good community-building tool but also as an investment. So people are programmed by the federal government to see their house as an investment in spite of economi…

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Writing and Thinking Less Badly with Mike Munger Oct 14, 2016

Show notes

In this episode, I discuss the process of writing and being successful with Mike Munger. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. Petersen: My guest today is Mike Munger of Duke University. Mike, welcome to Economics Detective Radio! Munger: It's a pleasure to be on your show! Petersen: So first I stole EconTalk's format and now I have stolen Mike Munger as well, so if Russ Roberts sends me a cease and desist letter, I'll completely understand why. Munger: Russ and I have an open relationship. We both date other people. Petersen: Oh good, good. I have many jokes I could make about that, but I won't! Munger: Thank you for not. Petersen: So, our topic today is going to be writing and thinking. Let's say that because, as we'll go through, the two are intimately related. So Mike wrote a piece titled "Ten Tips on How to Write Less Badly." Now you may be thinking to yourself, "Hey I thought this was an economics podcast! What does writing have to do with economics?" Well, writing is what economists do and if you write either for your career, or your hobbies, I'm sure you'll find something in this discussion that will be helpful to you. So Mike, you start your piece by saying that you've seen many talented people fail because they couldn't or didn't write. I think the impression a lot of people get while growing up is that writing is the easy subject and that math and science are hard, so how is it that these talented people get tripped up by writing of all things? Munger: Well, writing at all is not that difficult, I suppose like running at all is not that difficult. Most of us can at least run 10 meters. The point is that, if you want to be a professional economist, you are one of those people who actually found math pretty easy and you may not have practiced writing very much. So, I said, I've seen a lot of talented people fail because I was Department Chair here at Duke for 10 years and it's hard to get tenure at Duke, it's not a reward for past behavior, it's a hire. We are trying to guess if you're going to continue to produce interesting and important research after all material incentive to do that has been removed. Because once you have tenure you basically can't be fired. It's not quite true, but it's pretty close to true. So you get six years, I've watched 8 people doing this while I was Chair. You get six years to develop your research agenda and to show that you are going to continue to publish after you no longer have any incentive to do that. Now, what a lot of people do is, for four years they'll work on a few things but not very assiduously and the last two years they will work furiously and they'll have two or three things forthcoming and say, well, like it's a video game, I've done enough to get tenure. What they're saying is, if you ever give me tenure I will never publish anything ever again, which not surprisingly doesn't work out well. So six of the eight people who came up were fired. And when I, as Chair, had to tell them this, they cried, they were surprised, which probably means that I am a bad Chair, but I had tried to communicate over and over again that they needed to develop a research agenda and the way to do that is to write about it, and to write about it every day. That doesn't mean that everything that you'll write will eventually be used, but again, I would go back to the running analogy. Or let's say a soccer game. Suppose you knew those six months from now, you'll have a very important soccer game. You wouldn't wait until the night before the soccer game and practice all night. You would practice for an hour or two every day, recover, think about it, try to get better, but that's not how we do writing. All of us, who are at the level of thinking about graduate school and economics, are clever monkeys. We have always been good enough, that we can wait until the night before and write some bunch of crap and have it be good enough, because we're smarter than the other people. Well, now you're in with a group of people all of whom have always been able to do that and some of them are going to figure out that if you actually starts six months in advance, and work on the thing every day, and throw away most of it, time after time, and start over, your paper is going to be a lot better. And if you look at the books and articles that you think are important, the very things that got you excited about being in economics in the first place, none of those, not one, did the author stay up the night before it was due and write it. Adam Smith worked for years on 'The Wealth of Nations.' He showed it to people, he talked to people, he went for walks and muttered to himself. At one point he was so obsessed with what he was thinking about, he walked right into a noisome sump, that is the chemicals leftover after you have tanned leather. He didn't even notice where he was going! It smelled terrible, he didn't even notice by sight or smell because he was so busy thinking about this stuff, that he had been working on for years and would continue to work on for years. So part of this is my own cri de coeur, my own cry from the heart saying, it's so hard to watch talented people fail when they could have succeeded, because they didn't get this simple message---you have to teach other people. Sometimes you do it in the classroom, most of the time you do it through your writing. If you don't get good at that, you're going to fail. So don't start. If you don't think you want to write, don't become an academic in the first place. Petersen: Yeah, I guess another analogy is, you can be very naturally adept at swimming and that can make you an above average swimmer, but not one of those people swimming at the Olympics isn't both an above average swimmer naturally, and someone who has trained day after day, after day to be there. Munger: Not just at the Olympics. This is if you want to enter a swimming contest at the local YMCA, those other people are on the top one half of one percent. They're not near the Olympics, but they're going to kick your butt unless you've been practicing and practicing and practicing. Petersen: Yeah, and I guess undergraduate education is less like the YMCA; it's sort of the kiddie pool. You really can get by without practice, but you won't necessarily get much out of it. Munger: You won't learn much about writing, and what you write won't be very good, it will just be good enough, that because you're clever and good at this you can produce something that the professor is going to read and say "Ok, I sort of see what the argument is, that's better than the others: A." So that's not a 'good enough' it's just a 'better that the other losers' who aren't going to get to graduate school in the first place. And by losers I mean, people who are going to have successful lives. Petersen: Yeah, we have a funny definition of winning in academia. Munger: It's not clear you're really want to win. Although, to be fair getting tenure someplace and having the ability to write every day about the stuff you are interested in, there really is no better life. The problem is with the six or eight and in my case ten years, because I had a hard time finding a job, that went before that. Petersen: Yeah, so that's covered your first tip in that essay, which was, "writing is an exercise." The second tip was to set goals based on an output, not input. Can you explain that? Munger: One of the things that junior people do and that graduate students also do is to define how hard they're working by how long they spend outside of their apartment and in their office and they might even be at their desk, they might be in a coffee shop. What they're not doing, is facing the terrors of that blinking cursor. So the difficulty with any metric based on inputs is that you're not thinking, "am I actually doing something?" A metric that's based on output focuses more on writing. Now, that can be misleading because you can write badly but the same thing would be true of running or swimming. Sometimes when you have a workout it doesn't go that well but at least you're doing it so you wouldn't define how hard you work out by how much time you spent in the gym. You would say what exercises you actually did. It makes no more sense than that to define how hard you work by how much time you spent in the office, going to other offices, drinking coffee, talking to people, checking Facebook. None of that actually counts. So you have to set very high goal, five hundred, seven hundred fifty words per day, every day, five days a week and you will be a famous and successful academic. That again is the sort of dirty secret since no one does this. A lot of economics articles are only ten or twelve thousand words. So if you write five hundred words a day and you end up throwing away three hundred of those words you're still every ten days going to have two thousand usable words. So twice or three times a year you're going to have enough to have a journal article even if you're throwing away 60% of what you write. And here's the other thing: you learn by writing. What I find frustrating is a lot of people will count reading as work and it's not. Reading is an important input to work just like sleep and having a good breakfast. But in order to be an academic you have to write and the nice thing about writing is, you're writing along and you think, "oh right I understand this." You're trying to summarize the argument of some thinker and you realize "I don't understand it!" Now you go back and you read it, but you read it in a way that allows you to engage in a conversation with that writer. The nice thing about writing is that it allows you to communicate over time and space. I can look at something that was written 300 years ago and try to divine what was in the mind of that writer, what is he or she trying to communicate. And good writing creates in my mind an image or a logic similar to what was in that person's mind even though they're distant in time and space. So when I'm writing I read things differently. I've seen people count as reading, they go through a book, they go through an article they have three different colors of highlighting and they always think they're going to come back. None of that actually went through their brain. But if you're writing then you go to read something, you're looking for a specific question. You read better. So I actually ask my graduate students when they're working on their dissertation, on their third or fourth year, to put up a three by five card in their workspace that says: "Don't read, write! If you're writing you'll become a better reader." Petersen: Yeah, there's an irony in someone who has gone through years of economics education, who could explain to you exactly why the labor theory of value is not correct, applying it to their own work implicitly. Munger: Absolutely, it's "My day was valuable, I spent 11 hours at the office. Holy cow!" Petersen: Yeah, my own version of that was at the end of my first year of my PhD, I spent a lot of time in the office and I realized that I spent so little time at home that I actually only went through I think one full roll of toilet paper. So it's sort of the metric being what I didn't do which was spend time at home and therefore in my own bathroom. Munger: We get it. We get it Garrett. But it is interesting, that's necessary but not sufficient for success. Jim Buchanan always said, "The key to success is apply the behind." He didn't say "behind," he used a different word, but apply your behind to the chair. So you're actually in the chair at your desk and you are writing. Now for him that meant moving a pen across a piece of paper, for us it means typing on a keyboard. Either way, if you apply your behind to the chair---the actual chair at your desk, not the one in front of the desk of one of your friends so you can drink coffee and talk---you'll get a lot done. You'll learn a lot and you'll notice after just a couple of years that there's a divergence, not only in your ability to write but in your understanding of a lot of key issues because you've thought of these things pretty deeply. And the thing that's interesting about that is other people who haven't been writing may at one point have been ahead of you. Maybe they were better at classes but you have to learn to make the transition between being good at taking classes---which is why many of us want to go to graduate school---to being good at expressing our thoughts on paper in a way that other people find interesting. So the emphasis on classes is misleading, your first year in class, second year in class---you get A's but you haven't really developed your own research agenda. That's not as good as the person that actually practices, works on writing and after a year or two has developed a talent. Adam Smith has an interesting story about this with the Street Porter and the Philosopher. So the Street Porter and the Philosopher are not as different as the Philosopher wants to think. The difference was the Street Porter spent a lot of time carrying bags and the Philosopher spent a lot of time reading and writing. Well after just a few years they seem like different people but it's because, hour by hour, the philosopher spent time writing. You can be the Philosopher. If you don't write, you're going to stay the Street Porter. Petersen: Another tip you give is to find a voice. Don't just get published. But isn't getting published the point? What's wrong with making that your end goal? Munger: Let's think about entrepreneurs. Suppose you have two people who fancy themselves to be entrepreneurs. One of them says, "I want to make profits, I don't care how." The other one says "I have a vision of this great product that's going to transform this industry." Who's more likely to make profit? The second, paradoxically the second. Well if I say "I don't care about what I write I just want to get published," my work is going to suck. It's going to lack any kind of imagination or motivation or the reader is going to look at it and say "I don't even understand why this guy is writing." But the person that's found something that he or she is passionate about is actually more likely to get stuff published. So paradoxically the way to be published is to be passionate about what you're writing. If all you're trying to do is get published, that's going to come through. It will just seem instrumental and not very interesting. Petersen: Yes. So Scott Alexander writing at Slate Star Codex had an article recently where he made the distinction between what he called pushing and pulling goals, where a pull goal is when you want to achieve something so you come up with a plan and a structure. Whereas a push goal is where you have a plan and a structure so you'd scramble to try to find something to achieve. This strikes me as another version of the same thing where to just "get published," you know you want thirty pages double spaced with some graphs in there and you don't really care what your message is. That's just not a good way to write is what I'm hearing. Munger: Right. It's not a good w…

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New York Urbanism with Stephen Smith Oct 07, 2016

Show notes

Today's guest is Stephen Smith, he is an analyst for a New York real estate firm.

Stephen did some research showing that at least 40 percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built under today's zoning regulations. In fact, the number is probably significantly higher. Classic landmarks like the Empire State Building, with its floor-area ratio of 30, wouldn't fly today.

Watch this time-lapse of the New York City skyline, and pay close attention to the kind of changes that happen in the earlier part of the video compared to the later part:

Before the twentieth century, the pace of change is very gradual. Two storey buildings are replaced with three storey buildings. Waves of development sweep through the city, replacing wood buildings with brick and stone and concrete.

In the twentieth century, we see a different kind of development. Pay attention to any particular small building and you'll notice one of two things happening: Either the building stays exactly as it is, or it is replaced by a massive skyscraper. There's no more gradual change.

This is caused by the city's adoption of land-use regulations. The first zoning code was adopted in 1916, but the really strict zoning came in 1961. Once this happened, tearing down and replacing a building meant pulling political strings to get it rezoned. Because of the significant fixed cost of getting a lot rezoned, developers opted to build a few extremely tall buildings rather than many moderately tall ones. Heavy restrictions in most of Manhattan led developers to concentrate development in the few places that would allow it. That's why Midtown built up while other neighbourhoods didn't.

New York's mayors tend to be pro-development, but its city councillors block development at every turn. The city council's behaviour is consistent with William Fischel's home voter hypothesis. The city council tends to defer to individual councillors on their own local issues, giving each councillor de-facto control over development in his neighbourhood. When authority is devolved to the hyper-local level, there's a strong incentive to block development to raise real estate prices.

Democracy Versus Epistocracy with Jason Brennan Sep 30, 2016

Show notes

My guest today is Jason Brennan of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is the author of Against Democracy, which is our topic for this episode. The first chapter is available on the publisher's website.

John Stuart Mill believed that getting more people involved in politics would make them smarter, more concerned for the common good, better educated, and nobler. In the intervening century and a half, we've gathered much more data on Mill's hypothesis, and the results don't look good:

The test results are now in. They are, I will hold, largely negative. I think Mill would agree. Most common forms of political engagement not only fail to educate or ennoble us but also tend to stultify and corrupt us." (p. 2)

Diana Mutz performed a study that found that people's belief that their political adversaries were evil and stupid predicted high political engagement. Many studies show similar results, where politics seems to exacerbate our biases along with our meanness and contempt for the other side.

Jason splits democratic citizens into three broad categories: Hobbits, hooligans, and Vulcans.

Hobbits are your average non-voter. They don't care or know much about politics, and they're happy to just live their normal lives without thinking about politics.

Hooligans are your typical political partisans. They are the die-hard sports fans of their preferred party. They are typically well-informed, but the information they consume is extremely biased towards their own side. They cannot pass an ideological Turing test.

Vulcans are people who see clearly through the morass of politics, understanding the arguments from both sides and possessing the social scientific knowledge necessary to select the best options. And just like the Vulcans from Star Trek, they're completely fictional! Or at least they're very rare.

While most of us like to think of ourselves as Vulcans, we're probably more like hooligans.

What if the Knowledgeable Chose our Policies?

Jason's preferred alternative to democracy is epistocracy, a system where more knowledgeable people have more control over politics. There are many forms this could take.

One way of instituting epistocracy is to impose a basic knowledge test on voters. While an econ 101 test would be desirable, it might raise objections from people who view economics as an ideological discipline. But there are many ideologically neutral facts that a voter really ought to know. For instance, someone who doesn't know which party currently holds power probably doesn't have enough information to decide which party is most fit to govern.

You could then restrict votes to only the people who pass the test, or you could weight votes from knowledgeable people more heavily.

Another option is the "enfranchisement lottery" where a random subset of the population (perhaps a few thousand) are selected to vote, but only if they undergo exercises to build their competence as voters. This is somewhat similar to how a jury trial works, where a legal decision is left to a random group of citizens, but only once they have received extensive instruction from a judge, lawyers, expert witnesses, etc.

Finally, you can set up a hybrid system with democratic and epistocratic elements. For instance, you could have a democratic body decide policy while an epistocratic body retains a veto. The Supreme Court functions in this way, since it grants a group of highly educated judges the power to overturn democratically supported laws.

Democracy is Not an End in Itself

Jason encourages his fellow philosophers to think more like social scientists. While philosophers tend to view democracy as an end in itself, social scientists are more interested in whether it has good outcomes. Does democracy promote economic growth more than other systems? Are fewer people persecuted under democracy than under other systems? Are people happier in a democratic system than they would be in an alternative system?

These are the sorts of questions we should be asking about our system of government.

Urban Development, the Growth Ponzi Scheme, and Strong Towns with Chuck Marohn Sep 23, 2016

Show notes

Today's guest on Economics Detective Radio is Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns.

Strong Towns is a non-profit that seeks to reform America from the ground up, starting with its towns and cities. It aims to promote healthy local economies by improving local governance.

The Growth Ponzi Scheme

Chuck began recognizing the problems in America's towns and cities when he was working as a civil engineer. He recounts a story of working in a little city in central Minnesota in the late 1990s. The city had a 300-foot pipe that had cracked, allowing ground water to leak in and overflow their treatment facility. Chuck proposed a $300,000 solution to fix the pipe. However, this was a tiny town with an annual budget of $85,000. So Chuck went to higher levels of government (the federal government, the USDA, etc.) to find someone to fund the project. They all said, "This feels like maintenance. We don't have money for maintenance, so you need to pay for this yourself." Since the feds would only fund expansion projects, Chuck devised a plan: He would propose the largest expansion project he could, then repair the pipe as part of the expansion. This wasn't so much deviousness on his part as it was standard practice in his profession. He designed a couple miles of new pipe, doubled their treatment facility, and as part of that he included repairs for the old pipe. This new project cost $2.6 million.

Everyone was happy about this project. The grant agencies were happy. The legislators issued glowing press releases and held a big ribbon cutting. Chuck got a big bonus from his company. The city was ecstatic. The only lingering problem was that this tiny city that couldn't afford to maintain 300 feet of pipe would now be left with a few miles more pipe and a larger treatment facility.

This is an example of one part of what Chuck calls the Growth Ponzi Scheme. This is when cities and towns expand in ways they can't maintain without further expansion.

There's a political reason why things like this happen. Building new infrastructure is very politically appealing. You can build a new highway and name it after a prominent politician, you can have a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, and you can get all sorts of good press for the project. Maintenance is less sexy; you close down a lane of some existing highway, delay everyone's commute, and then you don't have a ribbon-cutting or positive press for all the potholes you filled in. That's why higher levels of government have been paying for big projects and passing off the responsibility for maintaining them to local governments. These local governments become insolvent when the revenue from the initial big project runs out and the maintenance expenses come due.

This process leads to a form of development where the local tax base is not sufficient to pay for the infrastructure that supports it. When the expansion can't go on any longer, the infrastructure crumbles, the affluent people leave, and the community ends up locked in poverty.

What's Wrong with Big Box Stores?

Embracing this form of unsustainable growth has made our cities less dense and walkable. Instead we have heavily subsidized driving as a means of getting everywhere. One consequence of this has been the rise of big box stores.

The public debate on big box stores tends to miss the mark. The left says big box stores crowd out local businesses, which is true. The right says they pass the market test, offering lower prices and thus improving poor people's standard of living, which is also true.

What both miss is that these big box stores only pass the market test because they don't bear the costs of the infrastructure needed to support them. By subsidizing infrastructure, and by building our cities to be spread out and unwalkable, we make bringing groceries to the people unviable. Instead, the people drive to where groceries are.

In addition to the rise of big box stores, we've seen the demise of small town living. While small towns still exist, they used to have enough small businesses, shops, and grocers to allow a full and comfortable life without leaving the town. Today, small town life consists of driving to the regional hub, perhaps multiple times every week, to get many of your necessities.

What's Wrong with Hastings Street?

Chuck coined the term "STROAD" to push back against the interchangeable use of the terms "street" and "road."

A street is where value lives. Homes and businesses locate themselves along streets so that they can be connected to rest of the transportation network, but the street itself features narrow lanes, low speed limits, and good sidewalks because it's designed more for pedestrians and less for vehicles.

Roads, by contrast, are not meant to be valuable locations in themselves; they are optimized for transporting large volumes of traffic over long distances. They feature wider lanes and faster speed limits.

STROADs are an unhappy blend of both elements. Wide lanes and low speeds make them bad for both pedestrians and drivers. One example of a STROAD is Hastings Street in Vancouver, which tries to be a major thoroughfare for thousands of commuters during rush hour, while still catering to the many businesses along its ten-kilometer span.

Because of its high volume of traffic and many stop lights, motorists can expect to average just twenty kilometers an hour on their commutes to downtown Vancouver.

Gentrification as Part of an Organic System

Chuck wrote an article titled "The Gentrification Paradox," in which he argues that gentrification was actually a healthy part of urban development in the pre-automobile age:

The pre-automobile development pattern was an organic process. It was both incremental and complex... Gentrification – investment followed by displacement – was part of the natural order of things and, as with any organic system, it had a positive role in making things work for everyone.

Before the twentieth century, cities would gradually grow and change over time. But we've used zoning laws to turn our neighbourhoods into unchanging time capsules. Cities used to be antifragile, to borrow a term from Nassim Taleb.

In the past, poorer people would buy property on the outskirts of town, on which they would live and run small businesses. Over time, as the city grew, these outskirts would gradually come to be incorporated into the urban ecosystem. These properties would become more valuable and they would grow with the community, perhaps adding a second storey and expanding the business.

You couldn't do this today. Building codes and zoning laws make any new development into a million-dollar endeavor. People with very little capital can't start with a small property and gradually increase its value over time. This makes the modern form of urban development much less equitable than it was in the past.

Population Growth, the Ethics of Having Children, and Climate Change with Steve Horwitz Sep 16, 2016

Show notes

Today's guest is Steve Horwitz, he is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of the economics department at St. Lawrence University.

Steve recently wrote an article titled, "Make Babies, and Don't Let the Greens Guilt Trip You about It." This was a response to an argument made by the bioethicist Travis Rieder, who was recently profiled by NPR. Rieder argues that it is immoral to have children because of the burden additional humans place on the Earth, in particular because of the risk of catastrophic climate change. Here's how that NPR piece put his argument:

"Back at James Madison University, Travis Rieder explains a PowerPoint graph that seems to offer hope. Bringing down global fertility by just half a child per woman 'could be the thing that saves us,' he says. He cites a study from 2010 that looked at the impact of demographic change on global carbon emissions. It found that slowing population growth could eliminate one-fifth to one-quarter of all the carbon emissions that need to be cut by midcentury to avoid that potentially catastrophic tipping point."

The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it views human beings as consumers and not as producers and innovators. Humans are able to contribute to the division of labour and to come up with ideas. That division of labour allows everyone to become more productive.

Rieder's ideas echo those of Thomas Robert Malthus, and he is wrong for much the same reasons. Malthus anticipated a world where the diminishing returns in agriculture and exponential population growth would lead humanity to subsistence in a few generations. As Malthus predicted, populations did skyrocket, but contra Malthus, people got significantly richer too. What happened?

Innovation happened. Along with that innovation, and contributing to it, was a finer division of labour created by population growth. As Adam Smith wrote, "the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market."

Humans create resources, not by violating thermodynamics, but by discovering better ways to satisfy our needs with the physical matter that exists. Resources are subjective. To a farmer 500 years ago, striking oil was a nuisance. It would ruin his crops and destroy the value of his land. Yet today, the very same oil is a valuable resource because we've discovered how to make it useful. Julian Simon challenged the idea that we're running out of resources, declaring human innovation to be "the ultimate resource."

Rieder and other environmentalists are different from Malthus in that they worry not about more people eating too much food but about them releasing too much carbon. A lot of this comes down to our estimate of the social cost of carbon. Rieder sees this cost as being so high, it outstrips all other concerns. He expects apocalyptic changes in the Earth's climate within twenty years.

Economists are not climate scientists, we aren't trained to be able to perform our own studies on the relationship between carbon emissions and global climate. But what we can do is look at the bulk of the published research. The two things we could say about this to someone like Rieder are, first, that he seems to have based his arguments on the absolute highest estimates of the climate impact of carbon, where a reasonable person might have looked at the median estimates. And second, people who have performed meta-analyses of this literature have found evidence of publication bias towards finding a larger impact, meaning the best estimate would be somewhat below the median estimate once we correct for publication bias. If the kind of climate change Rieder sees coming in twenty years is really more like two hundred years away, it changes the argument a lot.

With the costs of climate change so far out in the future, and the costs of abatement concentrated on the present, our cost-benefit analysis needs to account for the discount factors in such long time spans. The projects that have to be sacrificed today to abate climate change over the next couple centuries have their own benefits that need to be weighed against the costs of releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It all comes down to opportunity cost.

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