Soriek
1yr ago
I can believe something like this is true and would like to read more about it. That said, if we’re really trying to compare the British colonists to their homeland then we should probably also include the Appalachians, who underperform in the US. That’s at least part of the problem with this kind of model, even a relatively small country like the UK can have a wide range of differently performing groups all technically with the same length of time in agriculture and the same breadth of technology (though there’s certainly an argument the borderers didn’t really live under a central state). As you say, if selection effects mean you can’t predict which part of a country an immigrant will be representative of, then it’s hard to use deep roots to make immigration policy.
To your point about how England itself changed after mass emigration, my understanding is that rather than native English worker performance dropping, their productivity increased significantly. After moving so much of their agricultural sector overseas they suddenly had English workers freed up to move into higher paying, more productive industry jobs in those boom towns of Manchester and Birmingham, as you mentioned. I think the idea that this fueled a population change is interesting, though I imagine we wouldn’t see it in productivity stats just because it would be swamped by industrialization. I also assume to whatever extent Anglo-Americans did constitute a better preserved snapshot of those older demographics, this too has been faded away by lower birth rates and cross-cultural intermarriage.
Kind of unrelated but on the same topic of emigration, I’ve also heard it argued that the American settler colonies lowered European inequality, since food became so much cheaper via imports. Likewise, there’s an interesting argument that emigration could have strengthened European labor movements/social democracy (at least in one country studied) by shrinking the labor supply, and by emboldening workers to organize because they knew they had a literal exit option if repression got too bad.
Soriek
1yr ago
This description of the training is frustrating literally just to hear about haha
Soriek
1yr ago
The transformation of the poor East Asian countries into the modern tigers is endlessly interesting to me. I wrote an effort post a while back at the old place, I think partially inspired by a convo we had at some point, about what I see as America’s role in their development, though it’s far from the whole story. Whatever lessons there are to be gleaned in their takeoff eras seems crucial for other developing countries.
Soriek
1yr ago
That’s very interesting and makes sense in the same vein as the Swedish emigration. There’s also this piece on how German participants in the 1848 revolutions fled after they were crushed, and thus made the German immigrant population in the US exceptionally liberal, and even played a disproportionate role in abolitionist movements. All of these are cases where the impact of immigration had the exact opposite effect of what we would assume by looking at native populations, since the immigrants were specifically people who left in part because they didn’t fit in.
You have anything you recommend to read on Finnish immigration?
Soriek
1yr ago
I chose the low point of Chinese communism specifically to illustrate that even at its most destructive, it did not make China significantly poorer than Singapore. And no, it is not Singapore that had the twenty year head start over China policy-wise - hence their comparable growth rates during the 60s and 70s throughout the Cultural Revolution - but China that had policy and institutional head start over Singapore, which was a large statist, semi-socialist nation that only liberalized in 1995, fifteen years after China had liberalized FDI restrictions and started welcoming in multinationals.
To drag out how little the 1960 - 1980 era should matter to discussions of their modern, post communist divergence, we could even balance out those decades by freezing Singapore‘s growth for the next 20 years and allowing China to continue to grow at about 6.5%; 20 years later China would still have a GDP per capita barely over half of Singapore’s.
I am arguing that based on the deep roots, human capital model this entire discussion has been about, you should predict that China would be the richer of the two. That you see the exact opposite of this is likely evidence that deep roots has weak explanatory power for economics.
You said no, because of communism, so I pointed out that during the depths of communism China was barely poorer than Singapore, and since they both started at the same point and communism ended a very long time ago, its effects aren’t very relevant to our modern comparisons of their economies. The very fact that a country even can switch economic systems drastically, from communism to capitalism, is evidence that our institutions and economic performance are not constrained by culture as the deep roots theory would predict.
Soriek
1yr ago
I don’t know much about the Netherlands but in Belgium the Dutch and French (or Flemmings and Walloons if you prefer their Dr. Seuss names) have had pretty tense relations; pre ww2 the Dutch were poorer and had their language repressed in schools, now they’re richer (and have a a bit of an ethno-nationalist movement). I think they’re all mostly Catholic
Soriek
1yr ago
Oh really? I hadn’t realized. That’s remarkably rough for the UK, given that it’s one of our poorest regions
Roughly a month after hammering out the Windsor Agreement to settle Northern Irish trade, the United Kingdom has also finally joined the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What a bizarre trajectory the nation has travelled through from Brexit back to fulfilling David Cameron's hopes of joining the Asian multilateral trade deal.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the move early Friday, hailing it as a historic move that could help lift economic growth in the country by £1.8 billion ($2.2 billion) in the long run.
“The bloc is home to more 500 million people and will be worth 15% of global GDP once the UK joins,” Sunak’s office said.
The CPTPP is a free trade agreement with 11 members: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. It succeeded the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the United States withdrew under former President Donald Trump in 2017 . . .
As a member, more than 99% of UK exports to those 11 countries will now be eligible for tariff-free trade. That includes major exports, such as cheese, cars, chocolate, machinery, gin and whisky.
In the year through September 2022, the United Kingdom exported £60.5 billion ($75 billion) worth of goods to CPTPP countries, Sunak’s office said in a statement.
Dairy farmers, for example, sent £23.9 million ($29.6 million) worth of products such as cheese and butter to Canada, Chile, Japan and Mexico last year, and were set to “benefit from lower tariffs,” it added.
The deal also aims to lift red tape for British businesses, which will no longer be required to set up local offices or be residents of the pact’s member countries to provide services there.
Services made up a huge chunk — 43% — of overall UK trade with CPTPP members last year, according to Sunak’s office.
Unfortunately I don't know enough about the deal to say much intelligent, but was hoping people could share what they think the implications the new deal will entail.
Anti-Antiplanner
A week or two ago a commenter brought up Randal O’Toole, an ex-Cato Institute researcher who was kicked out for believing that single family zoning was a valid expression of property rights (or something). While I disagree with most of his shtick, it’s hard not to have a grudging affection someone who’s such an obstinate libertarian that even the other obstinate libertarians don’t want to hang out with him
O’Toole is probably more known for his work on transit, of which his focus on suburbs is kind of a subset. Famously, he’s deeply against public transit of almost all forms and strictly pro-car. Ironically, this is despite the fact that he personally is a train enthusiast and avid cyclist who claims to have never driven a car to work. His research is generally solid and numbers are legit, you can read a good summary of his transit ideas on the charmingly titled “Transit: The Urban Parasite.”
His broad claims are that transit both costs more and is more polluting “per-passenger miler,” or per person moved around, when compared to cars, and that transit ridership continues to fall even when we raise subsidies.
These stats seem basically true, but are they a natural free market outcome, or do they specifically reflect a choice landscape that emerged from the very fact that we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the interstate highway system and countless smaller road projects, and that single family zoning, parking minimums, and resultant sprawl have purposely built an environment where much of transit is impractical and rendered uncompetitive?
These are massively relevant questions because all O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership. Trains are not more expensive and polluting because they lack the capacity to move around more people but because (and this is O’Toole’s argument) most seats are unfilled lately, so a lot of energy goes into moving only a few people. But if ridership was higher the numbers would be completely reversed!
Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about: affordability, environmental damage, and efficient use of space. Ranking urban planning based on its contingent worst performance rather than its societal potential feels like bizarrely short term thinking.
Nor should we assume the present situation is irreversible. The strength of O’Toole’s argument about trains becoming obsolete rests on emphasizing a decline in ridership in the last few years, a timeframe that of course did include a global pandemic, a pretty clear reason to invest in a car and stay away from crowds. Critic Jarrett Walker notes that:
When he tells us that ridership “peaked,” he’s confessing that he’s playing the “arbitrary starting year” game. To get the biggest possible failure story, he compares current ridership to a past year that he selected because ridership was especially high then. This is a standard way of exploiting the natural volatility of ridership to create exaggerated trends. Again, the Los Angeles Times article that got O’Toole going made a big deal out of how ridership is down since 1985 and 2006, without mentioning that ridership is up since 1989 and up since 2004 and 2011. Whether ridership is up or down depends on which past year you choose, which is to say, it’s about what story the writer wants to tell.
Likewise, O’Toole’s much cited constant cost overruns and astounding costs per mile of construction on transit projects aren’t written into stone; they’re in large part due to the enormous legal, compliance and consulting costs caused by hopelessly inefficient procurement processes, environmental rules (“the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project, which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a ‘tiny transparent invertebrate’ might be at risk”), and land use regulations - government restrictions that O’Toole himself has compared to communism! Further high but unproductive expenses are maintenance backlogs (catching up for previous years of underfunding) and security staff. But O’Toole himself argues that security costs could be massively reduced simply by making turnstiles more secure.
Looking at other countries with less institutional corrosion, the costs of building transit are significantly cheaper:
On a per mile basis, America’s transit rail projects are some of the most expensive in the world. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile.
In contrast, Copenhagen built a project at just $323 million per mile, and Paris and Madrid did their projects for $160 million and $320 million per mile, respectively. These are massive differences in cost.
Furthermore, all of the above mentioned lines are profitable (though the Paris subway did record a year of loss in 2020). Which isn’t hard to imagine; if our transit system were 1/6th to 1/8th as expensive as it is now then we’d be profitable as well. O’Toole criticizes endlessly unsustainable transit subsidies, but ignores that absent America’s uniquely high costs, well-managed transit can actually be a boon to municipal coffers.
In contrast, he touts cars’ light subsidy footprint (up to 40% of costs but supposedly as low as a penny per passenger mile) - but of course these figures are depressed by outsourcing the costs of the actual vehicles to the users. [edit: updated from Walterodim pointing out we don't know how many people own new vs used cars] Experian records the average person paying $716 a month on new car payments and $525 on used car payments. Adding data from the AAA on insurance, fuel, and maintenance brings that up to $704 - $894 a month, or $8448 - $10,278 a year. O'Toole cites the total cost of cars in 2017 (with lower numbers than these 2023 costs) as worth $1.15 trillion, or “only” 6.8% of car owner’s incomes.
This is an enormous cost for normal people, and stealth deflates the actual costs of driving infrastructure when compared with transit. In contrast, most subways tickets can be bought for about $2.50, or $1200 yearly across a twice-a-day, five-day-a-week commute - nearly one tenth of the cost borne by the car owner.
Further stealth subsidies include municipal parking minimums that landlords pass on to the public in the form of higher rents, and that also unnecessarily burden business operations: “When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes”. Lest this seem like nitpicking, one pricing estimate, using conservative numbers, finds the total value of parking in the US exceeds the value of even the cars themselves, roughly doubling off-sheet privatized costs.
Tl;dr: Lest this seem overly critical, I actually hold a contrarian’s fondness for O’Toole and respect his work. Still, in every instance O’Toole seems to be taking transit systems that are specifically the worst possible example of their form, out of date, mismanaged, chronically underfunded, their customers drawn away by car infrastructure and their costs artificially inflated by regulations, and then compares them to suburban roadways bolstered by restrictive zoning and generous subsidies, with their costs artificially deflated by outsourcing far higher expenses onto consumers, and then pretends the free market has demonstrated the most efficient mode of travel.
Soriek
1yr ago
Sure, I don't disagree with any of that. Though I'm personally not a fan of driving I do think there's a place for both cars and trains in society and that each accomplish better efficiency in different areas. Among new urbanists this is the much maligned "cars- and- trains" take but I don't really see how anything else would work for America. All I want is for both to better serve customers . Insofar as transit's contingent lack of success is used by folks like O'Toole to argue for cuts to productive funding, that's all I'm personally against.
If all that has to be done to make transit superior is (1) Convince people to abandon existing driving infrastructure. (2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US. (3) Improve the strength of our institutions and management (4) Move forward transit spending to update all outdated systems. Then there is NOT a small potential barrier to cross from the O’Toole analysis world to the idealist Urbanist paradise world.
All true, but while there are public policy situations that are genuinely so daunting they might as well be imaginary, I don't think this should include systems that we see a bunch of peer countries having solved. In truth these countries haven't built paradise either - they all deal with project delays and cost overruns as well - but they have managed to make things function well enough that transit can turn a profit, and that's the really important question for me.
Soriek
1yr ago
That's not "depressed". That's actual less subsidy. Car users pay for their own rolling stock, both operating and capital costs.
I guess I should clarify that O'Toole's concerns wrt subsidies revolve around the cost burden on the taxpayer. Paying those costs privately is just a different, higher way of tallying the same burden
I too have an affinity for people who are so X that even other Xs think he's annoying.
A kindred spirit!
I'll be honest, I prefer trains by a lot. I grew up in the middle of nowhere where you needed a car to do anything. My family car broke down all the time and left me immobile, so for me driving only ever represented how stark the limitations on my freedom were. When I grew up and moved to the city I assumed things would be better, only to realize that almost nothing that makes me feel less free than being stuck in urban traffic.
That said, I tried as much as possible to keep my personal experiences out of it, and I don't begrudge the existence of the suburbs or anything. I think you're right that the current situation represents at least some people's preferences - O'Toole cites somewhere that large majorities of people say they want to someday live in single family houses, which is unsurprising. I think America should host all forms of urban planning as catered to different people's needs. I also think there's a balance to be walked between accommodating those different needs that isn't walked well (ie, was it reasonable for New York City to bulldoze hundreds of thousands of apartment units to build expressways for people outside of the city?).
I also think the current situation is to burdened by regulatory nudges and government intervention to really get a good look at what people's revealed preferences would look like. For instance, this paper showing that if parking minimums weren't set most businesses, trying to predict the needs of their customers, would probably build less parking than mandated (if this wasn't true, it would odd that we set minimums anyway).
Soriek
1yr ago
(2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US.
This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.
Agreed, while cutting project costs is definitely the most challenging battle, it's also one that encompasses so many things beyond trains - our inability to build housing, energy infrastructure, etc, to meet Americans needs and decrease costs. It should definitely be one of the top public policy priorities. And it's not like it's a mystery where to start; there's a lot of low hanging fruit from streamlining environmental review, permitting, and procurement processes.
Soriek
1yr ago
Trains are less efficient not because they aren't capable of better per-passenger-mile metrics than cars, but because trains use the same amount of energy no matter how many people ride them, and right now not that many people ride the train, so a lot of energy goes into moving around not that many people. The more that people use the train the more efficient it becomes (easily beating cars long before reaching peak capacity), so while I am not personally advocating for higher car taxes, to the extent that they shifted consumers towards trains they would be solving the problem of efficiency/reducing externalities per passenger mile in real time.
Soriek
1yr ago
It isn't really, no. If what we care about is how much people have to spend on transit then you both take into account how much they pay in taxes and how much they pay out of pocket.
Soriek
1yr ago
Sure, but that was why I added in the stats noting that ridership doesn't just decline, it bounces around and can be increased as well as decreased
Soriek
1yr ago
I feel like you're focusing on the definition of subsidy when the focus for O'Toole and myself is the costs we're all paying, of which subsidies are one form and private costs are another. Of course, much of the funding for cars is also money that other people spend for driver's benefit; from the above linked piece up to 40% comes from general funds, mostly from local property and sales taxes.
Consensus building. You might care about these things, but the market disagrees. Most people care about having open space for their kids that is free of drug addicts.
Much of my post was about demonstrating that transportation isn't a free market, it's massively distorted by government intervention and regulation. I too care about open space, which is why I advocate for more space efficient transit, and also about drug fee zones, which is why I endorsed O'Toole's idea of building secure turnstiles that cannot be easily hopped.
Experian's data only shows cars that have payments on them, which are usually the first or second owners and are 10 years old or newer, in the first half of their service life
I updated the piece about Experian after Walterodim pointed out we don't know what percent of cars are new or old, and instead took my numbers for the total private costs of car ownership from O'Toole, who estimated $1.15 trillion in 2017, and got his numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
He's highlighting the failure mode of transit systems. All systems in the US, except perhaps New York, are out of date, overpriced, and dangerous. Every transit system in America becomes a target for massive graft and corruption, and the American inability to police cities ensures that they will not only be corrupt, but violent.
This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.
Soriek
1yr ago
I think this was true for a while but nowadays the yimbyist-transit crowd have developed a growing consensus around opposing things like zoning and environmental road blocks to construction. The mouthpiece for this crowd are people like Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who talk about "supply-side progressivism" and fighting veto-points.
Soriek
1yr ago
Yeah it can be confusing because gas taxes are used for both systems as well. Also correct that the 40% doesn’t include private costs but rather taxes; the remaining 60% is from user fees. I just added that in to point out that both systems are financed partially by people other than their users; the fact that car owners bear the private burden of their vehicle doesn’t mean that car infrastructure doesn’t receive other people’s money as well.
Soriek
1yr ago
Yes, trains are more expensive than they need to be, because of the reasons I listed in the comment you’re replying to and in my OP. The “growing consensus” isn’t among policymakers and politicians but among urbanist advocates. Like him or not, if Noah Smith were transit god king these projects would likely happen much more cheaply.
Soriek
1yr ago
Doing a bit of googling to confirm this: that's for a five year loan. A new car lasts a few times as long as that. Google says the average age of a modern vehicle is 11.4 years. So pay $716 for 5 years and then get a paid off car for a hell of a lot longer.
Thanks for crunching that out, others have also pointed out my table napkin math was (predictably) off, so I switched to O’Toole’s Bureau of Economic Administration stat that in 2017 drivers spent $1.15 trillion on cars.
I saw a Federal agency's list of per passenger mile fuel consumption for various means of transportation and public busses were shocking bad. Worse than a single person driving a big truck. A full bus is very fuel efficient per passenger mile. But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.
You’ve described the long and the short of it really: transit is much more effective than cars when full, but less efficient when empty, which raises the question if we should keep pushing policies that distort the market away from the most efficient form of transit, like single family zoning, municipal parking minimums, and diverting sales and property tax to road infrastructure.
The things you care about.
Affordability, efficiency, pollution, and use of public space are things that people on all sides of this debate are comparing, from Randal O’Toole to the most militant /r/fuckcars poster.
Soriek
1yr ago
There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency.
I think in some instances this is probably true, but I feel deeply “managed” and stripped of my agency when waiting at a red light or stuck in traffic.
Agreed, though the deep roots position is that things like corruption, entrepreneurship, and innovation are all manifested out of culture. Idk whether they try to measure those qualities independently, or just take it for granted that if a country has low technology and state capacity that this contains the information that the culture has corruption baked into it.
Trust, likewise, is one of Jones’ important measures of how immigration should impact economies, but it doesn’t hold up that well, ie Hong Kong and Singapore both are about 30% less trusting than China but are quite a bit wealthier.
In fairness I haven’t read Jones’ book (and am not naturally already sympathetic to it) so there’s a limit to how well I can defend his argument.
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