jamesz

Bike lanes beget bicycles

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Meta-research shows that more bike lanes generate more cyclists:

Buehler and Pucher found that the presence of off-road bike paths and on-street bike lanes were, by far, the biggest determinant of cycling rates in cities. And that’s true even after you control for a variety of other factors like how hot or cold a city is, how much rain falls, how dense the city is, how high gas prices are, the type of people that live there, or how safe it is to cycle. None of those things seem to matter quite as much. The results, the authors write, “are consistent with the hypothesis that bike lanes and bike paths encourage cycling.”
If that sounds overly obvious, the authors do note that previous research was somewhat scattered on this question. A few studies had found that more bike lanes in a city were associated with more cycling, though it was unclear which was causing which.

The tricky question here is the direction of causation, and it’s likely that causation runs both ways. To claim that bike lanes generate cycling we really need a plausible hypothesis for why that might happen. Thankfully, it’s not that hard: bike lanes lower the cost of cycling because they’re more pleasant and less dangerous. Lower prices mean increased demand for cycling.

OK, so building bike lanes makes cycling cheaper, which gets more people cycling. More and more people are actually getting road bicycles for beginners and changing their lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea, unless more cycling is just inherently good. To decide whether it’s good policy to build more bike lanes we need to compare the cost of building them to the price that people are willing to pay to use them (plus any externalities). Hopefully that’s what’s being done, even though the local newspaper makes it sound as if the main issue is the strength of the cycling lobby!

jamesz

Elinor Ostrom

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I only just found out that Elinor Ostrom died last week. She is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics (although Joan Robinson probably should have got one) and the magnitude of that achievement is magnified by the fact that she didn’t train as an economist! If you’re not familiar with her life then have a read of her obituary over at the NYT.

As I was taught it, her work deals with the conditions under which communities will be able to avoid a tragedy of the commons in managing common resources. Tyler Cowen said of it:

Elinor Ostrom may arguable be considered the mother of field work in development economics. She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal. In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy-hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.
…
For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate… Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

jamesz

The talents of Steve Jobs

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Steve Wozniak may be a brilliant technician, but this quote shows why Jobs was so important to Apple’s success. Wozniak is talking about how much he preferred Siri before Apple bought it.

“I start telling everyone I knew and speaking around the world about how this was the future of computing, speaking things in normal ways, feeling like you’re talking to a human,” Wozniak said of the original Siri program. When asked for an example of how Siri used to be better when it was just a third-party iOS app, Wozniak said that he used to be able to get Siri to list prime numbers greater than 87, but when he asks Siri to do that now it thinks he’s talking about prime ribs.

Yep, he thinks that it’s more useful to interpret ‘prime’ as referring to numbers than ribs. Technicians should really recognise the importance of designers!

jamesz

Who’s scared of paternalism?

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Eric has pointed me to the discussion that happened at Cato Unbound over libertarian/new paternalism. It went a bit like this:

Glen Whitman alleges:

New paternalist policies, and indeed the intellectual framework of new paternalism itself, create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism.

Richard Thaler (a founding father of LP) replies:

[The] risk of the slippery slope appears to be a figment of Professor Whitman’s imagination… Slope-mongering is a well-worn political tool used by all sides in the political debate to debunk any idea they oppose. For example, when the proposal was made to replace the draft with an all-volunteer army, the opponents said this would inevitably lead to all kinds of disastrous consequences because we were turning our military into a band of mercenaries… Instead of slope-mongering we should evaluate proposals on their merits.

My favourite commentary on the debate was Robin Hanson’s:

As far as I’m concerned, all of these authors avoid the core hard problem. Yes paternalism can be a matter of degree, but even so we need principles by which to choose what degree of paternalism is appropriate in what context. Just repeating ‘More’ and ‘Less’ quickly gets tiresome. Such principles need to explicitly take into account the fact that organizations can give folks advice instead of limiting their choices.

It highlights how the argument often ignores the key normative question: how paternalistic should governments be? I’m constantly surrounded by people arguing from a fairly libertarian, utilitarian perspective so I’m curious about how the other half thinks. For instance, what’s the justification for trying to stamp out smoking? Which modern philosophers have supported positions that economists would refer to as hard paternalism, and why?

jamesz

The importance of economists

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In the comments of a recent post I claimed that philosophers and economists have little sway over important social policy decisions. Discussing the subject with colleagues I was pointed to this stunning quote by Keynes:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

I’d like to believe it but is there any empirical support? Not that I’d really want to kill such a beautiful idea with brutal facts.

jamesz

No free lunches in economic reform

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A recently released report from the Grattan Institute in Australia surveys ‘game-changing’ ways to increase GDP. Its conclusions on the priorities for economic reform are summarised in a diagram:

Notably, two of the three most urgent changes that they identify relate to lifting workforce participation. That’s a tricky topic because, while more labour might increase GDP, it also decreases leisure time. Read more