Tenantry Comfort

Friday, July 9th, 2010

In 1857 a select committee of the state legislature described the forces that were shaping New York:

As our wharves became crowded with warehouses, and encompassed with bustle and noise, the wealthier citizens, who peopled old “Knickerbocker” mansions, near the bay, transferred their residence to streets beyond the din; compensating for remoteness from the counting houses, by the advantages of increased quiet and luxury.

Their habitations then passed into the hands, on the one side, of boarding house keepers, on the other, of real estate agents; and here, in its beginning, the tenant house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings limited their expenses and whose employment in workshops, stores, and about the wharves and thoroughfares, rendered a near residence of much importance. At this period, rents were moderate, and a mechanic with family could hire two or more comfortable and even commodious apartments, in a house once occupied by wealthy people, for less than half what he his now obliged to pay for narrow and unhealthy quarters.

This state of tenantry comfort did not, however, continue for long; for the rapid march of improvement speedily enhanced the value of property in the lower wards of the city, and as this took place, rents rose, and accommodations decreased in the same proportion. At first the better class of tenants submitted to retain their single floors, or two and three rooms, at the onerous rates, but this rendered them poorer, and those who were able to do so, followed the example of former proprietors, and emigrated to the upper wards.

The spacious dwelling houses then fell before improvements, or languished for a season, as tenant houses of the type which is now the prevailing evil of our city; that is to say, their large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones (without regard to proper light or ventilation), the rates of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled, from cellar to garret, with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded or squalid as beggary itself.

Cited by Edward Banfield The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974).

Posted in Economics, Edward Banfield, Urbanism | No Comments »

Cats with Big Guns

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Everyone knows that the sabertooth “tiger” (Smilodon fatalis) had massive fangs — I can’t bring myself to call the big cat’s teeth canines — but its secret weapon was exceptional forelimb strength:

The sabertooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, was an enigmatic predator without a true living analog. Their elongate canine teeth were more vulnerable to fracture than those of modern felids, making it imperative for them to immobilize prey with their forelimbs when making a kill. As a result, their need for heavily muscled forelimbs likely exceeded that of modern felids and thus should be reflected in their skeletons.
[...]
Using radiographs of the sabertooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, 28 extant felid [cat] species, and the larger, extinct American lion Panthera atrox, we measured cross-sectional properties of the humerus [upper arm bone] and femur [thigh bone] to provide the first estimates of limb bone strength in bending and torsion.

We found that the humeri of Smilodon were reinforced by cortical thickening to a greater degree than those observed in any living felid, or the much larger P. atrox. The femur of Smilodon also was thickened but not beyond the normal variation found in any other felid measured.

(Hat tip to io9.)

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Solving the Problem of Loafing

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

In Legislative Leviathan, Cox and McCubbins share an unusual solution to the prisoner’s dilemma faced by a team of laborers:

In prerevolutionary China large gangs of men would tug fair-sized boats up the Yangtze. The problem was that each man was tempted to slack off a bit. After all, if enough others were pulling, the boat would still progress; if too few others were pulling, it did not matter how hard one pulled anyway.
[...]
Cheung has noted that the problem of loafing was so severe  that workers “actually agreed to the hiring of [someone] to whip them,” thereby ensuring that everyone both pulled and got paid.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Our urban problems are like the mechanical rabbit at the racetrack

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Our urban problems are like the mechanical rabbit at the racetrack, Edward Banfield says, which is set to keep just ahead of the dogs no matter how fast they may run:

Consider the poverty problem, for example. Irving Kristol has pointed out that for nearly a century all studies, in all countries, have concluded that a third, a fourth, or a fifth of the nation in question is below the poverty line.

“Obviously,” he remarks, “if one defines the poverty line as that which places one-fifth of the nation below it, then one-fifth of the nation will always be below the poverty line.” The point is that even if everyone is better off there will be as much poverty as ever, provided that the line is redefined upwards.

Kristol notes that whereas in the depths of the Depression, F.D.R. found only one-third of the nation “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Leon Keyserling, a former head of the council of Economic Advisors, in 1962 published a book called Poverty and Deprivation in the U.S. — the Plight of Two-Fifths of a Nation.

Similarly, police brutality has gone from meaning cracking skulls to attacking personal dignity with unjustified questioning and searches:

Following Kristol, one can say that if the “police brutality line” is defined as that which places one-fifth of all police behavior below it, then one-fifth of all police behavior will always be brutal.

The school dropout problem is a more striking example:

At the turn of the century, when almost everyone was a dropout, the term and the “problem” did not exist. It was not until the 1960s, when for the first time a majority of boys and girls were graduating from high school and practically all had at least some high school training, that the “dropout problem” became acute.
[...]
Obviously, if one defines the “inadequate amount of schooling line” as that which places one-fifth of all boys and girls below it, then one-fifth of all boys and girls will always be receiving an inadequate amount of schooling.

From The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974).

Posted in Economics, Edward Banfield, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Legalization could slash the price of pot 80%

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana, might slash the price of pot 80%, from $300–450 per ounce to $38, according to Rand:

The report noted that it was impossible to predict tax revenues from the initiative, which leaves that decision to cities and counties, but concluded that revenues from a statewide $50-per-ounce tax could range from $650 million to $1.49 billion.

To calculate the price drop, researchers looked at the cost of growing marijuana in a 1,500-square-foot house. The researchers concluded that the wages paid to employees who tend the crop would slip from as much as $25 per hour to no more than $10, just a little above what nursery laborers earn.
[...]
Researchers also looked at estimates of the cost of enforcing marijuana laws in California, which range from $200 million to $1.9 billion, and put it at “probably less than $300 million.” They also concluded that it is not possible to determine whether increased use would lead to more drugged driving accidents and to more use of harder drugs, such as cocaine, finding that the research is inconclusive.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Go Dutch

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) enumerates his reasons for rooting for the Netherlands in the World Cup:

  1. More than almost any nation since the Phoenicians, the Dutch traded rather than plundered their way to prosperity in their Golden Age.
  2. They were cheated out of winning (hosting?) the industrial revolution by invasions and attacks from jealous neighbours, especially Louis XIV.
  3. When thwarted at home they took their trade model to Britain by taking over the monarchy in the Glorious Revolution and installing merchant-friendly policies.
  4. Their trade created some of the most sublime works of art of all time. Rembrandt and Verneer would not have happened without trade and prosperity.
  5. They founded New York.
  6. Despite having one of the highest population densities in the world, they are encouraging biodiversity. They may even manage to recreate the aurochs.
  7. They suffered terribly in the Hunger Winter for standing up the Nazis.
  8. They are living proof to climate pessimists that dwelling below sea level is no problem if you are prosperous.
  9. They discovered Spitsbergen, the last land mass in the Northern hemisphere to be discovered by human beings
  10. They have yet to win the World Cup.

Apparently their soccer team is responsible for most of those. Right?

(By the way, using root to mean cheer only goes back to 1889 — at least according to Merriam-Webster.)

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The Spirit of Independence

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Intellectuals tend to believe that ideas cause attitudes, Lee Harris says, though it is far more often the other way around:

Several years ago, while attending a street festival in the small town of Tucker, Georgia, I came across a booth sponsored by the local libertarian society. At the time, I did not realize that my encounter would generate my next book. I only remember being struck by the question asked of everyone who visited the booth that day: “So who owns you?”
[...]
To most of [those who wandered into the booth that day], the question “So who owns you?” seemed to come with the force of a revelation, and they responded with a decided and often emphatic, “Nobody owns me.” Which is to say, someone may own other people, but certainly does not own me.

Lee Harris sees this as evidence that many people are natural libertarians. Arnold Kling does not; he emphasizes the last bit of that excerpt:

I think that most people resent being told what to do, and yet such people are not libertarians when it comes to other people being told what to do.

I have a stronger criterion for natural libertarianism. When you see other people doing something that really offends you, are you willing to see the state allow that behavior to continue? Only if you can answer “yes” are you a natural libertarian. I think that there are very few natural libertarians.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Lee Harris, Policy | No Comments »

The Authentic Voice of Rural Conservatism

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

The situation in Afghanistan sounds oddly familiar:

We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban — and they have very good reason for doing so — the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.

A powerful, centralized, urban government does not share the values of its conservative, religious, rural heartland? The authentic voice of the people must be heard — as long as they vote for secularism, gender equality, and progress?

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

American cities have frequently grown at fantastic rates

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

During the 1960s, the population of American metropolitan areas increased by nearly 17 percent, Edward Banfield notes — in The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974) — but this should not be cause for alarm:

American cities have frequently grown at fantastic rates (consider the growth of Chicago from a prairie village of 4,470 in 1840 to a metropolis of more than a million in fifty years).

Wow.

Posted in Edward Banfield, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Breaking the Rules

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Invite a few übergeeks over to play a cybersecurity simulation game, and you can bet the winner will be the one who most creatively breaks the rules:

Last July, during the inaugural round of the online cybersecurity simulation game NetWars, 75 contestants vied to hack into and control the game’s 12 servers, planting their user names on the conquered computers to declare their territory. But one contestant, known as SevenM7, had other ideas. Instead of focusing on the game’s targets, he hijacked NetWars’ scorekeeping algorithm. SevenM7′s tally of wins spiked. When the game ended he had three times as many points as any of his baffled competitors.

Some might view SevenM7 (in real life, a 17-year-old high school junior named Michael Coppola) as a cheater or, worse, a cybercriminal in training. Alan Paller sees him as the future of America’s national security.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

What It’s Really Like to Work for Google

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

An anonymous Google employee (“CinoBoo”) explains what it’s really like to work for the search giant:

I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers. It’s a trade-off. Google is at least aware of it and uses incentive programs to entice engineers to spend time in ops roles.

Last, the company is big into “generating luck”, which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off. The practical net effect of this on leaf-node employees is that you can wind up working on three, four, even five or more failed projects in a row. It doesn’t actively hurt you, and in some cases they even give big bonuses to teams that worked really hard before the project was canceled. But because promotions and bonuses are generally tied to “impact”, meaning stuff that actually launches and gets used, a whole lot of people wind up spending their first 4 years there with no launches, no promotions, and no fancy bonuses. (The bonuses really are quite generous for teams who launch things that are successful.)

This may wind up being a morale issue at some point, but at the moment people aren’t so fed up that they’d quit over it. They know they can always move to a sure-fire domain like GMail or Chrome or Ads or whatever, and be assured of at least minor launches and success for a few years. It’s just that there are a lot of opportunities for startup-like success within Google, and people are encouraged to participate without being told of the potential risks and opportunity costs.

These three factors combined yield a fair percentage of employees who wind up feeling a little disenchanted, though not actively scarred the way they might be if they’d worked for 90% of the rest of the industry.

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History Comes Alive in Afghanistan

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

History comes alive in Afghanistan:

At the crest of Jegdalek village, on 12 January 1842, 200 frostbitten British soldiers found themselves surrounded by several thousand Pashtun tribesmen. The two highest-ranking British soldiers, General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton, went off to negotiate but were taken hostage. Only 50 infantrymen managed to break out under cover of darkness. Our own welcome was, thankfully, somewhat warmer.

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. “It is exactly the same,” said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. “Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, ‘We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.’ But they are lying.”

“Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon,” said Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. The names of the fighters of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still known here.

(Again, hat tip to Cameron Schaefer.)

Posted in War | No Comments »

To the last breath a government will try to collect taxes

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

I read Bernard Fall’s The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency — which was originally published in the April 1965 issue of Naval War College Review — a few years ago, and one passage stuck with me:

When I arrived I checked in with the French briefing officer and asked what the situation was in the [Red River] Delta. He said:

Well, we hold pretty much of it; there is the French fortified line around the Delta which we call the “Marshal de Lattre Line” — about 2200 bunkers forming 900 forts. We are going to deny the communists access to the 8 million people in this Delta and the 3 million tons of rice it produces. We will eventually starve them out and deny them access to the population.

In other words, this was the strategic hamlet complex seen five thousand times bigger. There were about 8,000 villages inside that line. This fortified line also protected the rice fields then, whereas now the individual strategic hamlets do not protect the same fields.

“Well,” I said, “do the communists hold anything inside the Delta?” The answer was, “Yes, they hold those five black blotches” [on a map]. But at the University of Hanoi, which was under national Vietnamese control, my fellow Vietnamese students just laughed. They said that their home villages inside the Delta were communist-controlled and had communist village chiefs, and just about everybody else said the same thing: that both the French and the Vietnamese Army simply did not know what was going on.

Most of these villages were, in fact, controlled by the communists and I decided to attempt to document that control. It was actually very simple. To the last breath a government will try to collect taxes. So I used a working hypothesis; I went to the Vietnamese tax collection office in Hanoi to look at the village tax rolls. They immediately indicated that the bulk of the Delta was no longer paying taxes. As a cross-check on my theory I used the village teachers.

The school teachers in Viet-Nam were centrally assigned by the government. Hence, where there were school teachers the government could be assumed to have control. Where there were none, there was no government control. [I produced a map that showed] the difference between military “control” and what the communists controlled administratively, which was 70 percent of the Delta inside the French battle lines!

This was one year before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in May 1954. In fact, the [official military situation maps — showing only small, isolated areas believed to be less than 30 percent French-controlled — were] complete fiction and had absolutely no bearing on the real situation inside the Delta. Of course, when regular communist divisions became available to attack the Delta in June 1954, the whole illusion collapsed…. The last French battle line before the ceasefire [lay deep in a zone that was, in fact, solidly] communist-infiltrated and, of course, it collapsed overnight. That is revolutionary warfare.

Keep that anecdote in mind as William Dalrymple explains why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan:

The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.

(Hat tip to Cameron Schaefer.)

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Crime Is An Inner-Big-City Problem

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

In The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974), Edward Banfield notes how many urban problems only affect parts of cities:

Crime is a partial exception, but in Chicago (so the Violence Commission was told) a person who lives in the inner city faces a yearly risk of 1 in 77 of being assaulted whereas for those who live in the better areas of the city the risk is only 1 in 2,000 and for those who live in the rich suburbs only 1 in 10,000.

So, things are one order of magnitude safer in the suburbs than the city, and one order of magnitude worse in the inner city than in the good parts. I suppose that sounds about right.

Posted in Crime, Edward Banfield, Urbanism | No Comments »

Behind The Booze Brands

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Captain Morgan was, of course, a pirate, but who was Johnnie Walker?

Clearly, the name has come a long way from John Walker, the Scottish grocer who never distilled a drop himself. At the beginning of the 18th century, the British wanted to tax Scottish whiskey. Instead of kowtowing to what they saw as an imposition on their native drink, local producers started operating like jungle cocaine labs — making small batches of the stuff in hiding and splitting before the red coats could find them. Quality suffered.

Enter John Walker, a grocery store owner from Kilmarnock. He was skilled at blending tea leaves from multiple suppliers; why not try mixing a variety of the coarse single-malts he carried in his store? He did, and the resulting blend — the first blended whiskey brand — proved popular.

If you look on a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, you’ll find the signatures of R&A Bailey:

In 1970 the folks who sold Gilbey’s gin started working on a drink that reflected idealized Irishness. They came up with a rich blend of cream and whiskey, but it needed a name. The project team in Dublin enjoyed a post-work pint across at the Bailey Pub; the offices of the team in London overlooked the Bailey Hotel. Coincidence? No, convenience. The brain behind the brand, David Dand, looked at the company’s Gilbey’s gin bottle and saw the signatures of founding brothers W & A Gilbey. He changed the W to an R and the R & A Bailey signature was born.

So R&A Bailey were pure fiction.

How about Smirnoff?

The Smirnov brothers, Nicolai and Vladimir, made vodka for czars. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks took over their business, executed Nicolai and tortured Vlad. Vlad escaped, headed to France, changed the spelling of his name and started making vodka again. In 1933 an old friend visited from America with a plan to take Smirnoff to the States, but Americans didn’t bite. Enter John Martin, who bought the company in 1939, and exploited the emerging cocktail craze: Cases of his vodka were shipped with labels marked, “White Whiskey — No Smell, No Taste.”

From Behind The Booze Brands.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

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