Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson recently predicted that by 2020, half of Americans will be self-employed. While this estimate includes freelancers, small business owners and independent contractors, one big reason for the explosive growth in non-employer work is the gig economy. Driving for Uber or Lyft, delivering groceries for Instacart and finding handyman jobs through TaskRabbit may be among the best-known gigs, but there are now hundreds, possibly thousands, of such platforms used by millions of American workers on a part- or full-time basis.
Kristof’s main point is that workers in the gig economy are poorly protected by old-school labor laws. I think she’s right about that, but her piece got me curious about the size of the gig economy. I haven’t checked it out lately, so here it is:
This isn’t a perfect measure, but it’s pretty good. If the gig economy is truly exploding, we’d expect to see, at the very least, an increase in the number of part-time workers. We haven’t. It’s been flat at about 27.5 million for the past nine years, and it’s declined as a percentage of all workers. It’s currently at the same level as 1997 and 2004. The gig economy may be growing, but it can’t be growing very much if the overall figures for part-time workers look like this.
If Shania Twain doesn't want to spend the rest of her career singing at Canadian "football" games, she'd better get her views on President Trump straight.Daniel Lea/CSM via ZUMA
Back in 2003, when the Dixie Chicks said “we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas,” they were practically tossed out from the country music business on their ears. Shania Twain discovered yesterday that times have changed:
“I would have voted for [Trump] because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest,” the 52-year-old singer said. “Do you want straight or polite? Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bull—. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?”
Her quote went viral on social media, and hours later, “Shania Twain” was trending worldwide on Twitter. Given that lots of people were not pleased by her comments, the hashtag #ShaniaTwainCancelled had hundreds of tweets.
Twain, the highest-selling solo female artist in country music history, apologized Sunday night after the backlash intensified. She called her answer to the Guardian “awkward” and said that she wished she had given it more context. Twain also emphasized that she does not endorse Trump.
The question is, what changed? Is country music now more mainstream and less conservative? Is Trump worse than Bush? Is peacetime different from wartime? Do we not disapprove of Canadians saying they like our presidents? Hmmm.
One of the strongest arguments in favor of increasing big-city density is that it raises economic productivity. The higher the density, the more productive everyone is.
In a rough sense, this is something nobody argues with: big cities have been cauldrons of innovation and progress for millennia. And there’s certainly no question that workers in big cities earn more on average than workers elsewhere. But can this be quantified?
It’s hard. The basic problem is one of causation: does higher density cause higher productivity, or is it just that high-productivity people tend to be attracted to big cities, where they can earn more money? A few years ago, a team of economists working for the New York Fed created an instrumental variables model that allowed them to separate out the causes of productivity in big cities so they could isolate how much of it was due to density. The raw data looks something like this for the 20 most productive cities in America:
What this shows is essentially no correlation at all. The problem is that you’ve got too many kinds of cities. Wages in Casper are high because of a coal boom (the data is from 2001-05). Wages are high in Stamford because lots of rich New Yorkers like to live there. And wages are high in New York because it’s a big city. The authors offer this chart to explain things:
What this says is that density is important for certain kinds of jobs but not others. In the arts and entertainment, for example, density leads to higher wages essentially because of competition: being in the middle of a big arts community makes everyone better and shoves out those who aren’t top notch. In real estate, density increases wages even more, but for some other reason entirely. It’s not clear what that reason is, but it’s not because a big real estate sector makes real estate folks any better at their jobs. Finally, there are the sectors where density just doesn’t play much of a role at all: retail, manufacturing, education, and so forth.
In other words, it makes a big difference what kinds of jobs a city has. If it’s a financial hub or an arts center, density probably matters a lot. If its biggest employers are manufacturing or health care, becoming more dense won’t help much. In a nutshell, it all depends on skills and education (“human capital stock”). If it’s high, then density is important; if it’s low, density doesn’t matter:
Metropolitan areas with a human capital stock that is one standard deviation below the mean realize no productivity gain…while doubling density in metropolitan areas with a human capital stock that is one standard deviation above the mean yields productivity benefits that are nearly two times larger than average (i.e., 3.6 percent compared to 1.9 percent)….On average, we find that a doubling of density increases metropolitan area productivity by 2 to 4 percent.
Other research has suggested even higher returns to density. In his book The Gated City, Ryan Avent summarizes some of this research and ends with this:
Density isn’t a magic elixir. Other things equal, a denser city will be more productive, but density alone isn’t enough to generate wealth….Within the American economy, New York is the country’s densest city but not its most productive.
….Density itself is subject to diminishing returns….At some point, the marginal worker adds less in benefits than he does in congestion costs. At some point, the marginal skyscraper floor costs more than the benefits its occupants deliver….It is enough to note that density is important and that our actions often constrain cities at levels less dense than markets would seem to prefer.
But that’s not the end of things. There’s also research suggesting that it’s not actually density that’s important at all: the only thing that matters is the raw size of a metropolitan area, regardless of how dense it is. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute produced this chart, which I have approximately reconstructed from the original log-log chart in their paper:
It’s not immediately obvious, but the data obeys a power law, growing faster than a straight line. When population doubles, total wages in a city more than double. It looks like a small deviation, but it produces a big difference in per-capita income as you go from small cities to the very biggest. But what about density? In a follow-up paper, the same researchers reported that they found no effect at all:
The shape of the city in space, including for example its residential density, matter much less than (and are mostly accounted for by) population size in predicting indicators of urban performance. Said more explicitly, whether a city looks more like New York or Boston or instead like Los Angeles or Atlanta has a vanishing effect in predicting its socio-economic performance.
In the end we’re left with this:
Some researchers believe that higher density produces higher productivity. One of the most carefully done papers estimates an increase of 2-4 percent for a doubling of density, though there are others with higher estimates.
Some researchers believe that density has no effect at all. The only thing that matters is the raw size of the entire metropolitan area.
In either case, the effects are greater in areas with higher levels of skills and education.
At some point, density and population reach a level where there are no further gains to growth. We don’t know what that level is.
This appears to be the current state of research. Density has either no effect or a small effect on productivity, and at some unknown point it probably starts to make things worse. I wish there were something more definite to report here, but it’s just a hard subject to measure.
UPDATE: In the original chart for wages vs. population, I showed wages increasing exponentially with population. In fact, it’s a power law relationship. Both the chart and the text have been corrected.
One of the most compelling arguments in favor of building dense cities is environmental: cities use less energy per person than suburbs and emit less carbon per person. The reason is exactly the one you’d guess. People in big cities don’t own as many cars as suburbanites:
Glaeser’s chart is nearly unreadable, but all that matters is the red trendline: As cities get bigger, they consume less gasoline per person. Using buses or subways (or your feet) is far better for the environment than driving a car everywhere. It’s also cheaper to heat or air condition a single apartment building than it is to do the same for a thousand single-family houses. You can see this in the map below, where big cities are islands of green surrounded by sprawling suburbs in red:
However, there are a couple of things to watch out for. The first is industry: one reason that cities seem so green is because they’ve mostly zoned away dirty industries. However, just because steel mills and fracking operations are forced to operate elsewhere doesn’t mean cities aren’t benefiting from them. In fact, they benefit more than smaller places because big cities tend to be rich, which means they consume more than poorer or more rural areas. This chart outlines the size of consumption-based carbon emissions in big cities:
With the exception of a few big cities in Asia and Africa (light blue), carbon emissions due to consumption are higher than carbon emissions due to industry—in some cases, vastly higher. If you don’t count this, you’re underestimating how much carbon cities are really responsible for. The authors of this report estimate that urban carbon emissions are actually about 60 percent higher than normally estimated if you account for this.
Finally, here’s Ed Glaeser again, with a scatterplot showing the same thing. Cities with stringent land-use regulations basically outsource a lot of their carbon emissions, leading to lower per-capita carbon emissions in the cities themselves:
Even if you discount California, as Glaeser does, there’s a clear relationship: “Places with the least emissions tend also to regulate most heavily. This relationship is strongly statistically significant.”
What this goes to show is how complicated this whole issue is. Generally speaking, researchers agree nearly unanimously that big cities are environmentally friendly. The benefits from their lower number of cars combined with the economies of scale from packing lots of people into a single building are overwhelming. However, to get a true estimate of just how green cities really are, you also need to account for their consumption of goods and services that are produced in outlying areas thanks to land-use regulations.
And that’s tricky all by itself. Big cities tend to be pretty prosperous, which means their consumption of goods and services is high. But why? Do big cities tend to make people wealthier, which causes higher consumption? Or do richer people, who already have high consumption habits, tend to move to big cities? That’s hard to untangle. But to the extent that big cities support high incomes and therefore high consumption rates, they’re not quite as green as you might think.
I was at the market today and they had big sacks of M&Ms on sale. Two for seven bucks. Then I wandered to a different part of the store, and there were a whole bunch of crates full of half-price stuff—including the very same M&Ms I had seen in the candy aisle. But these were on sale for half off the regular price of $5.
So which was it? $3.50 or $2.50? The only way to find out was to buy one, so in the name of science that’s what I did. Here’s the answer:
They were on sale for $3.50, but everything in the crates was half off, so the final price was $1.75. Maybe I should buy more. M&Ms never go bad, do they?
To memorialize this great day, I also have an answer to one of the great philosophical questions of all time: Is it really turtles all the way down? As you can see, the answer is no. It’s just the one.
Agadez is 4,000 miles from Aghanistan, where the Global War on Terrorism began. It’s 2,500 miles from Iraq, our next destination in the war. It’s 2,000 miles from Syria and 1,500 miles from Benghazi. This is where we’re building a $110 million drone base that will host nearly a thousand American troops, double the number of a few years ago. Here is Eric Schmitt:
Taken together, these parallel missions reflect a largely undeclared American military buildup outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, often with murky authorities and little public attention, unfolding in remote places like Yemen, Somalia and, increasingly, West Africa.
In Niger alone, the Pentagon in the past few years has doubled the number of United States troops, to about 800 — not to conduct unilateral combat missions, but to battle an increasingly dangerous Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and even loosely associated extremist groups with proxy forces and drone strikes….Maj. Gen. J. Marcus Hicks, the head of American Special Operations forces in Africa, put it this way: “This is an insurance policy that’s very inexpensive, and I think we need to keep paying into it.”
….“Eliminating jihadi military leaders through drone operations could temporarily disorganize insurgent groups,” said Jean-Hervé Jezequel, deputy director of the International Crisis Group’s West Africa project in Dakar, Senegal. “But eventually the void could also lead to the rise of new and younger leaders who are likely to engage into more violent and spectacular operations to assert their leadership.”
The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan catalyzed the creation of al-Qaeda. The defeat of al-Qaeda catalyzed the growth of ISIS. The imminent defeat of ISIS appears to have already catalyzed the emergence of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Each group is smaller than its predecessor, but also more radical and more violent. It’s not clear if this represents progress or not.
How much has the cost of housing gone up over the last few decades? There are several different ways of measuring this, but here are five:
The CPI for shelter since 1990, deflated by the overall CPI. This measure accounts for both housing prices and rentals.
The Case-Shiller index since 1990. This is a national index of home prices only, not apartment rentals.
HUD’s affordability index for both homeownership and renting.
The 10-City Case-Shiller index since 1990. This provides an idea of how much housing costs have gone up in our largest cities.
An interpolated estimate from StreetEasy and Miller Samuel of average rents in Manhattan since 1992.
Note that I’ve removed the period from about 2000 through 2013 in some of the charts. There’s a lot of spikiness during that period thanks to the housing bubble, but in the end housing prices were only a little bit higher. Getting rid of this noise makes the long-term trends a little easier to see.
Donald Trump is unhappy with today’s New York Times piece about how he treats Michael Cohen “like garbage,” which might cause Cohen to flip:
The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will “flip.” They use….
Ha ha ha ha. Trump spoke with Haberman at least four times last year, on March 26, April 5, July 19, and November 1. Maybe more! How about it, Maggie? How many times have you spoken with Donald Trump since he began his campaign?
This is an artist's conception. It will be a very long time before California has anything more than that.California High-Speed Rail Authority
The LA Times reports today about a minor little cost overrun on the California bullet train. Over the course of five years, the cost of utility relocations along a short section of track near Fresno increased nearly 6x, from $69 million to $396 million:
The California High-Speed Rail Authority board on Friday took up the problem, hearing from its staff that the original estimate contained a number of miscalculations. The number of linear feet of utilities that have to be moved was underestimated, as was the cost per foot for the job, according to a staff memo. Then, there were utilities that nobody even knew were in the ground. The authority changed its mind about some of the work, as well, the report said.
….The history of the utility relocations suggests some turmoil in management decisions — which the rail authority staff said it would not repeat in the future….The staff said that “best management practices,” along with a new database, will enable it to better estimate costs in the future. “Additionally, the assumption that utilities will perform relocations will not be repeated,” the staff memo said.
No worries! This won’t be repeated in the future! I feel relieved.
The California bullet train is obviously one of my bugaboos, and I figure that all bloggers are entitled to one or two. But seriously, reading this stuff makes me wonder if anyone involved in this boondoggle has any experience whatsoever with large construction projects, let alone high-speed rail projects.
POSTSCRIPT: In fairness, I want to note that that this is not, strictly speaking, a new cost overrun. It’s all part of the “worst-case scenario” unveiled in January.
High-speed photos never get old, do they? Actually, yes they do, but I have an excuse for posting yet more of them. It rained a bit on Thursday, and later in the morning the sun was bright enough that I could crank the camera’s shutter speed all the way up to 1/32,000th of a second. Does that make a difference compared to 1/16,000th of a second? As near as I can tell, it doesn’t improve the hummingbird but it does improve the honeybee:
April 19, 2018 — Irvine, California
Since I’ve been shooting the night sky lately, I’ve also been experimenting with noise reduction. Here’s the problem: on a digital camera, if you keep the shutter open for an hour or two you’ll get lots of random dots caused by individual sensors firing for no good reason. So the camera has a noise-reduction feature that removes the dots. If you take, say, a one-hour exposure, it closes the shutter at the end of the shot and then keeps going for another hour. It’s basically taking a pure black photo during that time. It then compares the noise in the image to the noise from the black photo and removes the corresponding dots. Something like that, anyway. But it sure does work. Here’s a pair of two-hour exposures:
April 16, 2018 — Irvine, California
And finally, here are the moon and Venus last Tuesday, because why not?
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