This week's Economist has a special report on Texas and its rapid growth. (It makes a few jabs at California, too.) It's interesting to see what the Brits think of Texas.
Tory Gattis has the coverage. Ryan Avent reacts to their piece on California v. Texas.
Kevin Brass at the Chronicle has a piece questioning the start-up Austin Post's business model, which is, "Write for us for free in exchange for exposure." Spike Gillespie, a professional writer, understandably takes exception:
"If I want exposure, I'll hop up on the bar and take my shirt off, thank you very much," wrote Gillespie, the author of several books and a columnist with national credentials. "And how soon will the promised exposure net me invitations from still more websites willing to not pay me for my writing in exchange for still more exposure?"
I'm occasionally asked to write for other websites, and occasionally I agree. And sometimes I agree but later regret it.
I'm not a professional writer (except when I'm writing for stuffy old judges), and I've never made any money off my blog. I write just to be read.
So you might think that I view any exposure as good exposure. I don't. Exposure costs. It takes time to write a piece -- sometimes, a long time. Even if I'm doing little more than cross-posting, I have to rewrite my entries for the site's specific audience. The exposure has to be worth this cost.
The kind of exposure matters. Obviously, the size of the other site's audience is important. But it also has to have a bunch of readers who care about the type of stuff I write about. Mine is a niche blog.
And exposure is not the end all and be all. I want people to be exposed to the sum of my work, not a stray entry that they might scan for 15 seconds before the next click. If I can't entice them to my blog with back links, I won't waste my time.
It took me nearly three years to settle on these criteria. But they have helped and will help me ration my time wisely. They tell me that writing for free for a start up with a small circulation is a bad use of my time budget.
If every blogger had my callous attitude, of course, there would be no start ups like the Austin Post.
Shrug.
Smarter Cities (NRDC) has released its ranking of the most sustainable cities. Austin is sixth!
Of course, like most city rankings, this one is based on an arbitrary weighting of an arbitrary list of factors. For example, they include "standard of living" as a category. What does this have to do with sustainability?. Unless the goal is to jack up the ranking of wealthy California cities.
They omit a variable for land-use patterns. If you're worried about open space -- and I'm sure NRDC is -- this omission is inexplicable. I'm more sanguine about suburban development than many, but even I am surprised by this omission.
But mostly the problem is how they weight the factors. If climate change is the most pressing problem facing us today, then shouldn't energy consumption get the most weight? I think it should. And Austin fares very poorly on energy consumption. It's 100+ degrees here in the summer. My air conditioner runs virtually non-stop, and will until late September. Adding a relative handful of low-energy buildings to the existing housing stock won't budge our average energy consumption.
Ditto with transportation. TTI just yesterday released a report identifying Austin as one of the most congested cities its size. I don't know what NRDC means by "sustainable" (I think the word has essentially lost all meaning through overuse), but does NRDC really believe that spending an inordinate amount of time in traffic, burning extra fuel, is a sustainable transportation pattern?
I could go on. Water. Yes, we've got pretty stringent water controls. But then we live in an area that is frequently parched. Each Austin resident puts a greater strain on local water resources than each resident of, say, Cleveland.
This will piss a lot of Austinites off, but probably the greenest Austinite is the one who moves to a city with a milder climate, more water, and less congestion.
The Texas Transportation Institute has issued its annual report on congestion in American cities. As usual, Austin doesn't do well, punching well above its class. Tthe average Austin traveler experienced an annual delay of 39 hours in 2007. That's up from 32 hours in 1997, although no worse than 2006.
Ryan Avent puts the Austin figures in perspective:
The average traveler in the New York metro area faces 44 hours wasted per year, for instance, while the average traveler in Los Angeles loses 70 hours per year to congestion, even though New York’s metropolitan population is much, much larger than LA’s. More interesting still, Austin and Raleigh aren’t that far behind New York with 39 and 34 hours wasted annually, despite the fact that both metro areas have less than two million people while greater New York is home to 20 million people.
TTI also calculates the percent of peak period travel that is congested. Austin again fares poorly -- its roads are congested for 70% of the peak travel period:
By comparison, Dallas's roads are congested for only 66% of the peak travel period. Houston is marginally worse at 73%. Austin's peers include New York (69%), Detroit (71%) and Baltimore (69%).
One has to wonder what damage Austin's congestion has wrought to downtown. Businesses want to locate where their employees can get to them, and high peak-period congestion means that commuters must fight traffic to get to work most of the time. I suspect Austin's downtown suffers more heavily from peak-period congestion than any other employment center in the area since MoPac and I-35 -- downtown's principal commuter routes -- are the two most congested roads in the area. Eventually we must recognize that our congestion will stunt downtown's growth, if it hasn't already. We wil lose the economies of scale and agglomeration benefits that a vibrant downtown would yield.
You know, of course, that there is only one solution.
That's the social cost that Charles Kamonoff, an NYC environmental/transportation analysist, believes each driver who enters Manhattan's central business district imposes on other drivers. Via Felix Salmon:
After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.
Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.
I can't vouch for Komanoff's numbers or his methodology. Given the sheer complexity of the traffic dynamics in Manhattan -- which are much more complicated than the traffic dynamics of a single highway -- I would treat his estimate skeptically.
That said, his estimate doesn't seem outrageously high to me. The basic point is sound: we severely underestimate how many people we delay when we enter a congested network of roads. If you've ever tried to make the trip crosstown Manhattan in the middle of the day, you understand just how much delay one driver can cause.
Komanoff recommends congestion pricing. A good idea. But he also proposes making buses free, which is a bad idea (and one floated in Austin occasionally).
One problem is that a free bus would be a magnet for the homeless looking for a cool place to hang out. That sounds callous, I know, and perhaps it is, but in that case you'd never see a large switch from cars to buses, so what would be the point?
The other problem is that both bus and rail can be congested, too. If you've ever taken a packed No. 3 around ACL, you understand this perfectly well. There is a cost to standing up on a jerky bus for 20 minutes, squeezed in among a bunch of strangers who may or may not practice good hygiene. This is a genuine cost of congestion. In fact, it is probably too high a cost for most of the drivers around here, who would much rather be stuck in traffic in a cool, comfortable car.
If we price roads but not buses or trains, then the buses or trains will be too crowded (at least in Manhattan and DC, if not in Austin) and we simply will have shifted the cost of externalities from drivers to bus and train riders. This certainly does not mean that buses and trains must pay their own way. But it does mean pricing them with the interests of both drivers and non-drivers in mind.
Matthew Kahn wonders whether blog reading crowds out book reading. He believes there are two types of blog readers: the nerdy "Wikipedia" types who like variety and suffer from slight attention deficit order, and the "deep readers" who want to dig deep in a few subjects. He speculates that books are substitutes for the Wikipedia nerds and complements for the deep readers.
I read more books since I've started reading blogs. I don't buy more books, but I read more of the books I do buy. I've always bought books on impulse but then let them sit on a shelf. The real reason I read more books now, I think, is that I blog myself. Books stimulate ideas for new posts, of course. But, more importantly, I can only say the same thing a few times without getting bored. I long ago exhausted my own stock of ideas so I have to rip off others'.
What does my blogging crowd out? Baseball. Football. I used to watch two or three baseball games a week. I don't anymore.
Some TV, but, honestly, not that much. My prime TV watching time has always started at 10 pm with the Simpsons. I used to watch TV before 10, but I can't really remember what I watched, so I guess I'm watching TV more "efficiently."
Blogging crowds out some work. I used to hustle harder for new business when I was slow. I haven't sat down to estimate my lost earnings from blogging -- that might make me quit (blogging, that is, not work). Still, work is work; there hasn't been too much to take from there.
I think my blogging has mostly crowded out dead time. I don't know whether I used to just sit around staring blankly at a wall or what, but when I do the math, the time I spend on blogging and reading exceeds -- by a lot -- the time I used to spend on activities since crowded out.
Tory Gattis agrees with me that Perry's veto of the so-called "smart growth" bill was a good idea.
Tory, however, disagrees with me on one point: he thinks TxDOT's control over infrastructure in metropolitan areas is basically a good thing. Tory's point is that our highway system is a network that connects places and therefore needs a "master architect" rather than cities going their own way. Without some form of central control, we'd get NIMBYism run amok and be stuck with the equivalent of planned communities' cul-de-sacs rather than the connectivity of street grids.
I don't think this is right, as long as infrastructure decisions are made at the metropolitan level. Left to themselves, individual cities might indeed seek to shift infrastructure to neighboring cities, which would set off a battle of NIMBYs. But metropolitan areas want to be connected to other metropolitan areas. Their citizens want to be able to get places and good connections are essential to a city's economy. As long as metropolitan areas have control over their roads, they'll have the power to curb NIMBYism.
The better analogy is downtown Houston's tunnels. Developers have linked their office buildings to the tunnel network without central planning. They could have shorted the network by scrimping on their own infrastructure -- by building very narrow tunnels, for example -- but they haven't; later additions have matched the quality of the earlier ones. (Or "had" as of the mid-1990s. I confess I haven't been in the tunnels in 14 or 15 years.)
Local control works just fine as long as we use the right definition of "local."
McBlogger and I disagree down the line on tolls.
I understand his and many others' opposition to tolling existing, free roads and to the privatization of our highways, but these arguments against tolling new roads just don't make any sense:
Telling people not to use toll roads if they don't want to and then building them is almost like telling people not to breathe if they don't want to. They are going to be hurt.
Why? Because we all will be paying toll road TAXES even if we "don't use them".
How? We will pay the extra tolls at the cash register when we purchase goods and services because businesses will divert their toll costs onto the consumer. It's common-sense.
I don't think it's commonsense at all. Commonsense tells us that businesses won't incur costs for new toll roads. At worst, no one will use the toll roads, and businesses will face exactly the same costs as before. New roads can hurt existing businesses by blocking access or diverting customers to other, now more convenient locations. But this is a side effect of new roads, too, and it isn't McBlogger's complaint anyway.
In addition, toll roads are long-term debts that our children's grandchildren will continue to pay.
True, if the tolls don't cover all of the long-term debt. But free roads incur larger long-term debt because the public has to cover all of the cost. If we're worried about our great-grandchildren, we should toll all roads.
Lastly, if you think toll roads are the panacea for all our roadway, traffic and pollution ills, you are grossly mistaken. Just look at the long-time toll roads in tolling meccas like CA, NY, FL, etc., and you will see that not only do they still have the same issues and problems, but new ones have been created directly due to the building and maintenance of toll roads and plazas.
Toll roads don't have to be a panacea for congestion and pollution; they just have to be better than free roads. They are.
He also complains about the use of Eminent Domain and providing "wealthy special interests" more avenues for profiting at our expense. But Eminent Domain is a problem with free roads, too.
I assume "wealthy special interests" means private consortiums like Cintra-Zachry. But this is an objection to road privatization, not tolls. And free roads benefit "wealthy special interests," too -- property owners who benefit from better access.
In the long run, property owners capture all of the benefits of free roads. Tolls shrink that benefit. So what's the problem?
Correction: McBlogger points out the original post was written by Peter Stern, not himself. My apologies to both.
The Federal Trade Commission intends to make bloggers who endorse a product disclose freebies they receive from the product's seller. Seriously.
The existing regulations require those endorsing a product for an advertisement to disclose a connection with the product's seller "that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement." Being paid to endorse a product, the FTC believes, is a fact that "might materially affect" the endorsement's weight or credibility -- unless the endorser is a celebrity, whom everyone assumes is being compensated.
But since "might materially affect the weight or credibility" is a mushy standard that could mean anything, the FTC has to use examples to show what it means. And it intends to add paid blogger endorsements to its little menagerie of examples (FTC report pp. 84-85 (pdf)):
Example 7. A college student who has earned a reputation as a video game expert maintains a personal weblog or “blog” where he posts entries about his gaming experiences. Readers of his blog frequently seek his opinions about video game hardware and software. As it has done in the past, the manufacturer of a newly released video game system sends the student a free copy of the system and asks him to write about it on his blog. He tests the new gaming system and writes a favorable review. The readers of his blog are unlikely to expect that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product, and given the value of the video game system, this fact would likely materially affect the credibility they attach to his endorsement. Accordingly, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose that he received the gaming system free of charge.
I don't know who tipped off the FTC attorneys to the blogosphere's existence, or what impelled him to do it, but he should be ashamed of himself. Who was raising the hue and cry over blogger endorsements? Who thought it was a good idea to sic an agency obsessed with balding treatments and miracle vitamins on the internet?
Anyway, the damage is done. The FTC attorneys have concluded that readers of these quirky and newfangled "weblogs" are entitled to the same protection from undisclosed endorsements that it guarantees TV viewers exposed to weight-loss and vitamin-supplement ads.
This is a silly regulation for many reasons. First, the FTC can't effectively enforce its rules now for MSM advertisers. There are just too many outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines, radio) and too many advertisers creatively gaming the rules. The FTC can't even control specific industries. It has been battling weight-loss and vitamin-supplement advertisers for decades. Everyone operates at the laws' fringes; the FTC makes a rule, the weight-loss people figure out a loophole, and so on. And so late night TV is filled with ads for all kinds of flaky weight-loss treatments.
Because the FTC struggles to regulate a few thousand MSM outlets, it has no chance of enforcing its rules among millions of blogs. No chance at all. Bloggers will be able to do what they want, confident in the anonymity provided by numbers.
And, second, even if the FTC could be a credible enforcer, why should it be? I seriously doubt it will improve the reliability of blog product endorsements. That ought to be the goal -- to improve the quality of the information floating around out there. An undisclosed "material connection" perhaps sometimes reduces the value of the endorsement to readers. But lots of other things impair the value of endorsements. The blogger might be an idiot, for example. Or the blogger, while not an idiot, has bizarre, undisclosed fetishes which might make his experience just a mite atypical. The blogger might not have done his homework on the product because he was lazy. Or he endorsed the product because all the cool people were doing so. In each case, the reader is likeliest to get the best information from the blogger who got the freebie.
Third, the few, good bloggers who do provide useful information don't need regulations like this. These are widely-read bloggers who have been around long enough to build up credibility with their readers. Few would want to risk that credibility by failing to disclose something their readers would expect them to disclose. And their readers might expect them to disclose a free book, meal or video game system. Or they might simply assume the freebies and shrug. For example, I assume Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen get free review copies of the books they review. I don't believe that either will take the edge off a bad review merely because they got the book for free.
Fourth, Google can fix any harm posed by a "tainted" endorsement in 200 milliseconds. When deciding which video game system to buy, I can pull up my local bloggers' review, but I can pull up a dozen others in just seconds, as well as discussion boards and professional product reviews. There have been several widely-followed econ bloggers talking up the Kindle. I suspect many of them got their Kindle gratis. I don't know. But when deciding whether to buy my kindle, I considered the possibility that their endorsements perhaps had an artificial glow. But I also looked at the product review at Amazon (the 1* and 3* reviews are usually the most informative). And I did other searches for blogs and discussion boards devoted to the Kindle. Acquiring information to counterbalance one compensated endorsement is virtually costless.
These are four reasons why the regulations will either be impotent or pointless. But here's the FTC's fundamental mistake: it doesn't understand that readers' expectations depend on the background rules. Under the current system, I don't know whether a given blogger is being compensated for an endorsement unless she discloses a connection. If she doesn't disclose a connection, then I have to treat her endorsement with a bit of skepticism (although thorough, thoughtful reviews are good at dispelling this skepticism), and will continue to do so until I've developed trust in her blogging. In an unregulated blogosphere, my default stance is skepticism.
Under the FTC regulation, if a blogger has an ironclad obligation to disclose freebies, then I'll expect him to disclose that he got a free copy of the product, and discount his endorsement appropriately. If he does not disclose a connection, I'll assume that he's not being compensated. Of course, he could be cheating, and we know the FTC will not have the resources to police this kind of misrepresentation. In this case, the regulation's only consequence will have been too disarm me, to make me a little more gullible.
In a world without a credible threat of enforcement, we're better off in the first scenario than the second. The FTC's existing rules for television have arguably made consumers more gullible. They vaguely understand that the government requires commercials to be accurate. But "accurate" is judged on a sliding scale; commercials make a lot of claims that are unlikely to be true but which "must" be true because the government is letting them appear on TV. In the worst case, the FTC regulations increase the risk of deceptive and misleading blogposts by giving readers false assurances that they are not being misled.
One might argue that my concerns are overblown and that these regulations will be harmless at worst. But this is wrong. They will cause blog clutter if nothing else. Tyler's book reviews will come (I presume) with an asterisk and fine print at the bottom. Food critics will have to run disclaimers at the bottom disclosing which meals were free and which weren't. Clutter is irritating.
And it will be particularly irritating to those of us who won't need to clutter our blogs because no one is sending us free stuff to endorse.
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