Seth's Blog

This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.

That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:

• Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
• What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
• What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.

The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.

• Probiotic cuts probability of pneumonia in half for high-risk patients. In related news, yogurt confiscated.
• Medical ghostwriting is research misconduct, argues this article. Think what this means: A common practice among medical school professors can reasonably be considered research misconduct. Via the Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
• Parking-space maximums by Tom Vanderbilt

Thanks to Anne Weiss and Mark Griffith.

• Quotation bias in reviews of the diet-heart idea. “Criticism of the diet-heart idea is often met with the argument that consensus committees have settled the issue unanimously.” Uh, where have I heard that?
• Kefir for sale in Beijing. Eating plenty of fermented food for the first time, “for whatever reason this is first trip where I didn’t have any real bout with food poisoning or tourista.”
• Cheese and tooth decay
• Tim Harford on Jane Jacobs
• Fermented grain recipes from around the world
• Triumph over HMO. “His lack of action protected his status and his organization, but put [my daughter's] safety and well-being at risk.”
• Never bet against New Yorker writer Susan Orlean

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Gary Wolf.

• submarine tunnel and giant terrain model, discovered via Google Earth. More here.
• Nassim Taleb interview podcast.
• Shades of Jane Jacobs: How the cure for scurvy was lost. “From the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

• Jane’s [Jacobs] Walks
• 9 years of sleep data
• overview of Jane Jacobs’s work
• God is in every leaf of every tree. A great summing up of what science is about — taking seriously little things (such as leaves) and drawing inferences from the very small (“leaf”) to the very large (“God”). Someday I am going to use this saying . . . I would have used it already, had I known of it.

Thanks to Anne Weiss, Tom George, and JR Minkel

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of essays, has just been published by New Village Press (who sent me a copy). Several of the essays are very good, such as those by Pierre Desrochers, Janette Sadik-Khan (in charge of improving New York City’s streets), Daniel Kemmis, Robert Sirman, and Mary Rowe, but my favorite was the one by Janine Benyus. Benyus came in contact with Jacobs when Jacobs phoned her to ask her to speak at the 1997 Toronto conference Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter. Benyus was thrilled to be speaking to the person whose writing she’d studied to learn how to write. Benyus wrote about increasing appreciation of the value of biomimicry, learning how nature has solved this or that problem to help us solve the same problem.

[On the Galapagos Islands] I watched a quiet engineer named Paul stand motionless before a mangrove as if in deep conversation. He finally called me over and pointed: “This mangrove needs fresh water but its roots are in saltwater, which means it somehow desalinates using only the sun’s energy. No fossil fuels, no pumps. Do you know how we do it? We force water through a membrane at 900 pounds of pressure per square inch, trapping salt on one side. When it clogs, we apply more pressure, more energy.”

Then Paul asked the question I’ve been working to solve ever since: “How is it that I, as a desalination engineer with a five-year degree and twenty-year experience, never once learned how nature strips salt from water?”

I was pleased that Matt Ridley quoted me in his blog about the Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy and out of curiosity I read his previous post (“Chiefs, priests and thieves“). Strangely enough it’s closely related to the post of mine that followed The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy: about Jane Jacobs’s view of two moral systems, guardian and commercial.

In “Chiefs, priests and thieves”, Ridley wrote about what he’d learned from what sounds like a truly fascinating book: Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley.

As always, ordinary people wanted to carry on with commerce, but chiefs, priests and thieves — sultans, emperors, popes, pashas, holy knights and corsairs — just kept plundering the fruits of that commerce for their own enrichment and their own glory. Little wonder that, as the historian Meir Kohn concludes, preindustrial government was predominantly predatory in nature. Not that it is entirely free of that suspicion today.

This is exactly what Jacobs was talking about — the close connection between government and predation, in contrast to trading (commerce). And it’s what Russ Roberts is talking about in his terrific essay about the cause of the financial crisis. When large financial firms become close to government (“In the week before the AIG bailout that put $14.9 billion into the coffers of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson called Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at least 24 times“), they become predatory rather than commercial. Was Goldman Sachs providing useful innovation when it provided and sold the bonds that the SEC is now complaining about? No, it was basically predatory, under the guise of being commercial.

I think the rest of us let this sort of predation happen because of apocalyptic stories spun (always in future tense) by leaders: The infidels will . . . The terrorists will . . . The financial system will . . . Under cover of these stories, leaders do stuff that strengthens them and weakens the rest of us. But recently a countervailing story has gathered strength:  Guardians as idiots. These stories are past tense: Harry Markopolos went to the SEC five times with incredibly persuasive evidence of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the SEC did nothing. I think the hearings about this were incredibly embarrassing to SEC officials and a big reason they’re now doing something about Goldman. Another example of the genre is …First Do No Harm, wherein doctors nearly prevented an epileptic child from getting life-saving therapy. And, of course, Al Gore is looking more and more foolish as it becomes clear he trusted research (that hockey-stick graph) he had no clue about.

More More future tense: “To the Indios they said, “If you don’t work, this God will kill you.”

What do the following have in common?

1. Doctors who view patients as “profit centers”.
2. Chinese universities that open art departments because art students pay much higher tuition than other students. The classes in these departments have high student/teacher ratios and are taught by inexperienced teachers.
3. Corrupt government officials.
4. Katherine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, organizing salons where, for a hefty price, important people would meet Post reporters.

All can be seen as cases where guardians abuse the trust they’ve been given by trying to profit from it. Jane Jacobs wrote about guardian/commercial ethical differences in Systems of Survival. Jacobs’s answer to why two ethical systems? why not twenty? was that there are two different ways to make a living: taking and trading.

Jacobs wasn’t trying to tell people how to act. She was trying to describe and explain differences in behavior she’d seen. As a one-pass view of how people make a living, taking and trading is a good division. Looked at more closely, teaching (education) and learning (science) are also central. They underlie both taking and trading. Following Jacobs’s logic, maybe they need different ethical codes to function well. Yesterday I spoke to a Tsinghua professor who complained that other Tsinghua professors simply taught what they wanted to teach, as opposed to what would help their students. I said, yeah, I’d blogged about it (“For whom do colleges exist?“, “For whom do law schools exist?“).

“City air makes free” is a medieval saying quoted by Jane Jacobs. I thought of it a few months ago when I visited an experimental private school near Shanghai. The founder of the school wanted to encourage creativity among students, in contrast to the main Chinese educational system with its overwhelming emphasis on memorization. His school was itself an example of city air makes free. There are many factories around Shanghai, filled with migrants from rural areas. These workers moved without official permission, which made their children ineligible for public school. This created a market for private schools, such as the one I visited. The school’s founder was previously a school teacher. The rural-urban migration had made him free to start his own school.

By growing up in a city instead of a village, regardless of what school she attends, regardless of overall economic growth, a Chinese student will have more access to the Internet, much bigger libraries, better teachers, far more students of different backgrounds, far more occupations in action, and a much wider range of culture. Her parents’ increased income may allow her to have a computer. Her family will suffer less from corrupt government officials. The increase in freedom — in opportunity — is profound. Her creativity and productivity will increase because she will better match her talents and her job. This is why Chinese creativity will increase enormously in the coming years whether the education system changes or not.

That such thinkers as Bill McKibben (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for saving energy) and Jeffrey Sachs (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for economic development) fail to understand this point shows how non-obvious it is. One more reason Jane Jacobs was a great economist.

“She and other Chinese I met on my trip had a much broader sense of what was possible, or what they were missing out on, than previous generations.”

This is from China Daily:

Every day before sunrise, Zhang Zhengxiang leaves home to walk along Dianchi Lake, one of the major attractions in Yunnan province.

The 62-year-old retired farmer carries a camera, tripod and telescope to record the pollution encroaching on the country’s sixth-largest freshwater lake.

During weekends, Zhang collates his observations and sends letters to the local government, informing them of the growing pollution.

He has been doing this for 30 years.

Sounds good to me. Like my self-experimentation, he is (a) trying to change something he cares a lot about and knows a lot about and (b) slowly collecting data. In contrast to a great deal of American good works, such as Jeffrey Sachs’s.

In this case, unlike a lot of philanthropy, we know how the story ends:

His efforts slowly began to pay off.

In 1998, the local government shut down six mines near Dianchi because of his warnings.

In 2003, 56 large and medium-sized mines, chemical factories, and fertilizer and lime plants were closed.

Since 2008, the local government has invested about 12 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) to clean up the lake. . . .

[In 2005], Zhang was selected as one of 10 outstanding grassroots environmental activists. In 2007, he became a member of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences.

Last year, he was selected as one of the 20 people who have warmed Chinese hearts.

This supports what Jane Jacobs told an interviewer: “It’s a funny thing. You can only change something if you love it.”