Safe Water

by Conroy

Gathering unsafe water in India

I’m fond of saying that the modern world started when indoor plumbing, fresh water and modern sanitation, became widely available. Not only did these innovations make conditions far more sanitary but it also promoted better hygiene [1]. For the United States, this happened in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [2], and by the decade after World War II most urban and rural areas of westernized nations had modern plumbing; clean water was delivered to the house and dirty water carried away.

This development had a profound effect on public health. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever were among the common epidemics suffered in London, New York, and other major western cities before what I’ll term the safe water infrastructure was in place. Now those diseases are largely unknown in the west. I’m guessing that for most readers of this blog, safe water is taken largely for granted, as it was by our parents and even our grandparents. In fact, a resident of New York or London probably thinks that the word cholera is quaint and foreign, when as little as 100 years ago it would have caused mortal dread.

Unsafe Water
This isn’t the case everywhere though. Cholera still afflicts millions of people worldwide each year, and a major outbreak occurred in Haiti after the massive, crippling 2010 earthquake. This is because even now, in 2012, billions of people across the globe still lack access to clean drinking water and modern sanitation. Here are a few eye-opening statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO):

• 900 million people lack access to drinking-water from improved water sources (13% of the world population);
• 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities (37% of the world population);
• 2.2 million children die worldwide each year from unsafe water.
• Unsafe water is a major risk factor for diarrheal disease, which is the second leading contributor to the global disease burden.

Here are a couple of maps, taken directly from the U.N.’s 2010 Global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) report that illustrate the current safe water crisis (click on them to enlarge):

The top map shows the state of improved sanitation. The pink colored countries are where less than 50% of the population has access to improved sanitation; the light green colored countries are where less than 75% of the population has access to improved sanitation. The first category includes the great majority of sub-Saharan Africa as well as south Asia. The second category includes China, the world’s most populous nation. Less than 90% of the populations of Brazil, Russia, Argentina, and Mexico have access to improved sanitation.

The bottom map shows the state of improved drinking water. The pink colored countries are where less than 50% of the population has access to improved drinking-water; the light blue colored countries are where less than 75% have access; and the medium blue colored countries are where less than 90% have access. The first and second categories include the great majority of sub-Saharan Africa. The third category includes India and China, the world’s two most populous nations. Not surprisingly, all of these nations, including India and China, fare very poorly in the U.N.’s Human Development Index, which attempts to quantify overall quality of life by country [3]. This is hardly surprising; it’s difficult to imagine human development being high where safe water is a luxury.

"Bus Good, Train Bad"

by Conroy

Rendering of a "future" high-speed rail train in California

Sometimes exciting ideas are bad. Take the title quote, which I read in a recent Bloomberg article by Edward Glaeser the accomplished Harvard economist [1]. These four words, according to Glaeser, sum up the accepted wisdom gleaned from 40 years of transportation economics at Harvard. And they are directly at odds with one of the long-held – and long out-of-reach – goals of many American transportation planners: true high-speed rail (HSR in planning and transit lingo).

High Speed Rail in America
For many decades (if not longer) there has been a desire among transit advocates to connect America’s cities with a web of efficient, clean, fast trains. This transit mode would act as an environmentally friendly alternative to the automobiles that crowd urban highways and dirty the air, and to expensive, polluting planes. Advocates point to the successful HSR systems in Western Europe and Japan [2] and models for a future American system. Indeed, HSR does offer advantages over other transportation modes, but only under the right conditions. Those conditions include densely populated areas along the train route, relatively underdeveloped highway infrastructure, high gas prices, existing heavy passenger rail use, and relatively short distances. These conditions are needed because HSR becomes economically feasible when ridership is high. And ridership will only be high if it’s more cost effective for people to use HSR than it is to use other modes, or borrowing terms from economics, if the combination of cost (the price of a ticket) and duration (the time the trip takes) are lower than competing modes (road and air).

In Japan, where there are 65 million people living tightly along the 250 mile corridor between Tokyo and Osaka, HSR is an ideal solution. Similarly, the densely packed corridor in France between Paris and Lyon is a prime location. In Japan and France gas prices and population densities are high, intercity freeways are less extensive, and major urban areas are closely spaced. And even in these locations, HSR like other transit modes isn’t self-supporting. It requires government investment to fund the capital expense and support the high operating costs [3]. This investment is justified because of the high value of time saved by moving so many riders.

If you look at the United States, the conditions for HSR are far less favorable. Gas is cheap [4], the interstate highway system is vast, and excepting the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston [5], population centers are widely spaced across the continent. Today, on a national level, only about one half of one percent of passenger trips are made by train of any sort and just one tenth of one percent are taken on intercity rail. The Northeast Corridor is the most heavily used intercity passenger train route, but Amtrak’s semi-high-speed Acela train [6] deployed on that route only accounts for about three million trips annually. A number dwarfed by automobile trips on Interstate 95, the parallel freeway.

Despite these realities, the political support for HSR has grown in recent years. In 2009, as part of the much-touted, mid-recession American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, Congress included, at the President’s urging, $8 billion for intercity rail, with an emphasis on HSR. Since then the Federal Railroad Administration and many state-level transportation agencies have been studying potential routes all over the country. The furthest down the track in these efforts is California, which rather fancifully expects to start the building an HSR line later this year. Unfortunately for HSR advocates, numerous studies (prominent examples here and here) have demonstrated the massive flaws in California’s plan. Given the huge costs and time to develop HSR, and that funding and grass roots support is largely absent, HSR is likely to go nowhere in California or anywhere else (with the lone potential exception of the Northeast Corridor).

Shifting Americans

by Conroy

Bright big Dallas

Locals say everything is bigger in Texas, and maybe no place exemplifies this boast more than Dallas – “Big D” – a booming metropolis of well over six million people spread over the flat north Texas grasslands [1]. Examples of bigness: the city is home to the world’s largest domed stadium, along with one of the biggest and busiest airports, and many of the nation’s “mega-churches”. Fulfilling its reputation, metro Dallas has grown to become America’s fourth most populous urban area [2] and the nation’s sixth largest economy. An evening drive south along I-75 towards the city (inside an air-conditioned car which repels the smothering summer heat and humidity), reveals Dallas in all its vibrancy and excess. Starting around Allen, 25 miles or so from downtown, you enter into Dallas’ suburban sprawl: shopping malls, box stores, business parks, mid-rise towers, tract housing developments, and fast food restaurants flanking both sides of the freeway; your eyes dazzled by the sea of house lights, glowing colorful business signs, the pale orange twinge of sodium-streetlights, the alternating white-red of countless vehicle head-and tail-lights. Miles and miles later you can glimpse downtown, tall chromatically lit glass towers glinting in the fading twilight. It’s all new, pretty-ugly, dynamic-gaudy, impressive-bland, a 21^st century American city.

What a contrast to the Dallas of my parents’ youth, then a quiet mid-size southern city made infamous by an assassination. Contrast the blandness of Dealey Plaza (which looks much the same as it did in 1963 [3]) with the glitzy modern hustle of the nearby downtown. Dallas is emblematic of what seems to be a continuing fact of America; it’s ever shifting, moving, resettling population. It’s a source of some amazement to me how fluid and dynamic the American people remain, after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of nationhood, in where they choose to live. I think this can be demonstrated by two graphics.

Where Americans Lived in 1950
First, a map showing the largest urban areas in 1950:

In 1950 the U.S. population was 151 million, 6 percent of the world total. Well over a third of the population (36%) lived in rural areas, and as the map above shows, big cities were few and outside of the Northeast and Midwest, widely scattered.  Just one city, New York, had more than 10 million people. Chicago, then still America’s “Second City”, was the only other city with more than 5 million people. Just five other places had more than 2 million: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco. Only five others cities, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Baltimore had more than 1 million. The above map shows whole swathes of the country from the South, to the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, and desert Southwest bereft of large cities. Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, and San Diego didn’t even rank. Dallas and Houston were mid-size.

Largest Urban Areas in 1950
Rank	City	Metro Population	Rank	City	Metro Population
1	New York	12,600,000	11	Washington, D.C.	1,287,000
2	Chicago	5,208,000	12	Baltimore	1,162,000
3	Los Angeles	4,250,000	13	Minneapolis	987,000
4	Philadelphia	3,297,000	14	Buffalo	895,000
5	Detroit	2,884,000	15	Dallas	855,000
6	Boston	2,301,000	16	Milwaukee	829,000
7	San Francisco	2,131,000	17	Cincinnati	813,000
8	St. Louis	1,541,000	18	Houston	701,000
9	Cleveland	1,425,000	19	Kansas City	698,000
10	Pittsburgh	1,400,000	20	New Orleans	660,000

Source: Peakbagger.com

In 1950 the most populous state was New York with a little less than 15 million people (10 percent of the nation’s total); more than double the population of Texas and five times more than Florida. Over half the American population lived in a contiguous band of 15 Midwest and Northeast states [4], which together comprise just 15 percent of the total national land area. These are the states that were (1) well-settled, they all were admitted to the Union before the Civil War, (2) were home to America’s largest industrial centers, which in 1950 accounted for nearly 30 percent of the American economy (e.g., Detroit and Pittsburgh), and (3) were not hampered by the segregationist and discriminatory policies that caused the American South to languish for more than a century after the Civil War [5].

The least populous state was Nevada with just 160,000 people, and less than 50,000 of those lived in and around the new city of Las Vegas. Keep in mind an alternative statistic, baseball in 1950, still then very much America’s most popular sport, didn’t field a Major League team west of St. Louis or south of Washington [6].

Where Americans Lived in 2010
Now, a map showing the largest urban areas in 2010 (just sixty years – less than a lifetime – later):

The first thing that strikes you about this map is the impressive proliferation in the number of large cities. In 1950 there were 12 cities with metropolitan populations of 1 million or more, in 2010 there were 51. This is the result of two trends. First, by 2010 the U.S. population had more than doubled since 1950 to 308 million (5 percent of the world total) [7]. Second, the shift from rural areas to urban areas continued and in 2010, 82% of Americans lived in urban areas. So by 2010 there were more and bigger cities.

Whose Money?

by Conroy

1 World Trade Center under construction

Drivers approaching lower Manhattan in 2011 have seen the steady rise of a new skyscraper, 1 World Trade Center. By December its steel superstructure already stood over 1,100 feet above street level, dominating the famous skyline around it. When the building is “topped out” next year it will be the tallest building in the United States (in fact the tallest in the entire western hemisphere).  1 World Trade Center is the most spectacular part of the massive World Trade Center redevelopment effort, which includes several other towers, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (the memorial is open but the museum is still under construction), and a soon-to-be-completed transportation hub (road/rail/bus terminal). These are just some of the tangible signs that after a decade New York City has largely (physically) recovered from the 9/11 attacks.

Drivers Sue the World Trade Center?
Not long after 1 World Trade Center peeked above the surrounding buildings, the American Automobile Association (AAA), a service and advocacy group for over 50 million drivers, sued the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). Why? Well this fall PANYNJ announced significant toll increases, up to 50%, on its many New York area bridges and tunnels, which include the heavily trafficked Lincoln and Holland tunnels and George Washington Bridge. The higher tolls were needed, according to PANYNJ, to pay for ongoing facility maintenance and planned improvements and to cover some of the cost of the World Trade Center construction. You see, in addition to bridges, tunnel, airports, seaports, and transit, PANYNJ also owns several commercial properties the most visible being the World trade Center site. The AAA lawsuit claimed that the PANYNJ toll increases were an unfair burden to drivers and that toll revenues would be diverted from the bridges and tunnels that toll payers use to unrelated commercial enterprises. In other words, and rather nefariously in AAA’s eyes, 1 World Trade Center was rising high above Manhattan on the dime of drivers who would never benefit from the development.

PANYNJ has countered that in fact they misspoke and all of the revenue raised from increased tolls will be used on their transportation facilities and not a nickel to pay for the World Trade Center construction. Both sides argued their case in court last week and a ruling on the issue might be made by the end of the year. In light of PANYNJ’s modified account of how the toll revenues will be used, I foresee the new toll rates being upheld and no refunds for any AAA drivers, but I’m not a lawyer and won’t wager on any particular outcome.

This whole case may seem like one advocacy group attacking one issue from one public agency, but I think it’s a microcosm of a larger debate being held in many forms nationwide. Namely, when it comes to public money, whether it’s tolls or taxes, whose money is it and who gets to decide how it will be spent? In the 2010 U.S. midterm elections, Republicans across the country benefited greatly from a broad grassroots effort, the Tea Party movement, which essentially argued that elected officials and public agencies were incapable of responsibly using tax dollars. And therefore, all tax increases were unacceptable and major spending programs dubious. On the national level we’ve seen the results of last year’s elections: A tooth-and-nail struggle to get any spending programs passed through Congress, and none of those that eventually were passed included any tax increases. Clearly one’s sympathy or antipathy to the Tea Party movement’s agenda rests in your political and fiscal perspective, but this is one of the fundamental arguments in America today.

Whose Money is It?
So going back to the core question, whose money is it and who has the right to decide how it is spent?

The Abuse of the NCAA - A Counter Point

Conroy's post about the NCAA is interesting for the legal and economic issues it raises, in particular the antitrust problem that the NCAA faces. The fact that the NCAA is a cartel—a coalition of colleges agreeing with each other to restrain trade—organized as a monopsony helps explain its egregious behavior. Cartels are generally unstable, so enforcement and credibility are key. If anyone steps out of line, the hammer must fall. That's why the NCAA is so strict in enforcing its rules. And the NCAA is a best described as a monopsony—a single buyer—rather than a "monopoly"—a single seller. Its member colleges "buy" the labor of college athletes with scholarships, etc., but they have agreed not to compete with each other over the terms of the sale. A monopsony will drive prices down, which is what the NCAA has done.

So college players are exploited in the sense that they are paid less than what they would be paid in a competitive market, in which colleges would bid against each other for the athletes, driving the price up; and they also have less control over their own labor than they would if they had more bargaining power. And the NCAA is apparently able to get them to sign over their publicity rights, permanently. Contrast that with a typical non-compete agreement, wherein generally the restraint  has to be reasonable in time and location. Finally, bear in mind that the money these athletes could have earned, by for example selling their autographs, is transferred to other students, in the form of scholarships and cheaper ticket prices. This means that the NCAA effectively transfers money from athletes, who are often from underprivileged backgrounds, to students who are on average wealthier. It's not only inefficient but inequitable.

But often, when firms cannot compete by lowering (or, in a monopsony, raising) prices, they compete in some other dimension. So athletes reap other kinds of benefits. In fact, college athletes derive significant non-pecuniary benefits from being college athletes. They are revered, for one thing, even if not forever. It reminds me of the exchange in the movie Eight Men Out between Rothschild and Atell (the ex-boxer):

Arnold Rothstein: Altogether, I must've made ten times that amount betting on you and I never took a punch.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but I was champ. Featherweight champion of the world!
Arnold Rothstein: Yesterday. That was yesterday.
Abe Atell: No A.R. you're wrong. I was champ, and can't nothin take that away.

Of course, the NCAA creates more rules to limit competition in these dimensions, and generally it is more efficient to compete over prices, so these facts are not relevant to an antitrust analysis. Such an analysis would begin by noting that they NCAA is a cartel in which members are restrained in their ability to freely negotiate contracts—it's a horizontal price fixing arrangement. This makes it a "per se" violation of the Sherman Act. But when the Supreme Court examined the NCAA, it chose not to invalidate the arrangement as a per se violation. Instead, it applied the "rule of reason" and considered pro-competitive benefits that might justify the restraint of trade. The Court did so, because it believed that the "product," the college athlete—unpaid (i.e., amateur), attending classes, etc.—simply would not exist without the cartel:

This decision is not based on a lack of judicial experience with this type of arrangement, on the fact that the NCAA is organized as a nonprofit entity, or on our respect for the NCAA's historic role in the preservation and encouragement of intercollegiate amateur athletics. Rather, what is critical is that this case involves an industry in which horizontal restraints on competition are essential if the product is to be available at all.

This argument is not meritless. There are reasons to believe that if the NCAA were eliminated, college sports would suffer. Colleges would face higher costs. Labor costs would obviously rise, but there would also be tax and legal costs. Colleges might have to pay taxes on the income they derive from their teams, since they would be operating a business remote from their educational mission. They would also open themselves up to lawsuits brought under Title IX for discrimination, since female players would be paid less than male players. And converting college teams into professional teams would reduce team loyalty—alma maters would feel less connection to the players (and therefore the teams), be discouraged by trades, and feel less inclined to donate; and players would feel more pressure to take alternate offers and less loyalty to their teams.

The quality of the players might increase, and more resources might be diverted into college sports. But perhaps our society already puts too much emphasis on, and invests too much in, competitive sports. After all, it's a market characterized by superstars and arms-races, and for that reason prone to inefficiency. Choosing to participate in college sports means spending less time in the classroom. Eliminating the NCAA would make that trade-off more dramatic. It's a competitive world on and off the field, and we would do better as a society by investing more heavily in education and less heavily in sports.

Electronic Reading

by The Man

A friend recently bought me a Kindle 3G, the latest generation, so over the last week I've been busy loading it up with books, playing with the Kindle iPhone app with which it syncs, and shopping for a carry case and night light, which I bought tonight. Basically, I've been getting to know my Kindle. Now, I have no intention of writing a product review here, but I do think a couple of things are interesting about this electronic reader—things that are applicable to electronic readers in general—and worth writing about. To start with a few positive things, it's wonderful to be able to highlight text without having to worry about "ruining" the book, it's fun to be able to scroll through the text that you've highlighted (this is easier to do on the iPhone), and I think it's amazing that it's possible to do a word search across all of one's electronic books—it's like having a search engine for your own private library. It's no longer necessary to have to walk around looking for the right book, search through the index, etc. With the Kindle, I was able for instance to do a search for "anthropic principle" and find in just a few seconds the relevant sections of several books that addressed this subject. This is an immensely powerful tool, and it is aided by the fact that if, due to a sudden but overwhelming curiosity, you are studying a particular subject and wish to read a book that addresses it, you can rapidly obtain the book while your interest is still "hot," taking advantage of your motivation before it fades.

On other hand, I was struck by how confining the Kindle is when compared to a physical book. With the latter, one can very rapidly flip through pages—not just one at a time, but many at once. The Kindle also enables one to find one's way in a book quickly, and perhaps I simply haven't mastered its navigation system yet. There will undoubtedly be a technological solution that will enable electronic books to equal and probably surpass the ease with which one can maneuver through a physical book. But it isn't there yet, and I am more impressed by this aspect of physical books than before I used an electronic one. I also think there is an aesthetic aspect to books, having to do with their color, size, and weight, that I hadn't fully appreciated before. And I'm not talking about the status feature of possessing a book collection, which is a feature of physical books that a number of people have mentioned to me: "Now you won't be able to show off your collection." Well, I frankly think that's a bit shallow. Those who do possess such collections, however, will struggle with certain "Schumpteerian" anxieties, as the new technology diminishes the value of the old. What value is that old collection of music CDs when you have all your favorite songs stored in iTunes? I even found myself purchasing a book that I already have a physical copy of, just because I know how much I love having it with me. The problem of sharing is a real. My wife doesn't have a Kindle, but there's a book we would both like to read. If I get it electronically, my wife won't be able to read it (there's no way I'm "loaning" my Kindle to her just so she can read this book). But I think this problem will be solved, in the same way that Apple has enabled sharing of songs on iTunes.

By the way, Amazon has an incentive to solve that problem. If I'm selling something, I want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy. That also means eliminating or otherwise weakening any impediments to buying. So, if I hesitate to buy a book because I know I won't be able to share it, that's potentially a lost sale. There's another side to this, of course, which is that Amazon doesn't want me to buy the book and then make copies and distribute them to all of my friends: that may reduce sales. But couples and families are slightly different, because they tend to make purchases as a unit. So, it's a tricky business, but, again, I think there is a solution. Electronic books will continue to improve in quality, come down in price, and eventually they will eclipse the old-fashioned paper book.

This last point reminds me of something I've heard a number of people say, and which I think may be a very common misconception: fewer paper books, the argument goes, will mean fewer trees are cut down, and therefore electronic books are good for the environment. This argument isn't in the least bit compelling. Consider the elementary point that when the demand for a resource falls, other things being equal, the supply will also fall. Therefore, to the extent that the demand for trees is determined by the demand for paper, as the demand for paper falls so will the supply of trees. Yes, trees have an important ecological role to play, but the benefits flowing from that role are widely shared and so market forces will most likely supply too few trees for ecological purposes. That's all the more reason to be glad that there exist market goods, such as books and wood products generally, that require (for the time being, anyway) trees.