Random links
- How Big Cities Can Lead to Small Thoughts
- ”'People would expect in bigger and more diverse places you'd come into contact with a bigger and more diverse set of people,' says lead researcher Angela Bahns, a social psychologist at Wellesley. 'But you find the exact opposite.' … How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It's simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the 'similarity-attraction effect,' and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.”
- Forget About Income Inequality
- "... if Grusky wants to measure market-generated income inequality, household income is not the proper metric; individual income is. That’s because market rewards—paychecks, capital gains, and dividends—go to individuals, not households. Gini coefficients, which measure inequality, decreased slightly for individuals between 1994 and 2010, while showing a modest uptick for households, meaning that individuals became more equal and households less so. The uptick in household inequality might be unrelated to the economy." Is it in some sense measuring broken families?
- Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China
- Scary: "... Western financial experts who fear a bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble point out that the Chinese economy is more dependent on house building than the United States economy was, before the sub-prime lending bubble burst in 2007."
- Are transmission lines holding America back?
- Short answer: yes. The suggestion here is to move from large, centralized generation facilities to micro-generation. Perhaps but I'm not convinced. Sure there's transmission overhead but both economy of scale and the ability to site large projects in optimal locations - windspeeds in urban areas are typically lower than elsewhere - suggests to me that large scale energy installations still have an important role to play.