May 2010 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Alert Street Vendor Hero Saves the Day

“Lance Orton, center, who sells T-shirts, said that as a veteran he was proud of his actions. But he spurned most questions.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Hernando de Soto has shown that entrepreneurial street-vending is an important path for the very poor to constructively improve their lives. And yet governments around the world, including ours, consistently make it hard for street vendors to ply their trade.
Yet, on balance, street vendors make our lives better, not only through their products and services, but also through their alert eyes that make our city streets safer. Jane Jacobs made the point that the presence of good people observing the streets is a key ingredient of urban safety, one that was too-often removed by well-intentioned, but ill-conceived city-planners’ urban-renewal projects.
The incident recounted below also adds one more case to the well-documented conclusions of Amanda Ripley, who showed us that our safety in avoiding and being rescued from disasters rests in the alertness, preparation, level-headedness and good will of ordinary citizens on the scene.
There may be professionals who are better trained, but outcomes often depend on what is done quickly, and usually only those who are on the scene are able to act quickly.
And although the politically correct will glower at you for mentioning it, there are obvious implications for the issue of gun control.

(p. A19) Even in Times Square, where little seems unusual, the Nissan Pathfinder parked just off Broadway on the south side of 45th Street — engine running, hazard lights flashing, driver nowhere to be found — looked suspicious to the sidewalk vendors who regularly work this area.

And it was the keen eyes of at least two of them — both disabled Vietnam War veterans who say they are accustomed to alerting local police officers to pickpockets and hustlers — that helped point the authorities to the Pathfinder, illegally and unusually parked next to their merchandise of inexpensive handbags and $2.99 “I Love NY” T-shirts.
Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, the vendors — Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, who both served during the Vietnam War and now rely on special sidewalk vending privileges for disabled veterans — said they told nearby officers about the Pathfinder, which had begun filling with smoke and then emitted sparks and popping sounds.
. . .
But in a city hungry for heroes, the spotlight first turned to the vendors. Mr. Orton, a purveyor of T-shirts, ran from the limelight early Sunday morning as he spurned reporters’ questions while gathering his merchandise on a table near where the Pathfinder was parked.
When asked if he was proud of his actions, Mr. Orton, who said he had been selling on the street for about 20 years, replied: “Of course, man. I’m a veteran. What do you think?”
Mr. Jackson, on the other hand, embraced his newfound celebrity, receiving an endless line of people congratulating him while he sold cheap handbags, watches and pashmina scarves all day Sunday.
. . .
As for Mr. Orton, he rested on Sunday at a relative’s house, leaving others to talk on his behalf. “When he was in Vietnam, he said they had to make decisions and judgments from their gut, from their own feelings,” said Miriam Cintron, the mother of Mr. Orton’s son. “His instinct was telling him something’s not right. I guess he was right.”
She said Mr. Orton would mediate disputes between the police and other vendors, and when something did not look right, he would alert the police. “He always said, ‘Downtown is where they’re going to come to, and I’m going to be right there,’ ” Ms. Cintron said.
When Mr. Orton left Times Square about 7 a.m. on Sunday, he did so to a hero’s reception. As he walked down the street, employees from Junior’s restaurant stood outside applauding him. He briefly entered the restaurant before heading toward 44th Street.
Using a cane and wearing a white fedora, Mr. Orton limped away and hopped a cab home to the Bronx, but not before repeating a terror-watch mantra: “See something, say something.”

For the full story, see:
COREY KILGANNON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT. “Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes.” The New York Times (Mon., May 3, 2010): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 2, 2010 and has the title “Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes.”)

The most relevant Hernando de Soto book is:
Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

The most relevant Jane Jacobs book is:
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

The Amanda Ripley book mentioned is:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Profits on Economics Documentary May Not Be Dismal

(p. B6) If Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of “Freakonomics,” were to examine the movie business, they might ask: Why do documentary filmmakers keep doing it?

It can’t be the money, because the world is awash in documentaries that make little at the box office or are not distributed at all. Occasionally, though, a documentary makes a buck for those involved — and the new documentary based on “Freakonomics” could do just that.
Magnolia Pictures is expected to announce on Monday that it has acquired domestic distribution rights to the film, which was produced by the Green Film Company and directed, in parts, by a series of well-known documentarians. Those include Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (“Jesus Camp”), Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight”) and Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”).
“Freakonomics,” the film, got started when Chad Troutwine, a producer who worked on an earlier multidirector movie, “Paris, Je T’aime,” became interested in the best-selling book, which looks into matters like the socioeconomic implications of baby naming.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY. “‘Freakonomics’ Documentary May Be a Rarity: Profitable.” The New York Times (Mon., April 5, 2010): B6.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 4, 2010.)

The source information on the revised edition of the Freakonomics book is:
Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Maddison Showed Per Capita Income Stagnation from 1000 AD – 1820 AD

Angus Maddison. Source of photo: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/

I neither met Angus Maddison, nor ever heard him speak, but I have often seen his work praised by those whom I respect.
One example is the praise given to Maddison by Brad DeLong in his wonderful “Cornucopia” essay that documents the benefits from the process of creative destruction.

(p. B10) Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums. In one study he estimated the size of the world economy in A.D. 1 as about one five-hundredth of what it was in 2008.

He died on April 24 at a hospital in Paris after a long illness, his daughter, Elizabeth Maddison, said.
. . .
In his research, he tried to reconstruct thousands of years’ worth of economic data, most notably in his 2007 book “Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 A.D..” He argued that per capita income around the globe had remained largely stagnant from about 1000 to 1820, after which the world became exponentially richer and life expectancies surged.
. . .
In his archaeological excavation of the economies of other eras, he was “trying to explain why some countries achieved faster growth or higher income levels than others,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “Confessions of a Chiffrephile” published in 1994. He wanted to know what some countries did right and what others did wrong, and to figure out how growth influenced culture, and was influenced by it.
Professor Maddison often referred to himself as a “chiffrephile,” or lover of numbers, a term he invented to characterize economists and economic historians like himself who were prone to quantifying the world.
While macroeconomic research in the last few decades was dominated by elegant mathematical models and technical wizardry, his focus on meat-and-potatoes data and cross-country historical comparisons has come back into vogue in recent years, especially in the wake of the financial crisis.

For the full obituary, see:

CATHERINE RAMPELL. “Angus Maddison, 83, Who Quantified Ancient Economies.” The New York Times (Mon., May 3, 2010): B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated April 30, 2010 and has the title “Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83.”)

The Maddison book mentioned in the obituary is:
Maddison, Angus. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

FDR’s Bad Bet on Aksarben

The “RA” mentioned in the passage quoted below, refers to FDR’s “Resettlement Administration” program.
“Aksarben” is much better known to Nebraskans today as a much-beloved, but now defunct, horse racing track in Omaha, than as Nebraska’s part in FDR’s government housing debacle.

(p. 69) With a staff of (p. 70) 13,000 and a mammoth $250 million to spend, Tugwell made plans for resettling thousands of tenants and marginal farmers into new model communities.

The result was a disaster. “It was all done awkwardly and wastefully,” Tugwell later confessed about the work of the RA. Even Roosevelt himself conceded, “I don’t think we have a leg to stand on,” when confronted with the high costs of the model towns Tugwell was building. Drawing model communities on paper was one thing, but it was another thing to relocate real tenant farmers into affordable houses far away in real towns with functioning services. One of Tugwell’s model communities was Arthurdale in West Virginia. A major problem there was that the ready-made houses could not fit their foundations. Once that problem was solved, the planners discovered that most residents, people from poor backgrounds, could not afford to live there. That protest became a common one in model communities all over the nation. Finding meaningful and profitable work for unskilled laborers was another recurring complaint.24
What that meant was that sometimes the RA had communities built, but no residents either willing or able to move in. An example of this was Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward), a “dream city” of thirty-eight green-shuttered houses, each on seven acres of land twenty miles west of Omaha on the Platte River. The problem was that no one wanted to move in. Ak-Sar-Ben became deserted. Nearby farmer Henry C. Glissman observed this project and drew this conclusion: “I predict that in time these homes will all be abandoned and stand as a gruesome monument to a government’s inefficiency and folly in fostering a movement that to a practical mind has the earmarks of failure from the start.”

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

The Nanny State Versus Fun

“A boy slides down the enclosed “Monster Slide,” which drops riders the length of three flights of stairs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

We took Jenny to several children’s museums when she was young, but none was as neat as the City Museum.
It appears that it has continued to get better in the years since.
My view is that a child’s parents should generally decide what risks their child should be allowed to take. Parents have a right to be parents, and they generally do a better job of it than the government does.

(p. A1) The City Museum, housed in 10-story brick building, shows none of the restraint or quiet typical of museums. A cross between a playground and a theme park, it recycles St. Louis’ industrial past into such attractions as slides made from assembly-line rollers. Just about everything can be touched or climbed, including dozens of Mr. Cassilly’s sculptures, among them a walk-through whale on (p. A10) the first floor.

Despite the whiff of danger, or perhaps because of it, the City Museum is one of St. Louis’s most popular attractions. Its 700,000 annual attendance is roughly twice the population of St. Louis and dwarfs the turnout at refined destinations such as the St. Louis Art Museum.
The injuries and lawsuits put the City Museum at the center of an enduring argument over the line between liability and personal responsibility. Some of the injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks through signs or other warnings.
Mr. Cassilly counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore. “They [lawyers] are taking the fun out of life.”
. . .
Mr. Cassilly trained as a sculptor but made most of his money as a developer, having bought, renovated and sold some four dozen homes and commercial properties over the years. In 1993 he paid $525,000 for two downtown St. Louis buildings once used by a shoe company, and opened the City Museum in 1997. It’s now a for-profit enterprise that he co-owns with a local investor.
He says the museum is about first-hand experience, a “computer-free zone” where rules are kept to a minimum. At the “skateless park,” kids run up and slide down wooden skateboard ramps now used as slides. One smaller ramp has a rope swing that kids use to swing across the ramp, not always successfully.
“I slipped and the edge scraped my leg,” said Garett Vance, 11, sitting atop what the museum bills as the world’s largest pencil with a museum-provided ice pack taped to his leg. His mother, Mindy Vance, says a friend warned her that the museum was dangerous but she wasn’t deterred.
“You take a risk when you go anyplace,” says Ms. Vance, a nurse-practitioner who lives in Springfield, Ill., about two hours away.

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY. “This Museum Exposes Kids to Thrills, Chills and Trial Lawyers; Defiant St. Louis Venue Owner’s Claim: Attorneys ‘Take the Fun Out of Life’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 1, 2010): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Visitors passed through a dark tunnel. The injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks. Mr. Cassilly, the founder, counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

School Choice “Lifts the Performance of Public-School Students”

(p. A15) There is . . . clear evidence that many private schools outperform public schools academically. The first children to enter the Washington, D.C., voucher program, for example, now read more than two grade levels above students who applied for the program but didn’t win the voucher lottery.

Researchers from Northwestern University will soon release a study on how competition from Florida’s education tax-credit program is impacting the performance of children who remain in public schools. The preliminary evidence is that school choice lifts the performance of public-school students significantly.
Florida’s scholarship program appears to be the first statewide private school choice program to reach a critical mass of funding, functionality and political support. As an ever increasing number of students in Florida take advantage of the scholarship program, other states will find it hard to resist enacting broad-based school choice.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM B. SCHAEFFER. “Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution; A scholarship program could produce a new era of choice.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 30, 2010): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Leapfrog Competition in the Wine Industry

“A machine makes Portugal whine.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) ZEBULON, N.C.–In a nondescript factory in this small, wooded town, 10 giant machines worked around the clock last year to churn out 1.4 billion plastic corks, enough to circle the earth 1.33 times if laid end-to-end.

Unknown to most American wine drinkers, the plant’s owner, Nomacorc LLC, has quietly revolutionized the 400-year-old wine-cork industry. Since the 1600s, wine has been bottled almost exclusively with natural cork, a porous material that literally grows on trees in Portugal, Spain and other Mediterranean lands.
But over the past 10 years, an estimated 20% of the bottle stopper market has been replaced by a new technology–plastic corks that cost between 2 and 20 cents apiece. More than one in 10 full-sized wine bottles sold worldwide now come with a Nomacorc plug, while another 9% or so come from other plastic cork makers. Screw caps took another 11% of the market.
“We infuriated the cork industry,” says Marc Noel, Nomacorc’s chairman.
. . .
The story of how Nomacorc and other stop-(p. A10)per upstarts broke the centuries-old cork monopoly is a lesson in how innovation, timing and hustle combined to exploit an opening in a once airtight market. It shows that any dominant industry can be vulnerable to competition, especially if it grows complacent about its position.

For the full story, see:
TIMOTHY AEPPEL. “Show Stopper: How Plastic Popped the Cork Monopoly.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 1, 2010): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Henry Ford’s Finest Hour

(p. 52) Not all men who refused to sign the code could be easily intimidated. In the auto industry Henry Ford refused to sign the NRA code and jack up his car prices, as his competitors were doing. “I do not think that this country is ready to be treated like Russia for a while,” Ford wrote in his notebook. “There is a lot of the pioneer spirit here yet:’ However, General Motors, Chrysler, and the smaller independents eagerly signed Blue Eagle codes, which, under penalty of fine and imprisonment, regulated their production, (p. 53) wages. prices, and hours of work. Ford was astounded: his colleagues preferred stability and government regulation to competition and free trade. He was especially irked when Pierre S. DuPont, the former head of General Motors, urged him at a party to sign the code.

In the face of strong pressure from the NRA, Ford refused to sign the auto code. He defied the law, pronouncing it un-American and unconstitutional. Hugh Johnson, the NRA chief, and President Roosevelt, however, wanted government control as well as compliance. They tried to pressure Ford into signing the code, and when he refused they tried force. Ford would receive no government contracts until he signed–and with the large increase in government agencies during the 1930s, that meant a huge business. For example, the bid of a Ford agency on five hundred trucks for the Civilian Conservation Corps was $169,000 below the next best offer. The government announced, however, that it would reject Ford’s bid and pay $169,000 more for the trucks because Ford refused to sign the auto code. As Roosevelt announced at a press conference, “We have got to eliminate the purchase of Ford cars” for the government because Ford has not “gone along with the general [NRA] agreement:”

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

New York City Government Protects Us from More than Three Living in an Apartment

“From left, Doua Moua, 23, George Summer, 30, and David Everett and Jasmine Ward, both 21, are among six people in a four-bedroom apartment in Hamilton Heights. “It’s part of New York City culture,” Mr. Moua said.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A16) Doua Moua, 23, played a menacing gangster in a Clint Eastwood movie, but Mr. Moua swears he really is a nice, gentle and rules-abiding fellow. At least he was until he moved to New York City and unwittingly slipped into a world of lawlessness.

Mr. Moua lives with five roommates. And in New York, home to some of the nation’s highest rents and more than eight million people, many of them single, it is illegal for more than three unrelated people to live in an apartment or a house.
. . .
Mr. Moua’s landlord, who did not want his name published for fear of a crackdown, said he wrestled with converting some of his apartments into four-bedroom units. He knew it was illegal to allow four unrelated people to live together, but decided that if tenants were willing to live in what was once a dining room, it was fine with him. He could collect slightly more in rent over all and charge less for each room.
“If it’s done in a good way, and there’s not unlimited cramming in, and the shared facilities are adequate,” the landlord said, “then it actually helps solve the affordable housing problem, which I think is a good thing.”

For the full story, see:
CARA BUCKLEY. “A Law Limits Housemates to Three? Who Knew?” The New York Times (Mon., March 29, 2010): A16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 28, 2010 and has the title “In New York, Breaking a Law on Roommates.”)

“From left, Anya Kogan, 27, Jordan Dann, 33, Nick Turner, 29, and Michelle McGowan, 32, share a town house in Brooklyn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Higher Unemployment Benefits May Result in Higher Unemployment Rates

The size and structure of the “safety net” is a subject of hot debate. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom suggested that higher benefits would lead to slower labor market adjustments.
There may have been multiple causes for the high unemployment rate in the U.K. in the 1920s and 1930s. But it is highly plausible that higher unemployment benefits would have made the unemployed more selective in which jobs they would accept, and hence would have contributed to higher rates of unemployment and higher average duration of unemployment.

(p. 7B) The ultimate evidence . . . is from the 1920s, when the Labour Party came to power in the U.K. for the first time. As scholars Daniel K. Benjamin and Levis Kochin pointed out in a Journal of Political Economy paper, the moment was one in which “unemployment benefits were on a more generous scale relative to wages than ever before or since.”

The result was the mother of all jobless recoveries. For almost two decades, from 1921 to 1938, U.K. unemployment averaged 14 percent and never got below 9.5 percent.

For the full story, see:
Amity Shlaes. “Help can hurt job hunters.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday April 16, 2010): 7B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)