Category: Public Choice

N.Y.C. Regulation of Uber and Lyft Hurts Poor Blacks and Hispanics

(p. A1) Jenine James no longer worries about getting stranded when the subways and buses are unreliable — a constant frustration these days — or cannot take her to where she needs to go. Her Plan B: Uber.
So Ms. James, 20, a barista in Brooklyn, sees New York’s move to restrict ride-hail services as not just a threat to her own convenience and comfort but also to the alternative transportation system that has sprung up to fill in the gaps left by the city’s failing subways and buses. She does not even want to think about going back to a time when a train was her only option, as unlikely as that might be.
“It was bad, so imagining going back, it’s terrible,” she said.
The ride-hail cars that critics say are choking New York City’s streets have also brought much-needed relief to far corners of the city where just getting to work is a daily chore requiring long rides and multiple transfers, often squeezed into packed trains and buses. The black cars that crisscross transit deserts in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island have become staples in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods where residents complain that yellow taxis often refuse to pick them up. They come to the rescue in the rain, and during taxi shift changes, when rides are notoriously hard to find even (p. A19) in the heart of Manhattan.
New York became the first major American city on Wednesday [Aug. 8, 2018] to put a halt on issuing new vehicle licenses for Uber, Lyft and other ride-hail services amid growing concerns around the world about the impact they are having on cities.
The legislation calls for a one-year moratorium while the city studies the booming industry and also establishes pay rules for drivers. It was passed overwhelmingly by the City Council and is expected to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, who attempted to adopt a similar cap in 2015 but abandoned the effort after Uber waged a fierce campaign against him.

For the full story, see:
Winnie Hu and Mariana Alfaro. “‘At End of Line, A Cap on Uber Causes Distress.” The New York Times (Friday, Aug. 10, 2018): A1 & A19.
(Note: bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 9, 2018, and has the title “‘Riders Wonder: With Uber as New York’s Plan B, Is There a Plan C?”)

Americans Today “Are Far Less Likely” to Trust the Government than 40 Years Ago

(p. A16) . . . Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell University [was] perplexed by the trends that Americans have come to dislike government more and more, even as they have increasingly relied on its assistance through programs other than welfare. Americans are far less likely today than 40 years ago to say in surveys that they trust the government to do what is right or to look out for people like them.
. . .
People who strongly dislike welfare were significantly less likely to feel government had provided them with opportunities, or to feel government officials cared what they thought, . . .
“Their attitudes about welfare end up being a microcosm for them of government,” Ms. Mettler said. “They look at how they think welfare operates, and if they see that as unfair, they think: ‘This is basically what government is. Government does favors for undeserving people, and it doesn’t help people like me who are working hard and playing by the rules.’ “

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “The Outsize Hold Of the Word ‘Welfare’ On the Public’s Mind.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018): A16.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2018, and has the title “The Outsize Hold of the Word ‘Welfare’ on the Public Imagination.” The page of my National Edition was A16; the online edition says the page of the New York Edition was A14.)

Mettler’s research is more fully described in:
Mettler, Suzanne. The Government-Citizen Disconnect. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018.

“They Say ‘Yes,’ and We Pay the Price”

(p. A14) ELLENSBURG, Wash. — When a company from Seattle came calling, wanting to lease some land on Jeff and Jackie Brunson’s 1,000-acre hay and oat farm for a solar energy project, they jumped at the idea, and the prospect of receiving regular rent checks.
They did not anticipate the blowback — snarky texts, phone calls from neighbors, and county meetings where support for solar was scant.
. . .
The political power in Washington State, and the agenda for renewable energy and much else, comes from the liberal urban expanse around Seattle, and many people in conservative rural places east of the Cascades, like Kittitas County, chafe at the imbalance.
. . .
Opponents of the solar project have a shorthand line of attack: Seattle is pushing this.
“The wind farms aren’t located in the greater Seattle area, the wolves aren’t located in the greater Seattle area, the grizzly bear expansion isn’t slated for the Greater Seattle area, and the solar farms aren’t there either,” said Paul Jewell, a former county commissioner, ticking off highly debated initiatives that government officials have considered in recent years.
“They’re all in the rural areas,” said Mr. Jewell, who opposes the solar project. “And so there’s really a disconnect there — they say ‘yes,’ and we bear the burden. They say ‘yes,’ and we pay the price.”

For the full story, see:
Kirk Johnson. ” A Farm Country Clash Over Renewable Power.” The New York Times, Travel Section (Thursday, July 12, 2018): A14.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 11, 2018, and has the title “Solar Plan Collides With Farm Tradition in Pacific Northwest..”)

Ridiculed Nathan Myhrvold Perseveres on Asteroids and Is Vindicated

Nathan Myhrvold has also been ridiculed on his entrepreneurial patent clearinghouse (called Intellectual Ventures), and on his geoengineering solution to global warming.

(p. D1) Thousands of asteroids are passing through Earth’s neighborhood all the time. Although the odds of a direct hit on the planet any time soon are slim, even a small asteroid the size of a house could explode with as much energy as an atomic bomb.

So scientists at NASA are charged with scanning the skies for such dangerous space rocks. If one were on a collision course with our planet, information about how big it is and what it’s made of would be essential for deflecting it, or calculating the destruction if it hits.
For the last couple of years, Nathan P. Myhrvold, a former chief technologist at Microsoft with a physics doctorate from Princeton, has roiled the small, congenial community of asteroid scientists by saying they know less than they think about these near-Earth objects. He argues that a trove of data from NASA they rely on is flawed and unreliable.
. . .
(p. D4) Dr. Myhrvold’s findings pose a challenge to a proposed NASA asteroid-finding mission called Neocam, short for Near-Earth Object Camera, which would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A congressional committee that controls NASA’s purse strings just included $10 million more in a budget bill for the development of Neocam.
. . .
When Dr. Myhrvold made his initial claims, the Neowise scientists made fun of a few errors like an equation that mixed up radius and diameter.
“It is too bad Myhrvold doesn’t have Google’s bug-finding bounty policy,” Dr. Wright told Scientific American. “If he did, I’d be rich.”
Dr. Mainzer also said at the time, “We believe at this point it’s best to allow the process of peer review — the foundation of the scientific process — to move forward.”
. . .
Earlier this year, Icarus published Dr. Myhrvold’s first paper on how reflected sunlight affects measurements of asteroids at the shorter infrared wavelengths measured by WISE. It has now accepted and posted a second paper last month containing Dr. Myhrvold’s criticisms of the NASA asteroid data.
. . .
When the scientists reported their findings, they did not include the estimates produced by their models, which would have given a sense of how good the model is. Instead they included the earlier measurements.
Other astronomers agreed that the Neowise scientists were not clear about what numbers they were reporting.
“They did some kind of dumb things,” said Alan W. Harris, a retired NASA asteroid expert who was one of the reviewers of Dr. Myhrvold’s second paper.
Dr. Myhrvold has accused the Neowise scientists of going into a NASA archive of planetary results, changing some of the copied numbers and deleting others without giving notice.
“They went back and rewrote history,” he said. “What it shows is even this far in, they’re still lying. They haven’t come clean.”
Dr. Harris said he did not see nefarious behavior by the Neowise scientists, but agreed, “That’s still weird.”
. . .
Dr. Myhrvold said NASA and Congress should put planning for the proposed Neocam spacecraft on hold, because it could suffer from the same shortfalls as Neowise. “Why does it get to avoid further scrutiny and just get money directly from Congress?” he asked.

For the full story, see:
Kenneth Chang. “A Collision Over Asteroids.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 19, 2018): D1 & D4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2018, and has the title “Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks.”)

Regulations Support Car Incumbents and Undermine Tesla Profitability

(p. A13) . . . governments everywhere have decided, perversely, that electric cars will not be profitable. In every major market–the U.S., Europe, China–the same political dispensation now applies: Established auto makers effectively will be required to make and sell electric cars at a loss in order to continue profiting from gas-powered vehicles.
This has rapidly become the institutional structure of the electric-car industry world-wide, for the benefit of the incumbents, whether GM in the U.S. or Daimler in Germany. Let’s face it, the political class always had a bigger investment in these incumbents than it ever did in Tesla.
Tesla has a great brand, great technology and great vehicles. To survive, it also needs to mate itself to a nonelectric pickup truck business. . . .
We’ll save for another day the relating of this phenomenon to Mr. Musk’s recently erratic behavior and pronouncements. . . . Keep your eye on the bigger picture–the bigger picture is the global regulatory capture of the electric car moment by the status quo. And note the irony that Tesla’s home state of California was the original pioneer of this insiders’ regulatory bargain with its so-called zero-emissions-vehicle mandate.
Electric cars were going to remain a niche in any case, but public policy is quickly ruling out the possibility (which Tesla needed) of them at least being a profitable niche.

For the full commentary, see:
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “BUSINESS WORLD; A Tesla Crackup Foretold; The real problem is that governments everywhere have ordained that electric cars will be sold at a loss.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 23, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 22, 2018.)

Trump’s Judges Constrain the Administrative State

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — It has been practically a given that anyone nominated for a federal judgeship by a Republican president had to pass an unspoken litmus test — usually on abortion but often on any number of divisive social issues.
The Trump administration has a new litmus test: reining in what conservatives call “the administrative state.”
With surprising frankness, the White House has laid out a plan to fill the courts with judges devoted to a legal doctrine that challenges the broad power federal agencies have to interpret laws and enforce regulations, often without being subject to judicial oversight. Those not on board with this agenda, the White House has said, are unlikely to be nominated by President Trump.
. . .
(p. A13) That the concept of “the administrative state” has become so central to politics today shows how successful the Trump administration has been in elevating to the mainstream ideas that once thrived mainly on the edges of conservative and libertarian thought.
A year ago it was a term known mostly among academics to describe the vast array of federal departments and the unelected functionaries who run them. It entered the mainstream political lexicon last year after the president’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, pledged a “deconstruction of the administrative state” under Mr. Trump.
. . .
But this thinking has been advanced by many libertarian-minded conservatives who have long doubted whether the founders envisioned the creation of many New Deal and Great Society programs and the abundance of regulations that flowed from them.
“A lot of this, if you unpack it, I think it will get back to fundamental fairness,” said Mark Holden, general counsel for Koch Industries, which is led by Charles G. and David H. Koch, two of the biggest financial backers of the effort to elect office holders committed to deregulation and free-market enterprise.
The Trump judicial selection process, Mr. Holden added, was ultimately focused on “the size and scope of government and scaling it back, to the extent that it’s counterproductive and contrary to due process.”

For the full story, see:
Jeremy W. Peters. “New Litmus Test for Trump’s Court Picks: Taming the Bureaucracy.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 28, 2018): A1 & A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 26, 2018, and has the title “Trump’s New Judicial Litmus Test: Shrinking ‘the Administrative State’.”)

“Politicians Use Economics the Way a Drunk Uses a Lamppost”

(p. A13) Mr. Blinder cites what he calls the Lamppost Theory: “Politicians use economics the way a drunk uses a lamppost–for support, not for illumination.”

For the full review, see:
Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; What They Don’t Teach in Econ 101.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, April 17, 2018): A13.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 18, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Advice and Dissent’ Review: What They Don’t Teach in Econ 101.”)

The book under review, is:
Blinder, Alan S. Advice and Dissent: Why America Suffers When Economics and Politics Collide. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Clues to How Macron Achieves Major Free Market Reforms in France

(p. A9) PARIS — The plush red velvet seats of France’s National Assembly are filled with lawmakers who owe just about everything to President Emmanuel Macron.
Three-quarters of the 577 members are brand new, swept into power in the wake of his election last year. More than 60 percent are in his camp. Nearly one-third have never held public office, and 38 were under the age of 31 when they entered office.
. . .
On Thursday [March 22, 2018], tens of thousands of railway workers, teachers and air traffic controllers went on strike across France to protest salary freezes for civil servants and Mr. Macron’s pledge to cut 120,000 public-sector jobs and introduce merit-based pay and use more private contractors.
. . .
The assembly has become a showcase of Mr. Macron’s forceful powers of persuasion and the ways he wants to reshape and update all of France.
“There’s been a complete cultural shock,” said Jean-Paul Delevoye, a senior official in Mr. Macron’s government who helped pick his candidates for Parliament.
“We’ve completely overturned the sociology of the assembly,” he added.
Diet Coke replaced wine as the most popular item at the assembly’s bar. Wine sales had plummeted, stunning the barmen, though they are creeping back up under the influence of long days. Mr. Macron’s acolytes sit through them, unlike their predecessors.
Before the rule for a deputy was, arrive Tuesday morning and go home Wednesday evening. Now, many say, Mr. Macron’s deputies come for the whole week.
So assiduous are they that “now, it’s hard to find a spot at the restaurant, that’s what strikes me,” said Brigitte Bourguignon, another ex-Socialist who joined Mr. Macron.
Among the youthful deputies, common positions are worked out in advance on applications like Telegram, befuddling the old-timers. There is little patience for them in any case.
. . .
Parliament was barely to be seen last year when Mr. Macron forced through changes to France’s rigid labor code to allow companies more flexibility in negotiating directly with workers, and to limit payouts after layoffs.
Instead, the president proceeded by special decree, using a rarely used procedure that allowed the National Assembly merely to vote thumbs up or down on the labor reforms — it voted up — but without the power to change or even discuss them.
Then, Mr. Macron rammed through the lifting of a tax on wealth, insisting that it was necessary to free capital for investment. Many economists agreed. But apart from a few opposition whimpers there was hardly any debate.
In coming weeks he proposes to take on the railway workers — the bête noir of many a French government — again by special decree. Mr. Macron wants to end the hiring-for-life, early retirement and enhanced medical insurance that have contributed to a whopping deficit. But he doesn’t necessarily want Parliament debating it.
. . .
For his dedicated supporters in Parliament, subordination is not an issue. Asked whether he had been in disagreement with the government, Mr. Potterie replied: “Ah, no. No. At the margins maybe. But for the moment, no.”
In the National Assembly, “it’s true that we don’t challenge the government,” he added. “It’s because we were elected to carry out their program.”
That sense of purpose runs deep.
“It’s not true that we are simply puppets,” insisted Ms. Bourguignon, the former Socialist. “We’ve got a government that reforms, and we’ve got to follow the government.”

For the full story, see:
ADAM NOSSITER. “Macron Fills the Role Of French Strongman.” The New York Times (Friday, March 23, 2018): A9.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 22, 2018, and has the title “Emmanuel Macron Becomes France’s Answer to Strongman Populism.” The online version says that the article appeared on p. A13 of the New York edition. It appeared on p. A9 of my National edition.)

Dockless Scooter Startups Follow Uber in Asking Regulators for Forgiveness Instead of Permission

(p. B1) Electric scooters have arrived en masse in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, with companies competing to offer the dockless and rechargeable vehicles. Leading the pack is Mr. VanderZanden’s Bird, with rivals including Spin and LimeBike. The start-ups are buoyed with more than $250 million in venture capital and a firm belief that electric scooters are the future of transportation, at least for a few speedy blocks.
The premise of the start-ups is simple: People can rent the electric scooters for about a $1, plus 10 cents to 15 cents a minute to use, for so-called last-mile transportation. To recharge the scooters, (p. B5) the companies have “chargers,” or people who roam the streets looking to plug in the scooters at night, for which they get paid $5 to $20 per scooter.
The problem is that cities have been shocked to discover that thousands of electric scooters have been dropped onto their sidewalks seemingly overnight. Often, the companies ignored all the usual avenues of getting city approval to set up shop. And since the scooters are dockless, riders can just grab one, go a few blocks and leave it wherever they want, causing a commotion on sidewalks and scenes of scooters strewn across wheelchair ramps and in doorways.
So officials in cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica, Calif., have been sending cease-and-desist notices and holding emergency meetings. Some even filed charges against the scooter companies.
“They just appeared,” said Mohammed Nuru, director of the San Francisco Public Works, which has been confiscating the scooters. “I don’t know who comes up with these ideas or where these people come from.”
Dennis Herrera, the San Francisco city attorney who sent cease-and-desist letters to Bird and others, described the chaos as “a free for all.”
Mr. VanderZanden said given how enormous a social shift he believes his scooters are, he was not surprised it ruffled some feathers. But people would eventually adjust, he said.
“Go back to the early 1900s, and people would have a similar reaction to cars because they were used to horses,” he said. “They had to figure out where to park all the dockless cars.”
If there is something familiar about these scooter companies’ strategy of just showing up in cities without permission, that’s because that has now become a tried-and-true playbook for many start-ups. In its early days, Uber, the ride-hailing giant, also barreled into towns overnight to launch its service and only asked for forgiveness later.
“Cities don’t know what it is,” Caen Contee, the head of marketing for LimeBike, said of the arrival of electric scooters. “They don’t know how to permit it until they’ve seen it.”
. . .
“My brother and sister legislators from Santa Monica warned me that that phenomenon has hit their cities,” said Aaron Peskin, who is on San Francisco’s board of supervisors, the city’s legislative branch. Referring to the scooter start-ups, he added, “These people are out of their minds.”

For the full story, see:
Nellie Bowles and David Streitfeld. “Charged Up Over Scooters Despite Uproar.” The New York Times (Sat., April 21, 2018): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 20, 2018, and has the title “Electric Scooters Are Causing Havoc. This Man Is Shrugging It Off.”)

Dockless Bikes Flood Dallas as Officials Scramble to Regulate

(p. B4) . . . in recent months, Dallas has become ground zero for a nascent national bike-share war, as five startups armed with hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars have blanketed the city with at least 18,000 bikes.   . . .    . . . , the bikes flooding Dallas are “dockless.” In other words, these bikes–popular in many Chinese cities–can be left almost anywhere when the rider is done.
. . .
City officials are scrambling to write regulations. “You drive down a street, you see bikes everywhere, all scattered out,” said Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins. “We’ve got to think it through. It’s a mess.”
Other U.S. cities are having a similar experience, if on a smaller scale. The startups, which include China’s two leading bike-share companies, are in the early stages of a plan to blanket U.S. cities with hundreds of thousands of dockless bikes in the coming year.
Typically acting with cooperation and encouragement from city governments, companies seed a city with bikes placed on sidewalks, by bus stops and throughout downtowns. Users pay $1 per half-hour or hour for a bike they locate and unlock with an app on their smartphones, eliminating the need for a bike rack.

For the full story, see:
Eliot Brown. “It’s the Wild West for Bike Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 27, 2018): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 26, 2018, and has the title “Dockless Bike Share Floods into U.S. Cities, With Rides and Clutter.”)