Hikes and Bikes

Bush Environmental Policy

Surprisingly enough, the Big Three think that what the world needs is for them to do what they've been doing for years and form a more formal alliance with the cartel that dominates Presidential primaries.  Even more shockingly, Bush agrees. 

going to Duke

This fall I will enroll in Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment to study environmental economics.

So, looks like I'll be hanging up the skis. 

Unless my powder skis work on water.  They're pretty big.

Choosing a Graduate School

Last week I spent some time talking to the head of admissions at the University of Calgary.  This weekend I interviewed at Santa Barbara, where the environmental building is on the ocean and the airport baggage claim is outdoors.  That's somewhat attractive.

subtle global warming effects

This article is a great example of the near-term problems with global warming.  It's not that we're going to see glaciers attacking Manhattan (thanks, Hollywood).  It's that the world is a complicated place that we don't understand.  Small changes have subtle effects that may be pretty nasty for people. 

US emissions reductions coming

Well, this sure sounds like a good thing.  I don't know anything about the New England version that's mentionned, but between the two a third of the US population will be under some sort of greenhouse gas emissions reductions scheme.  That's a lot.

Chimps - hungry AND violent

The Washington Post reports that chimp scientists in Senegal have observed the chimps making weapons and using them for hunting.  They note that this is mostly by female chimpanzees, but do not clearly state whether this is because the females are more innovative or more violent.

No further comment.

Liberal Media Bias

I just came across a  draft paper in which Chicago economists Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow look at the determinants of political slant in US news media (abstract).  It turns out that preexisting local political beliefs largely explain media slant.  The idea is that people are more likely to buy a newspaper that they agree with politically.  The hard part is figuring out how much political slant that would imply, measuring that, and making sure it's not just slanted papers influencing votes.

First they used models of consumer behavior to predict how slanted a paper would be to maximize profits in a politically slanted area.   They the measured media political slant by how often papers used politically charged key phrases like "estate tax" versus "death tax".  They then compared this with local political identification data, and found that newspaper slant was almost exactly as predicted for each area.

They find that newspapers do, on average, use left-of-center language.  They also find that that's the profit-maximizing strategy for newspapers, suggest that it's due to demographic differences between newspaper readers and newspaper non-readers.

Interestingly, they also show that newspaper ownership only plays a small (and statistically insignificant) role in determining newspaper bias.

What an incredibly clever paper.

In praise of bureaucrats, aka the most interesting thing I read today

A friend that's a water engineer for the State of California muses on bureaucracy.  In the first post she explicitly reacts to Bush's recent executive order that federal agencies should put regulatory policy under more direct political control.  The second post is on the nature of regulatory policy and bureaucracy.  She really gets to the fundamental nature of the best regulations here:

I know growers feel frantic, hemmed in by unending, complicated, contradictory regulations. What motors they can choose! Which pesticides they can use! When they can use pesticides! How much sediment can be in their tailwater! How much water they can use on their crops! When they can plow to avoid kangaroo rats!! How they can store their crops! Everything! Every detail, regulated!!! Each regulation, eating a piece of their money!! Too much!! But those regulations are all intended toward one end, the ‘What happens on your farm can’t hurt anyone else’ end. If I could change their deep-seated beliefs that they are entitled to farm in ways that hurt people on the other sides of their farm borders, their historic sense that they are entitled to use the waters and airs of the state as sinks, our beliefs about what rights accompany land ownership, I wouldn’t have to have pissant regulations about the types of diesel motors you can use for farm pumps.

Stat of the day

Dan Drezner muses a bit on the changing structure of american work, from long-term company jobs to a series of short-term jobs.  He's certainly on to something (in 5 years since college, I've had 3 regular jobs, 1 consulting gig, and nearly a year of unemployment), but what really leapt out at me was the amount of churn.  According to a Treasury guy he quotes, in 2005 55 million people left their jobs and 57 million people took new ones.*  According to the CIA, the US labor force is about 150 million.  That includes the unemployed, which are abour 5% of the labor force, so we're talking about 142 million jobs.  That's 40% turnover, which seems amazingly high.

The same Treasury guy notes that US job tenure averages 6.6 years, a good bit lower than other developed countries.  What I'm struggling with is what sort of distribution would produce 40% annual churn and 6.6 year average tenure - a lot of minimum wage jobs turning over extremely rapidly, coupled with a normalish distribution of professional job tenure with a 10-year-ish mean?

*Note - I do not think that these are unique, so someone that left a job, took a new one, left that one, and took another would count twice in each tally.

Curses, foiled again

It's just hit me that since I'm not affiliated with a university at the moment, I've just lost my access to online journal archives.  This has already put a cramp in my curious browsing.  I'm going to have to find some sort of afflilate status somewhere.