First baseball stadiums, next public transport. Facing a $178 million budget deficit even after making $122 million in cuts, the Chicago Transit Authority has decided to get creative with ways to fund its infrastructure repair and renewal projects.
Apple would pay for refurbishments to a train station in exchange for “first dibs” on any and all advertising that would go up at the station. Not surprisingly, the station being discussed is North/Clybourn on the Red Line; construction is already underway on a new Apple store nearby. (Apple decided on that location for its new store after its much-publicized split with the Block 37 project.) One thing the deal, which could give the CTA up to $4 million in funding for the refurbishments, will not do is hand over station naming rights.
From Chicagoist
But why not license station naming rights? MARTA is famously underfunded, frustrated by laws restricting its budget decisions. One great way to remedy this would be to allow corporations to rename stations, lines, trolleys, and buses. If the practice was widespread it could be a coup for brands attempting to either enter a market or maintain their dominance. Given how many people use public transport, it would also be quite lucrative for city governments. (Cisco is paying $4 million a year for the naming rights to the A’s new stadium; no one goes to see them play.)
Companies could also compete for stop naming rights close to demographics that would be more likely to buy their products. The hipster-ass Damen Ave. stop in Wicker Park could be the “American Apparel Damen Station,” A stop around Madison Avenue in New York could be sponsored by Tiffany’s.
Perhaps that would get confusing for visitors. I would also object if my own neighborhood became known as the “place near that Kentucky Fried Chicken subway stop.” Admittedly, corporate sponsorship of public transport might buff off that classy sheen most cities strive to cultivate.
However, sponsoring bus routes or entire lines certainly wouldn’t be much worse. What information is actually conveyed by “the 6″ to a tourist? Or being on the ‘green line?’ The impact on the broader level would be less intrusive and yet still provide value to potential advertisers. Also, transit authorities could choose sponsors carefully to reflect the businesses most closely associated with the city. Atlanta would obviously solicit Coke. Goldman Sachs would be the logical choice for a Metro line in Washington, D.C. (they run everything else there already).
The Apple-CTA deal may prove to show us the greatest benefits of such a scheme. City governments simply do a poor job keeping their stations and facilities clean and safe. This deal could align corporate interests with the public good. Apple will be extremely concerned with the spillover effect of negative associations tied to filthy facilities, encouraging it to pump money into further improvements for image reasons.
Really the important thing is that CTA doesn’t go bankrupt or raise the fees to $3. Since I don’t want to be stuck in Hyde Park on weekends, I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.
So I admit that leaving the blog untouched, unmaintained for two weeks following a post titled, “Off to the place where fun goes to die,” may not have been such a wise move. But surprisingly enough it’s the over-abundance of fun, (and the lack of internet at my apartment until recently) rather than the lack of it which has kept me away from the intertubes for the last 2 weeks.
However, now that my shit is together, or as much together as it has ever been I guess, blogging will return to near the top of my priority list. I hope that it can rest somewhere in the middle of yours?
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, I’m leaving Atlanta today to attend law school at the University of Chicago. Wish me luck on my voyage north, and I will resume blogging again as soon as I get an internet connection.
My last trip left me scratching my head and impatiently tapping my foot. This time I was in an out of the store in 30 minutes, a new iPhone and a copy of Snow Leopard in hand. The clerk even taught me a few tricks I didn’t know existed on the iPhone (especially using the headphone volume control to answer calls).
Apple will be rolling in dough even if their customer service representatives are replaced with the cashiers at the Varsity, so I don’t suppose it would matter too much if I never updated or qualified my previous disparaging remarks on its retail experience.
I am, however, going to revise my opinion of the Lenox Mall Apple Store — one thumb up for making the customer feel special. Though I still think it’s stupid to make the point of purchase a game of “chase the guy in a blue shirt.”
Mike brings up a counter-point in the comments on the earlier post about socialism, Hayek, and universal coverage (thanks for the link, Andrew!):
I think you miss something very important. The danger of government-run insurance is not that it will encourage people to get cancer. It’s that it will — as all such systems have — encourage them to overuse the system. Indeed, this is precisely the problem with the system we have now. Since third parties pay the bills, there is zero incentive or the consumer not to get every fancy test, every exotic procedure and every expensive prescription they can.
This is why socialized medical systems have always had to impose rationing. Because it quickly becomes the only way to hold back costs from growing indefinitely.
This is absolutely true. Third-party payments must be minimized to control costs as the incentive structure makes demand for medical care inelastic to price changes.
My previous post, though, didn’t endorse the specific proposal put forth by Obama, which is a moral though not a fiscal improvement over the status quo (and still probably worth it). It instead addresses the misconception that even a full government takeover of health insurance would be a socialist program. This would be inefficient certainly, but not socialist. The term as so used is meaningless and deaf to the principles put forth by forefathers of conservatism/libertarianism. My problem with the way the health care debate is being framed is that showing compassion for people who are fully exposed to the risk of disease makes one a pinko commie bastard.
Ok, so if ObamaCare doesn’t totally do it for me, what would be a good alternative? I’m most persuaded by Milton Friedman’s ideas on health savings accounts, but even he argued that the government should step in and provide baseline catastrophic coverage for all Americans (emphasis mine):
A more radical reform would, first, end both Medicare and Medicaid, at least for new entrants, and replace them by providing every family in the United States with catastrophic insurance (i.e., a major medical policy with a high deductible). Second, it would end tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. And, third, it would remove the restrictive regulations that are now imposed on medical insurance—hard to justify with universal catastrophic insurance.
Milton Friedman, Hoover Digest 2001
Savings accounts aren’t really a popular idea anymore, but the point is that regardless of the specific policy proposed to fix the status quo, it is a moral imperative for our country to guarantee access to health care. How much care, at what quality, who is paying, whether it should be tied to employers – these are all legitimate points of debate. No position on any of those subjects, however, makes one a socialist. It can make you a poor policy maker, but not a Trotskyite, Nazi or a traitor. Which is sad that this needs to be pointed out.
People who don’t believe at least in universal health coverage, whether through mandates to find private insurers, government single-payer, or a hybrid model, have nothing productive to add to the reform discussion.
Just mostly advising us to do so!
But thanks to neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (which I’ve gone into in the past on this blog), we have some more evidence that human nature is not that of the theoretical Economic Man.
People who felt gratitude because of their experience in the first part of the experiment gave away 25 percent more tokens than did control volunteers, whose emotions were not manipulated. This held whether the partner was the person to whom they felt grateful or a stranger, showing that their cooperativeness—acting for the greater good rather than out of pure self-interest—was not driven by a sense of reciprocity. Instead, says DeSteno, “the more grateful one felt as a result of receiving assistance, the more cooperatively one acted. . . . [G]ratitude functions to enhance cooperative as opposed to selfish economic behavior.”
He speculates that natural selection favored the emergence of gratitude, which some of our ape cousins also seem to feel, because it helped our ancestors form stable “exchange relationships”—”you shared your mammoth with me; here, have some of my berries.” But gratitude, this study shows, triggers cooperative, for-the-common-good behavior at the expense of selfishness even when the recipient of that cooperation is not the one you feel grateful to. Gratitude may thus “increase the odds for cooperation” with lots of other people. And thus was born “pay it forward.”
from Newsweek
What’s interesting about this experiment is that the form and kind of help given by the first actor shares nothing in common with the particular expression of gratitude that it seems to cause later. According to Sharon Begley, “the volunteers finished one long and annoying task only to be told they have to do it all over because the computer recording their answers crashed—but then a fellow volunteer (actually one of the researchers) fixes the computer, at some cost to herself in time and effort but saving the real volunteers from having to redo the test.”
I’d like to see the impact of small courtesies on other opportunities for generosity, like tipping for example. Does holding the door open for a middle-aged couple put them in a mood more likely to leave a 25% tip rather than the standard 18? If a stranger offers you her bus schedule are you more likely to show a lost traveler the way to an ATM?
A homeless person offered me part of his KFC chicken breast combo while we were waiting for the bus in Koreatown last week, and 2 hours later I picked up the tab for a meal with two friends. Would I have done that without having my mood elevated by the unexpected generosity of a man who has to beg to feed himself?
Maybe evolution has programmed our brains to facilitate good karma. In most game theory, acting purely on self-interest often offers the individual her greatest expected value (though not highest possible value) while giving a sub-optimal result for the rest of the group. If we were simply strategizing creatures, disconnected with our emotions, we would lower our risks of being taken advantage of but at the cost of producing a worse society.
Clans that didn’t co-operate perhaps gathered less food, produced weapons at lower rates, and failed to protect members from wild animal attacks, allowing those clans whose emotions encouraged gratitude to out-compete and either wipe out or subsume them. Even modern nations can seem great on paper (lots of resources) but suffer from poor intangibles (a divided, distrustful and demoralized people). Or maybe I’m thinking about the Cincinnati Bengals.
(h/t Tyler Cowen)
I’m not sure if y’all know this, but during the primary season I was much more of a Paultard than an Obamacon. Drawn to Ron Paul’s principled stances and promised reduction of the military industrial complex (though not buying his stances on immigration or the Fed), I even donated a tiny sum of money to his campaign.
One of the major influences he cited as the basis for his libertarian philosophy was Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s book The Road To Serfdom, which essentially is to socialism what Noam Chomsky’s work is to capitalism.
Which is why I found it quite surprising when I stumbled upon this passage in the book (emphasis mine):
Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong…
…Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9)
Republicans call universal health care ’socialism,’ a radical expansion of government into the lives of private citizens. But if Hayek, one of the founders of modern libertarianism, in a book which operates on the thesis that any socialism or unreasonable restrictions on economic liberty at all leads us down the road to totalitarianism, says that communal social insurance is not only legitimate but a state obligation, in 1944 for God’s sake, you know that the word socialism has lost all meaning.
By the way, Hayek makes a great case here. The reason intellectual conservatives oppose transfer payments like welfare is that they destroy incentives to work, and may encourage attitudes of entitlement which undermine the moral strength of the country.
But universal health care does no such thing. Being provided security against the risk of cancer doesn’t make us less likely to avoid getting cancer. It doesn’t create incentives to be less healthy (more wasteful perhaps, but in the interest of health not pecuniary gain). Catastrophic disease could befall any individual at any time, nearly any of whom could not possibly prepare for it with only his or her personal wealth. Pooling the risk among everyone is of course the most efficient and humane solution, whether done through a public option, all through private insurers, or a competition between the two (this is why mandates are necessary).
There is a legitimate debate to be had about which of the three options above make the most sense for America. All of them, however, jive with classically liberal principles, and none of them have much of a spillover effect on the free market system we’ve built for our society. Unfortunately arguments to justify health care reform to conservatives are unfruitful because the Republican Party isn’t run by intellectuals, but reactionary politicos who murder language and truth to blindly oppose whatever the Democratic president supports. In wartime, might I add!
(Update — new post at 8:00PM – a response to a thoughtful comment by Mike)
“Aren’t you terrified about nuclear war? Are people going nuts over there?” This was a common refrain among well-wishers intrigued I’d live in South Korea, a place that the media portrays as an atomic testing ground, one drunken dictatorial whim away from being reduced to glass and cockroaches.
The second question, though, didn’t seem to compute. “No, in fact, people aren’t freaking out here. They actually don’t seem to care or think about the chances of nuclear annihilation whatsoever. Or any other kind of annihilation for that matter,” I’d have to reply.
When a North Korean press release threatened to reduce Seoul to ashes, Koreans tended to blow it off. “Meh, they say that all the time and never go through with it,” almost daring their estranged brothers to start something. But that ’something’ was never even a remote possibility, and certainly didn’t play into their day-to-day decision calculi.
This same pattern reappeared in my recent travels to Belfast and Los Angeles. Belfastians seemed unfazed by Molotov Cocktails thrown at police less than a mile from their homes, yet to an outside observer the Orange Day festivities of July seemed to precipitate another decline into total chaos.
No less than half a dozen people expressed concern for my safety as I flew into Los Angeles during the peak of wildfire season. Even as fires lit up the night sky here in LA, they were not mentioned once (except for the single time I brought it up). People still went out to eat on outdoor patios, walked their dogs, ate ice cream, and enjoyed themselves on the beach despite the rest of the country fearing for the safety of Bel Air plutocrats breathing pure black death.
So where am I going with this? You might think that I have brought up these stories in order to launch a diatribe about cable news fear mongering, but that would be too obvious.
Rather, I believe I have stumbled upon an effect that I will dub the Crisis Proximity Syndrome. In short, the closer to a crisis a people are, the less threatening that crisis seems to be. As a corollary, the more distant we are from the event, the more our conception of the place where it happens is consumed by the news coming out of it.
The Iranian Green Revolution may be another example. I remember at one point that Moussavi encouraged his supporters to boycott markets for a day in order to show solidarity. But wait. People have to be encouraged to not proceed normally at a time when tens of thousands (or more) of people are protesting, college dorms are being raided, the president has stolen an election, and the streets are ablaze? Not going to the market isn’t a natural outcome of all this?
Yet from the American point of view, the protests were the singular concern for most Iranians precisely because we were so distanced from the events both physically and figuratively by the clampdown on foreign media.
The effect may have something to do with the concept of enormity. There are some situations in which the human mind simply cannot grasp the scale of horror with which it is confronted. Instead of worrying and scrambling to find solutions, we instead make flippant rationalizations (like Koreans believing the North makes empty threats or Belfastians believing that the riots are contained to certain city blocks) or outright ignore a problem creeping up to our doorsteps (like the denizens of Los Angeles).
It may even explain how the financial wizards running Wall Street could be faced with the impending meltdown of the American economy and continue to wish away the consequences of their collective actions. Or to be totally cliche, global warming (fill in analogy here).
But even if Crisis Proximity is more localized than that, there may be a good reason for it. What does worrying about nuclear holocaust really get us? Sure, we could protest or do grassroots organizing if we think our country’s policies are endangering us, but in the meantime does that mean we need to act as if the threat had already come to pass? The closer we are to a crisis the more we need to be normal in order to deal with modern life’s tendency to escalate madness to the n+1th degree.
Or maybe this is over-thinking it. It’s possible that people just have a limited attention span. Unlike those of us who might catch coverage of a rowdy demonstration on TV for 15 minutes a day, those confronted with it continuously, experiencing no direct impact on their lives, are more likely to conclude that the problem will never affect them. The only reasonable course of action is to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Regardless, nowadays when Atlantans hear “Los Angeles,” they might think “rampaging wildfires,” while Los Angelenos just think “place where I work.” Just remember this next time you read about a Nobel Peace laureate being placed under house arrest, or a soccer riot in Manchester. Most people there are going to find out about it the same way we do here: the newspaper.
If you think the RIAA is bad, wait until Big Brother gets involved.
The British government says people who illegally download music and films could have their Internet connections cut off.
Treasury Minister Stephen Timms says the move would allow “swifter and more flexible measures” to clamp down on piracy.
The plans announced Tuesday include blocking access to download sites and temporarily suspending users’ internet accounts.
from The Associated Press
Is piracy really that great of a threat to the fabric of society that it compels us to censor the internet? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but this seems like, in the big picture, such a low-level, industry-specific problem that basically anything could justify further censorship in the UK.
I am not very familiar with traditions of individual freedom (or lack thereof) in that country, but to me restricting the ability of its citizens without due process is a shocking disregard for liberty or even basic trust. Your neighbor steals your Wi-Fi and downloads The Fast and the Furious? Goodbye internet. Download mp3s of vinyl records you already own? Looks like you are checking e-mail from the public library from now on. Disgusting.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a “put it off until it becomes a problem” kind of guy. Which explains my room at any given time. Which also applies to my electronic organization.
189. That’s the number of unread messages in my GMail inbox. Granted, most of these are newsletter or quasi-junk like Facebook notifications which I don’t actually read but use as a reminder to get on the site and respond to something else. The upshot to this is that when I get new mail from people I care about, I might miss it because I don’t notice the difference between 173 and 175 unread messages.
But fixing this is a giant pain in the ass. Before today I’ve been simply going through each 20 messages in the past and deleting the unread messages one-by-one, alongside read messages. This might go back 50 pages if I haven’t archived in a while (and let’s face it, I rarely do).
ANYWAYS. If this in anyway reminds you of your own GMail situation, then here is the quick way out. Labels.
GMail automatically labels its read and unread messages, allowing you to search for them from the search box atop the inbox. Therefore, if you want to search for only unread messages, simply type “label:unread” and viola! you’ll see all those beautifully bolded e-parcels from your buddies at Delta Air-Lines or that newsletter from the flower company you used last Mother’s Day.
This of course works for traditional fields as well. For example, “from:hugo.stiglitz@gmail.com” might save you from being stabbed in the head unawares (if you are an SS officer, of course).
Hopefully that helps someone else who reads this blog. Thank you to everyone who has checked it out over the last few months!
