Knowing and Making

Some recent interesting articles: A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation is a description of an ambitious project by Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute to develop mathematical models of the behaviour of cities (and earlier, of the physiology of living organisms). They claim to have found some strong correlations in both cases. For instance, a city that doubles in size increases its productivity and economic activity per capita by 15%. And animals that grow larger become more efficient users of energy. However, it's not clear whether they have a real model which explains these phenomena, or just some statistical correlations. Paul Mason went to the LSE and conducted a whimsical interview with the ghost of John Maynard Keynes. As fits someone who changes his mind with the facts, he has grown out of Keynesianism and is seeking a new model which can handle fiat currencies and global finance. An excellent challenge. Another challenge comes from Tyl...

Having questioned the flexibility of the British economy in my last post , I came across an article which made me wonder the same about America: ...the city took a marked turn for the worse. We passed vacant lots surrounded by listing barbed-wire fences, the shells of abandoned mini-malls and the cement outlines of what might once have been petrol stations, now being reclaimed by bushes and grass. There were lots of these ‘urban fields’, where buildings had been torn down and nothing built in their place, and it was curiously unsettling to see how easily sizable chunks of a city could be erased and swallowed up once humans left. ...the neighbourhood reached its nadir – no small feat – with boarded-up houses, a couple of burned-out shops being used as squats, a low, forbidding bar called ‘Club Rolex’ and, saddest of all, the brick skeleton of what had been George Rogers Clark Junior High School. It stood like the shell of a dissolved monastery behind a high wire fence in an asphalt...

Tim Harford's on a couple of rants this weekend: a light-hearted bitch about non-mathematical economists alongside a more serious argument against the "Robin Hood tax" (a much catchier, or perhaps I should say Orwellian, name for the Tobin tax ). I'm with Tim on this one. There's a typically Curtisian video on the front page of the campaign's website (about as blatantly manipulative as the director's better-known work, Love Actually , and with about the same amount of factual content). It attempts to put across the idea that the tax is simultaneously tiny and huge - small enough to have no impact on financial efficiency while being large enough to solve all the world's problems at home and abroad. Tim makes the case against it pretty well - here's a key example: For instance, I might buy car insurance which could – if I knocked somebody down and permanently disabled them – trigger a payment of £1m. My insurance company might want to reinsur...

This beautifully shot photostory isn't strictly about sweatshops, but it might as well be. The women who work as porters in Ghana's city markets must endure: Long hours Backbreaking physical labour Low pay Living in cramped slum conditions Moving from a village where there's food to share, to the city where you starve if you have no money Sounds terrible, right? And yet: People are doing it voluntarily It lets them build up savings They can reinvest those savings in a business, or in going home to start a family It is being used to finance their own or their children's education, so the next generation won't have to do the same Nobody is idealising this lifestyle. It's hard work, I wouldn't want to do it, and at least one of the women in the story who has left the job is glad to be out of it. There is an element of randomness, and if you have no money one day, nobody is going to feed you. But it's more dangerous to idealise the alternat...