Coyote Blog

Update:  Just one day after this story, the Lancet published a study showing that B.1.1.7 not likely more deadly than other variants.  As predicted below.

The New York Times has scary red maps of Europe on its front page today (at least in the version we get in AZ) implying mass death from new COVID variants.  Given the prominence of COVID in the news and our lives, there is certainly a story here.  But as usual with American media coverage of COVID, there is absolutely no balance here.  The article highlights new developments in the virus, which is helpful, but does so in a largely data-free manager and simultaneously engages in the crudest of rhetorical tricks to make the situation seem far worse than it is.  Here are a few pointers to how to read through this mess.

• The use of color on the front page maps is not accidental.  When the media wants you to be scared, it uses red on maps and scales it so that even small changes in variables result in a map going from green or white or blue to solid red and orange.    No exception here.  When one glances at the front page, one likely assumes that this is a map of spread of death or new case counts, but in fact it is merely a map of one new variant as a percentage of other new variants.  It says nothing about death or case counts.

• The article attempts to use certain rhetorical framings to imply that increases in cases and/or deaths are due to this new variant.  For example:

The variant is now spreading in at least 114 countries. Nowhere, though, are its devastating effects as visible as in Europe, where thousands are dying each day and countries’ already-battered economies are once again being hit by new restrictions on daily life.

and this even more egregious example:

What happened this winter in the U.K. was mass death and deluged hospitals on a scale not seen earlier in the pandemic. Since B.1.1.7 was first sampled in late September, 85,000 people have died. Four million people — one out of every 17 Britons — have recorded infections.

So 85,000 people died from this variant?  Well, they want you to think that -- but they were careful that while implying that (which would not at all be true) they do not actually say that.  When you think about it - especially given that there are now dozens of COVID variants - this sentence means exactly nothing.  It's like saying that since Biden took office, thousands of people have died of cancer.  Here is the UK deaths chart (from Google, not in the NY Times article):

You would certainly never know from this article that deaths in the UK have basically gone to zero.  This chart shows exactly the same seasonal pattern we are seeing everywhere, including in places like Arizona where we have had few if any of this new variant.  This picture has become the great totalitarian Rorschach test of the 21st century, with everyone reading their own preferred causes into these seasonal humps (opened too soon! variants! spring break! evil Republican governor!)

By the way, I will save you clicking through the Times link above that says "mass death and delayed hospitals" in an attempt to see the data.  There is none. Just like with the overloaded hospital meme in the US, the article is quotes from a few harried doctors and funeral home managers and zero data.  The first "overloaded hospital" story I see with actual occupancy numbers compared to the same months in prior years will be the first.   In this case there really is no excuse for this, as the NHS apparently keeps pretty detailed daily hospital records and puts them all online here.  So I looked at the week including January 21, which looks like the peak of critical care at least in the death chart.  On 1/21/21, there were apparently 3 acute and emergency care diverts in the whole of England, and it is not even clear if these were due to capacity issues.  Other days that week were generally on 3 as well (I don't know how they count so I don't know if these are the same 3 people all week or different people each day).  Occupancy of acute and emergency beds was around 87%.  For comparison, the January 2019 report from the same site showed acute and critical care occupancy of 85%.  The site cautions that with the segregation of COVID and non-COVID patients, capacity is harder to manage (a basic tenant one learns in any operations course) but it is hard to gauge by how much.  But all this sort of discussion and outlining of facts that are so easy to find is missing from the article, as the whole point is to scare, not to inform.  After all, reciting statistical facts about vampire incidents is not the best way to tell a scary ghost story around the camp fire.

• The article keeps saying that this variant is thought to be more transmissible and more deadly.  Towards the very end they get the most specific when they say:

The variant is believed to be about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent deadlier than the original version of the virus. 

If you follow the link, you have to go through an Easter egg hunt of clicks, but eventually one gets to this metastudy looking at a number of results.   I am not even going to pretend to have expertise in reading and interpreting these results, but I would observe that a) the claimed 67% number seems at the high end of a lot of the results; b) 67% is awfully precise for studies who summarize their study results as this variant "may" and "probably" be more deadly; and c) the sample sizes here are really small and pretty skewed (most seem to be dealing with people already hospitalized or at least showing symptoms).    My personal bet is that we will see a story buried on page 34 in August saying that original relative death studies for this variant appear to have been exaggerated.  When the NY Times is hyping a scare story that increases the power of government, particularly in a Democratic administration, take the under.

• My understanding is that most deadly viruses tend to mutate over time to be less rather than more deadly.   More transmissive but less deadly is the ideal for a virus trying to spam copies of itself across the globe.  I have yet to see any discussion in any article of this fact along with any hypothesis of why COVID might be behaving differently (since according to the media every damn variant is more scary than the last one).  There may be a reason, and it would be an interesting discussion -- as well as an obvious on of interest to readers -- but I have yet to see it.

I really should not get that worked up about all this -- after all, my blog certainly is not even-handed.  But my concern is

1. The undercurrent of all these stories is essentially "so shut up and obey."
2. No criticism or skepticism is being allowed by most of the major gatekeepers.  I can say this kind of stuff because I have a small audience, but once one gets any sort of prominence, such skepticism no matter how well-grounded in facts will be memory-holed.  Take this story.  The claim that children don't need masks is perfectly justifiable for a disease that is deadly for octogenarians but milder than the flu for kids.  We could have a discussion about this and people can disagree, but it is a totally reasonable topic for public discourse.  To ban this can't be due to science, it can only be a quasi-totalitarian deference to authority -- President Biden says we need masks so no one should publicly disagree with him.

Be warned -- totalitarians have not missed the significance of this nor that the government seems to be getting away with it.  You are going to see a spate of issues all reframed as public health issues -- guns, race, climate, immigration -- with folks claiming that newly established COVID-related dictatorial powers need to be applied to their pet issues as well,

I don't think in the history of this country the general populace** has been subjected to the sorts of limitations to individual freedoms that have been imposed over the last year, often by executive order without even involvement of the legislature.  Sometimes by public health officials who are not even elected.  Even in wartime I can't think of any affront to individual liberties that was as bad as the combination of lockdowns, school closures, and business closures.  To have all that happen is bad enough.  But to have the gatekeepers of the public discourse declare that not only are we going to do all these unprecedented authoritarian things, but we are not even going to allow public skepticism of them --that is really scary.  Historically, all the worst ideas have been accompanied by bans on public criticism.

** Clearly minority populations have been subjected to worse.  Enslavement of African-Americans, internment of Japanese-Americans, and near-genocidal actions taken against various native American groups come to mind.

Like many commenters, the hell the soldiers faced on Omaha beach  when the ramps dropped on the landing craft is simply beyond my imagination.  Everyone talks about the bravery of the men that day, which is beyond question.  But the ultimate success at Omaha Beach, which was far from assured after the first hour, required more than bravery.

Virtually the entire plan for the Omaha Beach landing was moot from the first minutes of the battle:  the naval and air bombardment was completely ineffective, the tanks that were to support the landing never made it, and many of the landing craft landed in the wrong places.  But the carefully coordinated waves of landings were fairly robust to these sorts of problems.

In my mind the number one planning problem is that the whole invasion plan and all the training was geared to getting off the beach from a limited number of draws that led inland through the beachfront hills and cliffs.  These draws, however, were absurdly well defended by concentrations of troops and hard fortifications.  It was virtually impossible to advance through these draws as was planned.

The success at Omaha was based on a few (mostly junior) men, under murderous fire, having the brains to recognize the plan was bad and improvising a new plan on the spot.  Eventually, these men began to lead others up the steep hills to the top (most of the heavily defended draws were only taken later from the rear).

The participants in the (often unsuccessful) North Korean human wave attacks in the Korean War were undoubtedly brave.  But these men were not allowed to exercise any initiative or use their intelligence to formulate a better plan than being thrown uselessly in masses directly into the teeth of fortified positions.

So yes, its appropriate to celebrate the bravery of the troops.  But bravery alone would have led to slaughter with waves of men mindlessly trying to storm up the fortified draws.  Omaha Beach was ultimately won with intelligence and initiative of junior officers and enlisted men.

Postscript #1: If there was a failure at Omaha Beach, it again went back to the organizers and planners.  They spent so much time training men in the landing itself, they did not spend any time training or even planning well on what to do next.  As a result, instead of expanding the bridgehead, most of the troops stopped not far from the top of the beach escarpments.  In the following weeks, troops were to spend miserable days in the hedgerow (bocage) country, without any training or fighting doctrine of how to deal with this beautiful defensive terrain.  Again, it was often the initiative of the frontline troops, rather than the planners, that ultimately developed fighting doctrine to deal with the hedgerows.

Postscript #2: Tomorrow I will have my usual day-after-D-Day post on why the Normandy landings were magnificent but not necessarily what actually defeated Germany.

Postscript #3:  Americans, particularly after the movie Patton, love to dump on British General Montgomery.  But D-Day was essentially his plan, and for all that went wrong, it was a magnificent plan.  Montgomery caught a lot of flak from Americans then and now for being too slow and cautious at times when daring and speed were required.  But the flip side of this is that he was an undoubted master of the set-piece, highly planned major attack -- better at this than anyone I can think of on  the Allied side in Europe.

Earlier this month, my wife and I spent a bit of time in Europe.  We started in France, which this time of year is 9 time zones ahead of Phoenix.  This time change is a problem for my wife, who really gets hit hard by jetlag.  To deal with this, we do something all of our friends think is crazy.

For the week before we go, we try to shift our lives as much as one time zone per day.  In reality, this means we wake up at 6am, then 5am the next day, then 4am to as early as 3am or even 2 on the day of the trip.  By the time we leave home, we are waking up as early as 11am in the time of our destination, and as a bonus we are ready to sleep when we get on the plane (Phoenix has a nice 10 hour direct BA flight to London in the evening).  The adjustment process to the new wakeup times is not totally effective because we don't have the sunlight signals at 3AM to get our brains thinking it is day time, but it has really been extraordinarily effective making the first 3-4 days of our vacations travelling east more enjoyable.

When we explain this to our friends, they treat us like the guy at parties who sings the praises of taking freezing cold showers every morning -- they sort of see the logic but can't imagine punishing themselves like this.

But here is our thinking: The value of a day on a vacation, almost anywhere, is way higher than the value of a random day at home.  Vacation days are rarer and require a much higher financial investment than days at home.  So doing things that make a few days at home less comfortable but that make a few days on vacation more comfortable seems to be a good tradeoff.

Megan McArdle has a great WaPo article and tweet storm on high-speed rail in the US.  In it she focuses on issues of distance and infrastructure barriers we have.

One thing she left out is that the US rail system is optimized for freight, vs. European and Japanese systems that are optimized for passengers (it is hard to do both well with the same network).  The US situation is actually better, much better, for energy conservation.  I wrote in detail about this before:

First, consider the last time you were on a passenger train.  Add up the weight of all the folks in your car.  Do you think they weighed more or less than the car itself?  Unless you were packed into a subway train with Japanese sumo wrestlers, the answer is that the weight of the car dwarfs that of the passengers it is carrying.    The average Amtrak passenger car apparently weighs about 65 tons (my guess is a high speed rail car weighs more).  The capacity of a coach is 70-80 passengers, which at an average adult weight of 140 pounds yields a maximum passenger weight per car of 5.6 tons.  This means that just 8% of the fuel in a passenger train is being used to move people -- the rest goes into moving the train itself.

Now consider a freight train.  The typical car weight 25-30 tons empty and can carry between 70 and 120 tons of cargo.  This means that 70-80% of the fuel in a freight train is being used to move the cargo.

This is another case of short-sighted analysis that looks only at the seen rather than the unseen.  Coastal elites take trips to Europe and see the beautiful high-speed trains and in turn never spend a moment thinking about freight trains.  So they fixate on beautiful sexy passenger trains rather than thinking about the system holistically.  I titled a Forbes article I wrote on the effect as "Shifting Capital from the Productive to the Sexy."

PS-  I am a train buff and have a whole room of my house filled with a model railroad, so I don't knee-jerk hate on rail.  I have ridden European high-speed rail many times so I am familiar with the product.  The London-Paris segment is great, and I have ridden the French TGV from Paris to Marseilles and the Italian line from Milan to Florence.  What's not to love as a tourist -- we don't pay for them and they provide good service between the city centers of tourist destinations.   But if you look at those trains they really have a ton of expensive infrastructure carrying not very many people over relatively (for the US) short distances.

I write this because after I criticized infrastructure triumphalism in Joel Epstein's article at Huffpo, he wrote me a one line retort: "You should get out of the country more often."  LOL, if you had to enshrine a hall of fame of sneering coastal elite dismissive comments of critics, this would have to be on the list.  I tried to follow up with him and ask him if he would have the US adopt China's infrastructure construction practices if the cost was adopting China's environmental and accountability standards, but I did not get a response.

The news came out the other day that Porsche will stop making diesel-engine cars.  This is the beginning of the end of significant diesel car production in Europe, and is the ultimate proof that the diesel engine is a dead-end technology choice for Europeans concerned with the environment.

The story is a long one and I will leave you with some links in a moment, but the basic story flow is:

• European governments are concerned about CO2 production, want to "do something"
• European car-makers have a lead over the rest of the world in diesel technology, urge governments to choose diesel as the technology of the future, since at the time it was more efficient than gasoline engines.
• European governments, hot to "do something" and also keen to do it in a way that seems to advantage domestic producers in the high profile automobile trade, promote diesel in a number of ways (including lowering taxes on diesel fuel and diesel car purchases).
• As Europeans adopt diesel, problems emerge as air quality degrades -- diesels may be more efficient, but have a number of harmful emissions that are far worse than with gasoline engines.  There are tests and standards for these emissions but it is discovered that most manufacturers are cheating on emissions tests.
• Too late, it is realized that other technologies (electric hybrids, all electric) are pushing well past diesel in terms of efficiency.  Diesel is a dead-end in terms of CO2 reduction, and increases harmful emissions.
• Emissions tests are tightened, but it is clear manufacturers cheated because they do not have the technology to produce cars people will buy that meet the standards.  Companies like Porsche start to exit the business.

One of the best articles I have found about this history is actually at Vox, that bastion of free market economics and government non-interventionism.

The failure here is entirely predictable and is subsumed in the general criticism of "government picking winners."  As with many such failures, they boil down to information and incentives.  In terms of information, folks in government have no idea of the range of technology choices now and in the future, and how these technology choices might or might not make sense in a broad range of applications.  In terms of incentives, government officials usually have very different true incentives from their publicly stated ones (in this case CO2 reduction).  In the US, the Feds continue to support insanely stupid ethanol subsidies and mandates in part because the first Presidential primary is in corn state Iowa.  In Europe, it may well have been that officials were more ready to support diesel, which Europeans were good at, over hybrids, which Asian companies were good at, no matter what the relative merits were.

If you think that is cynical, even the folks at Vox noticed:

At the time, there were lots of different paths Europe's automakers could have taken to green itself. They could've pursued direct injection technology for gasoline vehicles, making those engines more fuel-efficient. They could've ramped up development of hybrid-electric cars, as Toyota was doing in Japan. But European companies like Peugeot and Volkswagen and BMW had already been making big investments in diesel, and they wanted a climate policy that would help those bets to pay off.

Europe's policymakers obliged. The EU agreed to a voluntary CO2 target for vehicles that was largely in line with what diesel technology could meet. As researcher Sarah Keay-Bright later noted, these standards were crafted so as not to force Europe's automakers to develop hybrids, electric vehicles, or other advanced powertrains.

The result?

Although overall pollution in Europe has gone down over time, diesel vehicle emissions remain stubbornly high. Today, Paris sometimes has smoggy days comparable to those in Beijing. London is struggling with unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide. Germany, Austria, and Ireland have NOx pollution well above the legal limits, with vehicles accounting for roughly 40 percent of that output.

The health toll is likely considerable. One recent study estimated that diesel pollution from cars, buses, and trucks in Britain caused 9,400 premature deaths in 2010 alone. It's difficult to pinpoint what fraction of those deaths might have been avoided if emission rules on cars had been strictly enforced all along, but that gives a sense of the stakes.

Even Vox is willing to call for some technocratic humility:

Which brings us to the third takeaway. The future is hard to predict. Diesel cars seemed like a reasonable idea in the 1990s and a disaster today. That suggests that policymakers should have a lot more humility when crafting energy policy. Maybe battery-electric cars will win out, or maybe it'll be hydrogen, or maybe it'll be something else entirely. (Heck, perhaps diesel cars that are genuinely clean could play a role in reducing CO2 emissions.) No one knows for sure.

So one approach here might be to pursue technology-neutral policies focused on preferred outcomes — say, tightly enforced standards that require lower emissions — rather than favoring specific industries and technologies just because they happen to seem promising at that moment in time.

This conundrum is likely to come up again and again. For years, governments have been laying down big bets on emerging clean energy technologies. France did it with nuclear power in the 1970s and '80s. Germany did it with wind and solar power in the 2000s, through feed-in tariffs. The United States has done it with corn ethanol in the past decade.

Done right, this sort of government support can be valuable, helping useful new energy options break into the mainstream against entrenched competition. But there's also a huge risk that governments will end up gambling on badly flawed technologies that then becomethe entrenched competition — and prove impossible to get rid of. The US arguably made that mistake with ethanol, which has had unintended ripple effects on the food supply and deforestation that are proving politically difficult to untangle. The drive for diesel looks like it belongs in that category, too. It's not a story we'd like to keep repeating.

Thus we get to my plan, which eliminates all these political interventions in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

It is useful to have an algorithm for spending your travel (hotel, air) loyalty points.  Years ago I generally saved them for big vacation trips, usually to Europe or Hawaii.  These were the most expensive trips I took and it felt good to bring their cost down.

Two things have killed this algorithm for me.  One is that most major airlines don't have squat for points availability on popular Trans-Atlantic and Hawaiian routes (British Airways, I am looking at you).  The second change was that I started to read some of the web sites focused on travel points, for example the Points Guy.

There is good information on these sites, but a lot of the detailed strategies are way to arcane and time-consuming to bother with (e.g. Take your American Express points and convert them into gift certificates denominated in Ecuadorian currency, and then apply these for double credit... etc).  But the one takeaway I have had is to think of your points like a currency with a constantly varying exchange rate to dollars, and find the opportunities to spend the points at the best exchange rates.  TPG  maintains a monthly estimate of the value of each type of reward point.  Expected value is between 1 and 2 cents a point for most.

My new algorithm is to use my points when I am getting at least 2 cents for them, and hopefully more.   Take hotel points for example.  From time to time I will find that there is some squeeze in hotel rooms in a city I want to visit and the price of most hotels have risen 50-100% for these days.  This is a great time to use your points, particularly if you are locked into the dates and can't go on a cheaper date.  The reason for this is while the price in $ goes up, the price in points does not.  There may be some hotel chains that limit availability, but Starwood for example does not.  Let me give an example.

In several weeks I am taking my wife for a nice weekend to see her friends in Manhattan.  We are locked into the dates.  But it turns out that there is some UN event and all the hotel rates have skyrocketed even higher than usual NYC hotel rates.  It was just going to be too expensive to stay in a really special hotel.  Until I thought of the St. Regis.  It is not my first choice, but it is in Starwood and with the Starwood Amex card I have a zillion points.  Turns out for a basic room the nightly rate had gone all the way to $1500 (welcome to NY).  But the points cost for the same room was the same as it ever was, 35,000.  I was effectively getting 4.3 cents each for my points.  One could argue that since this was not my first choice, I should compare it to that alternative, but even with a cheaper rate at that hotel this was still 2.6 cents of savings for each point.

For American Airlines, I try to do the same thing.  Most transcontinental flights have no points availability, or have availability at really bad exchange rates (The one exception I have found is Cathay Pacific, which takes American points and tends to have a lot of award seats).  I increasingly use my points domestically.  When rates shoot up for a particular flight, there still may not be availability but sometimes the opportunities are there.

Trump supporters are saying "I told you so" as Trump and European officials reached an agreement to dial back tariffs and pursue some efforts at free-er trade.  Trump supporters have argued, and I was skeptical, that Trump really wanted free trade but was engaging in brinkmanship as part of the opening phases of negotiation.  First, let's see exactly what this agreement included:

– They will work towards “zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies” on non-auto industrial products. That’s not a huge category of goods, as it excludes agriculture and raw materials, among other things, and zero non-tariff barriers and subsidies seems really unlikely. But still, it would be great if we made progress here.

– The EU will buy more U.S. soybeans and liquid natural gas. This was probably going to happen anyway because of market shifts and other factors.

– They will have a dialogue about conflicting regulatory standards in the U.S. and EU. This is a long-time goal of U.S. and EU trade policy-makers. It sounds easier than it really is.

– They will work together on reform of the WTO, and to address problems to the trading system caused by China.

In addition, the agreement effectively included:

• Current Trump tariffs on steel and metals, and the European retaliation, will remain in place
• Trump will not currently put in place his threatened $200 billion in auto tariffs on European vehicles

So the basic agreement is 1) leave all new tariffs in place; 2) sell more soybeans and natural gas to Europe; and 3) talk about tariff and non-tariff barriers that typically consume years and years of discussion.

This is basically a big zero.  Even beyond the fact that the agreement avoids most of the major trade categories, the act of negotiating towards lower tariffs, lower non-tariff barriers, and reconciling conflicting regulator standards has been done before -- its called NAFTA and the TPP, both of which Trump has sh*t on.  Sure, they can have flaws (especially the TPP), but these compromises are the only way these trade deals get made, as country leaders each are in thrall to their own influential crony industry.  The US's own high tariffs on SUV imports is a great example.  This is all not to mention the time -- TPP negotiations took 8 years -- through which we consumers apparently will still suffer under Trump's tariffs.

So for most US consumers, the end result of all of this is that we still are paying higher prices for any product that contains metal, from soda cans to automobiles.  This is great for soybean farmers, I suppose, but sucks for the rest of us.   This is all about politicians balancing one crony against another and in this calculus, consumers always lose.

Trump says he is for free trade, but he still spouts all this fairness BS.  Things that he considers "unfair" are actually just "unfair" to a few people in a few industries, but are eminently "fair" for 300 million consumers in the US.  Here is the true test of a free trader:

Consider two trade regimes.  In Regime #1, the US charges 0% tariffs on German steel and Germany charges 0% tariffs on US steel.  In Regime #2, the US is able to charge 10% tariffs on German steel while Germany still charges 0% tariffs on US steel.   I would bet quite a bit of money that Trump would say that Regime #2 is a better deal for the US, while free traders like myself and most economists would say that Regime #1 is not only better for the world as a whole, it is better for the US.  Zero tariffs allows the division of labor and comparative advantage to all work their magic to make sure capital and productive effort in this country are employed for the highest return.

A few days back, we had a debate in the comments about whether Trump really wants free trade.   In my view, Trump looks at tariff rates and trade deficits like a simple scorecard of winning or losing without really understanding trade and its benefits.  Sure, Trump proposed a zero tariff rate agreement in passing with our European trading partners.  I think he did this because it made him look good and he knew they would never go for it.

But no matter the case, even if he is sincere, he still is judging this proposal by a very different standard than economists would.  Take European tariffs on passenger cars.  My understanding is that they are about 10% on US cars vs. our 2.5% on theirs  (this ignores the absolute hypocrisy in this whole thing that our light truck tariff on imports is like 25%, but put that aside).  Trump sees taking these two passenger car tariff rates to zero as a win NOT because it would be a benefit to consumers but because in his thinking the US gets a 10% concession out of Europe and only gives up a 2.5% concession in exchange.  Winning!

I tried to think of the best way to highlight the difference between Trump's thinking and good economic thinking on trade, and I came up with this hypothetical:

Consider two trade regimes.  In Regime #1, the US charges 0% tariffs on German steel and Germany charges 0% tariffs on US steel.  In Regime #2, the US is able to charge 10% tariffs on German steel while Germany still charges 0% tariffs on US steel.   I would bet quite a bit of money that Trump would say that Regime #2 is a better deal for the US, while free traders like myself and most economists would say that Regime #1 is not only better for the world as a whole, it is better for the US.  Zero tariffs allows the division of labor and comparative advantage to all work their magic to make sure capital and productive effort in this country are employed for the highest return.  I believe from reading the comment section of this blog that there are many many people who call themselves a free trader but who would say that Regime #2 is a better deal for the US.  If you believe that, you better have done a lot of work educating yourself on the issue because the great mass of economic theory and practice is against you.

I am not an economist and I am too busy today to give the whole explanation today, but here is one hint at part of the answer:

As of mid-2017, there were 29,288 steel-consuming firms, employing more than 900,000 workers who face higher prices versus just 916 steel-producing firms with 80,000 employees who benefit from those higher prices and reduced competition.

In an article about the French railroad SNCF, Randal O'Toole makes a point I have screamed to the world for years:

Meanwhile, French trains carry less than 11 percent of freight, as more than 86 percent of freight is transported on highways. Those numbers are in sharp contrast to the U.S., where at least a third of freight goes by rail and less than 40 percent goes by truck (and I suspect a bad model has erroneously exaggerated the role of trucks).

American railroads are a model of capitalism, one of the least-subsidized forms of transportation in the world. They are profitable and do far more for the national economy than Europe’s socialized railroads, which mainly serve narrow elites.

Most of the intellectual elites and nearly all the global warming alarmists deride the US for not having the supposedly superior rail system that France and Germany have.  They are blinded by the vision of admittedly beautiful high speed trains, and have frittered away billions of dollars trying to pursue various high speed rail visions in the US.

I know that the supposedly pro-science global warming alarmists sometimes are not actually very focused on science, but this is pretty simple to think about.

First, consider the last time you were on a passenger train.  Add up the weight of all the folks in your car.  Do you think they weighed more or less than the car itself?  Unless you were packed into a subway train with Japanese sumo wrestlers, the answer is that the weight of the car dwarfs that of the passengers it is carrying.    The average Amtrak passenger car apparently weighs about 65 tons (my guess is a high speed rail car weighs more).  The capacity of a coach is 70-80 passengers, which at an average adult weight of 140 pounds yields a maximum passenger weight per car of 5.6 tons.  This means that just 8% of the fuel in a passenger train is being used to move people -- the rest goes into moving the train itself.

Now consider a freight train.  The typical car weight 25-30 tons empty and can carry between 70 and 120 tons of cargo.  This means that 70-80% of the fuel in a freight train is being used to move the cargo.

Now you have to take me on faith on one statement -- it is really hard, in fact close to impossible, to optimize a rail system for both passengers and freight.  In the extreme of high speed rail, passenger trains required separate dedicated tracks.  Most rail systems, even when they serve both sorts of traffic, generally prioritize one or the other.  So, if you wanted to save energy and had to pick, which would you choose -- focusing on freight or focusing on passengers?  Oh and by the way, if you want to make it more personal, throw in a consideration of which you would rather have next to you on crowded roads, another car or another freight truck?

This is why the supposedly-green folks' denigrating of US rail is so crazy to me.  The US rails system makes at least as much sense as the European system, even before you consider that it was mostly privately funded and runs without the subsidies that are necessary to keep European rail running.  Yes, as an American tourist travelling in Europe, the European rails system is great.  Agreed.  I use it every time I go there.  I have to assume that this elite tourist experience must be part of why folks ignore the basic science here.

My original article on all this years ago was in Forbes here.

Postscript #1:  One could argue that what matters is not the weight ratios of freight vs. passenger rail but how those compare to the road alternatives.  I would have to think this through, but it gets way more complicated because you have to start worrying about average occupancy and such since that also differs.  At full capacity say of 4 people, the typical 4000 pound car (US, rest of the world is less) would passenger weight around 12% of the total, higher than for the passenger train.   But average occupies could change the comparison and I don't have the time to work it through.  But for a full analysis we would have to take a lot of other things into account.  For example, trains are a poor fit with customer travel time preferences for longer US distances, even for higher speed options.  In the same way freight pencils out worse for rail in Europe because the last mile transport problems become a bigger percentage in a shorter haul.  I am confident though that for the US, the freight-dominant system is the right solution and it amazes me how hard it is to get anyone to recognize this.

Postscript #2:  Thinking about the SNCF, I actually did a consulting project there 20+ years ago.  I remember two things.   First they had 25% more freight car repair people than they had freight cars.  Which led me to making the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could give every one of these folks their own tool bag, assign them their own car to ride around on, and still cut a fifth of their staff.  I have never, ever, ever seen bloated staffing like I did at SNCF.  My other memory was lunches with executives that took place in palatial dining rooms with waiters in white gloves.  We ate for like 3 hours and drank a case of wine and all I could think about doing after lunch was going to take a nap.

Postscript #3:  This is really going to be a random aside, but if you want to bring science to the table, monorails are the dumbest things ever.  The whole advantage of rail is the friction reduction of a metal flanged wheel rolling on a metal rail.   Most monorails (and people movers) are just tires on a concrete beam (e.g this is how the Disney monorails work).  This is no more efficient than a bus and actually less because the train jacks up the vehicle to passenger weight ratio over a bus.  Because of certain geometry issues, monorails also have limited capacity.  Disney has been struggling with this for years at the Magic Kingdom in Florida and their ferry boats seem to move a lot more passengers than the adjacent monorails.  Monorails do look awesome, though, and their tracks are airier and more attractive than traditional elevated rail tracks.

I have been reading all the articles (and the storm of emails in my inbox) on European GDPR privacy rules implementation with some dispassion.  After all, it does not affect me, right?  I run a camping business all in the US.  But then I got to thinking about it and realized that I had three avenues of exposure  -- my blogs, my jobs mailing list, and my company web site.  I will preface this by saying that I am no expert and I am not really hugely at-risk, but perhaps this will be useful to someone.  More importantly, if you ARE an expert and see something I am screwing up please email me!

The blog exposure strikes me as pretty narrow, particularly since we do not serve up advertisements (except in the comments via Disqus) and do not have a mailing list.  I don't store or have access to any user data (though I wonder if server logs count?) so I assess my main liability as secondary if Disqus screws up something.  I have been reading Disqus's updates and I would evaluate them as working on it but not done.  I suppose if the EU wants to come after me for "up to 4%" of this site's revenue they are welcome to do so.  Sort of like when I was unemployed being told to spend 2 months salary on my wife's engagement ring  (which in fact I did exactly, since it was my mom's ring given to me as a gift for the purpose).

Similarly, I think my liability surrounding the mailing list we maintain for job openings is pretty limited.  First, it would shock me if more than 0.0001% of the people on that list are in Europe, since I can't really legally hire Europeans in most cases and it is unlikely they will drive their RV over here to work in a campground.  More importantly, all the names are there through what I would call extreme opt-in -- they have to click on a special link and go sign up on a dedicated page just to join the mailing list.  The email provider is Constant Contact so again my liability is likely limited to whether they screw anything up in their compliance, but this is probably unlikely in my case.  Again there is no advertising and all people on the list ever get are notifications of new job openings and links where to apply.

Which brings me to our business web site.  There is no log-in or user information entered or advertising on our web site, so we are mostly fine.  With one large exception -- we have our own reservations site that gathers and stores customer reservation information.  Eek!  That sounds like it could be a problem.  The most dangerous piece of data we could potentially have in our hands is a credit card number, which is why our system was set up so our company never has the credit card number in our possession.  Customers are passed over to Stripe (highly recommended company, by the way) who handle all that dangerous stuff on their servers, and just pass us back a confirmation.  But we do have customer name, address, email, and camping stay dates on our server.  Maybe we are compliant already -- we treat that stuff with a lot of care.  Maybe we are not.  But since we really don't get any reservations at all from Europe, it was easier just to go black there, so right now my software guy is working on blocking traffic from European IP addresses.

Postscript:  On some of my posts, people write me and ask, "Why did you even bother to publish that."  And my answer is that I often write to think, so it may be that it is only for my own benefit.  My software guy is a reader of this blog and was probably laughing as he read this post because I stopped a couple times in writing it to fire off new questions or requests to him.

Update:  Hah, what timing!   This just appeared on my blog when I scrolled down to the comments so I guess Disqus must indeed be working on this.

I have written about this before, but critics of all things capitalism are usually particularly critical of branding, arguing that building brands has no value except to somehow beguile customers into overpaying for things or buying things they do not need.  Now, I can be sympathetic to this when I see folks who have paid a fortune for certain fashion items (*cough* Louis Vuitton bags *cough*), but in generally branding actually has real consumer value.  One important value of branding is predictability.  McDonald's was traditionally a classic example of this -- walk into any McDonald's in the world and you will be pretty sure what will be on the menu and what it will taste like.

I wrote about this before when travelling in Europe.  I know that I like some orange juice brands and don't like others.  I know for sure I like Tropicana and so I buy that because I am confident I will get something I will like.  In Europe, I had no idea what to buy -- I might pay for something I would enjoy, but I might also find myself having paid for something I really did not like.

I was reading a travel blog and thought that this quote really represented the epitome of why brands matter

I’ve been to Hyatts all around the world within every brand of the chain’s portfolio, and I don’t recall ever staying at a property which was miscategorized. There’s no mistaking a Park Hyatt for a Hyatt Regency, or a Grand Hyatt for an Unbound Collection. When I pick a property within the Hyatt portfolio, my expectations are met and the experience is standardized around the world. Hyatt Houses and Hyatt Places are almost identical properties regardless of where in the world they pop up.

I cannot say the same for the expansive Marriott portfolio. Just last month I stayed at the JW Marriott Copacabana in Rio, and nothing about that property represented the other JW’s I’ve visited. Certainly not all generic Marriott hotels are created equally, and I’ve found a very large variation in property conditions, common spaces, room sizes and other factors at Marriotts.

For example, let’s look at Courtyard properties. Within the last year I’ve stayed at the Courtyard in Durham, North Carolina, which resembled an updated Super 8. Then, not two months later, I visited the Courtyard in LaGrange, Georgia, which was more akin to a full Marriott hotel branded property. Compare those two with the Courtyard Seoul Times Square, which has an executive lounge with a rooftop patio, and I don’t know what to expect when booking a Marriott property, even within a single brand.

From the terrorists-have-won department:  Apparently, the current in-cabin ban on laptops and tablets the applies to flights originating in certain Middle Eastern countries will soon be extended to flights from Europe.  I am pretty sure that if the US bans laptops on flights from Europe, the EU will ban them in the opposite direction, if nothing else as tit for tat retaliation.  This will make long distance flight a LOT worse, at least for me.  Unlike most folks, apparently, I have no interest in onboard entertainment systems and spend most of my time on these long flights getting work done on my PC or reading books on my iPad.  This will make me a lot less likely to schedule a vacation in Europe, and frankly I am relieved we decided at the last minute not to go there this summer.

For years I have argued that immigration controls in this country are effectively a form of occupational licensing.  While US immigration controls are a terrible policy IMO, Germany's approach seems even worse.  They welcome people into their country but don't let them work, and then wonder why newly immigrated refugees can't find jobs.

In 2015, Germany waited the longest of any country in Europe to restrict the flow of asylum seekers from the Middle East. Yet once they arrived, the asylees who immediately sought work in Europe’s largest economy were greeted by bureaucracy. The law initially forbade asylees from seeking work for 9 months after their arrival, but was reduced to 3 months in November 2014. Then, inexplicably, at the height of the inflows, the German governmentbanned working if the asylee was forced to stay a reception center, which could be up to 6 months.

After the initial waiting period, asylees did not receive unrestricted employment authorization. Instead, they would have to find a “concrete” job offer—i.e. a firm must promise to hire them if the permit is granted—then apply for authorization. Even then, companies can only hire them during the first 15 months if the jobs are offered first to EU residents, and the federal labor department agrees that no one was willing to take. They also set asylee wages, which can price out low-skilled workers.

The hoops don’t end there. Asylees still have to get the approval of the immigration office at the municipal level. Under the law, it would take four years before they could compete equally with EU citizens.

On top of all these refugee-specific regulations, skilled workers are then tasked with proving that they can work in certain occupations. In order to obtain an occupational license, documentary proof of training—proof that’s often buried under bombed-out homes in Syria—is required. Some states in Germany allow asylees to demonstrate their skills in order to receive licensing, but others do not. “I am a dentist and could work, but what am I supposed to do? I am not allowed to work here!” one asylee told DW News.

Low-skilled immigrants haven’t avoided being targeted either. Germany introduced its first ever minimum wage in 2015—which disproportionately hits lower skilled migrants—and a study by the German government in August 2016 found that it had already cost 60,000 jobs.

I first saw this over the summer in Bruges.  If I had to name one place in Europe where I expected to be bored, but was in fact fascinated, it was the lace museum in Bruges.  They had a lot of examples of super-fine lace, as well as a history and examples of how it is made.  The best part was that upstairs, they had women actually doing hand lace projects that you could go watch.  I did not get a video of it but here are a few examples from the web that give the basic idea.  Here is hand-making of lace:

and here

and here is an insane machine for making it automatically

The super-fine hand-made lace in the museum in Bruges was unlike anything I have ever seen. An order of magnitude finer than even the best lace you have likely seen.

Kevin Drum, in commenting on a Binyamin Appelbaum article in the NY Times, writes that the Presidential candidates should be talking more about poverty in part because the US is way behind Europe.  Specifically, Appelbaum quotes a Harvard Sociology (!) Professor as the source for the poverty claim:

“We don’t have a full-voiced condemnation of the level or extent of poverty in America today,” said Matthew Desmond, a Harvard professor of sociology. “We aren’t having in our presidential debate right now a
serious conversation about the fact that we are the richest democracy in the world, with the most poverty. It should be at the very top of the agenda.”

Drum argues that Desmond is right, because of this chart from the OECD:

One of the dirty secrets about poverty measurement is that the actual measurement seldom has anything to do with absolute well-being.  And this is the case with the OECD numbers.  The OECD's poverty measurement is based on the country's median income, and is the percentage of people who are below a certain percentage (generally 50%) of the country's own median income.  As such, this is more rightly thought of as a graph of income inequality rather than absolute poverty.

Here is an example.   Image country A with a median income of $50,000 and an income of the 20th percentile at $20,000.  Now imagine country B where the median income is $30,000 and the 20th percentile income is $15,000.  In this example, the poorest 20th percentile in country A are better off on an absolute basis, but the OECD (and most other poverty numbers) will show country B doing better because the poor are closer to the (much lower) median income.  In an extreme example, if everyone in a country were equally impoverished, the OECD would show that country as doing the best on poverty -- Yes, you read that right.  By this metric, the OECD would show a country where every person made just $10,000 a year as having 0% poverty.

Obviously, what one would really like to do is compare across nations the absolute well-being of the lowest 10th or 20th percentile.  On a purchasing power parity basis, which country's poor has, after transfers and taxes, more money?  Unfortunately, you likely have never ever seen this.  Yes, the data comparison is hard, but it is possible, so one has to wonder if there is some ulterior political motive for never showing this quite obvious analysis.

I tried to do this analysis myself for years (I describe some false starts here) but was unsuccessful until I actually identified a data source that would work, ironically from two folks on the Left (Kevin Drum and John Cassidy) who were using data from the LIS Cross-National Data Center to make comparisons of income inequality.  It turned out the data they were using could do what I wanted.

So now we get to the chart I call the poverty Rorschach test.  It is a comparison of the absolute income, by income percentile and including transfers and taxes, of the US vs. Denmark (the country by Drum's chart that should be the "best" on poverty)

(The date is old, alas, because this kind of cross-country data is only gathered every so often)

This chart shows, on a purchasing power parity basis, that for every single income percentile, all the way to the bottom, an equivalent person in the US has more income than that a similarly situated person in Denmark.  In short, the poor in the US are wealthier than the poor in Denmark.  The only reason Denmark does better than the US in the way the OECD and others measure poverty is that the middle class in the US are a LOT wealthier than the middle class in Denmark.

I call it the Rorschach test because one either sees the US doing a good job, because everyone is better off, or the Danish doing a better job, because everyone is more even.  Proponents of the latter view tend to believe that the size of the economic pie is an exogenous variable, unrelated to the method one chooses to slice it.

I picked the Danish because they were the obvious comparison from Drum's chart, but here is the US vs. all the European countries for which there was data in the survey.  The US is better than all but 3 at the 10th percentile and better than all but one country at the 20th percentile.  And better -- by a huge margin-- for the middle class than any of the countries in Europe.

Update:  One more note on Drum's chart.  As I said above, the exact definition of the OECD numbers is percentage of people with income less than 50% of the country's own median income.  The US has a median household income, per the OECD, 41% higher than Denmark's.   So the US has 9% more people under a number that is 41% higher.   That is hardly a fair or meaningful comparison.

For reasons that are beyond my understanding, I am banned at Mother Jones so I cannot post the comments directly to his article.  If someone wanted to cut and paste this under his or her own name, I wouldn't complain.

Everyone on the Left is absolutely convinced that the Brexit vote was all about racism.  In part, this is because this is the only way the Progressives know how to argue, the only approach to logic they are taught in college for political argumentation.

Yes, as an immigration supporter, I am not thrilled with the immigration skepticism that dominates a lot of western politics.  I struggle to cry "racism" though, as I confess that even I would be given pause at immigration of millions of folks from Muslim countries who hold a lot of extremely anti-liberal beliefs.

Anyway, I would likely have voted for Brexit had I been in Britain.  I think the EU is a bad idea for Britain on numerous fronts completely unrelated to immigration.  The EU creates a near-dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats who seem to want to push the envelope on petty regulation.  And even if this regulation were just "harmonizing" between countries, Britain would still lose out because it tends to be freer and more open to markets and commerce than many other European countries.

By supporting Brexit, I suppose I would have been called a racist, but it would really have been about this:

The EU is poised to ban high-powered appliances such as kettles, toasters, hair-dryers within months of Britain’s referendum vote, despite senior officials admitting the plan has brought them “ridicule”.

The European Commission plans to unveil long-delayed ‘ecodesign’ restrictions on small household appliances in the autumn. They are expected to ban the most energy-inefficient devices from sale in order to cut carbon emissions.

The plans have been ready for many months, but were shelved for fear of undermining the referendum campaign if they were perceived as an assault on the British staples of tea and toast.

A sales ban on high-powered vacuum cleaners and inefficient electric ovens in 2014 sparked a public outcry in Britain.

EU officials have been instructed to immediately warn their senior managers of any issues in their portfolios that relate to the UK and could boost the Leave campaign were they to become public....

Internet routers, hand-dryers, mobile phones and patio jet-washers are also being examined by commission experts as candidates for new ecodesign rules.

As a free trade supporter, the downside would be the loss of a free trade zone with the rest of Europe, but I am not sure it can be called a "free trade zone" if they are banning toasters.  Britain will negotiate new tariff rates with the EU, just as Switzerland and Norway (much smaller and less important trading partners) have done.

The real crime from a US perspective is the actions of our President.  Mr. Obama has told the British that by voting for Brexit, they go to "the back of the line" for trade negotiations with the US.  This is, amongst a lot of stupid things politicians say, one of the stupidest I have ever heard.  My response as president would have been to move Britain to the front of the line, offering them a free trade treaty with the US the day after the Brexit vote.  Like most politicians, unfortunately, President Obama does not view trade as a vehicle for the enrichment of individuals but as a cudgel to enforce his whims in the foreign policy arena.  Why on Earth has President Obama threatened to undermine America's strong interest in trading with the UK merely to punish the UK for not staying in the EU, a transnational body this country would certainly never join?

A lot of folks, particularly on the Left, despise the Citizens United decision that said it was unconstitutional to limit third party political speech, particularly prior to an election (even if that speech was made by nasty old corporations).  The case was specifically about whether the government could prevent the airing of a third-party produced and funded documentary about one of the candidates just before an election.  The Supreme Court said that the government could not put in place such limits (ie "Congress shall make no law...") but Britain has no such restrictions so we can see exactly what we would get in such a regime.  Is this what you want?

As Britain gears up to vote in the EU referendum later this week, broadcasters are constantly working to ensure their coverage remains impartial. One such company is Sky, which has this week been forced to delay the latest instalment of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight HBO show. Why? Because it contains a 15-minute diatribe on why the UK should remain part of Europe.

Instead of airing the programme after Game of Thrones on Sky Atlantic on Monday night, like it does usually, Sky has pushed it back until 10:10pm on Thursday, just after the polls close. Social media users are up in arms about the decision, but in reality, Sky appears to be playing everything by the book.

Sky's decision allows it to adhere to Ofcom rules that come into effect during elections and referendums. "Sky have complied with the Ofcom broadcasting restrictions at times of elections and referendums that prohibit us showing this section of the programme at this moment in time. We will be able to show it once the polls close have closed on Thursday," a Sky spokesperson told Engadget.

In March, the regulator warned broadcasters that they'd need to take care when covering May's local elections and the subsequent Brexit vote. Section Five (which focuses on Due Impartiality) and Section Six (covering Elections and Referendums) of Ofcom's Code contain guidelines that are designed stop companies like Sky from influencing the public vote. Satirical content is allowed on UK TV networks during these times, but Oliver's delivery is very much political opinion based on facts, rather than straight humour.

By the way, the fact vs. satire distinction strikes me as particularly bizarre and arbitrary.

When will folks realize that such speech limitations are crafted by politicians to cravenly protect themselves from criticism.  Take that Citizens United decision.  Hillary Clinton has perhaps been most vociferous in her opposition to it, saying that if President she will appoint Supreme Court judges that will overturn it.  But note the specific Citizens United case was about whether a documentary critical of .... Hillary Clinton could be aired.  So Clinton is campaigning that when she takes power, she will change the Constitution so that she personally cannot be criticized.  And the sheeple on the Left nod and cheer as if shielding politicians from accountability is somehow "progressive."

Most folks know that labor costs in Europe are high, both because of high minimum wages, high required benefits, and various government regulations that raise the cost of labor (e.g. making it impossible to fire anyone).

My observation so far is that private businesses understand this perfectly.  Given higher labor costs than in the US, most service businesses have fewer employees.  In restaurants in the US a waiter might cover 4-6 tables -- in most European restaurants I have been in the waiter covers the whole restaurant.  In fact, two of the places we have eaten are 12 table restaurants run entirely by a couple, with one being the totality of the waitstaff and the other being the totality of the kitchen staff.  In this case, the married owners of a small business might be hiring nobody.

But for reasons I don't know but I can guess, public agencies -- which presumably have higher labor costs than in the US -- are simply profligate with labor.  The example I will cite is trash pickup, both in Amsterdam and Bruges.  In these two lovely cities, every business and residence throws their trash on the curb in bags and boxes and even loose in piles.  Here is a portion of the 9 streets district in Amsterdam, an important upscale shopping area that lives and dies by attracting tourists.  Look how ugly the streets are:

In Phoenix we all put our trash into standard cans which are a heck of a lot more attractive than basically just throwing garbage on the street.  These cans are then emptied by a truck with just one employee, a driver that has an arm that reaches out and grabs each can and dumps it in the truck.

In Amterdam, trash is picked up far slower and requires three people, a driver and two guys running around like crazy picking up trash and throwing it in the back.  The compactor on this truck was terrible and slow and so the truck compactor could not keep up with the workers, who had to bend down and pick up the same trash two or three times to get it to stay in the truck.

It looked like a total custerf*ck

• Bruges was a terrific little town, frozen in time about 400 years ago.
• Bruges has this sort of computer-game type retail economy, seemingly based on just 3 products:  Chocolate, Beer, and Lace
• The Lace Museum in Bruges was amazing. I would never have gone on my own, but having been dragged by my wife, it was truly fascinating.  I don't know if I had ever thought of how lace was made but it was more complex than I might have guessed.  There was a local lacing club (for lack of a better word) meeting upstairs and we got to watch a bit of the process.  The examples of extraordinary lace in the museum were simply amazing, I had never seen anything like it.  Likely way more fine and delicate and detailed than you have ever seen.  The machines, which knit clumsier lace products, were also quite a thing to watch in action
• After Bruges, Amsterdam was an unbelievable contrast.  Despite being a tourist town, Bruges was quite quiet.  Amsterdam is... frenetic.
• People have written many times about the bicycle thing in Amsterdam, but one does not really get a feel for it until it is actually experienced.  Coming out of the train station there was a storage area with literally thousands of bikes.  Bikes were everywhere.  One had to watch every step to make sure one is not hit by a bike.
• Amsterdam has some kind of weird Logan's Run things going on -- zillions of people in the street, but they are all under 30.
• As a libertarian, I love that Amsterdam has legalized marijuana and prostitution.  But as the only city in Europe that has effectively done so, it does create a problem in that it has become to Europe what Las Vegas is to the US.  Its streets are full of bachelor parties and drunken college kids.  The town has a lot of old-world splendor with its stately canal houses but it loses some of its charm as a visitor only casually interested in partaking of the debauchery.

Yglesias has a very good article on why passenger rail is not a bigger deal in the US.   In it, he says this (emphasis added):

Instead the issue is that the dismal failure of US passenger rail is in large part the flip side of the success of US freight rail. America's railroads ship a dramatically larger share of total goods than their European peers. And this is no coincidence. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the railroad infrastructure is generally owned by freight companies — Amtrak is just piggybacking on the spare capacity.

It is a short article, so it does not go into more depth than this, but I have actually gone further than this and argued that the US freight-dominated rail system is actually far greener and more sensible than the European passenger system.  As I wrote years ago at Forbes:

The US rail system, unlike nearly every other system in the world, was built (mostly) by private individuals with private capital.  It is operated privately, and runs without taxpayer subsidies.    And, it is by far the greatest rail system in the world.  It has by far the cheapest rates in the world (1/2 of China’s, 1/8 of Germany’s).  But here is the real key:  it is almost all freight.

As a percentage, far more freight moves in the US by rail (vs. truck) than almost any other country in the world.  Europe and Japan are not even close.  Specifically, about 40% of US freight moves by rail, vs. just 10% or so in Europe and less than 5% in Japan.   As a result, far more of European and Japanese freight jams up the highways in trucks than in the United States.  For example, the percentage of freight that hits the roads in Japan is nearly double that of the US.

You see, passenger rail is sexy and pretty and visible.  You can build grand stations and entertain visiting dignitaries on your high-speed trains.  This is why statist governments have invested so much in passenger rail — not to be more efficient, but to awe their citizens and foreign observers.

But there is little efficiency improvement in moving passengers by rail vs. other modes.   Most of the energy consumed goes into hauling not the passengers themselves, but the weight of increasingly plush rail cars.  Trains have to be really, really full all the time to make for a net energy savings for high-speed rail vs. cars or even planes, and they seldom are full.  I had a lovely trip on the high speed rail last summer between London and Paris and back through the Chunnel — especially nice because my son and I had the rail car entirely to ourselves both ways.

The real rail efficiency comes from moving freight.  As compared to passenger rail, more of the total energy budget is used moving the actual freight rather than the cars themselves.  Freight is far more efficient to move by rail than by road, but only the US moves a substantial amount of its freight by rail.    One reason for this is that freight and high-speed passenger traffic have a variety of problems sharing the same rails, so systems that are optimized for one tend to struggle serving the other.

Freight is boring and un-sexy.  Its not a government function in the US.  So intellectuals tend to ignore it, even though it is the far more important, from and energy and environmental standpoint, portion of transport to put on the rails. ....

I would argue that the US has the world’s largest commitment to rail where it really matters.  But that is what private actors do, make investments that actually make sense rather than just gain one prestige (anyone know the most recent company Warren Buffet has bought?)  The greens should be demanding that the world emulate us, rather than the other way around.  But the lure of shiny bullet trains and grand passenger concourses will always cause some intellectuals to swoon.

Which would you rather pounding down the highway, more people on vacation or more big trucks moving freight?  Without having made an explicit top-down choice at all, the US has taken the better approach.

Hooray for Veronica de Rugy, who is .

What makes the contact lens market unique — and also leaves it extra vulnerable to crony intervention — is the fact that customers are required by federal law to obtain a prescription from a licensed optometrist in order to purchase lenses.

It is a rare instance where prescribers are also sellers, which leads to a cozy relationship between manufacturers and the doctors who can steer patients toward their brand.

Prescriptions are brand-specific, which makes it difficult for consumers to shop around. Choosing a different brand would require paying for another exam in order to obtain a new prescription.

The simplest solution would be to do away with the gatekeepers altogether and allow the purchase of contact lenses without a prescription.

It works just fine that way in Europe and Japan

I feel like I have been the lone voice in the wilderness on this one, :

I drive into my local Shell station to fill up, and stick my card in the pump, but the pump refuses to dispense.  I walk into the office and ask the store manager why I can't get gasoline.  She checks my account, and says "Mr. Meyer, your Volvo fuel prescription has expired."  I say, "Oh, well its OK, I am sure I am using the right gas."  She replies, "I'm sorry, but the law requires that you have to have a valid prescription from your dealership to refill your gas.  You can't make that determination yourself, and most car dealerships have their prescriptions expire each year to make sure you bring the car in for a checkup.  Regular checkups are important to the health of your car.  You will need to pay for a service visit to your dealership before we can sell you gas."  I reply, "RRRRRRR."

OK, so if this really happened we would all scream SCAM!  While we all recognize that it may be important to get our car checked out every once in a while, most of us would see this for what it was:  A government regulation intended mainly to increase the business of my Volvo dealership's service department by forcing me to pay for regular visits.

So why don't we cry foul when the exact same situation occurs every day with glasses and contact lenses?

It appears that California is going to increase its state minimum wage to $15 in steps over the next five or six years.  This is yet another body blow for unskilled workers in the state.  As I wrote a while back, it is already overly difficult to build a business based on unskilled labor in that state, and increasing the price people have to pay for that labor by 50% is only going to make things worse.  It is possible low-skill workers in large wealthy cities like San Francisco will be OK, as service businesses are still going to want to be there to access all that wealth, and will just raise their prices even higher to account for the higher wages.   For laborers in rural areas that are already suffering from high unemployment, the prospects are not very bright.

As most readers know, we run a service business operating campgrounds across the country, including a number in California.  Over the last  years, due to past regulation and minimum wage increases, and in anticipation of further goofiness of this sort, we exited about 2/3 of our business in California.

Our problem going forward is that in rural locations, sometimes without even electricity or cell phone service on site, we have simply exhausted all the productivity measures I can think of.  There appears to be a minimum amount of labor required to clean a bathroom and do landscaping.  Which leaves us the options of exiting more businesses or raising prices.  Most of our customers in California are blue collar rural folks whose lot is only going to be worse as a result of these minimum wage increases, and so I am not sure how far they will be able to bear the price increases we will need to cover our higher costs.   Likely we will keep raising prices until customers can bear no more, and then exit.

By the way, the 5-6 year implementation time is a frank admission by the authors of the law, not matter what they say in pubic to the contrary, that they know there will be substantial negative employment effects from the minimum wage increase.   They are hoping that by spreading it out over several years, those negative effects will lost in the noise of economic fluctuations.  The Leftist playbook is to do something like this that trashes the earnings of the most vulnerable low-skilled workers, and then later point to the income inequality of those low-skilled workers as a failure of free markets.

On a related note, one of the more interesting things I have read lately is this comparison of successful integration of Muslim immigrants in the US vs. poor integration in Europe.  Alex Tabarrok raises the hypothesis that high minimum wages and labor market rigidity in Europe may be an important factor in reducing immigrant integration.  He quotes from the OECD:

Belgian labour market settings are generally unfavourable to the employment outcomes of low-skilled workers. Reduced employment rates stem from high labour costs, which deter demand for low-productivity workers…Furthermore, labour market segmentation and rigidity weigh on the wages and progression prospects of outsiders. With immigrants over-represented among low-wage, vulnerable workers, labour market settings likely hurt the foreign-born disproportionately.

…Minimum wages can create a barrier to employment of low-skilled immigrants, especially for youth. As a proportion of the median wage, the Belgian statutory minimum wage is on the high side in international comparison and sectoral agreements generally provide for even higher minima. This helps to prevent in-work poverty…but risks pricing low-skilled workers out of the labour market (Neumark and Wascher, 2006). Groups with further real or perceived productivity handicaps, such as youth or immigrants, will be among the most affected.

In 2012, the overall unemployment rate in Belgium was 7.6% (15-64 age group), rising to 19.8% for those in the labour force aged under 25, and, among these, reaching 29.3% and 27.9% for immigrants and their native-born offspring, respectively.

Wow, I guess it is sure lucky California does not have a very large immigrant population.  Oh, wait....

I book marked this long ago when I was in Europe and forgot to blog it.  From the Washington Post

You might be used to hearing criticisms of inequality, but economists actually debate this point. Some argue that inequality can propel growth: They say that since the rich are able to save the most, they can actually afford to finance more business activity, or that the kinds of taxes and redistributive programs that are typically used to spread out wealth are inefficient.

Other economists argue that inequality is a drag on growth. They say it prevents the poor from acquiring the collateral necessary to take out loans to start businesses, or get the education and training necessary for a dynamic economy. Others say inequality leads to political instability that can be economically damaging.

A new study that has been accepted by the Journal of Comparative Economics helps resolve this debate. Using an inventive new way to measure billionaire wealth, Sutirtha Bagchi of Villanova University and Jan Svejnar of Columbia University find that it’s not the level of inequality that matters for growth so much as the reason that inequality happened in the first place.

Specifically, when billionaires get their wealth because of political connections, that wealth inequality tends to drag on the broader economy, the study finds. But when billionaires get their wealth through the market — through business activities that are not related to the government — it does not.

The current refugee surge into Europe has caused a lot of my friends who are immigration restrictionists to say this proves that I am naive.

During the Cold War, we (including most Conservatives) considered it immoral that Communist countries would not let their people leave (Berlin Wall, etc.).  Now, however, it is argued by many of these same folks that it is imperative that the Western democracies build walls to keep people out.

So here is a question -- not of practical consequences, but of pure morality.  Consider this picture of people being prevented from crossing the border.

Explain to me why this scene is immoral if the wall and police forces were put there by the country at the right (the leaving country) but suddenly moral if the same wall with the same police force were put there by the country on the left (the receiving country).  Don't they have exactly the same effect?  Same wall -- How are they different?

We had a private tour in Vienna from a very good tour guide.  Apparently, to become a tour guide in Austria requires that one study for years and take a special government test to get a government license.  It does not matter if one wants to just focus on, say, giving special Klimt-only tours at the Belvedere or if one wants to give comprehensive cross-city tours, one still must pass the same test to practice tour-guiding.  This, by the way, is entirely parallel to how most US states require one to get a full dental license after a bajillion years of school whether one wants to repair cavities or just whiten teeth.

As a result, tour guides seem to get 80 Euros an hour and up.

Anyway, as we walked we were chatting with her as she called a cab.  We asked if they had Uber in Vienna, suspecting that they had the same conflicts with it as in, say, Paris.  But she had never heard of it, so we explained the concept to her.

To her credit, she immediately got it, so much so that she immediately thought about it in the context of her job.  She said, "Can you imagine, if any housewife could give tours and charge 30% (of her rate)?  I would be looking for work the next day."

I am not totally sure that is true -- there is more differentiation in quality of tour guides vs. cab drivers.  But she recognized that a portion of what she earned came because the license she had gotten from the government excluded a lot of potential competition.