Blogs

More than once in this space, I’ve said that derivative financial products set up a perverse incentive where investors have more to gain from the failure of companies and homeowners than their success. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the longer version of my description of the causes and consequences of the current crisis to understand how failed financial innovations, like credit default swaps, contributed to the meltdown of 2008.  read more »

Political “spin” descended to a new low today with the publication of survey results purporting to suggest that suburban residents and workers are pining for city life. The Washington Business Journal dutifully reported that Today’s suburban workers and residents miss the amenities of cities.  read more »

It has become customary for the fawning print media to lazily repeat whatever information is provided them by the urbanist lobby. The result is all manner of puff pieces that report as reality what is nothing more than hopes, or even delusions.  read more »

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing Wednesday – “AIG: Where is the Taxpayer Money Going?” Questions are being raised about whether the bailout better serves the interests of AIG’s customers and trading partners or the interests of U.S. taxpayers.  read more »

Here's some cool maps from radicalcartography.net looking at income dispersion in the country's 25 largest metropolitan areas by population. From the page:  read more »

The Kauffman Foundation, the "world's largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship," recently released the 2008 edition of their "Index of Entrepreneurial Activity."  read more »

The wind of change is blowing, but for once, that change might be affecting the wind.

Wind, often championed as a viable alternative-energy source in the United Kingdom, might not be as energy efficient as it was once thought to be. Independent reports of the wind-energy efforts in the UK “have consistently revealed an industry plagued by high construction and maintenance costs, highly volatile reliability and a voracious appetite for taxpayer subsidies.”  read more »

Consider the tax credits for alternative fuels such as ethanol and biomass that were rolled into the 2005 Transportation Law to encourage energy independence. At the same time, re-consider the law of unintended consequences, enshrined in Adam Smith’s notion that the unregulated behavior of capitalists gives rise to an invisible hand “to promote an end which was no part of their intention.”

The tax law included a fifty-cent-a-gallon credit for the use of fuel mixtures that combined "alternative fuel" with a "taxable fuel" such as diesel or gasoline.  read more »

Here's some great maps of our annual Best Cities Rankings created by Robert Morton at Tableau Software. Robert used their software tool to plot a color coded point for each city in the rankings by size group, and immediate geographic patterns emerge:  read more »

Austin fared very well on this year's Best Cities Rankings, and here's another interesting indicator of the difference in migration between Austin and San Francisco:

"When comparing California with Texas, U-Haul says it all. To rent a 26-foot truck oneway from San Francisco to Austin, the charge is $3,236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Clearly what is happening is that far more people want to move from San Francisco to Austin than vice versa, so U-Haul has to pay its own employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas."  read more »