As the Antiplanner recently noted, rail and smart-growth advocates are fond of using touchy-feely arguments for their costly policies, and when presented with evidence that a preponderance of their projects are unquestionable failures, they simply respond that critics “lie with statistics.” The Antiplanner’s response is that you have to rely on data to figure out of policies are working or not, and if you are afraid someone is lying with statistics, you had best learn enough about data to watch for the signs of such lying.
Of course, an entire book was written on this subject way back in 1954. But here are a few ways of lying with statistics that Antiplanner readers should watch out for.
Two decades ago, the Antiplanner predicted that the big battle for world supremacy in the twenty-first century would be between authoritarian capitalism — as then represented by Singapore but being emulated on an experimental basis by China — and democratic capitalism. Someone said to me, “No, it is going to be between radical Islams and the West.” But I never worried about radical Islamic countries because they had no ability to create wealth. “A society that cannot accept interest rates cannot grow and compete,” I answered.
The attacks on September 11, 2001, seemed to cast my hypothesis into doubt. But the real loss of 9/11 was not the World Trade Center, but our own good sense. Instead of saying, “This was the act of a few radical nuts,” we decided to start two costly wars against two countries, at least one of which had nothing to do with 9/11. If the terrorists’ agenda was to get us to waste resources and weaken our economy on an overreaction against them, they succeeded brilliantly.
I was reminded of this when Robert Reich made a similar statement about authoritarian vs. democratic capitalism on Sunday’s This Week with David Stephanopoulos — and George Will more-or-less agreed. This came out of President Obama’s recent trip to China, which has focused attention on the real competition we face. China is not necessarily our enemy, but those who want to preserve what they regard as the benefits of democracy — such as free speech, individual rights, and protection for minorities — need to understand that we are likely to lose all of those benefits if we cannot compete against China.
This is a bit premature, but booksellers such as Amazon and reviewers such as the Globe and Mail have already let the cat out of the bag. So I might as well announce the forthcoming publication of a new book: Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. This book is to transportation planning what The Best-Laid Plans is to government planning in general.
Regular readers of the Antiplanner will be familiar with some of the arguments in the book: Mobility is valuable, and the personal mobility provided by the automobile is not only convenient and inexpensive, it is available to nearly every family in developed countries. Mass forms of transportation such as intercity trains and urban transit cannot substitute for the automobile, so efforts to restrict automobility can cause grave harm to society.
The Antiplanner is a data junkie. When the Federal Transit Administration publishes each year’s National Transit Database, I feel like running down the street like Steve Martin in The Jerk: “The 2008 Transit Database is here! And I’m in it!” (I did, after all, ride the Washington Metro more than a few times in 2008.)
As in previous years, the 2008 database comes in two very different formats: the database and the data tables. Both are self-extracting exe files (if, like the Antiplanner, you have a Macintosh, you may need a special program such as File Juicer to extract the data). Each has more-or-less the same data, but the data tables are easier to read while the database is easier to manipulate in an Excel spreadsheet.
As a part of his weekly — soon to be daily — radio show in Gainesville, Florida, faithful Antiplanner ally Ed Braddy has put together a series of radio ads for smart growth. These include the Revolutionary New Compactorizer, the Class Action Lawsuit, and the Charrettes. Feel free to pass these along.
Some scholars at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center have compiled an assessment of the personal and economic freedom enjoyed by residents of each state. Similar studies from Cato, Heritage, and other groups have ranked various nations based on their economic freedom, but this is the first ranking of the states.
As indicators of personal freedom, the Mercatus study considers such things as marijuana, alcohol, smoking, and similar laws. As indicators of economic freedom, the study considers such things as land-use regulation, regulation or deregulation of such industries as cable television, natural gas, telecommunications, and health insurance. Each of these indicators is assigned a score (e.g., 1 if the state has a smart-growth law, 0 if it does not), which is then weighted somehow against the other indicators. The economic and personal freedom indices each rely on close to 150 different indicators, many of which are themselves summaries of several other indicators.
When the weighted results are totaled up, the personal freedom index ranges from about 0.40 (for South Dakota) to minus 0.59 (for New York), with positive meaning more free and negative less. The economic freedom index ranges from 0.27 (for Alaska) to minus 0.29 (for Maryland). When added together, New Hampshire has the most overall freedom (with a score of 0.43) and New York the least (with a score of minus 0.77).
Some guy in a Hawaiian shirt rants about urban planners. This is supposed to be “1 of 4,” but I understand the other three won’t be posted on YouTube for several weeks.
Does replacing windows on a building that is no longer used help to stimulate the economy? The Forest Service thinks so, so it is going to spend something like $1 million replacing windows on a visitors’ center that it closed in 2007. (Thanks to the Antiplanner’s loyal ally, Andy Stahl, for bringing this to my attention.)
The purpose of this part of the stimulus program is to make federal buildings more energy efficient. But if the building isn’t used, it probably doesn’t consume much energy.
The Gifford Pinchot National Forest says it might want to re-open the visitors’ center someday, if it ever gets a big enough budget to manage it. In the meantime, the new windows will provide virtually no benefit.
The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, has a different take on Obama’s fuel-economy plan in an op ed in USA Today.
That makes two op eds by Cato Institute scholars in the same issue of USA Today. (The newspaper accidentally left a word out of the penultimate paragraph, which should read: “Moreover, building high-speed rail consumes enormous amounts of energy and emits enormous volumes of greenhouse gases.”)
