NATHAN TANKUS, - Truthout
Stephan: Now we are seeing a move to close some libraries, and privatize others. For over two hundred years, Left or Right, we have recognized the importance of libraries as something a civilized society supports, essential to an informed electorate, and our democracy.
Along with prisons, schools, we now add libraries. Slowly the entire structure of support that creates national wellness is being undermined, and turned into a profit machine. It is another act of societal self-mutilation.
Libraries (along with post offices) have been a central part of urban planning for over a century. Orthodox urban economics is all about taking a central urban area as given, and then calculating ‘optimal
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MILES KIMBALL and YICHUAN WANG, Univ. of Michigan Economics Professor and Economics Undergraduate - Quartz
Stephan: You will, I am sure, remember the fiasco of the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, upon whose calculations much of austerity economic policy was based. How two far less prominent economists at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst found that Reinhart and Rogoff had made a simple miscalculation on their Excel spreadsheet, and that when it was corrected their main effect went away. That humiliating story has continued. And this is the next chapter.
It is very interesting to observe that in spite of being completely discredited at this point, Republicans in the House still cling to austerity. Obviously the argument is not really about debt, it is about punishing the poor and dismantling what little social safety network the country has. This report gives the lie to the whole debt argument. It turns out that Reinhart and Rogoff made more than one mistake.
Conservative economic theories and policy have no more reality than the Blues Brothers, and are far less entertaining.
Click through to see the excellent charts.
Leaving aside monetary policy, the textbook Keynesian remedy for recession is to increase government spending or cut taxes. The obvious problem with that is that higher government spending and lower taxes tend to put the government deeper in debt. So the announcement on April 15, 2013 by University of Massachusetts at Amherst economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin that Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff had made a mistake in their analysis claiming that debt leads to lower economic growth has been big news. Remarkably for a story so wonkish, the tale of Reinhart and Rogoff’s errors even made it onto the Colbert Report. Six weeks later, discussions of Herndon, Ash and Pollin’s challenge to Reinhart and Rogoff continue in earnest in the economics blogosphere, in the Wall Street Journal, and in the New York Times.
In defending the main conclusions of their work, while conceding some errors, Reinhart and Rogoff point out that even after the errors are corrected, there is a substantial negative correlation between debt levels and economic growth. That is a fair description of what Herndon, Ash and Pollin find, as discussed in an earlier Quartz column, ‘An Economist’s Mea Culpa: I relied on Reinhardt and […]
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FORREST V. MORGESON III, DAVID VANAMBURG and SUNIL MITHAS, - Journal of Public Adminstation Research and Theory
Stephan: Here is the abstract of a research paper, that is one of the first things I ever saw that seriously considered the E-government trend, and how it is going to impact citizens. It was published two years ago and, recently a reader sent it to me, and I read it again. I want you to notice how little has changed in the three years since it was published. Why is that, do you suppose?
Also note this odd lacuna. There is not discussion of voting, only communications. With our existing technology it is possible to develop e-voting in such a way that each citizen could vote. You wouldn't have to have polling booths, you wouldn't have to mail things, and you wouldn't have to go anywhere. It could be done from any computer, a pad, or a smartphone. To secure it you could use social security numbers, a pre-set-up ID, and a password.
We do billions of financial transactions each day on less security. By comparison this would be 50 state websites, whose Federal totals were simultaneously sent to a Federal website. Everyone eligible could vote in a single day. It would all be completely transparent to the media and the citizens.
It would bypass voter suppression, hanging chads, and all the rest of the schemes. And it would produce a radically different Congress and serve as the counterweight to Citizens' United.
Ask yourself: Why don't we have such a system?
Abstract
A growing body of research focuses on the relationship between e-government, the relatively new mode of citizen-to-government contact founded in information and communications technologies, and citizen trust in government. For many, including both academics and policy makers, e-government is seen as a potentially transformational medium, a mode of contact that could dramatically improve citizen perceptions of government service delivery and possibly reverse the long-running decline in citizen trust in government. To date, however, the literature has left significant gaps in our understanding of the e-government-citizen trust relationship. This study intends to fill some of these gaps. Using a cross-sectional sample of 787 end users of US federal government services, data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index study, and structural equation modeling statistical techniques, this study explores the structure of the e-government-citizen trust relationship. Included in the model are factors influencing the decision to adopt e-government, as well as prior expectations, overall satisfaction, and outcomes including both confidence in the particular agency experienced and trust in the federal government overall. The findings suggest that although e-government may help improve citizens’ confidence in the future performance of the agency experienced, it does not yet lead to greater satisfaction with an agency interaction […]
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Stephan: The fish of the world are under growing stress. Not only in the ocean for over fishing, and acidification but because the temperature of the water is changing, causing massive migrations. Fish in rivers and ponds also face a different world. The great systems of the earth are changing to something we have never seen; and whose implications we only dimly understand.
Climate change threatens most of California’s native freshwater fish — many of which don’t exist anywhere else in the world — with extinction, a new study says.
Four of five native fish in California, including salmon and steelhead trout, likely will be driven to or near extinction within 100 years if climate change continues on its current path, a new study predicts.
Of 121 native fish species, 82% will plummet in number or disappear because they need cool, flowing water yet climate change is boosting temperatures and lessening stream flow, according to scientists at the University of California-Davis’ Center for Watershed Science. In contrast, only 19% of the state’s 50 non-native fishes face a similar risk of extinction.
‘Most of our native fish will suffer because their habitats are disappearing,’ says lead author Peter Moyle, a professor of fish biology who has been documenting the status of California’s fish for 40 years. He says they’ll be replaced by non-native fishes such as carp, largemouth bass, fathead minnows and green sunfish. ‘Pond and lake fish will do fine or even better.’
Moyle says that while other research has looked at climate’s impact on waterways in general, ‘we quantify what’s going to happen to the fish […]
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ILANA LIPSETT, - sustainableindustries.com
Stephan: One of the things that is seriously beginning to differentiate the Blue value states from the Red value states, thus, exacerbating the Great Schism Trend, is how they are each dealing with the energy transition and climate change. Beginning now preparation and planning is going to determine what the experience we are going into is going to be like. Particularly in the South, I am afraid, life is going to be very difficult with a climate growing ever warmer. In North Carolina they are trying to legislate away any discussion of climate change, stipulating that data can not be used in making policy. Meanwhile this is what is going on in the Blue States. Washington's Bullitt Center, (See SR archives), and this in San Francisco.
Click through to see an important chart that accompanies this report.
Over the last year, there’s been palpable buzz in San Francisco around eco-districts – essentially, sustainability plans that operate at the neighborhood scale. We’ve learned about different eco-district models and how eco-districts are working in Portland, Seattle, Brooklyn and Denver. The San Francisco Planning Department has been especially proactive in this learning process, putting together numerous presentations on district-scale infrastructure and sustainability throughout 2012. The largest of these meetings, held last August at SPUR, kicked off a planning process for an eco-district in the Central Corridor of San Francisco. This 24-square-block area south of Market Street, centered around 4th Street, is currently undergoing a neighborhood planning and rezoning process to better manage and support growth around the new Central Subway.
What’s the buzz about? In areas of transition like the Central Corridor – once an industrial area and increasingly the home of the city’s high-tech sector – neighborhood rezoning creates many opportunities for new development. Some of this will be private development on sites within the corridor, and some will be public investment in transportation assets, water, wastewater, energy and neighborhood parks. The Central Corridor Eco-District was conceived to help the transitioning neighborhood perform well on the city’s environmental goals for […]
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