Book Club: The Mayor of Castro Street...

I picked up The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (MoCS; 1982; St Martin's Griffin) by Randy Shilts in a bargain bin while home in Canada. Given that I'd recently moved to the San Francisco Bay area, I figured that it would be interesting to read about a pretty famous (infamous?) time in the city's history.

Obviously, I'd seen the popular film Milk (2008), and thus had some knowledge of Harvey Milk's story: He was a Gay, New York Jew who moved to San Francisco, became involved in the city's politics, and after several failed attempts, was elected as city supervisor - the first openly gay elected official in America1. Notoriously, 46 weeks later, in 1978, both Harvey Milk and then SF Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by fellow city supervisor Dan White, who amazingly was sentenced to 2 counts of voluntary manslaughter and served only 5 years in prison for what was clearly a premeditated double homicide of elected officials.  

I'd like to avoid talking about the specific details of Milk's life here - these 'Book Clubs' are never meant to be synopses anyways - and instead discuss a few of the specific themes/subjects raised in MoCS.

Randy Shilts was gay himself (he died of AIDS in 1994), and he begins with a disclaimer that this fact means that MoCS is biased towards the gay plight. I don't think that many people reading the book in 2012 would find that Shilts' treatment is overly 'biased' in a direction away from current popular opinion, but I did find his description of the gay lifestyle as somewhat eye opening.

As Shilts points out - it's easy for 'liberal' heterosexual people to 'support' gay rights when they're not exposed to gay culture. As San Francisco's gay population grew in the 60s and 70s, locals could no longer ignore the presence of gays in their midst. Most likely due to a history of rather violent repression and derision, gay culture did not necessarily develop as a homosexual version of the 'traditional' marriage. Rather it involved its own definition(s) of attractiveness as well as its own styles (many of which were specifically based around mocking 'traditional' cultural norms). It's somewhat interesting to read about how much some politicos obsessed with particular aspects of gay culture rather than the homosexuality itself (not wanting to see men dressed up in leather, for instance). 

The aforementioned movie adaptation of Milk's life - which probably borrowed a decent part of its material from this book - only really covers the political part of Harvey Milk's story (~1970-78), whereas the book spends significant amounts of time on both his childhood, and the aftermath of his assassination. The latter aspect is quite chilling, and goes a long way to indicate how much of a backlash was brewing against the fledgling gay movement in San Francisco despite what appeared to be a series of cultural acceptance gains.

At some point during the 70s, the gay constituency became numerous enough to constitute a significant electoral presence in the city. This growth was not without resistance - many residents of the previous largely Irish 'Castro' district were pushed to leave the area because of the growing number of gays, and the skyrocketing property values. Unfortunately for the gays, the heavily Irish police force had many ties to the district, and thus they spent no small part of their time harassing the Castro's new residents. In order to please the growing gay constituency, the newly elected Mayor Moscone appointed a liberal police commissioner who ordered an end to gay harassment, something the majority of the force strongly resisted.

By the time Dan White murdered both the Mayor and Milk, graffiti calling for the Mayor's death was not an unexpected feature on police washroom stalls. Given White's previous history as a police officer, it's perhaps not surprising that his former co-workers didn't do a very good job of questioning him about the crime, or building a case against him in general. According to eye-witness reports,  the evening that White turned himself in, there was somewhat of a celebration in the jail, with multiple officers 'congratulating' the murderer. 

All accounts suggest that White's trial was a sham, featuring a mostly conservative, all heterosexual jury as well as a prosecutor who had childhood connections to White himself. The tide of public opinion at the time had briefly shifted anti-gay, and thus local newspapers refused to publish investigative pieces highlighting Dan White's former ties to racist groups in addition to those presenting evidence that the justice system was conspiring to protect him from the death penalty (for which he was eligible). All in all it seemed to be an unusually clear case of corruption. 

According to the book, the negative public opinion surrounding the slap on the wrist given to White turned the tide of opinion back towards the gay movement, and gays quickly began making additional political gains in the former of greater numbers of political appointments. However, it's also quite probable that the backlash against the gay movement came from it's earlier gains themselves - it was easy to be 'supportive' until they actually became 'uppity'. 

Things are far from perfect today, and homophobia still runs rampant, but it is somewhat amazing to reflect on just how far we've come on many social issues in the past few decades, isn't it? Especially when we consider that public mores and norms on some of these points hadn't really changed much in centuries prior. 

1Two previous elected officials came out after being elected, one of whom won successful re-election. See wikipedia. 

Rant: Replicability...

If one were to list those traits that separate 'scientific knowledge' from 'intuition' or 'revealed knowledge', one might choose traits such as a) demonstrability, b) testability, c) reproducibility, d) consistency with previous scientific knowledge, and e) subject to revision with new observations, among others1. As some scientific fields become more complex, involving highly specialized, technical analyses of ever-larger amounts of data, the question of 'reproducability' is becoming a serious concern.

One concern is practical: If I generate terabytes upon terabytes of data, I have to be able to provide said data to the community, should they want to reproduce my work. Not every lab has the expertise (nor the resources) to provide their own web-hosting of the data, therefore such data have been stored in large, public repositories such as those found at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). However, as has been pointed out by several op-eds in the recent scientific literature, the price of data generation (mostly in the form on nucleic acid sequencing) is dropping at a rate faster than the cost of the hard-drives required to store it. Therefore, it's quickly becoming cheaper to simply store samples (and resequence them as needed) rather than store the raw data themselves2.

A second concern is more personal: Some of the analyses being done nowadays are very, very big and very, very complicated. Anyone who's ever been involved in a genome consortium paper (and I've been involved in a few now) knows that a < 10 page Nature paper may involve the work of 40+ people, each contributing significant details to an analysis. Collating all of these details together into a single story is challenging, and unfortunately, crucial details about how things were done sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

It's not only consortium papers though - anecdotally, I've heard several scientists complain upon reading new papers, that they couldn't reproduce the details of the analysis. Either the descriptions are too vague, or the available data are not in a format that makes it easy to understand where they came from, or how they were generated.

In the past month, I've come across a few papers whose details and methods I'd love to adapt to answer some of my own questions. However (and you can probably see where this is going) I can't figure out how to square the supplementary data that are provided with the details of the analysis: Why is it that the paper consistently refers to 8 classes of data, whereas the public depository entry contains 14???? Unfortunately, it's an unnecessary impediment to me getting my work done.

If scientific data are going to be held up to the somewhat lofty goals of the discipline, we need to make sure that they're well documented and reproducible3.

1The difference between 'demonstrability' and 'testability' is the subject of much debate in some scientific circles. For instance, if a theory is testable in principle (e.g., given the appropriate conditions/equipment) but not in practice (e.g., the equipment required is far beyond the scope of current knowledge), can it truly be called scientific? There are many reasonable hypotheses about things like life on other planets that just aren't testable in the foreseeable future. That's not to say that this automatically means that such fields aren't 'useful' or interesting; however, the more appropriate question may be whether funding should be prioritized towards testable hypotheses.

2There are all kinds of issues of practicality and reproducibility when we discuss such things - I'm only pointing out the details on purely economics terms.

3I have a nitpicky specific discussion point about online data depositories that I think I'm going to save for a follow-up post.

Letting Go...

So I'm back in Moncton, New-Brunswick, Canada, for the holidays (which, incidentally, were lovely and white). I've become quite accustomed to the life and amenities of larger, urban population centers over the years, so coming home is always a reminder of the more 'relaxed' lifestyle in which I grew up1.

Though my old room has now been converted into a 'guest bedroom', the closet is still full of old games, books, and knick-knacks that I owned when I was younger - many of them very 'geeky'. Every time that I've come back to my parent's house, they've asked me to go through this stuff and throw away anything that I don't want to keep (some of this stuff I've shipped to my current abode, at considerable cost). Each year I've picked up books, trading cards, pins, and pointless grade-school medals and decided that these were worth keeping... Until now that is.

I honestly don't know know how it happened, but just before I bought my Kindle earlier this year, I suddenly had an epiphany: Why am I holding on to all of this stuff? Sure, I have a lot of 'science' books that I'd like to keep for professional reference - But do I really need a shelf full of DVDs, or video game boxes? Is it worth it for me to crate up all of my fiction novels and pay to have them sent to wherever I'm moving next?

I read a description of a 'media shelf' in the SkyMall catalog on the flight between Pheonix and Newark that said something to the effect of: 'Now you can proudly display your music collection...' Proudly display? I realize that this would've resonated with the me who had an entire 6' tall bookshelf stacked 2 books deep with fantasy novels, but it suddenly struck me that being 'proud' that I've read any collection of fiction is pretty much the same as taking great pride in having read every teenage hearthrob sparkly vampire novel. There's nothing 'wrong' with enjoying something (well most things), but there's something perverse about taking pride in what can really be considered 'non-accomplishments'2.

And thus I find myself now purchasing books that I can read digitally, throwing away the boxes to any movies that I buy, and trashing a whole bunch of junk that I've been leaving at my parents' place for the past decade. The weird thing about it is that I feel better, not sad about unloading all of this stuff. There are certainly things worth keeping, especially those of sentimental value, family heirlooms, etc., but being a pack-rat is a real hassle. 

1In my last post I said that I really didn't feel that my lack of an automobile was detrimental to my life in California. Such is not the case here in Moncton, and my lack of wheels - coupled to rudimentary public transportation and bitterly cold weather - have kept me stuck at home. Come to think of it, even if I had a mode of conveyance, where would I go? Moncton's big attraction in the area is its shopping, but pretty much everything here in Canada is more expensive than in the US, plus the sales tax rate is 13%, compared to Amazon.com's 0% (at least until California closes that loophole).

2Speaking of non-accomplishments, it's funny that some folks will actually boast about achievements that most people would consider a waste of time. There's nothing wrong with playing video games, but proudly declaring that you've spent 8,000+ hours in World of Warcraft isn't going to have the effect that you'd expect on most people, unfortunately. 

Book Club: The Gated City...

I heard about The Gated City (GC; 2011; Kindle Single) from Russ Robert's EconTalk podcast a few months back, during which the author, Ryan Avent, a regular contributor to The Economist, was interviewed. 'Kindle Singles' are self-published eBooks (they do not exist in print form) on the Kindle Digital Store that generally retail for less than their maintstream published counterparts. Though there are 'full-length' novels on the Kindle Store1, GC is more of an extended essay, and thus retails for $1.99 (at time of my purchase).

Avent's thesis is as follows: Cities are much more economically productive, in toto and on a per capita basis, than rural areas. This is because distance matters in many ways: 1) bringing all steps of manufacturing or information technology processes together improves efficiency, 2) capitalizing on new technologies is best done near where those technologies are developed as it takes time for such info to diffuse, and 3) city-based industries benefit from much deeper, diversified, and specialized labor pools. Cities (for the most part) also benefit from a more educated populace, have more access to amenities due to market size, and are less polluting (again per capita) than rural areas. And yet, despite these factors, America's major urban areas (essentially the coasts) have been growing at a much slower pace than the interior: In fact, if one removes immigration from the growth numbers, America's coastal cities have been showing a net population loss over the past 10 years.

Now one could argue that cities are not all pros - the cons include congestion, lack of green spaces, small properties sizes, and especially high costs of living, among others. However, this cannot seem to explain some of the startling facts about city 'shrinkage'. For instance, in the middle of the 'Dot Com Bubble' 15 years ago, Silicon Valley essentially had zero unemployment, and yet the area was losing population. Furthermore, fewer new businesses were started in the Valley than the national average. One would expect that given the market conditions, demand for housing and office space would have been at an all time high.

According to GC, such demand was at an all time high, demand wasn't the problem; rather, there was no supply. The same problem plagues all of America's cities: development is extremely difficult because of layers upon layers of regulation, bureaucracy, and resistance supported by local property owners stemming from the perpetual NIMBY principle (Not In My Back Yard). The inability of supply to meet demand has driven cost-of-living expenses into the stratosphere such that the averaged salary benefits of living in cities come nowhere near to compensating people for costs of living (for instance, salaries in the Bay Area are roughly 40% higher than Phoenix, Arizona. A similar sized house in both areas is ~6 times more expensive in the former).

Avent spends a considerable portion of the ~100 page book going over the various ways that outflow of people from the coasts to the 'Sunbelt' has harmed American productivity, much of which is valid, though I'm somewhat skeptical of his implied magnitude of the effect (The Nimby principle has cost America double-digit GDP percentages). Consider the following few points:

1) The NIMBY principle is an example of rent-seeking - it's perfectly 'logical' for property owners to do everything in their power to prevent drops in their investment's value. If the housing supply increases it's possible that many mortgages will be 'underwater' (or at least less valuable) and it's hard to see how an appeal to reason will lead to city landowners electing officials that don't support NIMBY values.   

2) As is admitted by the author, America's public transit system sucks. Many cities were built and continue to be managed under the philosophy of the primacy of the automobile. While most Manhattanites may get by without cars, this is the exception rather than the rule2. Allowing density to increase in most areas without serious investment in public transit infrastructure will lead to unbearable congestion.

3) The author doesn't address the housing market crash in the book at all. Areas such as Las Vegas, Nevada and Sarasota, Florida had massive increases in property values (and subsequent crashes) despite not fitting the NIMBY problem. Instead, they were victims of ill-advised investment property building and 'property flipping'. It's true that certain key Sunbelt areas (Dallas and Phoenix, for example) didn't experience the bubble market that other areas did - but the cost of living problems associated with the coasts are not entirely due to NIMBY factors. Therefore, estimates of the total economic 'cost' of NIMBYism, are probably about as accurate as anything else in econometrics3.

Despite these issues, Avent does make a point about city development: It's not 'fair' that neighborhoods have the ability to tell people what they can do with their own land. Furthermore, the 'costs' of increased density would be lower if NIMBYism didn't push all of the development to a few areas of a region. He also suggests a few methods via which NIMBYism can be mitigated such as setting aside annual quotas on how much land can be declared 'historic' or how much development can be limited. In addition or alternatively, municipal and regional governments could do a better job of planning transit-offsetting of density such as what is currently being done in Tyson's Corner, Virginia: The municipal government is planning a new dense, urban center just outside Washington DC, and is building subway lines, carpool and bike lanes, and sidewalk paths while development contracts are being sold.

Given the obstacle of NIMBYism, I think that the last solution - forward city-planning is probably the most feasible. It'd be nice to let supply meet demand in America's largest cities (driving down my cost of living), but given the already congested freeways and the lack of adequate public transit, the balance of urban vs. rural living may not be as urban as the author expects (demand my drop non-linearly with supply increase due to increased congestion 'costs').    

1I tried a single 'sample' (3 chapters) of a work of fiction sold as a Kindle Single and found the writing to be depressingly below the standards of professionally published books. There's something to be said about the 'democratization' of publishing - but the same caveats that apply to amateur news apply in this situation: There's a reason that publishers won't print just anything, after all. Though we hope that the cream will 'rise to the top', the reality is that most of us don't have the time to wade through the 'crap' that makes up 90% of all media. Star ratings from users helps, but I doubt that the distribution of readers of these things (and thus opinions) will be anywhere near as broad as the mainstream.

2It's amazing to me how many people tell me that you 'need a car' to live in the Bay Area, California. I honestly don't think that having a car would significantly change my situation. It would be nice for travel purposes (e.g., visiting places outside of the area), but that's a luxury for which I can (and do) rent a vehicle for a day or two. It's still cheaper than paying the upkeep costs of a car. It's when you don't live in an urban area that you 'need' a car. 

3From EconTalk: How do you know that economists have a sense of humor? They use decimal places.

Book Club: Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, Part 2...

This is the second of two posts related to Nicholas Wapshott's book Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics. Part 1 is here. In the previous post I discussed John Maynard Keynes, in the following I'll look at his philosophical opponent FA Hayek.

Friederich August Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian-born economist who grew up in Vienna during the First World War and experienced the economic devastation that followed his Empire's loss at the hands of the Allies. He studied economics under the classic liberal Ludwig Von Mises during the time when hyper-inflation was ruining the lives of his fellows, which strongly influenced his views that government should stay out the market and monetary policy (the cause of inflation was the government's printing of money in order to pay for war reparations while the economy was in a crippling recession). While Hayek was a relative unknown outside of Austria during his early career, he was recruited by a rare admirer of his work at the London School of Economics, specifically because his theories would act as a foil to the growing Keynesian movement at Cambridge.

Interestingly, Hayek was an admirer of Keynes' - even though they disagreed philosophically - mostly because of Keynes's many contributions to the study of economics, but also because of the book that made him famous, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). It had predicted the Austrian devastation and advocated against the Allies' post-war punishments. Whereas Keynes was such an imposing, eloquent public speaker (he was 6'6'' tall), Hayek spoke strongly accented English, relied heavily on mathematics to make his points, and constantly referred to work from the Austrian school that no Brits had heard of. Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that while many of Hayek's ideas have become well-respected and admired in modern times (he won the the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974), he was patently outclassed during the Keynesian revolution. As Wapshott posits in the book, the face of 20th century economics could have been vastly different had Keynes faced an opponent of equal public glamour.

Keynesianism focused on what to do after the 'bust' (economic depression) and chalked the boom itself up to the vagaries of business oneupmanship and instability due to speculation leading to ever riskier bets (what he called the 'Animal Spirits'). Hayek, on the other hand saw the boom as the key to understanding the entire cycle itself. In the Hayekian model (which, if I understand correctly, derives from the classical Austrian model), there is a lag in the chain between production and profit. Future demand (and general economic circumstances) must be anticipated, and thus overproduction happens all the time. In most cases, this leads to individual companies/suppliers taking losses and potentially going out of business. When conditions have been good for a while, it becomes easier to finance production (and consumption) via credit (banks forget the last bust and reduce interest rates - or the central bank may cut its rates). Profit-seeking incentive leads to bigger gambles on future demand, and debt-financed production begins in earnest. When the supply exceeds demand, losses are much higher, much more interconnected between borrowers and creditors, and consequently, there's a larger portion of the labor force whose talent goes to waste when the bust hits1.

The big difference between Keynes and Hayek in terms of boom/bust cycles involves what their respective theories argue should be done about the bust. In the Hayekian model, inefficiencies in the market are what produce the cycle in the first place; you'll only prolong the situation by injecting massive 'stimulus money' into the system. Sure, you'll keep more people employed, but only at the cost of propping up businesses that weren't profitable to begin with. The market takes time to readjust itself no matter what we do, so we shouldn't go out of our way to indebt the public coffers on useless or even worse-than-useless ventures (or freeze up trade by putting into place popular beggar-thy-neighbor policies, etc.). 

Whether Hayek was ultimately correct about what to do in a bust (I think that there's a lot of support for situations meeting his 'business cycle model'), it shouldn't be at all difficult to see why Keynesianism was and remains much more popular politically. Leaving aside the irony of how people want fewer taxes and less government intervention in good times, there's no doubt that the populace turns to government as a panacea when things are bad. No one was more acutely aware of the unpopularity of what he was saying than Hayek himself, and late in life he remarked that his one great disappointment was that he spent his life arguing for the acceptance of the futility of trying to manage something so complex as an economy: not a very 'positive' notion.

There's a lot about FA Hayek that's worth discussing, and despite running long, I haven't covered much of it here (read the book!). I'll end by pointing out that the man was long considered an out-of-touch, somewhat heartless bugbear, both during the height of his career, but especially during the Keynesian revolution. In the minds of many, Keynes's theories were so elegant and actually helped people, how could Hayek be arguing against them? In fact, Hayek fell into a deep depression for many years and identified unexpectedly winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 as the event that got him out of his 'funk'.

I actually find Hayek to be quite a fascinating man who seems to have been been highly misrepresented by both the right and the left. Despite perhaps carrying some of his philosophy too far, at least he was a man who stuck to his convictions and tried to keep them self-consistent (Keynes, by his own admission, was always changing his mind). While advocating limited governments and free markets, Hayek argued strenuously against the concept of 'conservatism' and loathed the practices of its revival during the 1980s (tax breaks targeted at corporations and strong military spending are just a different form of Keynesianism, after all). He advocated for completely 'fair' taxation systems (everyone taxed at the same rate) and surprisingly felt that one of the services that should be offered by his ideal minimalist government should be universal health care. Though he's become a darling of the American right, they've so cherry-picked his views that it's probably made the left all the more weary of him. I figure that it's best to get the story directly from the horse's mouth, so I plan to pick up some Hayekian writing in the future.

As was the case in the previous post - I'll end this one with a video as well. I found out that EconStories.tv made a sequel to their original video, and it's also quite 'bad ass': 

1Many people have argued that housing market boom/bust of 2008 is about as Hayekian a situation as you could expect, fueled even further by the implicit (or explicit) credit guarantee of the US Federal Government on mortgages and 'too-big-to-fail' institutions.