Oct 08,2012

UP Links 08 October 2012

+ Brandon Fuller

Parts of Sub-Saharan Africa Urbanizing Less Quickly Than Expected

Deborah Potts, a demographer from Kings College London who studies urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, says that more people are moving from urban areas to rural ones in countries like Ivory Coast, Mali, Zambia and Central African Republic. She says these “counter-movements” are the result of the severe shortage of jobs in many of Africa’s teeming cities. This out-migration has slowed the expected growth rate even of cities like Lagos, Nigeria, currently the most populous urban area in Africa. Cities in Africa are still growing, Potts says, just not necessarily from the rural-to-urban migration patterns seen in other developing countries like China and India in recent decades.

Mail Delivery, Government Performance, and Growth

Researchers often puzzle over the fact that on the quality of government services almost invariably increases with per capita income. This, the authors point, is “surprising if one focuses on the uniqueness of government, but makes perfect sense once it is recognized that government is subject to the same dynamics as the private sector.” In other words, government agencies are people and tend to share the characteristics of the overall society in which they’re embedded. Countries well supplied with capital and skilled workers manage to do a decent job of delivering the mail. Those that can’t get letters sent where they belong tend to be countries where the private sector doesn’t work well either.

Let Midtown Soar

London, Tokyo and other metropolises have created central business districts with forests of skyscrapers in recent years, seeking to meet the needs of globe-trotting corporate tenants. But New York’s premier district, the 70-block area around Grand Central Terminal, has lagged, Bloomberg officials say, hampered by zoning rules, decades old, that have limited the height of buildings.

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The initiative would, in some cases, allow developers to build towers twice the size now permitted in the Grand Central area. The owner of the 19-story Roosevelt Hotel at Madison and 45th Street could replace it with a 58-story tower under the proposed rules. Current regulations permit no more than 30 floors.

Democracy, Corruption, and Bureaucratic Capacity

The need for bureaucratic autonomy is why we don’t turn monetary policy or military strategy over to our elected representatives for management. Most Americans seem to recognize (at least implicitly) the importance of expertise and autonomy; surveys like General Social Survey tend to show that the most respected parts of the US government are actually the least democratic: the Supreme Court, the military, the Centers for Disease Control, etc. By contrast, the part of the government most immediately accountable to public opinion, the House of Representatives, is the least respected of all.

Edward Glaeser on Amtrak

Any decision on Amtrak should be based on whether the subsidies provide enough social benefit to offset their cost, and they should be tied to the measured advantages to society when people take the train instead of driving cars. Passenger rail is defensible in the Northeast Corridor and California, where the congestion costs of driving are considerable. But it is hard to imagine that the less-traveled rail corridors in Middle America provide benefits that offset their costs.