Links to Consider, 9/6
Tim B. Lee on driverless car safety; Road to Sociology Watch; Michelle Wu on homelessness; eugyppius on East Germany as a colony
In total, the two companies reported 102 crashes involving driverless vehicles. That may sound like a lot, but they happened over roughly 6 million miles of driving. That works out to one crash for every 60,000 miles, which is about five years of driving for a typical human motorist.
These were overwhelmingly low-speed collisions that did not pose a serious safety risk. A large majority appeared to be the fault of the other driver.
Suppose that we could reverse history, so that we had 100 years of a track record of driverless cars operating at their current level of quality, and now we introduced the possibility of human drivers. The experiment with human drivers would not last a week before they were banned.
The latest volume of the Journal of Economic Literature, one of the main official publications of the American Economic Association, is devoted to a single issue: Symposium on Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Justice.
Long-time readers know that I see the economics profession headed in the direction of sociology. This could mean dropping the smug claim to be “scientists” wearing the robe of mathematics and arcane statistics, instead allowing for methodological diversity suited to examining history and institutions. In that case, I would be fine with it. But to the extent that it means becoming steeped in left-wing causes, it leaves me cold. Doing the latter without the former is the worst possible case.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu writes,
Boston Police will be ready to deliver the presence and coverage that our public health workforce has been asking for—including 24/7 presence to implement the ordinance on Atkinson Street and in the Mass & Cass area, as well as coordinated response mobile units with public health and public safety staff conducting outreach citywide to ensure no additional encampments form in other neighborhoods. All of this will be run from a central operations post in the area, where all agencies and key community partners will have leadership in one place to adjust plans in real time, ensure close communication, and continue to refine our operations.
She is the mayor of Boston. She intends to get rid of homeless encampments. And she has a substack.
In his book on The East: A West German Invention, Dirk Oschmann describes the subordinate position of East Germany since reunification. The new states are “socially integrated” but “widely excluded … from discourse and political power.”
…Many, including Oschmann, have compared the position of East Germans to that of “flyover country” Americans, and while there is much truth in that analogue, I think it understates the situation. The near-total exclusion of those raised in the East from positions of influence within the German economy, media and politics since reunification is more extreme than anything I know of elsewhere in the West. On various occasions, Oschmann has spoken of the “colonisation” of East Germany by Westerners, and it is hard to see how that is wrong.
This casts the escalating rhetoric of the (West) German press about the alleged extremist nature of the AfD, threats from the establishment to disqualify successful Eastern AfD political candidates and even to ban the entire party in an entirely new light. It hardly matters that the AfD has a leadership comprised mostly of Westerners; the party is closely aligned with precisely those Eastern political preferences which the dominant 81% wish to suppress. They have excluded as far as possible the East from their own political system, while accusing them of antidemocratic proclivities when their electoral preferences deviate from the late-stage liberal programme. . .If the East will not voluntarily sign on to climate change, uncontrolled mass migration and trans ideology, that is because even 30 years after the demise of the DDR they have yet to be “normalised” and acquainted with the ways of democracy. The solution is more lecturing from the press, more indifference from the ruling establishment and more threats from the political police.
Pointer from Niccolo Soldo.
The elites no longer bring missionaries, gunboats, and opium. But with their religious fervor, military interventions, and economic power, they behave like a colonial empire. There are groups everywhere who resent the “Rich People from Richmond,” as the song goes.
I think that a big problem is the loss of local ownership. A few years ago, a journalist pointed out to me that St. Louis has become a colony. Once, it had corporate headquarters: Monsanto, McDonnell Aircraft, Anheuser-Busch. Now all of these headquarters have left the city, with the companies themselves either disappeared or merged into other corporate entities.
In American small and mid-sized towns, you used to have a business elite that included the owner of the local bank, the owner of the local grocery store, the owner of the local drug store, a small manufacturer, and the publisher of the local newspaper. These are all gone now, replaced by national banks, Walmart, imports, and the Internet.
If you are young and ambitious in one of these towns, you have very few opportunities. So you move away. What is left behind are the colonial subjects of distant economic powers.
Substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
@
Just fyi, it's "Rich Men North of Richmond."
Fun fact: there has been a big East/West divide in Germany, basically since Prussia acquired territory along the Rhine at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Rhineland was more heavily urbanized, more commercial, and liberal (in the classic sense) than in the East, which was largely rural, agrarian and conservative. Prussia's bicameral legislature, created after the revolutions of 1848, included a British-style House of Lords that gave outsized influence to wealthy landowners, and peasant farmers who also made their living in agriculture tended to throw their lot in, electorally, with the landowners, since their interests overlapped to a large degree. The West German urban liberals and East German agrarian conservatives grew to despise each other during the latter half of the 19th century, as Bismarck managed to tip the balance of power further in favor of his conservative friends and allies, even as West Germany's population and economy boomed. The emergence of socialism and communism in West Germany in the late 1800's only made East German conservatives more extreme, as they came to view themselves as the only bulwark holding back the forces of revolution (which wasn't totally wrong). It shouldn't be a surprise that in a more democratic, one-man one-vote era, the West quasi-colonized the East. This would have been the case 150 years ago, too, if not for the the particularities of Prussia's post-1848 constitution.
I'm most of the way through Christopher Clark's excellent book Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 which is where the above was cribbed from.
I agree with the impact of loss of local ownership and the subsequent decline of vested interest in their city. The local grocery store owner isn't as apt to pull up roots to start the business over in another city. The "colonial" effect of distant, major corporations is an interesting theory and likely valid. In the case of St Louis (or others) I also have to wonder about rising crime helping major corporations decide to move away.