Roger Lewis makes the case in The Washington Post for taller buildings in DC. I agree with what he says, though I think he’s far too ginger about calling for taller buildings in the existing central business district. Most people seem to think the downtown height limit has something to do with the Capitol Dome. So what if we replaced the current 130 foot limit with something closer to the actual 288 foot Capitol building? Say we let people go up to 260 feet?

Well you’d have higher property tax revenue, and you’d have a more vibrant retail scene downtown with more sales tax revenue. You’d have more employment, both in terms of high-end office jobs and also lower end service work related to that. You’d probably have fewer unemployed people in the poor sections of the city, and higher income tax revenue. That would all let the city reduce sales tax rates slightly (we’re currently at a very high 10 percent), thus putting more money into the pockets of low income families while allowing us to have more expansive city services.

It’d be a huge, huge, huge practical win. You can quibble about the aesthetics if you like, but the starting point of any aesthetics-based conversation about the evils of 250 foot office buildings (in Providence, Rhode Island buildings get over 400 feet and Paris has a building that’s almost 700 feet tall) has to be the huge practical price. If DC had no poverty, or unusually good public schools, or an unusually low crime rate, or even well-paved streets I’d be more open to the idea that it makes sense for us to leave all this money on the table.

Responding to Morgan Kelly’s excellent rundown of the Irish situation, I think Kevin Drum goes way too far in accepting German framing of the issue:

It’s easy to see why this is the case — why should thrifty Germans bail out spendthrift euro countries on the periphery? — but it’s also easy to see that there’s no way it can end well.

I think this conceptual scheme of saver = responsible, borrower = irresponsible needs to be challenged. It’s true that German households were thrifty net savers. But a German household that saves isn’t engaged in a self-sacrificing pursuit, it’s getting paid interest. And the institutions paying the interest are doing it because they’re expecting to make a profit by offering loans. And when they offer the loans, they’re charging interest. The entire claim of people in this line of work is that they’re good at making decisions about who to lend money to and what interest rate to charge them in light of default risk. When I got my mortgage it involved a phone call with a guy from Bank of America. The premise of the conversation was that of the two people on the call, one of us was a highly trained professional with expertise in mortgage lending and the other one was me. And it’s just the same with Irish borrowers and German banks. In that transaction it’s the Germans who are supposed to be the experts. When the whole thing goes sideways it’s the Germans who failed to be responsible stewards of the Eurozone’s capital.

Esther Duflo won the John Bates Clark medal last year for her work on development economics, so I was excited to read her new book with Abhijit Banerjee Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. It’s a good book. It doesn’t really contain a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty, but it does try to cut past lame debates over whether or not foreign aid “works” to instead attempt to find ways to actually assess which programs are working, which aren’t, and how to improve those that don’t. The book is structured around a set of questions, which are answered with a mix of illustrative anecdotes and randomized control trials of different anti-poverty interventions.

I suppose the RCT methodology is, itself, supposed to be the radical new way to fight poverty, but of course it’s not. It’s a way of assessing anti-poverty interventions. It doesn’t actually fight poverty. And even though bringing additional rigor to the subject is welcome, it hardly makes all difficulties melt away. For one thing, it’s very difficult to know how generalizable the results of any given RCT are. Is a really good experiment in Kenyan farming villages telling us something about Kenya? Something about a particular set of crops? Something about Africa? Something about a specific set of climactic conditions? It’s difficult to know. But this passage near the end about the importance of patient diligent work struck me as convincing:

We also have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world—elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepreneurs—in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day.

And the book is just full of striking factoids, for example this:

We have started including the question “What are your ambitions for your children?” in surveys given to poor people around the world. The results are striking. Everywhere we have asked, the most common dream of the poor is that their children become government workers. Among very poor households in Udaipur, for example, 34 percent of the parents would like to see their son become a government teacher and another 41 percent want him to have a nonteaching government job; 18 percent more want him to be a salaried employee in a private firm. For girls, 31 percent would like her to be a teacher, 31 percent would want her to have another kind of government job, and 19 percent want her to be a nurse. The poor don’t see becoming an entrepreneur as something to aspire to.

What the very poor want, overwhelmingly, is a job where you show up, do as you’re told, and get a guaranteed paycheck at the end. Given the fact that the prospects for government employment are always limited, I assume this explains a lot of the appeal of super low wage sweatshop work when it becomes available in poor countries. Evidently agricultural labor and informal work, even if “entrepreneurial,” is something most of the global poor really hate doing.

I think passing the Alternative Vote referendum (this is what Americans normally call “instant runoff voting”) would have been a good idea for the United Kingdom. At the same time, it’s easy to see why AV failed. Its key proponents are the Liberal Democrats, and they’re hideously unpopular for the very good reason that their decision to join David Cameron’s coalition has given the Tories the votes they need in parliament to enact a highly ideological and macroeconomically destructive agenda.

Nick Clegg, who certainly looked to be like a fairly charismatic and compelling leader during the campaign, has proven to be a total disaster. As Brad DeLong says he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage and then didn’t get any pottage. It was bizarre to agree to a coalition deal that had the Tory budget as a key plank but carried with it no guarantee of voting reform. Now at the next election the minority of UK voters who approve of the Coalition approach will vote for them, the majority who disapprove will vote Labour, and the Liberal Democrats will be wiped out. That it was the descendants of J.M. Keynes’ own Liberal Party who engaged in this blunder instead of recalling their party’s distinctive and noteworthy contribution to thinking about macroeconomic stabilization is just another sad irony.

In the long run, though, I tend to agree with Matt Wootton that AV’s passage would have been a win for progressives.