New World Economics

I've been thinking about the transportation issue. Self driving cars may or may not be widely available by the time they are finished. But they could bypass it all just by building sensors into the roads, or just tracks. You could then have a system of self driving busses that people could order with a smartphone, and then find the most efficient route to get everyone where they want to go. And then you have minimally congested streets that are very pedestrian friendly. In fact you don't need self driving vehicles to accomplish this even. A human pilot following instructions from a computer that calculates the optimal route. The point is you can get public transportation without the downside of fixed routes. Anyway, along other recommendations people have given, look at this site. I've always been fascinated with it: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/ Especially this article on Toledo, Ohio vs Toledo, Spain: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/022110.html

Not about TransferWise, but if anyone wants to know how banks ( and economies) work. I seriously recommend https://newworldeconomics.com/category/how-banks-work/ as a required reading.

I basically just parroted Nathan Lewis, who has a great blog series on the topic: http://newworldeconomics.com/category/traditional-city-post-heroic-mat… It's virtually the same message from Andres Duany. His talk from 30 years ago is still so eerily precise and comprehensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMvwHDFVpCE. When I feel presumptuous, I email this to people (deaf ears, mostly). Leon Krier bangs the same drum, and adds a more sophisticated, architectural perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFiYL8AvvnY.

Inequality in a society leads to instability in that society, and tears it apart. That's why we tax the rich to give to the poor, to reduce the rate inequality arises and attempt keep chaos at bay. When a society breaks down, everyone suffers greatly, but eventually as a new society arise, equality is reset, and people can improve their livelihood over time again. That's how it was with the Roman Empire, with each of the successive Chinese dynasties, with the Islamic Caliphate, and many other empires that have arose and fallen in the past[1]. So it will be with the 'West' we live in. [1] The Fate of Empire - Sir John Grubb http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/TheFateofE…

If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend this long series of articles: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.html

Another good source on human-scale urban design is Nathan K. Lewis. He has a great set of postings on traditional cities. An interesting point is the surprising commonality of organic urban building throughout the world, with the exception of the US. His recipe is mass-transit, "really narrow streets," and mixed-zoning. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.html

"Let's Kick Around Carfree.com" by New World Economics contains worthwhile criticisms of this design idea. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/111509.html Another worthwhile article is "Let's Take a Trip to Suburban Hell." http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/030710.html

> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all. Everything requires comparatively large bicycle parking areas. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osaka1.jpg is perhaps 5-10% of the visitors bike parking, making the street 30-40% blocked and 30-40% wider for everyone. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai4.j… are maybe 10-20 bikes clogging up the path for thousands of people. > I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't? And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk. 45k people live in https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai2-2… this photo with a ~10 minute walk to all of those places including a train station with lots of regular large trains. > The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas All…

Bus themed solutions would definitely be an improvement over LA's status quo. However a better idea would be to reduce the need to travel long distances by building denser. LA roads are super wide right now, so the easiest way to raise density would be by putting buildings in the middle of the road, leaving a Really Narrow Street (tm) along either side. Ground floors of new buildings could be commercial, upper floors residential. (Some LA roads are so wide we could put 2 or more blocks of Really Narrow Streets in the space consumed by a single car-oriented surface street). This would reduce housing prices by bringing a crazy amount of inventory online, and would greatly lower maintenance expenses by severely curtailing the number of square feet of publicly-funded roads, traffic lights, signage etc. If we structured this correctly, the city could make a giant pile of money in both land sales and new real estate taxes. Maybe they could then use the surplus money to build a real train system or just reduce taxes. Lastly, there would obviously also be large environmental benefits such as smog reduction, CO2 emission reductions etc. Yes, I realize this will never happen, and yes, I realize I'm proposing turning LA into old Paris. Old Paris is great, we should copy it more. I stole these ideas from [0]. [0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/

The author, Nathan Lewis, makes frequent references to concepts he established in detail in previous articles. For example, "Traditional City", "Place", "19th Century Hypertrophic City". All of his articles on cities: https://newworldeconomics.com/category/traditional-city-post-heroic-ma…

> Also you need wide spaces between buildings to have light at ground level. Tell that to almost anywhere in Europe: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shinjuku-Tokyo…

this ? http://newworldeconomics.com/corbusier-nouveau-3-really-narrow-streets…

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/TheFateofE… page 4. also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires

You don't necerally need high buildings to create density. You can have density with single family homes, if you have narrow streets and less parking. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/061211.html There is such a thing as sound insulation, not every appartment building is noisy. Not everything need to be super high density. There are thresholds that make a local restaurant, corner store, transit stop etc profitable. Not everybody wants to live like this sure, but many do, and these places are sadly often straight up illegal to build. Besides sprawl is incentivised through subsidized road construction, parking minimums, zoning etc.

The streets are too damned wide. America's streets were too wide even before cars. More here: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2013/112413.html

The thing that may be hard to understand if you've grown up in a fiat-currency world is that prices moved in both directions, not just one. The periods of high inflation you name are real, but they were generally compensated by subsequent periods of deflation, except for the case of 01947. Fiat currencies are often stabler than commodity money, but they very rarely deflate. Bitcoin so far seems to be acting a lot like commodity money in this sense; in the sense of prices rather than the money supply, it has currently inflated about 230% from its peak in value earlier this year. The Warren–Pearson wholesale price index is the one usually used for measurements of pre-WWI inflation in the US, at least by people who don't simply use the price of gold; it is plotted on https://newworldeconomics.com/the-warren-pearson-index/ and appears to be about 80 in 01776 and about 80 in 01891, where they've suspiciously cut off the price data. Warren and Pearson's book is apparently in the public domain in India and is available at https://dspace.gipe.ac.in/xmlui/handle/10973/22256. They did a plot from 01797 to 01932 on p.6 which looks pretty similar: it's about 100 in 01797 and also 100 in 01932. It is indeed 79–85 in 01891. At the end of 01776 in their data table (p. 7) it was 86; at the end of the data table in 01932 (p. 10) it was 95. So we could say that the average inflation rate from 01776 to 01932 was 0.06% yearly ((95/86)*(1/(1932-1776))). But this is probably…

Instead of choosing between density or single-family homes, why not have both? (i.e. single family homes that are built in a dense style). All you have to do is look beyond the borders of North America for working examples. The Tokyo suburb of Seijo mostly consists of single-family homes but is also dense. The homes aren't massive, but based on the Time article, residents are okay with smaller homes as long as they are detached. This blog post explains how it's done: https://newworldeconomics.com/how-to-make-a-pile-of-dough-with-the-tra… (it's a long blog post . . . you can skip to the line "I chose Seijo because:" and start reading from there) Some notes about Seijo (summarized from the blog post): - It is mostly SFDR (single-family detached residential), usually with parking for one to three cars per house, not dense apartment buildings without parking. - Has a population density exceeding that of Brooklyn I don't see why such a development style couldn't be implemented in a North American context.

That’s not actually true, at all. This is from a tiny village in Germany: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/GV-3.jpg This is a village in Italy: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/iv3.jpg A Swiss village: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/sv2.jpg A French village from above: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/eguisheim-alsa… Another French village from above: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/obernai-alsace… Do you notice something? These are tiny villages; around them for many kilometers is farmland. Yet they’re very dense.