Steve Reads

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Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity — October 13, 2015

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

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Image of a measuring table winding its way back and forth across the page, proceeding from the bottom of the page to the top in a zigzag

Let me itemize what I think I understand better about relativity now that I’ve read Bertrand Russell’s book:

  1. One goal of the theory of relativity is to express the laws of physics in ways that are less obviously tied to the position of the observer. In this way, the point is not to establish that “everything is relative”, but indeed to find a standpoint from which objective facts about the universe may be inferred.

  2. Measuring things in feet rather than meters is one of those obvious differences that shouldn’t matter at all in an objective theory of the world. We should be able to measure things in a “human-independent” way; our laws of physics should remain unchanged if the coordinates change. If we choose to express coordinates in polar form or rectangular form, who cares? If we choose to make the origin of the coordinate system the earth or make the origin Mars, that choice is obviously a fact about us, not a fact about nature. Devising a system of laws that removes these obviously human traits is what the tensor calculus is for.

  3. I think I understand what the Michelson-Morley experiment showed. If there really is such a thing as the æther, and if that æther has any mass, then we’d expect light to take longer to travel in certain directions than in others. I gather that the M-M experiment found no evidence that light travels at different speeds in different directions. Hence, if the æther does exist, it must have no mass … but now that I write it out, why is a massless æther a problem?

    (Forgive my spelling it ‘æther’; I just find that spelling so charmingly British.)

Here’s what I still don’t really get:

  1. I still don’t know what a tensor is, really. So I get the abstract outline of the idea of the problem we want to solve, and the name of the mathematical tool that solves it, but I don’t know the actual math.

  2. Russell makes clear — as every other popular exposition of relativity theory that I’ve read has made clear — that relativity theory didn’t have any data to support it for at least a few years. Russell emphasizes that relativity theory would still need to be confronted — as a logical argument, rather than as an empirical one — even if we had no data to support it. I don’t entirely understand the parts that “should have been obvious” even to Newtonian physicists. Certain points about reference frames make intuitive sense — e.g., that Bob dropping a ball while standing on a moving train will perceive the dropped ball differently than will Jim standing outside the train watching “Bob, train, and ball” as an ensemble; Jim will perceive a ball moving in an arc whose forward velocity matches that of the train, whereas Bob will perceive a ball with no forward velocity at all. Someone standing on Jupiter watching “Jim, Bob, train, ball, and earth” as an ensemble will see it altogether differently: now this larger ensemble is moving around the Sun at a certain velocity, moving away from or toward Jupiter, etc.

    …Is that all there is to it? That certain quantities can only logically be described in the context of a given reference frame?

  3. It’s a postulate of the system that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. I don’t really know why we’d assume that. Something-something Clerk Maxwell. Also, possibly, the M-M experiment?

  4. Russell tries, I gather, to construct a vocabulary for what now can be described objectively — i.e., for those concepts that survive even after we realize that much varies with the reference frame. He defines things called ‘events’ and ‘intervals’, but I don’t really understand what these are. The Wikipedia doesn’t clarify these concepts, at least for this reader.

  5. I understand, formally, the Lorentz contraction. It would appear that if I’m traveling the speed of light, and you’re observing me in relative motion, then you would see me as an object of length zero. As I say, I understand the equation formally, but I don’t understand why this should be so. Likewise, I understand the idea that if I’m in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, and you’re back on earth, and we both carry clocks that were identical when we were both on earth, then my clock will show that infinitely much time has passed for every second that passes on yours — using the same Lorentz contraction, this time in the form of time dilation.

    If the principles of relativity theory should apply in a Newtonian world as well — if it’s a logical argument that Newton himself would have needed to confront even in a world without science-fiction spaceships — then how would time dilation and Lorentz contraction have affected the models that Newton himself advanced? Put another way: would Newton have dismissed all of this as irrelevant for objects traveling at terrestrial velocities? Or would he have seen the difficulties introduced by separate reference frames and reworked his entire conception of space and time?

  6. I understand that large objects in some sense distort the space around them. I understand, somewhat, the elegance of postulating that light travels in straight lines, and that it’s the space rather than the light that’s changing its path when it moves past a heavy object. But I don’t really understand what’s happening when space is distorted. In fact I don’t even know if “space is distorted” is a sensible way of expressing this.

  7. I understand that in some sense referring to “space and time” as four separate orthogonal axes is out of date, and that now one refers to “spacetime” as a single unified thing. In some sense I guess this means the dimensions are interdependent: where you are in space dictates where you are in time. But I don’t really understand this clearly.

It’s my own personal mode of comprehension that’s at fault here. Partly, I think Russell’s exposition would be a lot clearer if he allowed himself some mathematics. As it is, I think he’s in a partly-metaphorical / grudgingly-mathematical world, and to me it’s not a very clear world. (Similarly: Krugman tries in one of his books to explain power laws as elucidated by Herbert Simon, and to my eye Krugman only made the situation less confusing.)

I need to read more about relativity — more Wheeler, say, and less Hawking. (Real talk: has there ever been a more-discussed and less-understood book than Hawking’s?) More-mathematical relativity goes on the queue.

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice — October 11, 2015

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice

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A map of Venice in the form of a painting -- maybe from the 1200s or so?

There’s a lot about European history from, let’s say, the fall of Rome up to the French Revolution that I don’t really have a good handle on. I mean, I know a few individual events, but that’s never helped me to keep a history in my head. To understand history, I need to be able to place events in a coherent story. Without a story, for instance, I was never able to remember the order of U.S. presidents; with the story it becomes a lot more straightforward. After Washington you’ve got Adams, during the Federalist era (see the book The Age of Federalism, which is really quite extraordinary). Washington’s Secretary of State was Thomas Jefferson, who became the third president after an extremely contentious first few years of the American republic (see the Alien and Sedition Acts); the fighting between Jefferson’s men and Adams’s men is why Jefferson’s inaugural contains the line “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Jefferson’s Secretary of State was then James Madison, who was then president right after Jefferson. And so forth. With a coherent story, I can remember a good solid chunk of history.

Well, it turns out that the history of Venice is an excellent view into a single coherent story of European history. The lagoon, in John Julius Norwich’s telling, has always sat on the boundary between the Eastern Roman Empire — which became the Byzantine Empire, and eventually the Ottoman Empire — and Western Europe. Its existence has always been tenuous, and it has always relied on its seafaring prowess to keep it alive. As long as it was able to dominate the Adriatic, and as long as it maintained good relations with Constantinople, it did well; as soon as the Ottomans took over and sundered Venice’s eastern lifeline, the writing was on the wall. The miracle is that it survived as long as it did. (Napoleon fired the coup de grâce.)

In the most remarkable part of the story that Norwich tells, Venice seals its own eventual death warrant. It led the Fourth Crusade, which was supposed to go to Jerusalem around the year 1200 but which stopped at Constantinople on the way, sacked it, and fatally weakened the Byzantine Empire. Thus weakened, the Byzantines couldn’t effectively resist the Ottomans, who finally took Constantinople 250 years later. The ascent of the Ottomans destroyed the Venetian connection to the East.

I expected to see the formation of modern Western European states as a reaction to the rise of the Ottomans, but it didn’t happen. I expected all the little Italian city-states — Genoa, Milan, Venice — to put aside their differences and fight off the “Arabic menace”, but perhaps that was expecting too much. Instead, the story seems to be that Italy remained disunited until soon after Napoleon swept through. In the meantime, city-states seemed to be united only so long as their immediate interests demanded it. From the perspective of someone like Norwich, who clearly loves Venice in his bones, this is a great tragedy.

I do love the coherence that Norwich brings to European history, but that coherence comes at the cost of glossing over the lives of ordinary Venetians. Instead, we get an endless parade of doges, no matter how inconsequential. Venetian doges were usually elected to the role after a lifetime spent honorably serving the Serenissima Repubblica (Most Serene Republic, which is an awesome title); hence very often they’re in their 80s when elected; hence very often they’re dead within a few months. Yet I’m pretty sure Norwich discusses every single doge. He also discusses most every naval battle, seemingly regardless of whether that battle had any lasting importance. I would have liked, instead, to have understood what we would now call the social history of Venice. What did most people do for work? How did the government treat its poor and its sick? How was Venetian sanitation? (When we went on our walking tour of Venice, the guide stopped briefly at one of the city’s public wells and noted how much disease they spread.) Norwich writes a lot about how “the people” would cheer this or that doge or admiral; which people is he referring to? The gentry, or the landless masses? And Venice was in many ways a melting pot, it seems, again because of its status both as a gateway to the East and as the commercial capital of the world; so I’d like to hear about whether these various ethnicities lived together harmoniously. The plague struck Venice repeatedly, and sharply reduced its population; what was the lived experience of the plague? How did they dispose of so many bodies?

Finally, all the shifting alliances and invasions and changes of fortune make me wonder about the lived experience of, say, those who lived in Padua. I quickly stopped being able to keep track of how often Padua and Ravenna changed hands. Maybe it’s easy for a European author to envision what it’s like when your town is repeatedly bombarded and sacked, but it’s not easy for an American — living, as we have, with basically no threats to our domestic tranquility for our entire history. “They lay siege to it, and 3 months later [or whatever] it fell” appears countless times throughout The History of Venice. What’s it like to live in a besieged city? If the siege is successful, does it basically end when the residents are starving to death?

A subset of this book would be extremely useful for tourists. Whenever a doge dies, Norwich writes — usually in a footnote — about where that doge’s body is now buried; 90-plus percent of the time, the doge seems to be buried in one of Venice’s innumerable churches, basilicas, and cathedrals, and maybe most often in the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo or St. Mark’s. If you were to take the subset of this book that explains the artistic and historical backdrop to Venice’s countless churches, tombs, and paintings, it would dramatically improve every tourist’s experience of the city.

I know that I need to go back. Norwich says in the introduction that walking through Venice at night is one of his favorite things; I need to do that, and I need to do it fearlessly. The first time I encountered Venice, I was overwhelmed by the city’s, well, Byzantine layout, and it took me a few days just to feel comfortable with it in the daytime. Braving it at night requires an extra bit of courage. The city is almost incomprehensibly mysterious, and Norwich’s book only adds depth to the mystery.

Paying the full cost of a car — October 10, 2015

Paying the full cost of a car

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I wonder how much mileage (so to speak) we’d get out of compelling car owners to pay the actual cost of their driving into a crowded city. The actual cost includes

  1. The cost of parking, which is to say the value of the next-best use of that extremely scarce land. As I recall, Shoup considers only the cost of constructing a parking space within a surface lot or in a structure, and explicitly ignores the value of the land. But imagine what we could do with that land: if the parking weren’t there, we could, among other things, extend housing. The average parking space looks to be around 180 square feet. In Boston, it’s not at all uncommon for an apartment to be valued at $750 per square foot. Imagine putting four stories of housing on top of that 180-square-foot unit; the value of the foregone housing is $540,000 (180*$750*4). If you secured a 30-year mortgage on that $540,000, it would cost you $3.58 per hour; the price of parking ought to be at least that much. Then add in the cost of constructing the parking space in the first place, the cost of its maintenance (occasionally re-paving it, etc.), the cost of enforcing parking tickets on it, etc., and it adds up.

    The point of the numerical exercise is simply that the cost of a thing should equal the cost of what you’re giving up to get it. Since we treat parking as free, and we treat it as a god-given part of the landscape, it’s hard for us to remember that there are other, possibly better, uses for that land.

  2. The collective loss of time caused by our individual decisions to enter an already-gridlocked city. One fellow has estimated that every additional car entering Manhattan during the weekday costs $160 in lost time. (Obviously the amount decreases at night and on weekends.) This is not hard to believe: one additional car adds a few seconds to everyone else’s commute. This is not to say, unless I misunderstand, that the marginal driver should pony up $160 for the privilege of driving into Manhattan; it’s easy to imagine that a fee of $10 or $20 would discourage enough drivers from entering the city that the congestion problem would resolve itself. But regardless, it should be obvious that my decision to drive has effects on people other than myself, and that I’m not required to pay for those effects. The economists call this a “negative externality” — a term for which we need a more scolding replacement. A “negative externality” is “your not cleaning up your own messes” or “a tax you impose on the community.” [1]

    The positive externality corresponding to this, on the flip side, is what subway riders give to the community every time they get on the train. If, in lieu of riding the train, you would have taken a car into work, then your decision to take the train saves the rest of us time, and you ought to be rewarded for that. (I don’t own a car; in lieu of taking the train, I’d walk or take the bus, so I sadly shouldn’t be the beneficiary of this reward.) You could be rewarded, for instance, by cheaper subway fare. A fee levied on automobile drivers that goes directly to subway riders would make the point particularly clearly.

  3. Environmental costs. When befouled air causes children to develop asthma, I don’t pay for that. When leaded gasoline leads to increased levels of crime and stunted mental development, neither I nor the petroleum companies paid for that. When your backfiring engine rouses me out of a sound sleep and destroys my productivity the next day at work, you don’t pay for that.

Add up all these costs, and many others I’ve not articulated (e.g., how much of our military budget would disappear if cheap gasoline weren’t considered a birthright?), and I wonder what the actual social cost of driving a car is.

[1] — I’ve wondered for a while whether economists feel morally complete once all negative externalities have been paid off. Suppose I dump radioactive waste in a lake, then pay to relocate everyone around the lake to a nicer, less-befouled area. By hypothesis, that waste now hurts no one, and all present harms have been compensated. Does the economist smile and consider the work done, or does he feel a morally repugnant residuum? After all, I dumped radioactive waste in a lake. Simply paying off the negative externalities shouldn’t balance the moral scales. Yet so long as the townspeople and I signed a contract freely and fairly, I get the sense that economists sleep soundly.

Naturally there’s a question of those who weren’t around when the bargain was struck. My children now can’t enjoy that lake. A few generations hence, someone might drink irradiated water and die a horrible death; that person didn’t get to choose whether to sign the contract. So within the notion of a “compensated externality” there lurks, not far below the surface, the idea that I hold this world in trust for those who follow. If I’m going to sign a contract on their behalf, I’m also assumed to be a fair judge — in fact, the only permissible judge — of their will. After all, if I’m not in some sense their representative, then what right do I have to sign a contract on their behalf?

I’m sure someone has written about the moral assumptions underlying negative externalities. I’d love to read it. As is so often the case, what sounds like a neutral technical dispute — how much to pay for the messes I create — is soon found to be a moral problem rather than a narrow economic one.

Two tiny experiments in food — October 8, 2015

Two tiny experiments in food

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  1. I’m making this right now. I’m just past the “Sprinkle surface of dough with 2 Tbsp. sugar” part. Seems to be going well so far.

    I got obsessed with this pastry at Ames St. Deli, and found what is (thus far) its apotheosis at Flour. Flour will even be teaching a class on how to make this tomorrow; the class has long since sold out. I think this pastry is something of a mini-obsession around here; and like all things which are high-quality in Boston, there’s always a gigantic line for it and it sells out early. So maybe if I can make these on my own, I can slake my thirst for them.

  2. Ever since we went to Italy, we’ve been obsessed with Aperol spritzes. I ran out of Aperol, so I’ve been experimenting with other amari. A Cynar spritz is very good, though I need to change the ratio from 3:2:1 prosecco:Aperol:seltzer to 4:2:1 prosecco:Cynar:seltzer. Amari can taste quite medicinal, and I love that about them, but in the spritz that needs to be cut a little bit.

    For the record, Campari spritzes are also delicious. I’ve not worked out the appropriate ratio there yet.

P.S.: A friend tells me that he and his wife drink a cocktail that is roughly 1.5 parts Campari, 1/2 a part vodka, 1.5 to 2 parts grapefruit juice, and 1 part soda. That sounds dang nice.

A brief PSA — October 3, 2015
Proof that Boston’s public parking is wildly mis-priced —
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow — September 26, 2015

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

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Mostly white text on a black field. The black field is then rent asunder by what looks like a white lightning bolt, but could also be interpreted as a tear in fabric or in paper

There are many books I could recommend that overlap with the history of the civil-rights movement. J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground remains one of the three or four best books I’ve ever read, focusing on the tragic failure of desegregation in the North. John Lewis’s Walking With The Wind is the civil-rights movement as documented by one of its central participants — a man thrown in jail dozens of times, and on the business end of countless police truncheons. Then there’s Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s somewhat arch but mostly disheartened take on the whimper with which the civil-rights movement ended, and how Richard Nixon exploited white working-class fears to hasten its demise. If you’re looking for some hope that de facto school segregation will end, try Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools In Raleigh. If you wanted to follow the civil-rights movement past the end of the Nixon Administration, you could do worse than to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World And Me — a letter he wrote to his son, in the wake of Eric Garner and and Trayvon Martin, explaining that white society has always fought to control black bodies.

As long as U.S. history is the history of slavery and its aftermath — as long as we remain unable to free ourselves from systemic racism — there will always been a need for these books. C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow is in some ways the granddaddy of these books; it’s the book that Martin Luther King called “the historical Bible of the civil-rights movement.” [1] Even three-quarters of a century after it was written, and even in the light of all those other great works, I think it’s still well worth reading. Its power is in its concision: it was originally delivered as three lectures at the University of Virginia, and it retains that feeling of historical evidence being laid out, methodically and metronomically.

The main take-away is that the South didn’t have to turn to Jim Crow; for a short window between the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870, and the beginning of Jim Crow in earnest around 1900, Southern whites explored the possibility of living in harmony with blacks. Several events conspired to turn the South decisively onto the road to apartheid: Northern liberals lost interest in desegregation and instead sought reconciliation with the South, at the expense of Southern blacks; Southern radicals fought to create sectional discord, which drove Northerners into the arms of moderate but segregationist Southerners; and Teddy Roosevelt carried the white man’s burden to the Philippines, thereby awakening a theory of racial hierarchy (whites near the top, blacks toward the bottom). The point is that it could have gone differently. Woodward implies that, if the South could have been something other than violently racist in the late 19th century, then it could be something other than violently racist in the mid-20th.

None of this is to say that the South was ever a blissful idyll for blacks. As Woodward puts it:

It would certainly be preposterous to leave the impression that any evidence I have submitted indicates a golden age of race relations in the period between Redemption [what Southerners call the end of Reconstruction –SRL] and complete segregation. On the contrary, the evidence of race conflict and violence, brutality and exploitation in this very period is overwhelming. It was, after all, in the ‘eighties and early ‘nineties that lynching attained the most staggering proportions ever reached in the history of that crime.

Woodward shouldn’t, then, be perceived as an apologist for the South. As a historian from the South, however, he dumps some much-needed ice water on Northern pretensions. The North certainly ended slavery and fought official segregation well before the South did, and of course the North’s economy was not based on slavery as directly as the South’s was. All that said, Northern segregation was and remains of the de facto rather than de jure variety. We segregate by our white families’ fleeing to the suburbs and sending their kids to private schools; we thereby leave, e.g., the Boston Public Schools only 13% white.

None of this is to say that Southern segregation wasn’t real and violent and terrifying. Woodward’s book brought out details of legal desegregation that I hadn’t heard of before — e.g., that the Brown v. Board of Education decision, with its command that desegregation proceed with “all deliberate speed”, actually took at least a decade to be carried out. There’s a danger that most of us — certainly including me — carry in our heads a potted history of the civil-rights movement that goes something like this:

  • Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus. So segregation on buses ended.
  • Brown v. Board!
  • Martin Luther King had a dream.
  • King died. :-(
  • Now we have civil rights forever!

It’s the Whig Interpretation of Civil-Rights History.

It’s really worth adding complexity to this potted history. It’s worth, among many other things, throwing out the “one lone woman on a bus” story; the Rosa Parks incident was the product of a disciplined campaign of organization — and when I say “organization”, I mean “organization” of the sort for which people made fun of Barack Obama when he said he was a “community organizer.” This isn’t just re-learning history for re-learning history’s sake; the “one lone woman” story is part of a pernicious libertarian fantasy about the power of individuals. The civil-rights movement was the product of focused, organized political action, in large part centered on black churches. The decline of the civil-rights movement is the story of that organized movement’s fracturing, as a pacifist wing that sought to continue King’s work ran up against a militant wing (represented by Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and others) that was frustrated by the glacial pace of change. A white working-class backlash (heartbreakingly documented in Common Ground) led us to where we are now: people generally seem to acknowledge that progress toward racial equality has stalled; books like Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration And the Myth of Black Progress make the point that if you count black people in prison correctly, there has been virtually no change in black wealth or black civic involvement. I’m told that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness makes the point even more forcefully.

It’s hard to feel anything but desperation in the era of Trayvon Martin and the new Jim Crow. I don’t know how Woodward felt when he began writing his Strange Career; did he see himself in the middle of half a century when virulent Southern racism had only become more intransigent? Or did he see that new possibilities were dawning? And did he merely describe what he saw, or did his book contribute — in any small way — toward the revolution that was about to come?

We really feel stuck today. Few people trust the Federal government: many conservatives believe it can only do harm (e.g., Obamacare), and many liberals believe that even its good intentions will be watered down by the power of organized money (e.g., Obamacare). As for local government, Boston’s late Mayor Menino prided himself on being an “urban mechanic” — enacting small changes that maybe would add up, in time, to something big. Big changes, like desegregating Boston public schools whose enrollment fell by 35% between 1970 and 2000 (and whose composition changed from 64% to 13% white), even as the city’s population continues to rise, are implicitly off the table. So are any big public-works projects, even those that would help the poor and working class, after our slog through the Big Dig.

So that leaves off local and Federal government. Where else do we look for the next revolution. Corporations-as-saviors? Hardly. Civil society? Bowling Alone suggests that’s decaying as well. The fight against income inequality might be the spark that we need, but again: individual sparks here and there do not a movement make; we need organization.

All I’m getting at here is that I wonder what Woodward would make of the spot we’re in. Would he see something on the horizon that we don’t? Or would he be as dejected as the rest of us?

[1] – C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History, 1986, p. 92.

Python SIGPIPE — September 25, 2015

Python SIGPIPE

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I ran into the same Python problem as this fellow. Namely: he’s written a script that dumps lines to stdout, and then runs

my_script.py | head

and gets this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/slaniel/bin/my_script.py", line 25, in 
    main()
  File "/home/slaniel/bin/my_script.py", line 22, in main
    print "".join(["%s %s\n" % (value, key) for key, value in sorted_list])
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

I.e., Python still has data in the pipe, ready to go to stdout, but it can’t send it because head(1) exited. So my_script.py gets SIGPIPE, and Python traps that as an IOError exception. The solution is straightforward:

from signal import signal, SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL
signal(SIGPIPE,SIG_DFL)

This DFL thing is new to me:

signal.SIG_DFL
This is one of two standard signal handling options; it will simply perform the default function for the signal. For example, on most systems the default action for SIGQUIT is to dump core and exit, while the default action for SIGCHLD is to simply ignore it.

If I’m reading that right, Python replaces the default SIGPIPE behavior with a thrown exception. To make the signal yield the system default, you need to tell Python explicitly to do that.

Two questions:

  1. Why would Python do this? Is the general logic that it’s trying to “internalize” systemwide behaviors? Maybe it wants a script to be “write once, run anywhere”, so it can’t just accept the systemwide behavior. Instead, it has to turn external system events (like SIGPIPE) into internal program behaviors (like exceptions). Is that the idea?
  2. I don’t want to have to tell every one of my scripts to exit silently when it receives SIGPIPE. So I would prefer not to write
    from signal import signal, SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL
    signal(SIGPIPE,SIG_DFL)
    in every script that I ever produce. Do people have a general approach here? E.g., every script does an import Steve_lib (or your own equivalent) that sets up the expected signal-handling defaults?
Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking — September 24, 2015

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking

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A Monopoly board -- particularly the few squares around Free Parking, of course

The High Cost of Free Parking has changed a lot of minds in its few years on this earth. For a book about a seemingly dry subject, THCOFP‘s effect has been shockingly strong. The premise of the book can be laid out in a few bullets:

  1. Cities’ parking minimums on real estate are dangerous. This much is obvious, in that producing too much parking is exactly the point: if developers would produce that much parking on their own, then minimums wouldn’t be necessary.
  2. The usual argument for buildings to come with their own parking is that if they didn’t, the buildings’ users would spill over and use public parking. But the only reason to assume they’d use city parking is if public parking is free, as it is most everywhere. But what if cities charged the market rate for public parking? Then, presumably, people would be indifferent between off-street parking and public parking.
  3. The impact of free parking is devastating at many levels. It scars cities. It orients cities toward drivers rather than toward bicyclists, pedestrians, or those who cannot afford cars. And free parking (emphasis on the free part) isn’t good for the drivers, either: they spend minutes, on average, cruising around looking for parking, with expected effects on the environment and the drivers’ own state of mind. And the environmental effects go further: a world oriented toward drivers and parking is a world where buildings are more spread out, which is thus harder for pedestrians, which encourages more people to own cars purely out of convenience, which thus creates a larger lobby for car-centric cities, which makes the cycle start all over again.
  4. People expect to be able to park free everywhere, so the story is even worse than all of the bullets above would have it. Not only must there be one free parking space in the world for my car — there must be two or three. City planners seem to require enough free parking at every new restaurant, barber shop, ice-cream shop and café to accommodate peak demand; as Shoup quotes somewhere in The High Cost of Free Parking, “Do not build the church for Easter Sunday.” A typical standard for restaurants (in California, anyway, from which Shoup draws most of his examples) is four spaces per thousand square feet of dining area. At 200-300 square feet per parking space, parking area can easily swamp dining area.
  5. So parking should be market-priced. How much should we charge? Answer: charge enough so that there are always one or two free spaces available on every block; Shoup’s threshold is 85% full. This will stop people from needing to cruise, so the drivers themselves should be happy.
  6. But people are used to having free parking everywhere. How, to put it bluntly, do we buy them off, so that they’re willing to forego free parking? Answer: give them something for it. When a neighborhood charges for parking, some fraction of the parking proceeds should be returned to a Business Improvement District in that neighborhood — money that can be used to repair (or expand!) sidewalks, plant trees, and generally make the neighborhood look nice. People will see the benefits of paid parking returned to them. The people who will object to paid parking will be those who, for instance, drive into the neighborhood during the day to go to work and drive home to the suburbs at night — but those people don’t vote in that neighborhood, so their voice won’t have an effect.

Donald Shoup is in many ways like Jane Jacobs. One of the great joys of Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is that she turns what might be a huge topic — subject to pure moralizing arguments like “What do we want out of cities” — into a number of small, practical, answerable questions. She looks out her window and asks what value sidewalks have. You want sidewalks to be wide enough so that kids can play on them; wide enough that a restaurant can drop a couple tables on them; etc. How about buildings? How tall do you want them to be? Well, we want our neighbors to be engaged with what’s happening on the street; skyscraper apartments can’t do this. And so forth. After she’s wrapped her (and our) brain around low-level details, only then does she scale out and talk about cities generally. And by that point she has a much more concrete object in her head, which it’s much easier to reason about with a minimum of ideological pollution. So it is with Shoup: he hardly spends any time talking about grand issues like global warming; instead he keeps focused on an individual car searching for an individual parking space, asks us why the car is spending so much time cruising, and lands the blame on the fact that parking is free.

Of course this should be obvious. We see videos of Soviet-era breadlines, and we pin the blame on a price system that wasn’t allowed to work; we never turn the lens back on ourselves and ask what harm we’re doing by assuming that a scarce resource should be free. Others have probably pointed this out in the past; this sort of thing probably occurred to Lewis Mumford, but Mumford was a genius who was a few decades ahead of his time. It took Donald Shoup to really bring this issue into the public mind in a real way. Now I hope people will actually put his ideas into action.

A few thoughts on ad blockers — September 19, 2015

A few thoughts on ad blockers

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Marco Arment, of Instapaper and Tumblr and coffee-geekery (his app company is called Full City) and much general lovableness fame, introduced a web-tracker-blocking app for iOS 9 the other day. It was called Peace. A day later he wrote a blog post agonizing over some of the trackers he was blocking. Today he straight-up removed the app from the store.

I can’t speak to his motivations, but it seems like he’s agonizing over the decision to treat all web trackers as identical and block all of them. I surmise that he got some push-back from various content networks that believe they’re the good guys. And I don’t doubt that not all trackers are created equal. But this withdrawal says something a lot more worrying to me: that people are having a hard time choosing the end-user over the advertiser.

I’ve never understood the ad-supported web. I don’t understand how anyone makes any money off of web ads, when virtually no one I know clicks on ads. Yet I’m told that one of the first things they teach you, upon your being hired at Google, is that you are not the user: there are lots of people who just spend all day clicking on ads. Somehow an entire economy is based on this.

Fundamentally that economy is for the advertisers; it’s not for you and me. As the aphorism goes, “If you get something for free, you are not the customer; you’re the product.” All those ads being served up to you are you being sold to someone else. And of course no one wants to see ads on their screens; this is obvious. Ads are a thing that we’re told we need to suffer through in order to enjoy the free web. (If I never click on an ad, am I stealing? What if I click on an ad but never buy the advertised product?)

No wonder, then, that people install ad blockers and tracking-blockers like Peace. Yet Marco seems to worry that he’s taking money out of the hands of innocents. I don’t see the moral concern here: he has a choice between doing the end-users’ bidding and doing the advertisers’ bidding. I thought he knew that he was choosing to do the end-users’ bidding.

What worries me more is that there will always be a temptation to take money with both hands. Search Google News for an article titled “Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool”, or check out my cached copy. Sure, you can earn money from users paying you, but you can earn even more money if you have the users pay you and you take some money from the advertisers. Sort of like the New York Times: I happily pay them $15 a month, almost as a charitable contribution, because I view them as a social good, yet they still serve me ads. I want the Times‘s loyalty to be entirely directed at me, just as I want Marco and the AdBlock people to be indivisibly on my side. Is that too much to ask?

Depending upon how you look at it, it’s either fortunate or disheartening that we have, broadly, two wildly opposed business models: the Apple model, which is “pay us money and we’ll make something you love”; and the Google model, which is, “pay us nothing and we’ll give you a beautiful product while spamming you and making our money from garbage peddlers.” (Merlin Mann put it better in less than 140 characters.) I understand how the Google model spreads to pay for the web, of course: a new startup wants to build its user base quickly, so it offers its product for free. Ideally, to my mind, a company that has established itself and gained that user base would then stop the ads and ask its users to pay. It hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen, and I can see why it wouldn’t happen, but still: a man can dream.

(How much would you be willing to pay for the full suite of Google services? How much is it worth to you, every month, to get Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Docs? That’s never a choice you’ll ever have to make, of course: if Google ever put its search engine behind a paywall, you’d make do and switch to Bing; you’d use the inferior-but-I’m-told-improving Apple Maps; you’d use Yahoo Mail, which I guess is a thing that still exists; you’d use whatever the Microsoft cloud office suite is called. But if I measured the actual value that instant search, instant travel-planning, high-quality email, and cloud documents add to my life, it couldn’t possibly be less than $200 a month.)

Sites are now blocking you from using them until you disable your content blockers. I noticed this the other day when I tried to watch the first episode of the new Stephen Colbert late show; I had to disable either AdBlock Plus or Ghostery for that specific site to make it work. This is all turning very silly.

Since I know how corrupting the ad-supported business model is, I try my damnedest to pay for things that are important to me. John Oliver’s show is worth at least $15 a month to me, so I happily pay for HBO Now. I pay for the New York Times, and I’d gladly pay for the Boston Globe if the site didn’t do everything in its power to prevent me from giving them money. I listen to a ton of podcasts, and my life would be appreciably worse without This American Life or Radiolab, so I donate $20 a month to the former and $15 a month to WNYC. It’s possible I’m overpaying. But it’s also likely that a lot of people don’t/can’t pay for these things, so I like to think that I’m paying for a few people who can’t afford it.

I wish there weren’t this natural tension between what readers want and how writers make money; I wish that charging people money for consuming goods and services weren’t considered a bold business idea. But for now there is such a tension, and people largely don’t pay. I’m going to continue using ad-blocking software, and I’m going to hope that more software developers realize where their allegiances should lie.