The New Yorker: Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong

celebrate the opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so far consists of just three stations and two miles of track, is, at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion per kilometre of track, the most expensive ever built. And it will keep that record as Phase 2 begins, at a projected cost of $2.2 billion a kilometre.

Construction projects everywhere are subject to delays and cost overruns. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic geographer, has found that nine out of ten infrastructure mega-projects worldwide ran over budget and the same number finished behind schedule. But the U.S. is the world’s spendthrift. A 2015 study by David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, and Tracy Gordon, a fellow at the Urban Institute, looked at a hundred and forty-four rail projects in forty-four countries. The four most expensive, and six of the top twelve, were American, the Second Avenue subway among them. In a study of transit construction costs worldwide, Alon Levy, a transit blogger, has found that they are often five to six times higher here than in other developed countries. [...]

Then, too, because most infrastructure decisions in the U.S. are made at the state or local level, involving multiple governing bodies, projects must also satisfy a wide range of constituencies. Political considerations are often as important as technical ones, and schemes that are initially well defined can end up like Swiss Army knives, fulfilling any number of functions. Long-suffering engineers call this “scope creep.” Washington and Oregon, for instance, spent years collaborating on plans for a new bridge on I-5, spanning the Columbia River. What started as a simple proposal quickly morphed into a full highway expansion (including the rebuilding of five miles of interchanges), along with a light-rail extension. The cost rose to more than three billion dollars, after which the idea was abandoned.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Argument for God is Out of Tune

In fact, one possibility—suggested by the mathematical string-theory that many think will be the key to an adequate cosmology—is that what existed from the beginning was not just our universe but an infinite multitude of universes, a "multiverse,” each specified by a different set of constants relevant to the emergence of life. It seems highly probable that at least one of this infinite set of universes would have constants with values needed to produce life. We may be inclined think that it would still be highly improbable that our universe would be such a universe, so that we still need an explanation for this fact. But this improbability is comparable to the improbability of winning a lottery. My winning a billion-dollar Powerball drawing wouldn't support that claim that someone had rigged the outcome. The highly improbable event would need no explanation beyond the luck of the draw. The same holds for our universe's being one that allows the emergence of life.

The second difficulty also concerns the fine-tuning argument's assumption that mere chance can never be an adequate explanation of an improbable event. It's reasonable to exclude chance when we've learned from our previous experience about causes that could plausibly explain the event. To use philosopher John Leslie's example, if I've been sentenced to execution by a firing squad of expert marksmen and all the shots miss me, there's reason to think, from what we know about guns and the people that fire them, that this was intentional and not mere chance. But when it comes to the origin of the universe, we have no relevant previous experiences. Our data about the Big Bang are all we know about this apparently unique event; we have no experience of any similar event. So we have no basis for judging what might be plausible in this unique situation. In particular, we have no basis for thinking that intelligent design is better than chance as an explanation of why organisms exist. [...]

But this effort to turn cosmology against religion is no more effective than the fine-tuning effort to support religion. A major failing is the assumption that we could have any plausible sense of how a divine designer would be thinking. A being with knowledge and power utterly exceeding ours might well be aware of possibilities beyond our feeble capacities. But even from our merely human standpoint we can suggest reasons why our apparently ordinary place in the universe might not count against a privileged relation to the creator. Why should an essentially spiritual status have to be reflected in the physical world? Might God not have created the universe precisely as an object of knowledge and awe for us? And why should our privileged relation to God exclude similar relations for other sorts of creatures? Scientific cosmology is an endlessly fascinating study in its own right. But, on reflection, it seems to have no particular significance for fundamental questions of religious belief. 

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Nautilus Magazine: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

This turns out to be a very difficult question to answer just by looking at individuals. We all know stories of ambitious and talented people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, who grew companies and created great wealth. But for each one of these superstars, there may have been many more people who were equally ambitious and talented, yet did not succeed. Maybe the string of investment and managerial decisions that made one person’s company successful, and that seem so very wise in retrospect, were actually just the entrepreneurial equivalent of flipping a coin 20 times and getting all heads. The chances of that happening are about 1 in 1 million, so if enough people try it, someone is bound to get lucky and look like a coin-flipping genius—purely by chance. [...]

To illustrate the basic idea, suppose that we are flipping coins and trying to figure out whether they are fair or biased. This is tricky with only a single coin. If we flip it 20 times and get 14 heads versus 6 tails, we might be a little suspicious that it’s biased. But we could not be completely sure: The chance of a fair coin yielding 14 heads or more is still about 6 percent, and unlikely events do sometimes come to pass. A much better approach would be to perform the same 20-flip experiment with thousands of identical coins: If we still see lots of them coming up with an overabundance of heads, then something is definitely fishy. [...]

Or is it? The obvious objection, of course, is that the coin-flip investment game is a gross oversimplification of reality. For example, it takes no account of consumption—the money that rich people siphon out of the market to spend on travel, penthouses, yachts, or whatever. Nor does it allow for the fact that some people are born with inherited wealth that gives them a huge head start in life. Yet it turns out that neither consumption nor inherited advantages make much of a difference: Even when the model is adjusted to allow for such factors, Pareto still rules. Another possible objection is that it may take a very long time for the wealth distribution to converge to its steady state. However, it has been shown both numerically and experimentally that the convergence to the Pareto wealth distribution is actually quite fast. [...]

Still, it is possible to get a crude sense of the effect of talent by modifying the investment game to include two types of players. Normal investors are just like those in the first game: They flip a coin with heads yielding a return of 30 percent, and tails producing a loss of 10 percent. But the talented investors are more skilled at playing the market: They earn slightly more than 30 percent when the coin comes up heads, and lose slightly less than 10 percent when the coin comes up tails. Now we set the players loose and ask an empirical question: How big can this “talent differential” be and still stay statistically consistent with the power law wealth distribution we see in the real world?

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Nautilus Magazine: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

Frank says his research ideas often come from his own experience, and his work on luck is no exception. His latest book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, argues that the role of luck in life, and specifically in economic success, is not as widely appreciated as it should be. The book claims that if the prosperous were more cognizant of luck’s role in their success they would be more supportive of government efforts to spread opportunity, and of the higher taxes they’d have to pay as a result. [...]

So, even if luck counts for only 1 percent, you’re going to see the winners most of the time won’t be the most talented people. Most of the time they’ll be among the luckiest of all the contestants. Let luck count for more than 1 percent, and it’s very easy to construct narratives where it matters enormously more. [...]

Choosing your parents, what genes you get, what kind of upbringing you’re going to get, and the country where they live is the hugest dimension of all the chance events that effect outcomes in your life. You can’t affect any of those, but we can affect those. We can make the investments that make our environment one that if you work hard and have some talent you’ve got a reasonable chance to succeed, at least on a decent scale, unlike Somalia where no matter how hard you work and how talented you are you’re not ever going to get anywhere. We could affect that outcome. We can’t do it as an individual, but collectively we could affect that outcome.

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Quartz: From dictatorship to LGBT paradise: Taiwan’s road towards marriage equality

Same-sex marriage has been discussed on and off in the past decade, but proposals never got far. The issue regained momentum in 2016 in part after Jacques Picoux, a French-born resident of Taiwan, apparently committed suicide in October. He had reportedly become depressed after his Taiwanese partner of 35 years died of cancer and Picoux had been forbidden from taking part in medical decisions towards the end of his life. [...]

LGBT rights are relatively strong in Taiwan in large part because the island has a vibrant civil society. Taiwanese endured almost four decades of rule by the repressive Kuomintang party, under which thousands disappeared, were imprisoned, or were murdered in a period known as the “White Terror.” Causes ranging from women’s rights to opposition to nuclear power blossomed in the 1980s as democratization set in, and exploded with the lifting of martial law in 1987. “Taiwan society will not allow Taiwan to go backwards to the days of the KMT,” says Chen Mei-hua, a women’s rights activist and sociologist at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung. [...]

Education is another reason for Taiwan’s progressive atmosphere. In 2004 it passed the Gender Equity Education Act, requiring schools to teach gender equality and diversity. That was a response to the death, still unsolved, of a junior-high student, Yeh Yung-chih, whose body was found in the bathroom in his school in 2000. Yeh was known to have been bullied for displaying “feminine” tendencies, and his story remains a rallying cry for LGBT people in Taiwan. [...]

Finally, some attribute Taiwan’s progressive attitudes to its racial diversity, its relatively small Christian population, and a tradition of religious tolerance. Buddhism, which does not have teachings about homosexuality, also remains an important religion in Taiwan, and in 2012 a same-sex couple tied the knot in a Buddhist ceremony.

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The Guardian: Without path from protest to power, the Women's March will end up like Occupy

Today’s social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest: the comforting belief that if you can get enough people into the streets from diverse demographics, largely unified behind a clear message, then our representatives will be forced to heed the crowd’s wishes.

If this story has ever been true, and I’m not so sure it has, then it hasn’t been the case since 1963, when 250,000 people marched on Washington for “jobs and freedom” and heard Martin Luther King Jr deliver his I Have a Dream speech. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in employment and housing.

But let’s be real: there are countless counter-examples of marches on Washington that failed: the 1913 march of women to demand the right to vote, the 1978 march for the Equal Rights Amendment, the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, the Million Man March of 1995, the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, the inauguration protests against George W Bush’s second term in 2005 … the list is practically endless. Activists have a tendency to ignore repeated failure in favor of overemphasizing one or two anomalous minor victories.

The absolute failure of the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest, the largest synchronized global march in human history, was the last gasp of this tactic. Today’s nominally democratic governments would be more concerned by the absence of our marches, as that might suggest something darker is in the works.

The only way to attain sovereignty – the supreme authority over the functioning of our government – is to use social protest to win elections or win wars. Either we can march to the ballot box or the battleground; there is no third option.

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CityLab: Where Europe's GDP Is Rising And Falling

Most people have a pretty clear idea of which countries in Europe are richer and which are poorer. Income levels thin out the farther south and east you go on the continent, you might assume, while Scandinavia and Germany enjoy the highest income levels. [...]

Overall, wealth is poorly distributed across the European Union, as made clear by March 2016 maps of regional GDP using the latest figures available from Eurostat. Meanwhile, the regions that have seen the largest decreases in per capita GDP aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect. [...]

The map above, which is adjusted for each nation to show comparable purchasing power, demonstrates how much wealth varies from one region to the next. The former eastern bloc almost universally comes in below average, except for the regions around some of its largest cities: Bucharest, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw. Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, meanwhile, emerge as the only states where every region exceeds average wealth.

The rest of the continent is an uneven mosaic, especially in the U.K. At the upper end of the scale, three areas are especially wealthy: London, the region around Oxford, and Northern Scotland’s Aberdeenshire (the landing point for the country’s offshore oil and gas extraction). Elsewhere, West Wales and County Durham have a per capita GDP so much lower that it places them in the same category as Southern Italy or Romania.

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CityLab: New York's Early Skyscrapers, Transplanted to Paris

What would Paris look like if you combined it with New York?

You could spend all day dreaming about a mashup of the French capital’s grand boulevards interspersed with Manhattan’s skyscrapers—or you could jump head-first into a beautifully vintage alternate reality created by Paris architect and photographer Luis Fernandes and shared on his blog, Haussmanhattan. Using old photos of both cities to create striking collages of urban landscapes that seem strangely real. In Haussmanhattan’s elegant visual creations, the Flatiron Building reappears on the prow of the Île de la Cité, the Woolworth Building pokes out from clouds next to the Eiffel Tower, while the neck of the Invalides’ dome is stretched into a cloud-scratchingly high cylinder towering over the city.

The results are eerily effective thanks to the careful choice of black and white photos. It also sticks to Manhattan landmarks finished well before World War II, whose masonry facades blend more easily into Parisian surroundings. Curiously, the result of this combination of aesthetics of 1920s Paris and 1920s Manhattan turns out to be somewhat familiar to people who have visited the Eastern Bloc. The combination of broad European-style boulevards with tall towers still clad in historicist embellishments at times looks rather like Moscow or Kiev, where elaborate Stalinist towers hover over wide, tree-lined avenues. Haussmanhattan’s hybrid city might look like a delightful place to explore, but most of us will be glad that it’s striking combination of Baron Haussman and Ernest Flagg remains fictional.

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The Huffington Post: One way Trump is different from European nationalists

Both Trump and Kaczyński have appealed to explicit xenophobia. Both promise to return “greatness” to their country, even as their isolationism and extremism distance them from former allies. Both evoke memories of a lost era of job security and prosperity for industrial workers, and claim that they can bring those good days back. Most of all, both cultivate a worldview based on an existential struggle between themselves and a mysterious, conspiratorial network of enemies.

Even the path to power for both Trump and Kaczyński has been similar. Neither represents a majority, but both took advantage of constitutional quirks to transform extraordinarily tight electoral results into a victory.

In Poland, parties that get fewer than 5 percent of the vote get no seats in Parliament. Their votes are distributed proportionately among the larger parties. Because the left splintered into multiple parties, none of them got more than 5 percent and PiS’s 38 percent of the votes translated to 51 percent of the parliamentary delegates. As in America, a couple hundred thousand Polish votes cast differently would have led to a totally different outcome. Since the elections, PiS’s support has remained in the low to mid-30’s. That should give us some pause before we attribute either victory to profound cultural or sociological shifts. [...]

Despite all these similarities, there is an essential difference between the two leaders. Kaczyński, like his European counterparts on the far right, is genuinely hostile to capitalism. [...]

The base that elected him is more closely aligned to their European counterparts than to the Republican leadership. This difference is crucial. Trump and Kaczyński are similar, but the latter is at the head of a coherent and committed movement, while the former is trying to ride two horses that won’t be going in the same direction for very long.

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