Afternoon roundup, and around the traps

The worthies on the closing of the browser tabs.

• Nice comparison of vacant housing to transitional unemployment, in an American context. Filing this one away here for the next time somebody notices a few empty houses and decides that policy should do something about it. It comes up too often. 
• Susan Edmunds over at Stuff looks at household income distributions; the piece includes a short bit from me on AHC- and BHC- incomes. 
• Universities need to lift their darned game. 
• AUT not only caved at the last minute to pressure from the Chinese Embassy to pull the rooms booked for a memorial event for the Tienanmen Massacre, they also (and I just cannot stress enough how stupid this is) failed to redact the name of the lecturer who had booked the rooms when the documents were released under OIA. I hope that lecturer does not have family living under the Communist dictatorship. Utter muppetry. Newsroom's since blanked out the name but what the hell. 
• International students at Auckland University from China cannot be expected to feel safe there unless the University takes a stronger stand in support of their international students - and especially when the Chinese embassy is lauding the pro-Communist student who shoved the student who was supporting the protesters in Hong Kong. 
• I dunno what the answer is here. Stronger emphasis on freedom of speech in international student orientation events and policies expelling students who become violent in debate with other students could be part of it. But universities are massively dependent on foreign students, disproportionately from China. Capped domestic tuition fees have the universities seek money where they can - from full-fees paying foreign students. The government has to cap tuition fee increases because students don't really pay them - the government does. The first year's free, the rest is funded by loans that are marked down by about 45% the second they're issued. Every tuition fee increase increases the government's liability through the student loan portfolio. So you get this self-reinforcing mess that the government cannot afford to cover the education costs for the volume of students it wants to go through the universities and is unwilling to have students pay their own way a bit more, so pushes the universities to get international students to cover the bill. That builds in vulnerabilities when stuff like this happens. 
• If you wanted to build a house out of straw bales and eco-friendly materials, good luck getting it signed off and consented. "Oh, the market fails to provide eco-friendly alternatives!" Yeah, well, if the government won't sign off on the standards, then you get messes. 
• Elsevier is expensive; the UC libraries no longer subscribe to them. So the excellent Ted Bergstrom is organising volunteers to put together running tables of contents of those journals with links through to faculty website copies of the final edited versions of their own papers. Superb.
• I don't get why the Reserve Bank wants to ban anyone who knows monetary and macroeconomics from serving on the monetary policy committee, but that looks to be what they're doing. It's hard to come up with good explanations. The piece at Interest has some minor comment from me.
• Running field experiments? Watch out for this: the presence of the foreigner as experimenter changes behaviour.
• Google might yet build itself a city development in Toronto. It looks pretty neat. 
• I also give a couple warnings about a 'virtual shopping' study finding that people in a fake supermarket are responsive to sugar taxes. In the real world, people stock up when things are on special, and buy less when it isn't, so short-term price responsiveness isn't the same thing as long term consumption changes. 
• A mammoth listening task: Jordan Hoffman ranks 180 Rush songs. The ranking is very defensible, though I'd have moved Dreamline and Time Stand Still up the list a bit and pushed Working Man down the list. Almost all of the songs are on Spotify; here's a playlist, from lowest to highest ranked. And Hoffman is absolutely correct in his top pick (again: 1 here is the lowest-ranked. You work your way up). UPDATE: It looks like the embedded playlist can only run the lowest-ranked 100; click through to the web player to get the full list.
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On the awesomeness of Rush

Colby Cosh explains all.

It’s disorienting for a Rush fan—someone who was patronizing and defending them when it wasn’t just not cool, but the opposite of cool—to watch the bien-pensants struggle to cram them into the canon in the year 2010. Especially since it’s been twenty years since their finest work, and arguably more like thirty.

I started university at almost the exact moment Nirvana broke, and I still remember exactly where I was standing the first time I saw Kurt Cobain on the cover of a guitar magazine. I don’t play, but for years I’d been devouring the rhetoric of high-performance musical gear and modal theory as a fan, incapable of appreciating it as anything but a species of foreign-language poetry. In that world, the members of Rush were (and are) senior deities. It was instantly clear to me that Cobain, who had duct tape on his guitar neck and probably thought the Mixolydian was a brand of food processor, was going to annihilate the universe we had known. This was a lot like being Michael Corleone in Godfather II and watching that Cuban guerrilla blow himself and the cops to smithereens. “Uh-oh.”

But the last revolutionary flowering of romanticism in pop music ended up being the best possible thing for Rush’s reputation. Intellectuality and musicianship were purged from the radio, but this left the generations that followed hungry for a little classicism, a little ambition and ironic pretension. (How else do you account for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness?) Grunge provided an opportunity, as punk had before, for separating the wheat from the chaff—annihilating acts that had truly been predicated on nothing but hairstyles and codpieces, and allowing reconsideration and critical filtering of arena rock, metal, and prog that might have been burdened with excessive pompousness and trippy kozmik imagery, but still possessed enduring value. (You don’t want to hear my lecture on how Iron Maiden has introduced more teenagers to literature than anybody in Britain not named J.K. Rowling.)

Granted, I’m not actually sure that “classicism vs. romanticism” is the best metaphor for thinking about the tension between artfulness and sincerity in popular music. The three-chords-and-the-truth types are arguably the real classicists, self-restrained as they are by a musical version of the Aristotelian unities. But self-imposed limitations have been part of the fun of listening to Rush, too. It’s not really natural for a band to insist on doing what Rush has: being a three-piece outfit that will, as an inflexible rule, only make music in the studio that it can eventually replicate without additional help on stage.

I wasn't aware that there was a time when Rush was the opposite of cool. Is it possible?

Cosh's whole article is excellent: there's good reason he's now on the Arts and Letters Daily blogroll.

Previously: Rush, Red Barchetta, and the anticipating of Peltzman's seminal article on offsetting behaviour...

Offsetting behaviour: Rush edition

Did a fiction article in Road and Track (1973) predict the Peltzman Effect before Peltzman?

Denis at ALD today points us to a brilliant piece by PJ O'Rourke.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda “tuners.” The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che.

I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8.

O'Rourke nails it exactly. Regulation has forced the car to become utilitarian; Japan does utilitarian better than does Detroit. Read the whole thing.

The O'Rourke article, of course, drew to mind Rush's (to my mind) best song: Red Barchetta. I hadn't known that the song was based on an old fiction article from Road & Track in 1973. Wikipedia informs me:

The song was inspired by the futuristic short story "A Nice Morning Drive," written by Richard Foster and published in the November, 1973 issue of Road and Track magazine. The story describes a similar future in which increasingly-stringent safety regulations have forced cars to evolve into massive "Modern Safety Vehicles" (MSVs), capable of withstanding a 50-mile-per-hour impact without injury to the driver. Consequently, drivers of MSVs have become less safety-conscious and more aggressive, and "bouncing" (intentionally ramming) the older, smaller cars is a common sport among some.

Note the year: 1973. Peltzman's seminal article, The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation, came out in the JPE in 1975. I wonder if Peltzman read Road and Track. The Road and Track article, "A nice morning drive", outlines the argument perfectly:

Despite the extent of the safety program, it was essentially a good idea. But unforeseen complications had arisen. People became accustomed to cars which went undamaged in 10-mph collisions. They gave even less thought than before to the possibility of being injured in a crash. As a result, they tended to worry less about clearances and rights-of-way, so that the accident rate went up a steady six percent every year. But the damages and injuries actually decreased, so the government was happy, the insurance industry was happy and most of the car owners were happy. Most of the car owners - the owners of the non-MSV cars - were kept busy dodging the less careful MSV drivers, and the result of this mismatch left very few of the older cars in existence. If they weren't crushed between two 6000-pound sleds on the highway they were quietly priced into the junkyard by the insurance peddlers. And worst of all, they became targets . . .

I'd always thought the gleaming alloy aircar in Red Barchetta was a police car trying to chase down a forbidden gas-powered car; Foster's article (above) suggests rather a post-regulation griefer car. I prefer the former; it's less depressing. In any case, Foster is picking up the basic Peltzman mechanism. More accidents as folks take less care, fewer deaths per accident, but external costs for folks outside of the safer vehicles. Should we really call it the Foster Effect?

Some days, I really miss my old 350-4bbl '69 Skylark Custom. It waits for me in Manitoba. Sigh.