Posted on Thursday November 5th by Alex Lessard-Pilon | 102
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- Why go to the lumber yard when you can just build with whole trees? An architect builds houses by bending whole slim ash trees into frames and rafters; a whole tree supports 50% more weight than could the largest piece of lumber milled from it. (NYTimes)
- A list! Betcha can’t guess which is America’s most toxic city. Lots of no-brainers, but also lots of surprises here. The kicker is that Las Vegas, wasteful in so many ways, is the least toxic. (GreenBiz)
- New York Senator Charles Schumer is taking on a $1.5 billion wind farm planned for west Texas. The project wants $450 million in stimulus funds, some of which it’ll spend in China. Schumer finds it “disturbing” that “more than 2,000 manufacturing jobs would be created in China.” (GreenInc)
- Another list! The eighteen strangest bridges. One has a 217 foot sundial, another is a giant gold snake, and a third is made of bamboo and can support 8 ton trucks! (Popular Mechanics)
- Imagine if we spent as much money on infrastructure as we do on defense. That’s $680 billion: enough to build a national high-speed rail network. Cost-benefit analysis? Anyone? (Ryan Avent)
- California is overhauling its water system because of a protracted drought, and plans to restore a river delta, build dams, and monitor groundwater use. Environmentalists don’t think the measures go far enough. (NYTimes)
- The president of Audi’s US division says “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to developing low-emission cars, and anticipates that it’ll take 20 years to get close to a zero-carbon footprint. He sees clean diesel and diesel hybrids as a good intermediary step. (Time)
- A sculptor recycles old school buses to build a bus shelter. It looks great, but the claim that projects like this “attract people toward recycling and adopting a green lifestyle” is highly questionable. (TheDesignBlog)
- Three dumb fisherman at the helm of a 10-ton boat couldn’t handle their own nets, which were full of 400 lb jellyfish. Their boat capsized and sank. Can someone teach these guys how to fish? (Telegraph)
November 5th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
The cost-benefit depends; do you spend the $680B on HSR instead of or in addition to defense?
November 5th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
The same issue came up in the comments on Avent’s post. I think the hypothetical is that it’s “instead of,” which might be met with eyerolls. But really it’s a thought exercise: what spending practices make a country grow? “Grow” here is subject to interpretation.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
You have to wean the country off of the Military Industrial Complex and I would propose doing that by turning them into the Infrastructure Industrial Complex. At some point we will have to worry about how that might make us way overbuilt like in Japan but as we are nowhere near that right now I don’t see it as a concern.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Windmills from China?
You know I watch windmill components being trucked over from Mexico everyday…why haven’t we found it “disturbing” that we’re creating jobs in Juarez Mexico?
Living out here in west Texas, I think this is a great place for windmills…it’s certainly a windy place
November 5th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Oops - whole tree article is at :
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html?em
Thanks for the dog article though.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I think the high speed rail versus military spending is a strictly thought exercise. Currently the American defence spending as a proportion of GNP is pretty low, it is simply that we have such a large economy is that it dwarfs all around us. Also the efence of American interests is a historical function of the Federal Governement, and the only times which it was nearly non-existant was when we either had completetly turned inward in isolation or else had been under the umbrella of Pax Britanica in the 19th Century. What we are going to have problems with are the entitlements and other non-historical spending that we have added to the Federal Governement’s mandate over the last three quarters of a century.
Also does one count the $680 billion as a one time expense or as a total outlay which over the course of construction may begin to have a return on investment and help offset some of the up front costs of the program?
Could we again reach a national concensus that a high speed rail network is desirable let alone being practical from a construction standpoint, like that which was formed around the Interstate program - I don’t know.
I think if we are to see anything it will be via regional groupings of states and not the Federal Government, as the political will may be easier to come by with a smaller group of stakeholders.
November 6th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Matt, US military spending is higher than it ever was before WW2, except during periods of total war like the Civil War or WW1. It was somewhat higher during the Cold War, but only somewhat - during the Vietnam War the US spent about 7% of GDP on the military, versus 5% now. The figures for today look a bit lower because the official numbers don’t include Iraq and Afghanistan, which are authorized separately from the rest of the Pentagon’s budget, which is only 3.5%. Even the last figure is close to a post-Cold War high: 9/11 gave the Pentagon an excuse to spend a lot more money, even on projects that have nothing to do with terrorism, like the F-35.
Alex, the research I know of is that domestic spending of all kinds has a multiplier of about 1.5 - e.g. Mankiw refers to 1.5 for domestic spending as conventional wisdom in his posts promoting tax cuts - and military spending has a multiplier of 0.8, as shown by Robert Barro, who, like Mankiw, used the number to argue against government spending. Both numbers are meant to be true in recessions - Mankiw quotes New Keynesian consensus, whereas Barro looks at WW2. In times of growth deficits crowd out private investment, and I don’t know of any research that looks at the growth potential of raising taxes to pay for government programs.