Monthly Archives: September 2013

When a country depends on one company, like Finland did with Nokia

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Here is a quick overview of how important Nokia once was for Finland:

Nokia, meanwhile, has been declining even faster, as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Apple Inc. have carved up the market between them. The company that used to account for 20 percent of Finland’s gross domestic product has seen its sales decline dramatically in the smartphone era and is operating at a loss.

That raises an interesting question: What does this mean for Finland?

I’m not exaggerating how dependent Finland’s economy has been on Nokia. Here’s the Economist last year, detailing the extent of the country’s reliance:

NOKIA contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer’s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country’s total, and it generated nearly a fifth of Finland’s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. No wonder that a decline in its fortunes — Nokia’s share price has fallen by 90% since 2007, thanks partly to Apple’s ascent — has clouded Finland’s outlook.

Since the trend in recent decades has been more toward diversification, this might strike many as surprising. But, I suspect Finland is not alone though I’m thinking more about countries reliant on companies dealing with natural resources like oil or minerals.

I’m also prompted to think whether the United States is in a similar position. There are clearly American brands known worldwide that also have large revenues: General Motors, Walmart, Budweiser, McDonald’s, Apple. But, even with (incorrect?) quotes like “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” our economy has a number of important corporations. At the same time, this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t interrelated. Remember the talk from several years ago about what might happen if General Motors went bankrupt? Or, what might be the ripples if Walmart declined significantly? Perhaps more importantly, the companies cited above all make material goods. As the recent economic crisis suggested, we are very susceptible to problems in the financial industry where the products are less tangible and yet financing, investments, and debts are incredibly important parts of the modern economy. These companies are so large and intertwined with so many areas of the economy that their fate to that of many others.

Commercials that market smartphones as education devices shouldn’t fool many

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In the past few months, I’ve heard several commercials for smartphones that suggest kids can and will use them for educational purposes. When your child needs help on their homework, they can whip out their phone and find the answer.

Who do they think they are fooling? While parents want to hear about helping their kids succeed in school (this is an American constant over the decades), these commercials offer implausible possibilities. Kids could use their phone for homework or studying. But, I suspect the smartphone is used for two other tasks that will far outweigh educational purposes: social interaction (texting, chatting, Facebook, etc.) and media consumption (music, YouTube, TV and movies, etc.). The real education provided here might be in how to be a media-saturated, 21st century American kid.

This may be effective marketing but it also hints at another issue: the idea that new technological devices automatically lead to more learning. Where is the evidence for this? We can argue that kids needs to keep up with technology to understand and use it for their good like applying for jobs. We can argue the new technology engages kids. We can argue the technology can open up new opportunities like forming and maintaining beneficial relationships or learning how to code. But, suggesting it actually leads to more learning is a more difficult case to make.

My conclusion: such commercials play off the interests of parents who would say they want to help their kids succeed without marshalling much evidence that the new smartphone will help kids learn.

Can you have a food desert in a rural area?

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A number of commentators on this new map of food deserts in the United States suggest the reason there are rural food deserts out West is because few people live in these areas. Here is a sample of the comments (from three different people):

surprise surprise……grocery stores don’t exist where people don’t live. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that out. (Only to spend the time to show people that in a brightly-colored graph.)

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Commenters here have it correct. This graph is an absolute waste of time given that there SHOULDN’T be fresh food available where there are no people to eat it. “You can see the number of grocery stores multiply as you start in Nevada and enter into California’s urban areas.” Duh.

Crisis creation. Move along folks. Nothing to see here but smoke and mirrors.

The creator of the map explains how he measured food deserts in more rural areas:

Using the Google Places API, Yau search for the nearest grocery store every 20 miles (this included smaller stores–not just the major chains he plotted in his last visualization). “I chose those increments, because there’s some rough agreement that a food desert is a place where there isn’t a grocery store within 10 miles,” he explains, adding that in pedestrian cities the standard is closer to a mile. “And if you consider searches every 20 with a 10-mile radius you’ve got a fairly comprehensive view.”

There are two issues at work. One is how exactly to define a food desert. One mile might make sense in a city but is 10 miles a good measure in a more rural area? The second issue is behind the scenes and concerns more than just grocery stores in rural areas: how exactly should services and businesses be distributed in rural areas? How many health care facilities should there be? What about social services? Businesses and organizations could make a case that it is difficult to make money or cover their costs in such a rural environment.

One way around this would be to distinguish between urban food deserts and rural food deserts.

Eleven years to complete Bay Bridge, 4 minutes to watch time-lapse video of its construction

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The Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland is a key traffic artery. The bridge opened recently and you can watch a time-lapse video of its long and expensive construction here. Quick thoughts:

1. This is an impressive undertaking. San Francisco Bay is a large body of water with lots of shipping. But, I’m usually impressed by big infrastructure projects.

2. This illustrates the problems that arise when so much traffic is dependent on one bridge. While there are other bridge options to get over the bay, they are out of the way to the north or the south for reaching much of San Francisco.

3. The new span is much better aesthetically. The old bridge was a truss structure that didn’t look very impressive. The new bridge has cable towers and the more minimalistic look is good. I look forward to seeing it from the waterside on my next trip to San Francisco.

3. The music on this official time-lapse video could be better. As an official video, it is likely that the music is licensed from some provider. However, it is rather bland rather than inspirational.

When a new building can melt cars, the building is not a good neighbor

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Here is a story out of London of a new impressive-looking glass building that has an unfortunate side effect: it focuses the sun on a nearby area and causes destruction.

A new London skyscraper that reflects sunlight at an intensity capable of melting parts of a car became the latest attraction in the city’s financial district on Tuesday as the developers acted to find a quick fix.

The glass-clad tower, dubbed the Walkie Talkie for its distinctive flared shape, was blamed this week for warping the wing mirror, panels and badge on a Jaguar car parked on the street below the 37-storey building that is under construction.

Business owners opposite 20 Fenchurch Street pointed to sun damage on paintwork on the front of their premises and carpet burns. TV crews fried an egg in the sun beam reflected from a concave wall of the tower watched by bemused spectators…

The architect is Uruguayan-born Rafael Vinoly and the building’s concave design means developers can squeeze more money from its larger upper floors, where the views over London promise to be magnificent and rents are higher.

It is not the first time a Vinoly building has been linked to intense rays of sunlight. The Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas allegedly produced intense areas of heat, according to reports in U.S. media three years ago.

Perhaps there is room to wax about humanity’s attempts to tame nature and yet we can’t even master the angle of the sun’s rays.

But, this would also be a good time to note that buildings don’t exist in isolation to their surroundings. I remember talking with an architect a few years ago and talking about how architects might think about the larger social fabric, not just the footprint of their specific development. There is a lot of work that goes into designing big buildings but that can be for naught if the building sticks out from the surrounding area. This doesn’t mean all buildings have to be of the same design or look the same; fitting into particular styles is one part of it (think of the similarities of the tallest buildings in Chicago’s skyline) but so is whether the building is inviting to people passing by. New Urbanists make this argument: Americans have tended to stress the private realm of single-family homes but homes can also be oriented to the neighborhood, helping to promote social interaction through some design choices. Does the new building contribute to or detract from public spaces? This is particularly important in dense urban spaces – London definitely qualifies – where space is at a premium.

If your building is burning nearby areas or blocks the sunlight in drastic ways or presents a monolithic front to what was a lively street, then the building is not being a good neighbor. Looks and maximizing floor space aren’t everything; there is a social dimension to buildings that goes a long way toward whether the building is well regarded for decades or not.

More low-income students in suburban Chicago school districts

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A number of suburban school districts in the Chicago area have experienced increases in the number of low-income students:

An analysis of Illinois State Report Card data for 83 school districts in the Daily Herald’s circulation area shows poverty rates rose an average of 18 percentage points from 2000 to 2012…In 2000, only East Aurora Unit District 131 and Round Lake Unit District 116 identified at least one-third of students as low-income. None of the 83 districts’ poverty rates were above 50 percent.

By last year, 23 school districts reported their low-income student populations exceeded one-third. And of those, 11 had poverty rates that topped 50 percent.The most drastic increase over that period came in West Chicago Elementary District 33, where the low-income population jumped to 76 percent from 23 percent. Superintendent Kathy Wolfe didn’t respond to requests for comment…

Eight of the top 10 districts in poverty growth are in DuPage County, where the Hispanic population rose 50 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to a 2011 report by the county’s Department of Economic Development and Planning. Over the same period, the number of county residents living in poverty doubled, U.S. Census data shows.

This is not surprising given the increase in poverty in the suburbs in recent years. Yet, it highlights two other issues:

1. Some suburban communities and organizations just don’t perceive themselves as communities where lower-income people live. Traditionally, American suburbs were places for the middle- and upper-class. And, it would be interesting to see how many wealthier Chicago suburb residents would be willing to move to suburbs that have a reputation for being more working- or lower-class. My prediction: few, particularly when articles like this highlight the challenges for suburban schools, a common selling point for suburbs.

2. These same communities and organizations haven’t always allocated or shifted resources to facing the issues that accompany poverty and lower incomes. Providing more resources for schools may be unpopular with many, both because it could mean increased taxes but also because it may mean less money for other local services.

Both of these are hurdles to overcome.

Paperwork makes bureaucracy go, for better or for worse

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Max Weber would be interested: here is a review of a new book that explains how paperwork both enables and hinders bureaucracy.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (the abbé Sieyès), one of the principal theorists of the revolution, had thought that the resolution of this riddle would be achieved by combining a division of governmental labor into numerous areas of narrowly demarcated responsibility, together with scrupulous attention to recordkeeping—which is to say, paperwork. As Kafka notes, however, its praxis in the revolutionary period involved an intrinsic contradiction: The greater the revolutionary regime’s attempts to wield its power, the more impeded it was in the exercise of that power by the need to precisely document its every deed with the requisite paperwork…

Paperwork presented a means of resistance to the power of the state, while remaining the means of the state’s assertion of that very power.

The refractory power of paperwork drew the serious attention of Tocqueville, Marx, and Freud, each of whom receives Kafka’s extended attention. Tocqueville struggled with the contradictions of bureaucracy to the point of eschewing the very use of the word, though not its substantive import. He asks: “How to reconcile the extreme centralization that [the bureaucratic regime] consecrates with the reality and morality of representative government?” Tocqueville’s comments on the relative absence of paperwork in America—and on the greater appeal to ambitious Americans of trade and industry over service in “official appointments”—are timely, and Kafka’s discussion of the evolution of Tocqueville’s thoughts on bureaucracy makes for fascinating reading.

From a lesser-known early work of Marx concerning a dispute between the Prussian tax authorities and winemakers of the Mosel region—a dispute that was to generate innumerable notes, dossiers, and reports, but no just resolution of the winemakers’ claims—Kafka educes a theory of the praxis of paperwork. Here, we have Karl Marx as media theorist, propounding a conception of paperwork as “a refractive medium [in which] power and knowledge inevitably change their speed and shape when they enter it.” In its unpredictability, paperwork “accelerates and decelerates power [and] syncopates its rhythms, disrupts its cycles, which is why paperwork always seems to be either overdue or underdone.”

This is enough to give one pause when waiting in line to fill out forms of any kind. It is very difficult to imagine just how much paperwork is generated within bureaucracies today, even in the age of computers: think of the local hospital, the city clerk’s office, the local university. From my own limited experience in a few universities, paperwork makes the whole college system work. Actually, if you think about it, much of the modern world is made possible because of paperwork we all (from individuals to groups to corporations to governments) fill out and file….

Photography of the last row houses standing

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A photographer has put together a series of row houses that now stand alone in urban neighborhoods:

For German-born photographer Ben Marcin, the plucky row houses left standing in cities on America’s Eastern Seaboard—so-called “nail houses” that are the leavings of gentrification, unrealized developments, and stubborn homeowners—are the kind of domestic oddity that his shutter snapping. Why? “Many details that might not be noticed in a homogenous row of twenty attached row houses become apparent when everything else has been torn down. And then there’s the lingering question of why a single row house was allowed to remain upright. Still retaining traces of its former glory, the last house standing is often still occupied.” The shot above is in Baltimore, but others in his Last House Standing series sit in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J.

If I had to guess at what these photos are about, they are meant to invoke communities that have been lost. This is similar to all the photos coming out of Detroit in the past few years; the buildings themselves aren’t the focus but rather the sad state in which the current buildings are in.

I’m trying to picture what form a similar picture might take for a suburban subdivision. Simply showing one house all lonely at the end of an otherwise empty cul-de-sac might work. But, the beauty of the row house photos is that all these houses together formed a single unit whereas single-family homes already stand alone. Perhaps a middle unit suburban townhouse might do?

Can you have a “Colonial version of a McMansion”?

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An article about a notable 18th century property in Boston suggests the main house was a McMansion of its time:

The Royall House takes its name from the ostentatiously wealthy Isaac Royall Sr., who grew up in Dorchester then went to Antigua where he established a sugar cane plantation and traded in sugar, rum, and slaves.

He came back to New England in 1737 with more than two dozen slaves, and trumpeted his nouveau riche status by purchasing a 500-acre estate in Medford with impressive lineage: The property had once been owned by Governor John Winthrop. Here, on the banks of the Mystic River, he built the Colonial version of a McMansion.

It’s an immense three-story Georgian residence with two completely different facades. One, mimicking English architecture, was meant to be appreciated by visitors approaching by river; the other was apparently designed to impress those entering the estate by carriage. (It had a more modern look, fabricated of wood that was carved and rusticated to look like stone.)

The lavish interior of the house was adorned with intricate wood carving; the so-called “Marble Chamber” has wooden pilasters “pretending to be something else, in this case marble,” said Gracelaw Simmons, a board member and tour guide.

The description hits some of the main features of McMansions today: its owner wanted to show off his money; it is a big house; it presented multiple architectural looks intended to impress visitors; the inside had nice features. The article also takes the common tack today of suggesting McMansion owners are bad people; the nice house is contrasted with the nearby slave quarters.

But, I wonder at the usefulness of retroactively applying this term. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this and it strikes me as odd every time. One of the key features of McMansions today is missing in older homes: until the early 20th century, homes were not mass produced. Additionally, McMansions today are often assumed to be in the suburbs and suffer from the suburban problem of not having authentic community life.

All together, life was quite different centuries ago and claiming an older home was a McMansion is anachronistic. While it might help current readers and people understand what the author is trying to say, it ends up distorting the social conditions at the time the older house was built and also ignoring the particular social conditions in which the term McMansion emerged in the late 1990s.

 

Do private schools keep wealthy families in American big cities?

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In response to last week’s argument that bad people send their kids to private school, Megan McArdle suggests urban private schools have kept wealthy families in big cities.

However, I think that Benedikt isn’t thinking through what would actually happen if everyone felt a moral obligation to send their kids to public schools. What would actually happen is that Allison Benedikt wouldn’t live in Brooklyn, because New York, like most of the rest of the U.S.’s cities, would have lost all of its affluent families in the 1970s — the ones who stayed largely because private school, and a handful of magnet schools financed by the taxes of people who sent their kids to private school, allowed them to maintain residence without sending their kids into middle- and high-schools that had often become war zones. Anyone with any choices left that system, one way or another. But because New York had a robust system of private and parochial schools, they didn’t necessarily need to leave the city to leave the violence behind…

Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire (and neither, I imagine, would Benedikt). If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move. That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems; any resident who had any means at all picked up and moved outside the city’s borders, beyond the legal limits of busing so that there could be no question of bused students importing these problems to their kids’ schools…

Benedikt’s dictum makes sense only if parents can’t move. If they can — and bid up the value of real estate in good school districts — then making parents send their kids to the local schools probably doesn’t mean that all the parents in mixed-income neighborhoods will put their children, and their effort, into the local school. It probably means that they’ll leave the mixed-income neighborhood, taking their tax dollars with them.

This is nominally public schooling, but in fact, as I once remarked, parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.

Cities need and/or desire to have wealthy residents because they provide tax dollars. Perhaps this is the deal cities make with such residents: we need you so we will provide you with the opportunity to spend your money how you wish regarding the education of your kids. So, cities and politicians try to support public schools but also allow space for private schools, setting up a two-tier system where wealthier families can buy into the second track.

Another thought: McArdle’s argument makes the assumption that schooling is the primary factor that pushes families out of the city into the suburbs. Schools are a huge factor but not necessarily the only one. Her argument also highlights an interesting feature of middle/upper-class American society: do all you can for the children.

It would be interesting to look for data to test McArdle’s argument but it seems like you would need a city or a few cities where private schools weren’t available in order to make a comparison.

h/t Instapundit