Can Americans elect a non-Christian president?

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On President’s Day, Pew Research highlighted the religious faith of America’s presidents:

With the exception of Democrat Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish), all of the presidential hopefuls are Christians and most are Protestants.

In addition, all of the current presidential candidates have spoken openly about the importance of faith in their lives (again, with the exception of Sanders, who describes himself as “not particularly religious”). Our recent survey shows that many Americans care about their leaders’ faith. For instance, half of all American adults say that it’s important for a president to share their religious beliefs. And more people now say there is “too little” religious discussion by their political leaders (40%) than say there is “too much” (27%).

Historically, about a quarter of the presidents – including some of the nation’s most famous leaders, like George Washington, James Madison and Franklin Roosevelt – were members of the Episcopal Church, the American successor to the Church of England.

The next largest group of presidents were affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which has roots in Scotland. Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, all of whom had Scots-Irish ancestry, were among the commanders in chief who belonged to the denomination.

Protestants have dominated the office yet just two denominations – Episcopalians and Presbyterians – have supplied nearly half (19 out of 43) of the presidents. Arguably, Americans might not care exactly what denomination or particular doctrinal beliefs a president has as long as they identify as a Christian. This may be part of American civil religion where particularities are not encouraged but a general Christian faith is helpful.

In a continuing trend, a sizable number of Americans say they are unwilling to vote for atheists for president though more younger voters are open to it:

As the 2016 presidential election field takes shape, more than nine in 10 Americans say they would vote for a qualified presidential candidate who is Catholic, a woman, black, Hispanic or Jewish. Less than half of Americans would vote for a candidate who is a socialist…

Among religious identities, while the large majority of Americans would vote for a Catholic or Jewish presidential candidate, smaller majorities say they would vote for a candidate who is Mormon (81%), an evangelical Christian (73%), Muslim (60%) or an atheist (58%)…

At least two-thirds of adults younger than 30 say they are willing to vote for a candidate with any of the characteristics included in the survey.

How this influences the 2016 election remains to be seen.

Rumbler emergency siren to shake your vehicle

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Milwaukee police are trying out a new kind of siren:

It’s a siren you don’t just see, and hear, you actually feel it. It’s called the Rumbler and it’s expanding on a police force near you. It’s a siren that emits a low frequency sound that vibrates your car. It goes through the material of the vehicle, the frame, and seats. The subwoofer is located inside the grill of the car. Milwaukee K-9 Police Officer, Jeff Lepianka says the department has been adding the sirens over the last few years to battle distracted driving.

Lepianka says, “Drivers will have their ear buds in, be on their cell phone. This siren will break through this and get the people to pull over so I can get to where we need to go.”…

“With the Rumbler going people 10 to 15 car lengths are already getting to the side.”

Those precious minutes saved, could save lives.

In the name of safety and combating distracted driving, perhaps this is the wave of the future. This possible technology prompts two thoughts:

  1. This reminds me of the use of high-frequency sound devices used to chase away teenagers. Since adults lose the ability to hear such frequencies as they age, it can be particularly effective in targeting loitering youngsters.
  2. When we eventually all have self-driving cars, it would be easy to automatically pull all vehicles aside to allow emergency vehicles through. This could certainly help decrease response times but it would certainly be odd – at least the first time or two – to be automatically sidelined.

The article suggests pulling over is often delayed because of distracted driving but I wonder if this is also the case even when the drivers aren’t engaged in other activities. Have driving norms changed? At what distance are drivers supposed to pull over? I’ve noticed that fewer emergency sirens use their sirens and it is not always easy to see flashing lights.

An overhead projector in the front window

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As I was walking near campus recently, I came across a curious sight: the front window of a home filled with an overhead projector. It was facing inward, not working as an old-fashioned Christmas projector for the yard. I have never seen such a scene.

Why was the projector in the window? My first guess is that the owner is a teacher or educator of some kind. Indeed, it wasn’t too long ago that these devices were used in numerous classrooms at all levels. From my elementary through college years, instructors frequently used them. While they were being phased out while I was in college, some of the older faculty still used them regularly. (Indeed, I recently showed a class a YouTube clip of physicist Geoffrey West making a presentation about cities at the Santa Fe Institute with the help of an overhead projector.) Even early in graduate school, I remember hearing advice that a presenter could have overheads as a backup should a Powerpoint fail to load. But, you would be hard-pressed to find one in a classroom on my campus today (though they and the film projectors only disappeared in the last few years). I have no idea what happened to them.

The overhead projector preceded bulky TVs on the way to the landfill – if you can find people willing to take them – and perhaps they will a return as a retro decorative item…

Regulating sex businesses in the suburbs

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Many suburbs want nothing to do with strip clubs and similar businesses so they employ several methods to discourage them:

Warren is running into something that has plagued businesses dealing in sex for decades. Local governments — and the officials elected to govern them — don’t want these businesses around, according to Judith Hanna, a professor at the University of Maryland.

Hanna has testified as an expert witness in more than 150 court cases involving sexually oriented businesses. She even wrote a book about her experiences…

The majority of the cases she testified for involve strip clubs, which Supreme Court rulings protect because of First Amendment rights…

Menelaos Triantafillou, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who teaches courses in planning and urban design, explains: “The only thing you can regulate is not the use itself,” he said, “but the specific location.”

Local governments typically allow these businesses to exist in industrial areas. Restrictions are placed on how close they can be to other establishments such as schools and day cares.

In the particular case discussed in this article, the community is working hard to make a swingers club go away. But, it sounds like they are making it up as they go to appease voters as several local officials have privately supported the new business.

Perhaps an alternative strategy is in order. Zoning is a big deal in suburbs as they get to keep uses that limit endanger property values or a high quality of life away from single-family homes. But, zoning can only do so much. Yet, communities can make it clear that certain businesses are not welcome. While suburbs often welcome new businesses (they provide jobs, property tax revenue, perhaps sales tax revenue), couldn’t they also make it hard for the new business to make money? I’m thinking bad publicity, protests, no invitations to the local chamber of commerce and local events.

Why don’t American subways feature open gangway cars?

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American subway cars differ in design in one crucial way that would help solve overcrowding issues:

Open gangways, as it happens, may be one of the more widely used elements of subway design. You will find trains like these on every subway system in China, India, Spain, and Germany, as well as in Dubai, Singapore, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Toronto. According to research by planner Yonah Freemark, open gangway trains run on 3 out of every 4 subway systems in the world. Mexico City hasn’t bought separate-car trains in two decades.

Yet open gangway trains are nowhere to be found in the United States. They will debut in Honolulu in 2018. New York City might request 10 of them—in an order of 950…

That American transportation authority leaders are reluctant to embrace the concept reflects a couple of facts about how they do business. First, they clearly don’t spend enough time using the systems they run. Second (and relatedly), they are conservative about change. They are willing to let culture, or their perceptions of it, dictate design—rather than the other way around.

The most convincing explanation for the absence of open gangways in the United States is that planners feel “amenity-conscious” (or “choice”) riders would find them unpleasant. The enhanced mobility open gangways grant to beggars, merchants, and buskers has been cited as a potential problem with the model. That shouldn’t be sufficient reason to keep riders stuffed in like sardines. New Yorkers don’t take the subway because it’s pleasant, but because it gets them to work on time. The MTA could aid that cause by ordering a hundred—or a thousand!—open gangway train cars.

Americans have different ideas about personal space as well as who they are willing to mingle with. This isn’t only about subways; planners have tried to figure out how to get more well-off Americans to ride the bus even as Americans seem pretty happy to drive solo in their cars unless it is quite difficult.

Here is a question: what would happen if an entire mass transit system did this without consulting riders? Would people in New York City really stop taking the subway and find other ways to get around? In some places, subways are the most efficient and I’m guessing that riders would adjust over time. When riders have more options, particularly in more sprawling cities, this might not be a good solution as people might actually stop using the subway.

More than ten year gap in life span among rich and poor

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New data shows that the difference in life spans between richer and poorer Americans continues to grow:

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.

New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.

For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years…

It is hard to point to one overriding cause, but public health researchers have a few answers. In recent decades, smoking, the single biggest cause of preventable death, has helped drive the disparity, said Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the rich and educated began to drop the habit, its deadly effects fell increasingly on poorer, uneducated people. Mr. Fenelon has calculated that smoking accounted for a third to a fifth of the gap in life expectancy between men with college degrees and men with only high school degrees. For women it was as much as a quarter.

In the set of the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, you can’t have as much of the second and third if the first is not the same. While we often discuss inequality of opportunities or outcomes, we spend less time focusing on the body though commentators like Ta-Nehisi Coates have recently drawn more attention to the role of bodies in racial differences.

The article does suggest that evidence shows access to healthcare is not a big driver of this gap.

Proposing a stronger theory of NIMBYism

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A lawyer in Austin is working on a more-encompassing theory of explaining NIMBY responses to development:

The key to any strong definition or explanation, suggests Bradford, is that it must go beyond the simplistic idea that NIMBYism aims to protect home value, full stop. If that’s the case, why do some homeowners reject development projects so forcefully while others don’t? Why is California more NIMBY than Texas, for instance, or Austin more NIMBY than Houston? Why is NIMBYism more intense now than it was 40 years ago, when home value mattered just as much to personal wealth?

Bradford builds his own central thesis around the idea that NIMBYs seek to monopolize “access to neighborhood amenities”:

“In the absence of zoning restrictions on the number of housing units in a neighborhood, neighborhood amenities would be a public good. Zoning converts neighborhood amenities from a public good (a partially non-rivalrous, non-excludable good) into a “club” good (a partially non-rivalrous, excludable good). Because “club” membership is bundled with home ownership, zoning causes the value of neighborhood amenities to be capitalized into home prices. NIMBYism can be thought of as the practice of objecting to development in order to protect the value of “club” membership.”…

As for realistic policy solutions, Bradford makes an initial go at these, too. Rather than trying to undo existing single-family zones, he says, an easier place to start would be for local planners and officials to stop automatically applying such zoning to new developments. “There is no particular constituency for zoning fringe greenfields exclusively for single-family use, so cities ought to stop doing it,” he writes. “This practice merely begets the next generation of NIMBYs.”

It sounds like the argument is that property values are part of a deeper desire to protect the neighborhood from use by others. People buy a property with the expectation that they will have exclusive use of particular features, whether that is parks, roads with less traffic, or nearby open spaces.

The policy solution offered above is intriguing. If buyers don’t have any knowledge of how the land nearby might be used, it lowers their expectations about what might be there some day. Still, they might object to any changes – home buyers on the fringe become quite enamored with empty fields. Additionally, this recommendation doesn’t help deal with infill or redevelopment situations.

I wonder if some developer could up the value of their properties by writing into the deed or through some other contract that the land nearby will not change for a certain number of years. Would buyers be willing to pay a premium if that land was controlled and they knew they had exclusive rights to amenities? If a developer couldn’t be sure of the actions of a municipality, perhaps they could purchase a buffer zone that they would control.

CNBC: owning a home may be “the new luxury item”

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CNBC suggests the dream of owning a home is becoming less attainable:

Almost half of those people who don’t own a home said their financial situation is standing in the way, according to a report by Bankrate.com released Tuesday. Additionally, 29 percent said they can’t afford a down payment and 16 percent said their credit isn’t good enough to qualify for a mortgage…

“A lot of people could be feeling traumatized by what happened to the housing market and are counting themselves out,” she said…

These days, first-time homebuyers, who are primarily in their 30s, are spending a bigger chunk of their incomes to buy their first house — coughing up about 2.6 times their annual pay; in the 1970s, first-time homebuyers purchased homes that cost only about 1.7 times their yearly salary, according to Zillow.

Tighter lending standards and hefty down payments have further deterred some buyers.

Economic conditions and reasoning can go a long ways to determining who can access parts of the American Dream and when they may do so in life. This reminds me of other analyses I’ve seen in recent years suggesting the delayed age for marriage as well as a decline in marriage is also tied to economics: people want to be more financially secure before they marry. Similarly, buying a home is now being put off – not because Americans don’t want it but because they just aren’t set and the conditions have imposed particular restrictions.

Using smartphones to collect important economic data

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Virginia Postrel describes a new app used in a number of countries to gather economic data on the ground:

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup Premise began by looking for a way to supplement official price indices with a quick-turnaround measure of inflation and relative currency values. It needed “a scalable, cost-effective way to collect a lot of price data,” chief executive David Soloff said in an interview. The answer was an Android app and more than 30,000 smart-phone-wielding contractors in 32 countries.

The contractors, who are paid by the usable photo and average about $100 a month, take pictures aimed at answering specific economic questions: How do the prices in government-run stores compare to those in private shops? Which brands of cigarette packages in which locations carry the required tax stamp? How many houses are hooked into power lines? What’s happening to food prices? Whatever the question, the data needed to answer it must be something a camera can capture…

The result is a collection of price indices updated much more frequently and with less time lag — although also fewer indicative items — than monthly government statistics. For Bloomberg terminal subscribers, Premise tracks food and beverage prices in the U.S., China, India, Brazil and Argentina, using indices mirroring government statistics. It gets new information daily; Bloomberg publishes new data twice a week. Premise tracks a similar index in Nigeria for Standard Chartered bank, which has made the aggregate data public. (Premise clients can drill down to see differences across products, types of retailers, or regions.) While more volatile than official statistics, the figures generally anticipate them, serving as an early-warning system for economic trends…

Premise has government clients, and it carefully positions its work as a complement to official statistics, as well as to the academic Billion Prices Project, which scrapes massive amounts of price data from online sources but can’t say what cooking oil sells for in a corner shop. Make no mistake, however: Its methods also provide valuable competition to the official data. The point, after all, is to find out what’s actually happening, not what government reports will say in a few weeks.

This is an innovative way to get data more quickly. It would be interesting to see how reliable this data is. Now it remains to be seen how markets, governments, and others will use more up-to-date information.

More broadly, smartphones could be used to collect all sorts of data. See previous posts on using the microphone and the use of additional apps such as Twitter and Waze.

Can’t ignore race when discussing poverty in America

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Ta-Nehisi Coates cites several sociologists in making the argument that white and black poverty is different in the United States:

In its pervasiveness, concentration, and reach across class lines, black poverty proves itself to be “fundamentally distinct” from white poverty. It would be much more convenient for everyone on the left if this were not true—that is to say if neighborhood poverty, if systemic poverty, menaced all communities equally. In such a world, one would only need to craft universalist solutions for universal problems…This chart by sociologist Patrick Sharkey quantifies the degree to which neighborhood poverty afflicts black and white families. Sociologists like Sharkey typically define a neighborhood with a poverty rate greater than 20 percent as “high poverty.” The majority of black people in this country (56 percent) live in high-poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of whites (94 percent) do not. The effects of this should concern anyone who believes in a universalist solution to a particular affliction…

But the “fundamental differences” between black communities and white communities do not end with poverty or social mobility.

In the chart above, Sampson plotted the the incarceration rate in Chicago from the onset imprisonment boom to its height. As Sampson notes, the incarceration rate in the most afflicted black neighborhood is 40 times worse than the incarceration rate in the most afflicted white neighborhood. But more tellingly for our purposes, incarceration rates for white neighborhoods bunch at the lower end, while incarceration rates for black neighborhoods bunch at the higher end. There is no gradation, nor overlap between the two. It is almost as if, from the perspective of mass incarceration, black and white people—regardless of neighborhood—inhabit two “fundamentally distinct”worlds.

Coates might also cite Massey and Denton’s classic American Apartheid that convincingly shows residential segregation between whites and blacks is of a different magnitude than residential segregation between other groups. Additionally, there is evidence that whites and blacks with equal characteristics are not treated equally (see a number of audit studies involving mortgages, renting, car loans, and jobs) and even that blacks who are wealthier than whites do not have access to the same opportunities. Ultimately, Coates uses these sociological findings to argue policies intended to float all lower-class boats won’t really work because they ignore the fundamental differences between black and white poverty.

Put another way, given America’s history perhaps we should require scholars and policy makers to show that race doesn’t matter in the issue they are addressing rather than the other way around.