Facebook not going to run voting experiments in 2014

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Facebook is taking an increasing role in curating your news but has decided to not conducts experiments with the 2014 elections:

Election Day is coming up, and if you use Facebook, you’ll see an option to tell everyone you voted. This isn’t new; Facebook introduced the “I Voted” button in 2008. What is new is that, according to Facebook, this year the company isn’t conducting any experiments related to election season.

That’d be the first time in a long time. Facebook has experimented with the voting button in several elections since 2008, and the company’s researchers have presented evidence that the button actually influences voter behavior…

Facebook’s experiments in 2012 are also believed to have influenced voter behavior. Of course, everything is user-reported, so there’s no way of knowing how many people are being honest and who is lying; the social network’s influence could be larger or smaller than reported.

Facebook has not been very forthright about these experiments. It didn’t tell people at the time that they were being conducted. This lack of transparency is troubling, but not surprising. Facebook can introduce and change features that influence elections, and that means it is an enormously powerful political tool. And that means the company’s ability to sway voters will be of great interest to politicians and other powerful figures.

Facebook will still have the “I voted” button this week:

On Tuesday, the company will again deploy its voting tool. But Facebook’s Buckley insists that the firm will not this time be conducting any research experiments with the voter megaphone. That day, he says, almost every Facebook user in the United States over the age of 18 will see the “I Voted” button. And if the friends they typically interact with on Facebook click on it, users will see that too. The message: Facebook wants its users to vote, and the social-networking firm will not be manipulating its voter promotion effort for research purposes. How do we know this? Only because Facebook says so.

It seems like there are two related issues here:

1. Should Facebook promote voting? I would guess many experts would like popular efforts to try to get people to vote. After all, how good is democracy if many people don’t take advantage of their rights to vote? Facebook is a popular tool and if this can help boost political and civic engagement, what could be wrong with that?

2. However, Facebook is also a corporation that is collecting data. Their efforts to promote voting might be part of experiments. Users aren’t immediately aware that they are participating in an experiment when they see a “I voted” button. Or, the company may decide to try to influence elections.

Facebook is not alone in promoting elections. Hundreds of media outlets promote election news. Don’t they encourage voting? Aren’t they major corporations? The key here appears to be the experimental angle: people might be manipulated. Might this be okay if (1) they know they are taking part (voluntary participation is key to social science experiments) and (2) it promotes the public good? This sort of critique implies that the first part is necessary because fulfilling a public good is not enough to justify the potential manipulation.

More older Americans dealing with mortgage debt

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Retirement may look quite different for many Americans who have more mortgage debt than in the past:

Nearly a third of homeowners 65 and older had a mortgage in 2011, up from 22% in 2001, according to an analysis from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, using the latest available data.

The debt burden also grew — with older homeowners owing a median of $79,000 in 2011, compared with an inflation-adjusted $43,400 a decade earlier.

For decades, Americans strove hard to pay off their mortgages before retirement, an aspiration that when achieved was celebrated with mortgage-burning parties…

A recent study from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies showed that of mortgage holders ages 65 to 79, nearly half spent 30% or more of their income on housing costs. Of mortgage holders 80 or older, 61% pay that amount on housing.

This continues a trend noted last year. This is worth watching as a higher percentage of Americans are older and this particularly affects older residents in more expensive markets where housing options are not as cheap. Homeowners could have several options down the road. First, perhaps they shouldn’t buy homes close to retirement age. Unfortunately, this means they might not be as flexible in searching out new jobs. Second, they may have to sell at retirement and bank that money for future concerns. Yet, even if they can make a good return on selling their home, moving can still be a tough transition (even within a metro area as opposed to moving to significantly cheaper markets). Third, they may have to pursue other living arrangements at retirement such as renting rooms or small apartments in their dwelling to try to make some extra money.

Why do more liberal cities have more expensive housing?

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After providing evidence that more liberal American cities have higher-priced housing, several explanations are offered for the phenomenon:

Kolko’s theory isn’t an outlier. There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he said, they built fewer homes….

“All homeowners have an incentive to stop new housing,” Kahn told me, “because if developers build too many homes, prices fall, and housing is many families’ main asset. But in cities with many Democrats and Green Party members, environmental concerns might also be a factor. The movement might be too eager to preserve the past.”

The deeper you look, the more complex the relationship between blue cities and unaffordable housing becomes. In 2008, economist Albert Saiz used satellite-generated maps to show that the most regulated housing markets tend to have geographical constraints—that is, they are built along sloping mountains, in narrow peninsulas, and against nature’s least developable real estate: the ocean. (By comparison, many conservative cities, particularly in Texas, are surrounded by flatter land.) “Democratic, high-tax metropolitan areas… tend to constrain new development more,” Saiz concluded, and “historic areas seem to be more regulated.” He also found that cities with high home values tend to have more restrictive development policies…

“Developers pursue their own self-interest,” Kahn said. “If a developer has an acre, and he thinks it should be a shopping mall, he won’t think about neighborhood charm, or historic continuity. Liberals might say that the developer acting in his own self-interest ignores certain externalities, and they’ll apply restrictions. But these restrictions [e.g. historic preservation, environmental preservation, and height ceilings] add up, across a city, even if they’re well-intentioned. The affordability issue will rear its head.”

The options presented above include: (1) fewer housing permits; (2) environmental concerns; certain geographies that limit space, particularly along coastlines; (4) high taxes and high home values and (5) generally having more restrictions. Even though these factors are likely intertwined, it seems like it would be possible to look at the individual effects even when controlling for the other factors. One issue may be the relatively small sample size as such analyses are often limited to the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Even within the 100 biggest cities, there could be very different processes at work as Boise, Richmond, and San Bernadino are #98-100.

One common theme of these findings – outside of the geography argument – involves regulation and restrictions. Regulation doesn’t necessarily have to lead to less affordable housing. Regulations could also be used to push developers to include some units of affordable housing. Yet, it is hard for communities to turn down the big real estate money that can flow in; just see the recent happenings in New York City where high-priced units are still being built at a furious pace.

“The Saddest Office Cubicles”

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Wired has a collection of “The Saddest Office Cubicles.”

In 2007, WIRED.com (then known as “Wired News”) asked readers with particularly depressing office cubicles to submit photos of their plight. People hated their cubicles—and rightly so. They didn’t offer any real privacy, but were incredibly effective at communicating office hierarchy. The hatred of this terrible design was clear: Our gallery of “winners” of the saddest-cubicle contest still holds the record for WIRED’s most popular post ever…

The winner — if you can call it winning — of the Wired News saddest-cubicles contest is David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn’t work — his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp — and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely.

Quite depressing. It is interesting, though, that several of these seem to be the product of what was once a temporary adaptation: because of rearranging or some odd situation, the company threw something together. Perhaps the big problems then come in when these temporary solutions become permanent. I do have to wonder how much these individual workers complained and what responses they heard.

These are the sorts of pictures that probably helped the motivate the writing of Cubed regarding the history and development of modern office settings. Of course, most offices don’t look like this. But, these pictures tend to be popular (the most popular Wired post ever?!?) and it is easy for many workers to see hints of their own workplaces (certain lighting, bland furniture, close quarters, lots of noise, etc.).

 

Is the Biltmore Estate “the original McMansion”? No

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One TripAdvisor reviewer suggests the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Caroline was “the original McMansion”:

At first we were a little surprised at the price of admission but after all was said and done, definitely worth it. It is really an all day project. The tour through the house itself is kind of a slow line through but you do get to see a significant portion of the house, actually you see rooms on all 4 floors. It took us about 90 minutes to go through. Then there are the gardens which are very extensive. There were other tours one could take like a ‘behind the scenes tour’ which seemed really interesting but alas we had run out of time. Our lunch at the Stable Cafe was superb. At the height of the lunch rush we had a 45 minute wait so we went off to some of the nearer gardens for a half hour or so. The setting is literally what used to be the stable and the old horse stalls are booths now. The rotisserie chicken that I ordered is about the best chicken I can ever remember. Juicy, flavorful, cooked to perfection. Sometimes simple is best. And served quickly no less. We commented on that to the waiter who said, We know you have better things to do.

Visited October 2014

From all accounts, this sounds like a flashy and impressive house. Here is the opening description from Wikipedia:

Biltmore Estate is a large private estate and tourist attraction in Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore House, the main house on the estate, is a Châteauesque-styled mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately owned house in the United States, at 178,926 square feet (16,622.8 m2) of floor space (135,280 square feet (12,568 m2) of living area) and featuring 250 rooms. Still owned by one of Vanderbilt’s descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of the Gilded Age, and of significant gardens in the jardin à la française and English Landscape garden styles in the United States. In 2007, it was ranked eighth in America’s Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

This sounds like a classic case of (1) an anachronistic application of the term McMansion as well as (2) an instance where this is clearly a mansion. When it was built or today, the home is simply large – McMansions are often roughly 3,000 to 8,000 square feet and this home has 135,000 square feet of living space – and this wasn’t just some new money but real big money from the Vanderbilt family.

Perhaps the home’s most McMansion like feature is its borrowing of architectural styles with French and English gardens alongside French architecture. Here is Wikipedia’s brief description of the estate’s architecture:

Vanderbilt’s idea was to replicate the working estates of Europe. He commissioned prominent New York architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had previously designed houses for various Vanderbilt family members, to design the house in the Châteauesque style, using several Loire Valley French Renaissance architecture chateaux, including the Chateau de Blois, as models. The estate included its own village, today named Biltmore Village, and a church, today known as the Cathedral of All Souls.

Vanderbilt borrowed the imposing and monied architecture of Europe to convey similar ideas in the United States. Yet, over a century later, the home’s architecture is celebrated.

My conclusion? The Biltmore Estate is nowhere close to being a McMansion.

Bringing sociology and understanding culture to Wall Street

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A sociologist argues for the value of bringing a sociological perspective to Wall Street after noting how the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently used the term culture repeatedly and defined the term:

“Culture relates to the implicit norms that guide behavior in the absence of regulations or compliance rules—and sometimes despite those explicit restraints. … Culture reflects the prevailing attitudes and behaviors within a firm.  It is how people react not only to black and white, but to all of the shades of grey. Like a gentle breeze, culture may be hard to see, but you can feel it. Culture relates to what “should” I do, and not to what “can” I do.”

Dudley has a doctorate in economics, and spent a decade as chief economist at Goldman Sachs. But in his remarks he sounded more like a sociologist than an economist. His many mentions of “culture” could be significant. I’m hoping they mark the beginning of a change in how regulators think about reining in law-breaking and excessive risk-taking at banks. I’m also hoping that I had something to do with them…

So I studied sociology, and for my doctoral dissertation focused on the organizational culture of Goldman Sachs. The dissertation became a book, titled What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences (HBR Press, 2013). One of the changes I document in the book is how Goldman drifted from a focus on ethical standards of behavior to legal ones — from what one “should” do to what one “can” do.

After the book was published, Dudley got in touch. I met with him and his people, and discussed what I had learned in my study of sociology and, in particular, my in-depth study of Goldman. I made recommendations on how to improve regulation. Also, I sent him two pieces I wrote for HBR.org, one on the importance of focusing on organizational behavior and not just individuals, the other asserting that culture had more to do with the financial crisis than leverage ratios did.

One of the key conclusions I drew from my study was that to achieve sustained success and avoid firm-endangering risks, a firm like Goldman has to cultivate financial interdependence among its top employees.

Employees that can make big financial decisions on their own means that many will take big risks and a lot of money could be lost. This reminds me of some of the arguments of Nassim Taleb who suggests losses should not be shared, especially in unpredictable areas like the stock market or with innovative and cutting-edge financial instruments. Instead, there could be organizational cultures that promote more prudent financial decisions that may still be innovative and profitable but limit the possibility of major black swan losses.

When American protestors take to the highway

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Americans like their highways free of obstructions. So, what happened recently when a group of protestors blocked one of Atlanta’s main highways at rush hour?

That was what made the images of last week’s protest on the road known as the Atlanta Downtown Connector so jarring. A few dozen individuals, including members of the group Southerners on New Ground, walked out onto that roadway and laid down a banner reading “#BlackLivesMatter.” This was one of several actions around the country protesting police violence and mass incarceration, and expressing solidarity with those who have been demonstrating in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of black teenager Michael Brown by white policeman Darren Wilson…

The protesters blocked traffic on I-75/85, one of Atlanta’s major commuter routes, for only a short time, but they managed to get the attention of the drivers who rely on that route before the police cleared them from the roadway without making any arrests…

Reaction to the protest was decidedly mixed among Atlantans, with some people going on Twitter to criticize the action with comments such as, “I support the protests in #Ferguson, but why are they shutting down a highway in Atlanta so that BLACK folks can’t get home from work?” and “Look, I get standing in solidarity w/ #Ferguson, but #Atlanta traffic is already bad. So yeah, if you’re stuck in that, I’m POd w/ you.”

Blocking city streets has been an urban protest tactic since there were urban protests…

Blocking major roads in the United States, however, is much more rare. Most notably, the Selma to Montgomery marches that were pivotal in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s used U.S. Route 80, a move that was upheld in a ruling by Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. His opinion was deeply controversial at the time: “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups,” said the judge, “and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”

While this summary doesn’t give many details, I would be really interested to hear how the police handled this. Any pedestrian activity, let alone an intentional protest, on a major highway would often be viewed as a concern. At the same time, this is a good way to get the attention of a lot of people for the unusual location of the protest.

The article ends on a note that such protests help make highways less removed from normal life. This is due to a long American history of generally wanting their roads to be for automobile travel. This means bicycling, walking on nearby sidewalks, slow vehicles, and any other impediments (including natural ones) are often scorned. Such thoughts and policies helped lawmakers and politicians ram highways through major cities and urban neighborhoods in the mid-1900s. In contrast, our cities don’t have as many public pedestrian spaces like many European or other global cities which are full of plazas, parks, and wide sidewalks.

 

Fortysomethings have more influence on sluggish housing than millennials

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While millennials currently have lower homeownership rates than in the early 2000s, Derek Thompson suggests fortysomethings are the bigger issue for the sluggish housing market:

The economy has a Gen-X problem. It’s a small cohort with a much-smaller-than-usual homeownership rate. And people wonder why the housing market is sluggish.

Update: Read Trulia’s Jed Kolko on why the middle-aged are the true lost generation of homeowners. In short: They bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis:

In 2005, the year when the true homeownership rate peaked for most age groups, 25-to-29 year-olds were the age group for which homeownership was highest relative to the demographic baseline, followed by 30-to-34 year-olds. These were first-time home-buyers getting easy credit for overpriced homes; then, they bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis, losing their homes and wrecking their credit history…

The millennial generation was still in their early 20s or younger in the mid-2000s–too young to have bought during the bubble and then to have suffered a foreclosure: Only the oldest among the 18-to-34 year-old group in 2013 would have been of home-buying age during the bubble.

Interesting data. Generation X had bought into the American Dream and the importance it places on owning a home but they were badly burned by the housing collapse. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time: eager to buy homes, able enough to overpay based on decent jobs, and particularly indebted when their housing values tanked.

There is another issue at play here: while millennials may not have been very involved in the economic crisis, they are the generation that could continue the homeownership ideal among Americans. If they choose otherwise – and perhaps they are watching those older than them – then there may not be much of an upward tick compared to Generation X.

Side note: a funny quote from earlier in the article.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a journalist in possession of a negative statistic must find a way to blame Millennials for it.

Generational blame is alive and well even in our advanced rational and enlightened age. Talking about generations is an easy shorthand for analyzing social trends. Whether such talk holds water compared to other age breakdowns or other data may be another matter…

When a few people generate most of the complaints about a public nuisance

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The newest runway at O’Hare Airport has generated more noise complaints than ever. However, a good portion of the complaints come from a small number of people.

She now ranks among the area’s most prolific complainers and is one of 11 people responsible for 44 percent of the noise complaints leveled in August, according to the city’s Department of Aviation.

The city, which operates the airport, pokes at her serial reporting in its monthly report by isolating the number of complaints from a single address in various towns. It’s a move meant to downplay the significant surge in noise complaints since the airport’s fourth east-west runway opened last fall, but it only seems to energize Morong…

Chicago tallied 138,106 complaints during the first eight months of the year, according to the Department of Aviation. That figure surpassed the total number of noise complaints from 2007 to 2013.

The city, however, literally puts an asterisk next to this year’s numbers in monthly reports and notes that a few addresses are responsible for thousands of complaints. The August report, for example, states that 11 addresses were responsible for more than 13,000 complaints during that 31-day period…

But even excluding the serial reporters, the city still logged about 16,000 complaints in August, about eight times the number it received in August 2013.

There are two trends going on here:

1. The overall number of complaints is still up, even without the more serial complainers. This could mean several things: there are more people now affected by noise, a wider range of people are complaining, and/or this system of filing complaints online has caught on.

2. A lot of the complaints are generated by outliers, including the main woman in the story who peaked one day at 600 complaints. It is interesting that the City of Chicago has taken to pointing this out, probably in an attempt to

This is not an easy issue to solve. The runway issues and O’Hare’s path to being the world’s busiest airport again mean that there is more flight traffic and more noise. This is not desirable for some residents who feel like they are not heard. Yet, it is probably good for the whole region as Chicago tries to build on its transportation advantages. What might the residents accept as “being heard”? Changing whole traffic patterns or efforts at limiting the sound? Balancing local and regional interests is often very difficult but I don’t see how this is going to get much better for the residents.

A continued rise in megachurches?

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Megachurches continue to grow in the United States and around the world:

Even with a growing share of the American population who say they do not identify with any religion, megachurch domination continues to rise. In all, 10% of worshipers attend churches that draw in more than 2,000 people, totaling nearly six million megachurch attendees nationwide each weekend.

And it’s not just the U.S. that catching onto super-sized congregations. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a single church in Korea says more than 250,000 people attend services there. By comparison, Hartford researchers say America’s largest megachurch has an average of 45,000 attendees…

A major driver behind the rapid expansion are often the leaders themselves. As congregations slowly began to swell in numbers, so too did the star-status of the leaders at the church’s helm. Church leaders and televangelists like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson paved the path in becoming household names marketing themselves in the big business of bringing faith to the masses…

Churches built a franchise out of the success, setting up satellite branches just to keep up with the demand. In what critics have called the “Wal-Mart effect,” megachurches are expanding in suburban areas, absorbing congregants from small-town churches and running them dry. To keep up with the demand, megachurches lead multiple services held throughout the entire weekend. For church campuses hosting guest speakers or church leaders from out of town, live video monitors bring services to congregations sometimes held hundreds of miles away.

“Clearly the majority of the people who came to a megachurch were coming from a congregation nearby. Then there’s also a sizable number of folks that say they came to that congregation and they hadn’t really gone to any for a long time,” Thumma said. “If you’re moving to a suburb, the megachurch allows you an almost instant community of people who think like you.”

I’m not sure this article says much new about megachurches. It hits some of the key points: lots of Americans attend, it has spread to some other countries, charismatic leaders often lead the way, and they are typically suburban and draw from across a metropolitan region.

Alas, this article could go a lot further to actually discuss megachurches beyond having a catchy headline. For example:

1. The average size of American churches is actually quite smaller. According to the National Congregations Study, the average church was 75 people in 2006-2007. See wave three of the NCS data here.

2. Just how common are megachurches around the world? The article cites one church – a really big one in South Korea – but doesn’t say anything else.

3. It is easy to focus on superstar pastors like Rick Warren or Joel Osteen or T.D. Jakes. But, is this the primary reason people attend megachurches? Are they primarily drawn by the big name or do the churches offer key features?

4. The satellite church phenomenon is relatively new for a lot of big churches. How effective is this model?

Overall, this is the sort of media piece that rehashes information for readers who don’t know much about megachurches but misses an opportunity to go deeper.