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Wednesday, February 4, 2009
A couple of days hence, NURBN's proposal for an artificial lake — an aqueous inversion of Jakob Tigges' Tempelhof Mountain, really — in Berlin reminded us of one expensive hole on Chicago's lakefront, the one dug for the construction of the Chicago Spire. Because of the economic downturn and the developer's secrecy about a date for the resumption of major work on the building, some have wondered if the hole will remain unfilled, in which case, count another one in a growing list of cancelled prestige projects. No doubt many will see this gaping abyss as a delicious commentary on the excesses of this decade.
But what to do with the hole? Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, has the obvious but probably best idea. Last year, he wrote:
Might the hole, 76 feet deep by 110 feet wide, be filled with water and become the world's deepest swimming pool? Perhaps demonic sports federation directors would threaten to send losers in Olympic swimming races there, forcing them to backstroke in circles for the rest of their lives.
How about subterranean skydiving?
Negative Manhattan
Its not easy being Davos Man. Last year's master of the universe is this year's public enemy #1. Breaking the financial architecture, plunging the world into depression, mega-bonuses and ornate office furniture amid rising unemployment and home foreclosures; that's a lot to live down. Its no wonder the mood was so dismal on Mount Olympus last week.
Really, Davos Man? Really?That's the question being asked in this report by Maurice Black and Erin O'Connor over at Minding the Campus. Actually, the title is misleading since they are really asking two questions, one focused on knowledge of personal finances (debt, credit, investment, risk) and the other on knowledge of basic economic principles. They are related, but distinct, so I think it's worth looking at them separately.
I think answering the first part is easy: yes, we should spend more time teaching youth the basics of personal finance. As the report points out, a large - and growing - chunk of [American] children make use of debit and credit cards, but few have a strong grasp of concepts like credit risk, interest rates and so on. One paragraph reads:
...more than half of all high-school seniors do not realize that paying off a credit card balance more slowly will result in higher finance charges. Only one in three teens knows how to read a bank statement, balance a checkbook, or pay a bill. In short, young adults have ready access to finance, but not to education about finance.That's discouraging, particularly in light of how we've seen the consequences of consumers in Anglo-American economies taking on completely unsustainable levels of personal debt. Now, society as a whole might be better off if we were better educated in plenty of areas - a basic understanding of, say, automechanics and carpentry. But those are fields that can be safely contracted out to specialists; personal finance is an area that has the potential for more wide-ranging costs and benefits.
I would put it in the same category as health and sexual education: the more aware you are of the basic facts, the more informed your decisions will be and people around you will benefit. For instance, perhaps more education on the basics of infectious disease will lead to more people getting vaccinated - that's a public good. Similarly, it's become clear that poor finance has contagious effects as well.
This is one reason why I think high school math courses should place greater emphasis on teaching risk and probability. In my personal experience, once you moved past basic math courses you were offered Algebra & Geometry, Calculus and other high-level material. But very few of our daily decisions require an understanding of calculus. By contrast, a great deal of them require some basic assessments on risk, probabilities and returns: everything from card games to deciding whether to go back to school, from buying a stock to starting your own business, right down to family planning.Moreover, psychologists have plenty of experimental evidence suggesting that, as a species, we are very poor at guaging probabilities and risks: we tend to discount high-probability events like heart disease, but focus on low-probability, attention-grabbing events like airplane crashes. So we need all the help we can get. For the topic at hand, a basic understanding of risk and probability might help some people realize that they need more diversity in their financial portfolio than that which is provided by a 401(k), or something similar.
So for me, a stronger emphasis on the basics of personal finances in school would be an excellent idea. However, I'm not sure the case is so clear for the study of economics more generally - but I'll look at that next. In the meantime, does anyone have suggestions for other areas we could beef up on when it comes to secondary and higher education? Comment away.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
We love reading other people's project proposals: fantastical proposals, provocative proposals, silly proposals, worldchanging proposals, wish-we've-thought-of-it-first proposals. And this, by David Gissen, is a good one: a “fantasy archive for the retrieval of future data related to the indoor atmosphere of cities.”
When I was writing my dissertation, I lamented the fact that we had no archive of indoor air; as we do for all other manner of indoor elements of the built environment—furniture, designed objects, fashion. The specific content of the air of the interiors of the past is lost to us — its bio-physical make-up is gone; we really can’t study it with a full range of analytical methods. But I wondered...what if we archived our current indoor urban atmosphere for the historian of the future? Why would we do this, and how would this be done?
The thought of future urban climatologists in a library of paleo-air, perhaps located on some rocky arctic island, is mindnumbingly interesting.
Imagine cylinders of atmospheres piled high up like drilled ice core samples or perhaps room-sized chambers stacked like shipping containers in vast, darkly lit corridors, all categorized by time, geography and socioeconomic class.
One section contains the indoor chemicals of credit bubble lofts built overnight on gentrified inner city neighborhoods. Another section might be those sampled from rammed earthen homes in Africa, off the grid, with dung-fueled stoves. Or would it be more interesting if they were all jumbled up together? In the morning you're detecting the tell-tale aroma of modern Scandinavian furniture stewing with other chemical exhalations of conspicuous consumption; in the afternoon, something with a bit less artificial provenance.
Out of thin air, a physical space is then reconstructed.
Be sure to check out Gissen's proposal to recreate the “smokey air of Pittsburgh at the early 20th century” above the Pittsburgh of the early 21st century.
Vapour City
Monday, February 2, 2009
From Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fischer:
"Let me just be blunt. Protectionism is the crack cocaine of economics. It may provide a high. It's addictive and it leads to economic death"
Editor's note: the provision in question has been alternately referred to as "Buy America" or "Buy American." I started using "Buy America" because Reuters (the source of my initial post on the provision) does. However, it seems "Buy American" is more widely used.
Legendary journalist William Safire has a weekly column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called, "On Language", in which he explores the origins, meanings, and uses of popular words or phrases. I think the "Buy America"/"Buy American" distinction would be an interesting case. While the essence is the same, does the addition of the 'n' alter the implied scope or meaning in some subtle way? Sadly, I can't answer that.
-Political violence is on the rise in South Africa. A string of high profile assassinations in Kwa-Zulu Natal reflect rising tensions in the province between ANC and IFP supporters. Meanwhile, Cope (the party formed out of the ANC split last year) leader Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota issued his strongest criticism yet of the ANC and Zuma, claiming the party will push through immunity for the presidential favorite after the coming general election.
-Davos utterly failed its agenda: "shaping the post-crisis world". Chris Giles, Peter Thal Larsen, and Gillian Tett of the FT found the attendees united in their lack of confidence and inspiration.
- Oh how I wish I wish this had happened while I was living in London: the heaviest snowfall in almost two decades has hit the UK capital. I've always wondered how the City workers would react to snowfall and now we've found out: they take a "snow day" - to the cost of about 1 billion pounds. (Here's a slideshow, and more funny)
- Anti-protectionist writing continues to pour out of the economic blogosphere. You can find a writer at Free Exchange dismantling the populist argument here; the Davos crowd is understandably nervous, and Willem Buiter is his usual, uncompromising self. A sample:
If anything like the Buy American clause inserted by the House survives in the bill president Obama gets on his desk, he must veto it. The questionable value of the fiscal stimulus is overwhelmed by the unquestionable domestic and global harm caused by the Buy American clause. If president Obama fails to veto a protectionism-laced bill, it will be clear that we have a wuss in the White House.
- China's manufacturing sector contracted for the sixth consecutive month in January. But in fact the trend is much wider than that, and much worse. Cue the trade war.
It's World Wetlands Day once again. Yesterday we made some DIY frogs (folding instructions here) and a couple of DIY turtles. Today we'll be sacrificing a virgin.
Why, you ask?
There are many reasons:
1) Wetlands are “the kidneys of the landscape,” able to filter out pollutants from, for instance, agricultural runoffs and urban effluents.
2) Because of their bioremediating properties, wetlands can be a cheap alternative to municipal waste water treatment.
3) During particularly heavy storm events, they act as temporary water storage tanks. They then release the excess water slowly rather than in a deluge, lowering flood heights and minimizing the damage of valuable property downstream.
4) Wetlands also store carbon within their live and preserved (peat) plant biomass instead of releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Therefore, wetlands world-wide help to moderate global climate change.
5) Along the coast, they are good at mitigating the effects of hurricane storm surges, tsunamis, and the less energetic but no less destructive normal ebb and flow of ocean waves.
6) Wetlands help to replenish aquifers that so many people depend on.
7) They are “biological supermarkets,” producing annual commercial harvests of fish and shellfish that sometimes amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, many people rely on wetlands for their livelihood.
8) As eco-attractions, they inject a sizable amount of tourist income to the local economy.
Wetlands, in other words, provide so many beneficial services for people that they are very much deserving of a sacrificial virgin. Or two.
Meanwhile, apart from their more tangible benefits, wetlands have always been a source of intellectual fascination for us. According to Rodney Giblett in his book, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology, only recently have people come to see them as very important features in the landscape. Especially “in the west,” they were long seen as “places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous.”
Dante and Milton demonized them, calling them the embodiment of sin and impurity, the darkest expression of a corrupted inner self. Popular culture in later eras has populated their murky depths with the Swamp Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, murderers and pederasts, satanic occultists and incestuous cousins.
Empires and fledgling nations everywhere simply thought of them as a wasteland, an obstacle towards their Manifest Destiny. So they were drained, cleared of vegetation and filled in. Suffocating them out of their own hydrology was a cause célèbre, indeed considered a heroic act, because to destroy wetlands was to be civilized.
Now with greater scientific understanding of their environmental functions, wetlands are undergoing a sort of cultural reconstruction. In a reversal of fortune that landscape scholars must surely find interesting at the very least, they are metamorphosizing from an anti-Eden into an ecological paradise.
Anyway, Happy World Wetlands Day!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
NURBN has a counter-proposal to Jakob Tigges' own counter-proposal for the adaptive reuse of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport: an artificial lake.
Flooding the recently closed Tempelhof Airport would open up a catalogue of new opportunities for the city, not least a vast beach with what would become the largest beach hut on earth forming a grand backdrop. Surfing and beach volleyball would come to central Berlin, bringing with them a fresh wave of slackers, hippies and drop-outs to contain the growing army of yuppies and investors. Parts of the reservoir could be left to nature, forming wetlands and wildlife reserves, other parts could be given over to city infrastructure such as forms of energy generation and water cleansing systems (solving the sewage problem).
Provide for an access system radiating throughout this inland sea from its sandy edges, and you can transform this new negative mountain into a destination, which is definitely something that's a thousand times more interesting than some clusters of buildings and trees surrounded by turf.
Urban infrastructure designed as a tourist attraction.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
On constructed wetlands
Politique
-As the financial crisis rolls on, the next phase of government (re)action is developing: US House approves an $819bn stimulus package (with a certain provision we don't like very much) and the FT reports that Obama will unveil a "Big Bang" package of banking/financial/housing reforms this week (now next), Harper's minority government unveils a federal budget that includes the country's first fiscal deficit in over a decade, Merkel has reportedly settled on a plan to create government-backed "bad bank" vehicles to clean up balance sheets, and Aso unveiled his own stimulus package under considerable opposition (he also pledged $17bn in aid to other Asian nations).
-62% of Bolivian voters approved a new constitution in last Sunday's referendum. The new constitution increases the government's control over strategic industries (including natural resources), strengthens indigenous rights, and furthers land reform. Despite the popular majority, 4 of the country's 9 provinces voted against the changes.
-North Korea voided all political and military agreements with the South this week, as mounting tensions on the Korean peninsula threaten all out military conflict. While Kim's motivation is unclear, a few theories seem plausible: 1) he is pushing his way onto Obama's agenda, 2) he is provoking an international crisis to stem any internal revolt amid his ailing health, 3) he has lost control and hardliners are their authority over foreign policy.
-Social and political instability is spreading across Europe: Iceland's government fell, massive strikes paralyzed France, and British workers walked off the job to protest the use of foreign workers amid rising British unemployment. Nationalism, protectionism, and industrial action are all on the rise.
-Iraqis voted in provincial elections. Despite a lower than hoped turnout, the elections were peaceful.
Economia
-The IMF reduced its global GDP forecast for 2009 to 0.5%, and the global economy shed over 70,000 jobs in one day.
-Sterling had a small recovery this week on a slight confidence jump in UK banks, the Euro slipped amid eurozone economic weakness and lack of faith in the ECB, and the USD and Yen both endured "rollercoaster" weeks.
-Exxon Mobile reported record earnings for the 4th quarter. The Lex column in the FT praised the company for "generating free cash flows as others invested" during the good times, positioning itself to pick off rivals and acquire assets in the bad. This conservatism has acted as a hedge against the rapid fall in prices.
The Rest
-In the Prem, ManU go 2 clear with 1 in hand, Liverpool score 2 late to take all 3 from a 10-man Chelsea, and Arsenal throw up a big 0 at home against West Ham. Elsewhere, Becks scores his second for Milan as speculation mounts over his return to LA.
-In tennis, Nadal beat Federer in 5 for the Australian Open title. Rafa's performance was simply incredible, coming less than 48 hours after his Australian open record 5 hour, 14 minute semifinal match against fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco. Many took Federer's uncontrollable tears in the post-match ceremony as a sign that even the Swiss great doubted his ability to ever beat Nadal again in a major final and catch Sampras' record 14 major titles.
-In Olympic swimming, Oops!
-While much of the fashion world has been tailoring collections to reflect our dark economic times, these designers look to color.
-Move over Highlander, meet Turritopsis nutricula: immortal jellyfish.
