Today Post::Blocking and Tackling and Transit

When I lived in Washington, I took Metro to work nearly every day–I took it so often that I didn’t have a parking space at GW.

Now that I live in LA, I take transit about once a week, and part of the trip (a bus from Union Station to Campus)is subsidized by USC.

Before you yell sprawl, let me point out that in Washington I lived 9.3 miles from work while in LA I live 12 miles from work. So what is the difference?

For all that people complain about it, Washington Metro is well run. Connections are good, the buses and trains are clean, and the web site works great.

Transit in LA is not well run. The timing of the connections is often awful, and th web site is nearly useless. Many drivers on the Gold Line have a hard time figuring out where to stop in stations.

Could better management improve ridership in Los Angeles? Perhaps not, but it sure would be worth trying.

Today Post::Underemployment

The other night, I was on a panel sponsored by the UC-Berkeley Alumni Association, the UCLA Anderson School and the USC Lusk Center and Marshall School of Business. One of the panelists was a business economist, and he claimed that the employment picture wasn’t as dire as the media suggested. He also scoffed at the notion that there was underemployment, arguing that people generally consider themselves underpaid, and therefore, by extension, underemployed (most people in the audience did not agree that they were underpaid). He also scoffed at the concept of discouraged workers.

In light of this, I wish I had had the following graph on my flash drive:

The employment to population ratio has fallen to less than 60 percent; it peaked at nearly 65 percent at the end of the Clinton Administration. The share of us working has dropped precipitously in the last two years to levels not seen since the Carter-Reagan recessions.

This panelist also complained about comparisons to the Great Depression. The only common comparison I know is that this is the worst recession since the great depression. Given that California’s unemployment rate has just reached its highest level since 1940, the comparison seems apt.

Today Post::Clawbacks and Capital

The two Cs will go a long way toward preventing future catastrophes. If people (and firms) have their own money at risk, and if short term windfall compensation based on short term profits can be wiped out in the event of longer term catastrophe, risk will be priced appropriately.

Today Post::David Byrne is better at music than math

In his piece in the Wall Street Journal on what makes a perfect city, David Byrne extols the virtues of San Francisco–and then complains that Los Angeles isn’t dense enough.

The problem: metropolitan Los Angeles is denser than metropolitan San Francisco, and considerably denser than the San Francisco Bay area (and no, the Bay itself is not in the denominator).

Los Angeles is a real, live city where people from all over the world seek their fortunes. When they do so, they double-up and triple-up in housing, meaning that more people get crammed into lower buildings. Koreatown is as dense a place as there is in the US outside of Manhattan, and the length of Wilshire Blvd is very dense (by US standards).

If the lead head wants not to like LA, it is no skin off my nose. But dislike it for a correct reason.