The new Carnival of Tomorrow is up, with an amusing King Kong theme running through the entries.
Speaking of Kong, we saw the movie Saturday night and enjoyed it very much. It's definitely Big Screen material. You don't want to wait for the DVD.
By overwhelming margins, the Michigan legislature has passed a constitutional amendment that substantially restricts the power of local governments to seize private property for economic redevelopment. Voters still have to approve the amendment.
Here's a press release from the Institute for Justice. Here's a news article in Crain's Detroit Business.
The DMN reports that the price of domestic sugar is skyrocketing, thanks to hurricane damage.
On Aug. 19, before Hurricane Katrina pounded the sugar-rich gulf region, large users could buy refined beet and cane sugar for up to 28 cents a pound, according to Milling & Baking News. By Dec. 2, that price had climbed to 42 cents a pound--the largest midyear jump since at least 1982, according to Ron Sterk, assistant editor of the trade publication.
Some large buyers locked in the lower prices with long-term contracts earlier in the year. Others were forced to pay spot prices that peaked at 72 cents a pound....
The U.S. scarfs down about 10 million tons of sugar a year among retail, food service and manufacturing uses, according to Jack Roney, director of economics with the American Sugar Alliance in Arlington, Va.
Typically, more than 80 percent of that need — up to 8.5 million tons — is homegrown. Some 40 percent of that comes from Louisiana and Florida, with a smaller amount from Texas. All those states were hit hard by the 2005 hurricanes.
"There's no question that they hit the Louisiana farmers and the Florida farmers pretty hard," Mr. Roney said. "It knocked the cane over and inundated it with water."
He said farmers are still trying to "figure out how to save that crop."
In addition, one of the nation's largest refineries, Domino Foods' plant near New Orleans, sustained heavy damage from Katrina's floods. It is slated to reopen today.
Given the storms and a lower-than-expected yield from Midwest sugar beets, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that sugar production this year will be down to 7.5 million tons. Imports will help pick up the slack.
Unfortunately, that's all DMN reporter Karen Robinson-Jacobs has to say about imports. Sugar is in fact one of the country's most subsidized and protected industries. Here's an earlier post on the topic, with links to previous ones. And here's an old-but-seasonal article by Cato's Dan Griswold on the cost of sugar quotas. Maybe there's a post-Katrina opportunity for a buyout in exchange for phasing out quotas and subsidies.
The LAT's Scott Timberg profiles architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, author of the provocative new book Sprawl: A Compact History
Bruegmann has always been interested in the built environment and urban change. "When I went to study this," he says by phone from Chicago, "I went to a department of art history, because that's where people talked about architecture. It probably wasn't the most logical place for me to go, because when I got there I had to learn about Nativity scenes and the Madonnas of 15th century Florence.
"However, it gave me something that I think is invaluable: a broad panorama of what people have thought about aesthetics over the last couple of thousand years. And because a lot of social scientists don't have that, they're often very puzzled by arguments that truly are aesthetic and metaphysical in nature but are disguised as being pragmatic and about objective things."
He's a historian of the beautiful, documenting something often taken as the height of ugliness. And the issue, he says, really is aesthetic at base. "And aesthetic judgments are not very susceptible to explanation or argument. That's why it's so hard to talk about."
Part of what's startling about the book is its defiance of the idea that sprawl was birthed in the postwar U.S.: Sprawl is not just bad but "American bad," architecture critic Witold Rybczynski writes in a recent Slate review, blaming it, with tongue in cheek, for everything from McMansions to the disappearance of countryside to an oil-driven Gulf War. "Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as an example of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation."
But Bruegmann's book is grounded in a history lesson--one that finds the roots of present-day Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles in Augustan Rome or Restoration London. People of means, he writes, have always tried to get some distance from urban centers, often inhabiting villas outside city walls.
"I'm sure you would have found it in the very first city ever established," he says. "Living in cities has almost always been unpleasant and unhealthy--not something most people wanted. If you were in imperial Rome, crowded into dark, dingy, polluted apartment buildings, it would have been a nightmare. Most cities I looked at had just crushing density until about the 18th century."
Timberg's profile also makes the never-repeated-too-often point that the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles. Just because the city goes on and on and on doesn't mean you can't find just about anything you want, not to mention thousands and thousands of people, within a short walk.
In Dallas, the political and journalistic establishment seems to believe that airport competition is bad, especially since no on can tell you exactly how it will turn out. But that's exactly the reason you need it. If we knew in advance what travelers really valued--and, of course, if we could somehow contain interest-group politics--competition wouldn't be so important. From The Future and Its Enemies
Competition provides not only useful criticism but a continuous source of experiments. It gives people...the ideas with which to create still more progress and encourages them, too, to come up with incremental improvements. By picking winners, stasist protectionism eliminates this learning process, which includes learning what does not work.
"Premature choice," warns the physicist Freeman Dyson, "means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame." Protecting established interests from new challengers is one form of premature choice. But technocratic planners also sometimes kill existing alternatives to force their new ideas to "succeed." To protect the space shuttle, NASA not only blocked competition from private space launch companies, it also eliminated its own expendable launchers. Such pre-emptive verdicts often mark public works projects. Planners pick an all-purpose winner, squeeze out alternatives, and eliminate any real chance of experiment and learning.
Consider the infamous Denver International Airport. Aviation officials touted the $4.9 billion project as essential to keep up with the region's growth. They promised it would be a vast improvement over the old Stapleton Airport, which was often socked in by bad weather. But its sponsors foisted DIA on unwilling customers. The airport is 25 miles outside Denver, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, while Stapleton was just 15 minutes from downtown. To make matters worse, there are no hotels near DIA. And the new airport's cost per passenger is somewhere between $11.75 and $18.14, depending on how you count--substantially more than either the $4.59 at Stapleton or the $9.91 promised by former Mayor Federico Pena. Frequent travelers resent the inconvenience and the generally higher ticket prices. "I liked Stapleton better," one told The Denver Post. "You could literally leave about 45 minutes before your plane departed. With DIA, you have to leave an hour and a half before." A flight attendant expressed a common sentiment: "It's a beautiful airport. But we hate it."
On the airport's first anniversary, journalists had trouble reaching a simple verdict on DIA. There were complaints all right--lots of them. But some passengers liked the spiffy new airport, with its marble floors and inviting shops. And flight delays had in fact dropped dramatically. The first-anniversary stories were confused, lacking a central theme.
The reporters had missed the main problem: The city had eliminated the most obvious source of feedback--competition from the old airport. It had made DIA a protected monopoly rather than an experiment subject to competitive trial. By shutting down Stapleton, DIA's political sponsors had made it impossible to rule the new airport a definite error. No matter how many complaints passengers lodge, officials can always point to other advantages. At the same time, however, DIA's monopoly keeps it from becoming an accepted success. Without a genuine trial, we simply have no way to tell whether travelers (or airlines) would rather trade a convenient location for fewer weather-related delays. One airport must fit all: Love it or hate it, if you're flying from Denver you don't have a choice.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Rick Romell, who interviewed me Monday, has published a well-reported local feature on the trend toward hiring professionals to hang lights.
I'm happy to say that this blog has been nominated for a Weblog Award in the "Best of the Top 250 Blogs" category. I don't expect to win, but I do hope to beat Dan Drezner.
UPDATE: Maybe I'll get more votes if I take the similarly-complected Megan McArdle's approach: "Asymmetrical Information has been nominated for best business blog of 2005. Please go vote for us. Because if we don't win, I'll cry. Big, fat tears rolling out of my dewy green eyes, staining my porcelain cheeks as my body racks with sobs. No one wants that."
Last week, the president signed a transportation bill that included a little relief for Dallas air travelers. We can now fly from Love Field, the small, convenient airport, to Kansas City and St. Louis (and, theoretically, anywhere else in Missouri). American Airlines, which fiercely opposes any change in the Wright Amendment, the bizarre federal law that dictates where planes can go from Love, was not pleased. Southwest Airlines, which has its headquarters at Love, said, "9 states down, 41 to go" and immediately started selling tickets to KC and St. Louis, with service starting next week. American, flying out of DFW, matched its prices. American also promises to start flights from Love, where it has three unused gates.
As Fort Worth Star-Telegram business reporter Mitchell Schnurman notes on his terrific blog, American's threats don't make a whole lot of sense as anything other than a temper tantrum.
I never thought it made much sense for American to take on Southwest at Love, considering AA's efficiencies and reach at D/FW. But American says too many of its best customers would opt for Love's closer-in location.
Maybe on trips to New York, Chicago or LA, but St. Louis and KC? My gut tells me there aren't that many Highland Park Platinum members in danger of being poached on those routes.
But AA is in a box now. It's been huffing and puffing about having to go to Love, and now it has to make good on the threat, even if it's for a single state.
Can American make money on this service? No way, unless it's indirect -- if it somehow helps keep Wright in place.
Schnurman's tough-minded coverage of the issue demonstrates the great virtues of distant newspaper owners. His paper is owned by Knight Ridder, which isn't entangled in local crony capitalism. The Dallas Morning News by contrast seems terrified to even voice an opinion on the issue. (And I'm not just annoyed that they turned down this piece on the grounds that they'd already run too much on the topic. In fact, I'm delighted. D Magazine paid me twice the DMN's rate, and I like them better anyway.)
Viewed up close, the whole Wright discussion demonstrates the wisdom of my old boss Bob Poole, who has spent at least two decades arguing for airport privatization. Locally, the only thing any politico seems to care about is what's good for DFW Airport and, secondarily, for the airlines. The traveling public doesn't count--either in the political equation (too diffuse) or, apparently, in airport management. Anyone who's had the misfortune of traveling through DFW knows that, with the exception of its new Terminal D, it's hardly a comfortable or accommodating place. Neither does it seem to maximize revenue. No mall developer would use space so pathetically.
Bob Poole isn't alone. When I interviewed Brookings Institution economist Cliff Winston for this NYT article on the Wright Amendment, he denounced the pernicious effects of government-owned airports. The debate over Wright, he said,
really exposes the weakness of our current public-sector provision of airport infrastructure, where this is allowed to happen--having DFW attempt to block something that would benefit consumers because [the airport] is not set up to be an effective competitor....
What is so troubling about airports is they simply have no experience or effective relationship with their customers, airlines. It's not like they work with these guys actively and say, "What can we do to attract you? What sort of things should we be doing?" It's all political:" What can we do to keep you happy in underwriting our bonds?" And usually what keeps them happy is keeping out other people from the airport. The whole incentive for you to develop an effective relationship between an airline and an airport to become more competitive and efficient is just not there. The incentives are basically to slap each other's back, to limit competition and keep a secure source of revenue.
Our conversation took place almost exactly a year ago. This week, DFW released a study demonstrating just how completely politicized its measures of "success" are. Stores and restaurants owned by women, minorities, and disabled people account for a higher percentage of total retail sales at DFW than at any other airport, just over half. As the Star Telegram reported:
Don O'Bannon, vice president of D/FW's small and emerging business department, said D/FW's success "far exceeds other competing hubs out there."...
"The moment we start talking about moving passengers out of D/FW to Love Field, I think you'll start to see a dramatic impact on concessionaires," he said. "It speaks volumes for what's going on and how important it is."
The airport had no comments on whether the traveling public is satisfied with the rather pathetic choices it offers. Why, after all, should it care? Paying customers aren't organized enough to exert political influence. Minority concessionaires, like Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (always identified in the press as representing Love Field, where she also has concession interests), do. I share Cliff Winston's disgust.
Full disclosure: The article I'm writing on pens is for Spirit, the Southwest Airlines magazine. If that sounds like a conflict, keep in mind that the magazine is published by a subsidiary of American Airlines. Weird. My real conflict is that I'm a consumer who would benefit enormously from repeal of the Wright Amendment.
The DMN's archive of Wright coverage is here.
Several readers have sent email pointing out this A.P. story on Christmas lights, which quotes me on the trend toward hiring professionals to install them. Yesterday, I did another interview on the subject, with a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
This burgeoning business provides a microcosm of learning and value-creation in a dynamic economy. For the full picture (and some pretty photos), see my 2003 article.
No, this isn't a commentary on the Bush administration. It's a help wanted ad.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve, does a wonderful job holding the nation's colleges and universities to their declared principles of academic freedom. After helping to transform FIRE from a startup to a professionally run organization, the current president, David French, is stepping down at the end of the year, with plans to serve his country in the JAG Corps. We're looking for a new president, and I'm on the search committee.
The job has three primary responsibilities: communicating the principles of the organization in a variety of public media; managing FIRE, including both long-term strategy and immediate tactics, personnel, etc.; and fundraising. FIRE's annual budget is about $1.2 million. A detailed job description is here. If you are interested, or know somebody who might be a good candidate, please email me.