Interesting article arguing that state capacity is the real constraint for delivering infrastructure projects, not interest rates.
“The new tunnels for New York’s East Side Access project cost about $4 billion per kilometer, while Paris built a similar project (infill development, went under the Seine, had problems with catacombs) for $230 million per kilometer. Copenhagen, Barcelona, Naples, and Milan were all cheaper still, while South Korea was generally the cheapest, with a tunneling cost around $100 million per kilometer, or perhaps less. That’s quite a difference in state capacity.“
It’s not just tunnelling – NYC spent $39m per station to add elevators, Boston $25m while in Berlin it cost just $2.6m.
Interesting chart via The Browser (a must subscribe) plotting each issue of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) by the gender mix of authors.
“What you are seeing is that there are only twelve issues out of 1228 (1%) to which women have contributed half or more of the articles. Nine of them have appeared within the past three years. Meanwhile there are about 196 issues (16%) to which not a single woman contributed an article.”
Many have heard of George Soros’ idea of reflexivity.
This idea is important especially as we look at the current market situation.
To understand it more deeply it is worth reading Soros’ own writing on the subject – especially this piece from the Journal of Economic Methodology (2014).
Here Soros lays out his full framework which is actually based on two propositions – reflexivity but also human fallibility – together the siamese twins that form “the human uncertainty principle”.
“My conceptual framework deserves attention not because it constitutes a new discovery, but because something as commonsensical as reflexivity has been so studiously ignored by economists.”
