Without the state

More on economic gardening

If you are a town of 9000 people and have managed to create 2000 jobs in 15 years I think you can feel pretty proud of yourself - the location? - Fairfield in Iowa - or Silicorn Valley. You can read how they did it here. An outstanding achievement by any standard - can any town or city in the UK claim as much?

Dublin Statues and their nicknames

I'm told by a commenter on the original post that Patrick Kavanagh's statue has always been referred to as "The Crank on the Bank". A new name for the Spire is apparently "The Rod to God".

Thanks Paul

Do something!!

Christopher is 36 years old and is the father of five children, four of whom have been sent to live in the rural areas with their grandparents so that they do not have to see their father dying like this. Christopher does not take anti retro virals, he could never afford them and now his body is too weak to be able to handle them. He used to support his wife and children and worked as a security guard until he became too sick to continue. Then his wife supported the family by selling tomatoes and bananas on the road-side, but now all day, every day she is at home, caring for her husband, watching him die. They have no income, no drugs, no support and only the food given to them by well wishers.

...

We know that it is probably too late for Christopher but it is not for thousands of others like him. People who ask for nothing but whose eyes plead for a little comfort and dignity. Anything you can do to help us will be appreciated, nothing will be wasted, diverted or sold. If you can spare one pair of disposable gloves, one bar of soap or one tube of antiseptic, please contact me. If you can put this letter up in your church, office or club, we will be so grateful. If you would like to help in any way at all, please email me at [email protected] . If you would like to donate even one dollar, the Christopher Campaign wants and needs your help. The Rotary Club of Marondera have very kindly agreed to receive donations for the Christopher Campaign through their registered charity and their banking details are at the end of this letter. Nelson Mandela recently said that "millions of people are in danger of being reduced to mere numbers," because of Aids. Christopher is no longer a number to me and this letter is for him.

The Christopher Campaign, Rotary Club of Marondera, Barclays Bank, Marondera, Zimbabwe. Account Number: 1534957. (Emphasis added.)

Via normblog

Please - link to Norm's post as much as you can - individual actions can make a difference.

Read too the blog from which this letter came - a truly horrifying story of incompetence and malice probably as bad in its way as as anything perpetrated by Amin.

Why a failing private school still means private is best.

Brain Micklethwait reports on a new piece of educational jargon (new to me anyway) which turns out to be a gross failure in the school concerned. Yet another public school horror story? Not this time - the school in question charges £3500 per term and still doesn't have a maths teacher with more than GCSE maths.

In predictable fashion however Brian manges to make it all right because of course it would be even worse in the public sector!

MRSA in the NHS

According to the Adam Smith Institute MRSA is a public sector disease. They argue this, citing an article in the Sunday Telegraph as their source.

Unfortunately for the ASI, the article they cite makes no such claim. What the article really says is that while the NHS has a particular problem, hospitals in other countries - like such hotbeds of private medicine as Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands - have all been highly successful in preventing the infection reaching the bloodstreams of their patients. This information is confirmed here.

On the other hand this article from the US PubMed shows that the incidence of MRSA in the USA is sgnificantly higher than in Germany.

It is clear that there is a real problem with the NHS and MRSA. It may be down to the micro-managment style which this government is so fond of adopting, but the alleged evidence offered by the ASI in support of that is not only lacking but says something different to that which they claim for it. Moreover, even if the article had said as they claim, recycling someone else's assertions is at best evidence of nothing but sloppy thinking.

[for obvious reasons I haven't attempted to either comment or trackback]

Morality and the minimum wage

A little while ago I linked to posts on Crooked Timber about minimum wage, hinting that I was also preparing a post on the issue. This is that post. I am not however arguing from an economic standpoint, but from a moral and ethical one.

The strict utilitarian would argue that it is the consequences of an action that matter, not the content. I don't entirely accept this argument but I am not entirely clear about why I hold that belief. I believe for example that business and personal life should be governed by the same ethical principles, but that isn't a position universally accepted or if accepted, practiced. Are moral principles indivisible? Should we apply the same principles we adopt in our personal relationships to our economic life?

What follows is an incomplete exploration of the issues this question raises. Being neither an economist nor a philosopher by trade, I am doing this almost from first principles. While this is no bad thing, it almost certainly means I am going to get out of my depth. It also means I will no doubt be rehashing questions others have already dealt with much more effectively and in more depth than I can. Even so, I think it a worthwhile exercise - if only as an exercise in thinking philosophically.

Using urban history

On wednesday I attended a presentation by Chris Miele of consultants RPS on Heritage and Regeneration - the idea that conserving our historic areas and buildings is worth doing for economic benefits as well as for its own sake. Making this work however, needs a good basis on which to build and Chris Miele's presentation was about a technique called 'Characterisation'. You can find out more at this site which covers a project in Cornwall, although the presentation dealt with Gloucester and Shoreditch. So far I haven't been able to track down web links for those.

The Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey is providing a framework for sustainable regeneration in 19 historic towns. The project integrates two key factors - improved understanding and characterisation of the rich and diverse historic environment which makes Cornwall and Scilly’s towns so distinctive and the identification of heritage-led regeneration opportunities so vital to the region’s future

This approach is by no means new, as Chris acknowledged. He cited the work of Patrick Geddes (and here), Camillo Sitte, and Parker and Unwin in the British new towns of Welwyn and Letchworth, as well as Gordon Cullen and Thomas Sharp.

What seems to be new(ish) is the way in which this historical analysis is being put in a wider spatial context as a key part of the regeneration process. The Cornish study I referred to earlier was used by the SW Regional Development Agency in support of work on Objective 1 funding. In Gloucester a similar study was used to underpin the work to establish a new Urban Regeneration Company, while in Shoreditch it was intended to guide the response of the local council (Hackney) the pressures for development overspilling from the City of London.

Timing seems to be critical - the Gloucester study slotted nicely into the process of setting up the URC, but in Shoreditch it may have been too late with a great deal of investment in land and sites already having taken place on the backs of expectations which the study may not have supported.

I'm hoping to get hold of copies of some of these studies, since it looks to me as if at least some of the work could be carried out by community groups. After all Village Design Statements, which are yet another approach to characterisation, have been developed by local groups for some time. Indeed if funding isn't available, the DIY approach may well be the only way forward. Many local communities will have within them people well versed in local history who know their way around the archives for example.

It would be fun too to see the results of this historic mapping tagged to the area through something like the Urban Tapestries project. Even better would be a set of VR glasses like those at the heart of William Gibson's novel Virtual Light!

Just as the man says - a nice story

Whatever your views about Iraq those who got stuck with it deserve the best (with a few dishonourable exceptions) so this is a genuinely nice story - and every credit to the first one who offered up his seat.

What's your seat number, soldier?

It's 23-B, sir, the soldier told the businessman.

No, son, that's my seat. Yours is in first class.

As more soldiers boarded, similar offers quickly came from the other first-class passengers.

And eight soldiers heading home from Iraq for two weeks of R&R found themselves with their officers in the big seats up front instead of the center seats in coach.

U.S soldiers fresh from Iraq were surprised but grateful for the first-class seats on Flight 866 from Atlanta to Chicago.

That spontaneous act of good will transformed American Airlines Flight 866, from Atlanta to Chicago, on June 29.

This is America at is folksy best. I just hope it doesn't turn out be another urban myth.

[via Laban Tall]

UPDATE: Having found the photo here, the story is clearly genuine. I'm obviously too cynical for my own good.

Affordable housing US style (perhaps)

A different take on affordable housing on the Cool Town Studios blog. I'm not convinced the same solution would apply in the UK, where houses are already pretty small, but good design does no one any harm! I not too the same distrust in the US of any suggestion of increasing density.

Strange as it seems, the US zoning laws are much more prescriptive than any housing allocations would be in a local plan in the UK. As far as I can tell many zonings in the US context would be impossible in a UK plan and would be ultra vires - single family housing on minimum plot sizes for example.

Affordable housing

A publication from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts the debate on affordable housing into context, clearly showing that even in the lowest price areas like Rochdale or Stoke, on average about 20% of households cannot afford to buy even the cheapest house available - and that takes no account of whether those houses would be suitable for their family needs in any case.

The study was undertaken by Professor Steve Wilcox of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York. It draws on house price data from Halifax Plc, and on data from the Government's Family Expenditure Survey, Census, Labour Force Survey and New Earnings Survey, to compute local household incomes.

The knee jerk response, that these problems are a result of artificial restrictions in land supply caused by the planning system simply doesn't wash in these circumstances. These are areas where there is no 'new land' and where creating land for housing by and large means clearance of existing houses. Even more importantly these are districts where across huge tracts no one wants to build.