Most bike friendly cities in the US

Sorry for the silence. I've just spent some time on bikeleague.org and was fascinated by their 2013 city awards, the corresponding criteria, and who has won what. It's a platinum, gold, silver, bronze scale and the results for the top cities are below:

   

Note that several famous college towns (Boulder, Davis, Fort Collins) fill the highest spots. Portland reaches platinum status whereas Seattle is gold. Other notable college towns fill out many of the gold spots (Eugene, Minneapolis, Madison, Missoula). Salt Lake City is rated silver. If you're looking for a new place to live, the quality of life in each of these towns is quite high. Note the oddity that is Scottsdale (and Tucson to some extent). I guess rich Arizonans are getting on board with great bike infrastructure. And good for them!

Might have to encourage the dear wife to accelerate our tour of the great American cities.

Gone

Sorry for the radio silence. I've accepted a position at a new company and, before I start, the wife and I are traveling. Back to the real world (and posting) soon. Happy Wednesday!

Which is the world's most successful country?

Building off of this post, I've added employment rates (in %) for those from 25-54 years old and have come up with this table, which ranks various rich countries by several key indicators (click to zoom):

This doesn't get discussed much (although here's one recent post), but note how the US has the lowest employment ratio for those form 25-54 years old. Note that we're talking about employment here and not unemployment. On the right, the overall rank column is a ranking of the sums of the individual ranks. Note that, according to these metrics, the most successful countries in the world (in order) are Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Switzerland. Overall, it appears that any talk of the US moving toward European-style tax rates isn't necessarily a bad thing. Northern Europe, with their large social safety net, appears to be doing something very right. In fact, I might try to convince the dear wife that a trip to Iceland is in order.

Source notes:

1. Number of deaths between birth and age 1 per 1000 live births in 2012. Data here.

2. Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2013. Data here.

3. Number of deaths of people between 15 and 60 years of age per 1000 population for 2012. Data here.

4. Life expectancy at birth (in years). Data here.

5. Prisoners per 100,000 population. Data here.

6. Employment rate (%) for those 25-54 years old for 2013. OECD countries here (table 3) and Singapore here (chart 17).

Red meat: So delicious but so many reasons not to eat it

Coming via Matt Yglesias, the Environmental Working Group put together the following chart, which tallies up the amount of CO2 emissions associated with producing a kilogram of various types of food:

Whether it's for health, moral, or environmental reasons, it appears eating less lamb and beef is a responsible thing to do. Interesting how the benefits can come along so many different axes. The jury is still out, however, on how my family's love of California Burger will change as a result.

Note: when reading part of Thoreau's Walden recently, I came across this related passage (page 164):

It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Dave Chappelle explains why high marginal tax rates are great

Here's the description from the Upshot:

Dave Chappelle, the comedian who walked away from a wildly successful TV show named for him a decade ago, made his first talk show appearance in ages Tuesday night. He probably wasn’t intending to make an argument about maximizing the efficiency of the tax system in his appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman,” but that’s what he ended up doing.

Mr. Chappelle discussed the reported $50 million contract he walked away from when he abruptly ended “The Chappelle Show.” Does the loss of all that money haunt him?

“So I look at it like this,” Mr. Chappelle said. “I’m at a restaurant with my wife. It’s a nice restaurant. We’re eating dinner. I look across the room and I say: ‘You see this guy, over here across the room? He has $100 million. And we’re eating the same entree. So, O.K., fine, I don’t have the $50 million or whatever it was, but say I have $10 million in the bank.’ The difference in lifestyle is minuscule.”

His point is about the diminishing marginal utility of rising wealth. If you are flat broke and somebody gives you $1 million, that money significantly increases your quality of life. Going from $1 million to $10 million makes you better off, though probably not 10 times better off. And similarly, going from $10 million to $50 million in net worth creates far less improvement in your quality of life than those early steps of going from broke to $1 million or $1 million to $10 million.

The video of Chappele explaining this is here. Indeed, one of the greatest things about higher marginal tax rates is the marginal utility of wealth. In other words, raising taxes on rich people isn't a zero sum game, because transferring one dollar from a millionaire to a poor person helps the latter much more than it hurts the former.

As Matt Yglesias puts it, "the difference, in welfare terms, between a Sub-Zero refrigerator and an Ikea refrigerator is much smaller than the difference in welfare terms between having health insurance and not having health insurance."

Where the jobs are in and around SLC

Just a quick note today. Has job sprawl made suburban job access as good as for those living closer to the CBD? According to data from here, that doesn't appear to be the case. Here I'll show what they call the Employment Access Index for Salt Lake County:

It appears that in SLC proper, South Salt Lake, west Millcreek, and even much of Murray have about twice as many jobs per square mile as most of South Jordan and Riverton. The suburban cities of Draper, Midvale, West Valley City, Sandy, and Cottonwoods Heights appear to fall in the middle of the SL County pack in terms of job density.

The fuel efficiency of air travel

The dear wife and I took a 737-800 to Phoenix en route to Orange County over the weekend. If you haven't taken a Southwest flight recently, they're flying many new ~2 year old 737s, which really enhance the flying experience compared with older planes. While I'll go into this more later, I just wanted to note how fuel efficient flying is these days. From here, I find that Southwest's new "737-800 burns 4.88 US gallons (18.5 L) of fuel per seat per hour." Since the plane's cruising speed is 514 mph, that means each seat (or person) gets ~105 miles per gallon when flying on this plane (i.e. 514/4.88). Not too shabby for one person whose contemplating driving over taking a plane. However, if four people are piling into a Prius instead of driving, the calculus changes. Suddenly, the flight is about 26 miles per gallon for the group (105/4) and the car would be around 50 miles per gallon.

Note also that aircraft emissions (due to their altitude) affect the climate more than equivalent emissions from vehicles, although it's hard to nail down by how much.