Advice from a successful writer (Joe Scalzi)
about being a financially successful writer.
More.
In Africa particularly,
no amount of foreign aid failure is too much failure.
About
the latest book in the successful genre of pop economics. Looking at J K Galbraith’s Affluent Society
60 years on.
The UK
hopes to raise money in the Middle East through Sharia-legal bonds.
A raid in Germany raises yet again
the issue of tax havens.
Worrying about
the reversal of the trend towards more equal income distribution. The UK is having near postwar record levels of emigration,
particularly of the highly skilled. Ireland
is going to keep its tax haven arrangements. Purely coincidentally, Ireland now has
a higher per capita GDP than the UK, or any other country in the Anglosphere.
Study of housing prices in Washington State finds price rises
are principally caused by (pdf) land use regulation.
Why the Left is fucked #572: the government
screws up the New Zealand housing market by restricting the land available for housing, this makes housing increasingly unaffordable. So the solution is? Spend
lots of taxpayer’s money on a new wave of government housing. Apart from the waste, apart from the poor-as-second-class-citizens, apparently nothing has been learned about the perennial problems of public housing.
Local governments still know how
to create slums with public housing: Statistics show that drug crimes and prostitution have grown almost 300 percent in the Argay area between 2003 and 2007.
Police patrolling the area, often rolling down unpaved streets, said housing lots that used to hold one home now have over 20 homes crammed into the same space.
Police say the sharp increase in population has led to increases in traffic and crime while bringing down the livability of the area.
East Portland Police Commander Mike Crebs said the problem lies with the explosion of "affordable housing," which he thinks could turn into slums in the near future.
He said the new homes are poorly built and will not last. He also says much of the housing lacks "neighborhood" features such as sidewalks, outdoor lighting, fencing and landscaping.
Crebs said those features actually help reduce crime, while a lack of them invites criminals. "They [criminals] like disorder. They like graffiti," Crebs said. Government ownership regularly does not work in building cars, growing food or building houses.
A failed “cheap housing” program in a US county
where no one seems to “get it” (certainly not the journalist). The only case I know of where public housing has been consistently done well is Singapore, where every MP is an ex-officio member of each Housing bloc committee and it’s all part of the government’s system of social control.