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Where does it get better though? The one big study on "Induced Demand": https://www.aeaweb.org/article... - "We conclude that increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion."

Just googling around suggests there's a 1:1 or near 1:1 correlation with capacity and increased traffic.

That isn't to say we shouldn't build more lanes and roads, but as more people move to cities etc - traffic is going to get worse. Where I live - rush hour went from something that happens between 8-10 am in the morning and 4-7pm in the evening - now it's pretty much rush hour traffic all day every day from 7-9pm, and even on weekends.

It's obviously not a perfect measure of GDP, but actually people have done the research and shown a strong link between the two. If, as you claim, you have a PhD (and it's in a relevant field: sorry, an English PhD gives you zero qualifications here), you're not only free, but should have the capability to put out your own research disproving this work. Of course, given the quality of logic in your post, I suspect you don't have that capability. For example:

A city with street lights but no people do not produce GDP.

The entire point of both a city and street lights is to have people. It's true that China has been building "ghost cities, but all that does is suggest that in fact the light-based estimate overestimates economic activity, which just makes the point in TFA that much stronger.

On the other hand, a factory that only works in the daytime, like in industrialized countries such as western europe and east China, do not have light volume at night.

Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night? Most of them absolutely put out light at night (they're usually glittering beacons of light, in fact). In fact if they have smokestacks or chimneys they're required to or they're a huge safety risk to aircraft. Also lots (most?) factories in most climates run in mornings and evenings before/after sunrise, and it's not uncommon for them to run overnight: downtime is a huge waste of money when you have an expensive factory. In fact, factories not running overnight would be an indicator of economic weakness, such as happened to the US auto industry in the 2000s.

Gee, it's almost like women just aren't interested in the tech fields and there just aren't qualified female applicants out there.

But that can't be true, because that would be admitting that there are innate differences between the sexes and that's just not PC to talk about.

There's enough evidence that there are innate differences between the sexes. Some of it is from socialization, some of it is genetic, some of it is epigenetic. We can only affect the first of those three factors.

I don't see them calling for an end to economic discrimination against left-handed people, even though it's easy to see ho's left-handed.

In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of handedness can provide insight into some of the issues surrounding economists’ recent exploration of early biological and environmental influences on people’s long-run outcomes. I review prior research showing that left- and right-handed individuals have different brain structures, particularly with regard to language processing. Using fivedatasets from the United States and the United Kingdom, I show that, consistent with prior research, both maternal left-handedness and poor infant health increase the likelihood of a child being left-handed. Thus, handedness can be used to explore the long-run effects of differential brain structure generated in part by genetics and in part by poor infant health.

Lefties exhibit economically and statistically significant human capital deficits relative to righties, even conditional on infant health and family background. Compared to righties, lefties score a tenth of a standard deviation lower on measures of cognitive skill and, contrary to popular wisdom, are not overrepresented at the high end of the distribution. Lefties have more emotional and behavioral problems, have more learning disabilities such as dyslexia, complete less schooling, and work in occupations requiring less cognitive skill. Differences between left- and right-handed siblings, which offer a way of controlling for qualities of family upbringing, are similar in magnitude. Interestingly, lefties with left-handed mothers show no cognitive deficits relative to righties. Some of these facts have been documented previously, though not across the range of datasets used here.

Lefties also have 10–12percent lower annual earnings than righties, roughly equivalent to the return to a year of schooling in these samples. A large fraction of this gap can be explained by observed differences in cognitive skills and emotional or behavioral problems. Lefties work in more manually intensive occupations than do righties, further suggesting that their primary labor market disadvantage is cognitive rather than physical. This paper is the first to document these patterns

If CO2 is returned to pre-industrial levels - the ideal goal in addressing global warming

I'm not sure it's ideal to move back to pre-industrial levels. There is some evidence that at least the initial warming was beneficial: https://www.aeaweb.org/article... Some substantial errors were later discovered in that paper, but I think even when corrected there is still some evidence of net benefit for at least the initial warming.

Hi, can you explain what you mean by this, "Government should not be concerned with redistributing wealth (which is almost wholly unrelated to the legitimate social responsibility of caring for the poor and needy)."?

Also, progressivity has decines quite a bit in the US over the last 40 years.
  http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/...

and there are good reasons to want a progressive system https://www.aeaweb.org/article...

Ultimately what counts is economic output.

Is it? If the economy were to grow by 5%, but all of that extra money then went to a tiny slice of the population (less that 0.1%), does that growth really matter?

If the vast majority of a society gets poorer, while a tiny, tiny slice of the population gets vastly richer, has that society improved?

Indeed. Figure 1 in this article says it all. The 1947-1979 era saw relatively uniform growth in incomes across the whole range. Since 1979, the distribution is very heavily biased towards the top 0.5%, and by some estimates the share going to the bottom 90% hardly changed at all. Figure 2 in the same article indicates the successful rent-seeking of CEOs. Actually, the whole article argues that the increase in income share for the top 1% has resulted from rent-seeking rather than from well-functioning markets rewarding competitive behavior.

Or, if you want a different reference, try this one. So 95% of income gains since 2009 went to the top 1%. That leaves just 5% of income gains to be shared among the other 99%. Oh, and accoding to this article, almost half of that went to the top 10%, so only about 2½% of income gains would be left for the bottom 90%.

"To live outside the law you must be honest" The coal industry may not be outside the law, but the same principle applies. You may lie to others about your business, that's business as usual. But when you begin to believe your own lies that's insanity, and leads to bad ends. Even excluding any climate effects, the externalized costs of the coal industry make it more expensive to society than any power source which has NOT been exempted from EPA regs, including all the renewables. These guys who get their income from the coal industry are, pure and simple, on the dole. http://solar.gwu.edu/index_fil... http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/el... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.cleanair.org/Downwi... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.aeaweb.org/articles... http://apo.org.au/sites/defaul... http://www.eea.europa.eu/press...

The most recent issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives is focused on the patent issue.

http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1

All articles reach similar conclusions to the first (Boldrin and Levine). They have been saying the same thing about patents for over 10 years, so don't expect their careers to be destroyed or whatever other apocalyptic scenarios were discussed above. They are academic economists who have worked for a several strong research departments and feds over the years. They (and others) provide very strong evidence that the current patent system does not help consumers/citizens. That is the purpose of laws governing commerce, correct?

It is highly likely that a perfectly designed and operated patent system would be better than no patent system. Given the reality of humans running things, this is unattainable and no patents are probably better than the current system for consumers. When examining the evidence, this claim appears obviously true (to me at least, but I read the Boldrin/Levine book a decade ago). The NIH and NSF could pick up the slack in funding pharma research, and in other fields, first-mover advantage seems to provide plenty of monopoly profits for innovators.

And people wonder why Ireland has become the basket case of Europe.

The EU is very fond of harmonising the pain to its citizens. It should have a minimum corporate tax rate to ensure that companies pay their dues...

The headline rate might be 12.5%, compared to that of 33.3% for France for example which has complained for a long time about the headline rate; but in reality the effective rate in France can be as low as 8.2% which they actively advertise here.

References can be found here (second graph), here, and here.

What brought down Ireland, and will bring down Spain and the rest of the PIIGS is the private banking debt owed to non-indigenous investors/wholesale banks & the ECB that their taxpayers are being forced to pay for by the ECB. In Ireland's case it was three times its national debt, and continuing to cost more. For Spain it could be worse, possibly €100Bn-300Bn. What turned both countries into basket cases was an unregulated credit fuelled bubble and the idiocy in Germany and the EU commission for confusing a banking problem for a fiscal (i.e. sovereign) problem. The fiscal problem was created by forcing unsustainable levels of debt on the taxpayers of these countries.

Did you just put bad family in quotes? Does this imply that there aren't families that devalue education? Or is it meant to simply imply that schools are not effected by the surrounding area?

Let me put this in words you'll understand, small ones

I sell pig meat. I live in Jew area. Jew no eat pig. My store close soon.

See the one-syllable words I used for you?

But insults aside, really. I whole-heatedly support performance based evaluations, I whole heatedly support performance bonuses. I do not support vouchers simply because it leads to racial segregation . I also do not support performance based evaluations and merit pay in a vacuum. These two things can not exist in the forms currently being touted.

We have to find a way to evaluate teachers IN CONTEXT, and without BLAMING THEM FOR EVERYTHING BAD IN THE COUNTRY.

Stop it

I'll second this. In economics, where there is a (nominally) unified classification code for both jobs and research, most filled positions don't match the stated classification code. A professor may be hired to do time-series work but end up teaching only one time series course and supervising quantile regression work. Plenty of long-term faculty are hired under classification codes which described their early-career research interests but no more describe their current work than would your 4th grade movie tastes describe your current library. And the faculty don't bother changing that crap on the website because nobody really cares. No one who matters is going to search for faculty by the classification on the website. Press will go through a press office, colleagues will know the research and students will twist in the wind. :)

If you don't provide enough detail for someone to be able to reproduce your result, your paper will (well, should) be rejected.

Peer review and the journal acceptance procedures do not check this. Peer review is merely a sanity check. Papers in climatology journals are not rejected because you don't provide enough detail to reproduce the result - referees don't check this. Furthermore, some climatological journals do not believe it is their job to require data archiving either before or after the fact of publication. See here, here, and here.

The policies for journals should be as good as they are at the American Economic Association: Data Availability Policy. Anything less is inadequate.

It is standard practice in Economics and Econometrics journals to require just this. This practice was instigated by the non-profit academic societies journals. See: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/submissions.html

9. All data used in analysis must be clearly and precisely documented.
10. All data used in analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of replication. See Data Availability Policy.

If they can do it, I don't see why others can't.

(Don't cry for Elsevier - they make huge amounts of money from libraries. There have been calls to boycott Elsevier journals because they use unpaid reviewers but charge the libraries at the academic institutions the reviewers work at an arm and a leg for the journal.)

It is standard practice in Economics and Econometrics journals to require just this. This practice was instigated by the non-profit academic societies journals. See: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/submissions.html

9. All data used in analysis must be clearly and precisely documented.
10. All data used in analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of replication. See Data Availability Policy.

If they can do it, I don't see why others can't.

(Don't cry for Elsevier - they make huge amounts of money from libraries. There have been calls to boycott Elsevier journals because they use unpaid reviewers but charge the libraries at the academic institutions the reviewers work at an arm and a leg for the journal.)

Actually, there's some correlation between height and intelligence, as well as income. And there was a recent study in the UK that showed that one of the most significant predictors of whether women would find a man attractive when meeting in person was the man's height. (I can't find that study, but this paper found similar results in online dating data.)