Glaeser's Final HSR Attack - For Now

Edward Glaeser published the fourth and final entry in his anti-HSR series at the New York Times' Economix Blog. Glaeser suggests he will come back to the topic before long, to address the criticism of his flawed use of a Dallas-Houston HSR line (which, although being planned by Texas is not one of the current federal HSR corridors). In this entry, Glaeser chose to attack the argument that HSR would help spur greater urban density and limit sprawl:

A third possible benefit of rail is environmental. Can high-speed rail bring people closer to city centers and thereby reduce carbon emissions?

My work with Matthew Kahn on the greenness of cities suggests that each household that moves from Houston suburbs to the central city reduces carbon emissions and creates $164 of global-warming-related benefits each year. Each household that switches from suburb to city in Dallas creates $133 of benefits annually. Those benefits represent both reduced electricity usage (associated with smaller urban homes) and reduced driving.

But there is little evidence documenting that rail has strong positive effects on land use.

Glaeser, however, doesn't actually explain this supposed lack of evidence. His examples, MARTA in Atlanta and BART here in California, are limited. Glaeser says BART has had some positive effect on density, but "the effects are still modest." What Glaeser doesn't understand is that the Bay Area has a series of anti-density zoning rules in the most dense and favorable areas near BART stations - as anyone who's witnessed the battles in Berkeley over downtown development can tell you. Without those restrictions we might well have seen much more TOD along the BART corridor.

Of greater absurdity is Glaeser's lame attempt to argue that HSR wouldn't cause urban growth by looking at Eastern cities, making claims that are unsupported by the evidence:

Philadelphia is the more natural beneficiary of high-speed rail access to Manhattan; there are already people who live in Philadelphia and commute to New York. Yet even in this most propitious setting, the coming of Acela seems to have had little impact on the population decline of Philadelphia or growth of Wilmington. Perhaps the absence of any trend break in population growth around 2000 just reflects the incremental nature of the Acela investment, but there is little here to bring confidence that rail lines revitalize cities.

Ryan Avent continues his thorough demolition of Glaeser's arguments, including a refutation of the above nonsense:

Meanwhile, the blithe use of population change in Philadelphia as a proxy for economic benefit is a little silly. For one thing, it would seem to ignore actual trends. Since 2000, the rate of population decline in the city of Philadelphia has sharply diminished.

From 2000 to 2001, the city's population declined by 15,000. From 2003 to 2004, by contrast, population fell by just over 7,000. And from 2007 to 2008, Philadelphia lost a mere 1,200 people.

Just using Glaeser's fly-by-night statistical methods, it seems as though the introduction of the Acela has in fact materially slowed population decline in Philadelphia. And obviously there are other variables which show that Philadelphia has enjoyed a serious economic rebound over the last decade.

The rest of Avent's post is worth reading in its entirety. Avent closes with a point that is worth remembering for the inevitable moments when we see Glaeser's work repeated:

Glaeser seems to believe that in coming decades congestion costs will cease rising; otherwise he'd build future increases into his model. He seems to think that the addition of over 100 million new Americans need not lead to any new infrastructure investment; otherwise he'd compare the economic benefits and life-cycle emissions of rail investments to alternative investment plans.

I think those beliefs are daft and indefensible. And four posts into his high-speed rail series, Glaeser hasn't given any of us reason to think that his analysis is worth taking seriously.

And that is the core problem with Glaeser's approach. He didn't consider the alternative costs, including the cost of doing nothing. He did not assess the benefits of the jobs HSR will create, or the role of the trains in creating new transportation patterns that can enable new kinds of economic growth over many decades. Glaeser's posts consistently and arbitrarily used a set of factors that gave readers a limited and incomplete sense of how HSR will actually play out in context. It would be nice if the NYT would give space to someone like Ryan Avent who can explain the benefits of HSR with respect to the evidence. Apparently that's too much to ask.

What's Up At The New York Times?

That's the question Ryan Avent is asking in the wake of the Times' blog attacks on HSR:

The New York Times has now turned loose writers at two of its economics blogs to make weak arguments against the construction of high-speed rail lines.

I have been following Ed Glaeser's attempt to do a back-of-the-envelope assessment of the costs and benefits of a hypothetical rail line (catch up here and here). Now, Freakonomics' Eric Morris seems to want to get in on the act, via a lame post comparing the effects of high-speed rail with the fruits of "cash for clunkers."

Let me just begin by pointing out how utterly ridiculous this comparison is. The Obama administration's vision for high-speed rail essentially involves a multi-decade effort to significantly upgrade transportation infrastructure along several of the country's most economically important metropolitan corridors.

"Cash for clunkers," on the other hand, is a $3 billion, roughly two-month program of automobile purchase incentives.

Avent goes on to explain his quite sound reasoning as to why it is totally absurd to compare these two programs. "Cash for clunkers" is a program that is designed to produce immediate economic stimulus through the sales of a few thousand cars, offering the possibility of some extremely minor environmental benefits. HSR is a long-term restructuring of intercity and interregional passenger transportation, a permanent piece of infrastructure whose benefits will be with us for many decades to come - just as the Golden Gate Bridge and Shasta Dam are still providing us with economic activity 70 years later.

Both programs are valuable, but for utterly different reasons. To compare them is to confuse them - and to confuse the reader.

Avent also pointed out that both Glaeser and Morris's anti-HSR work consistently downplays the impact of global warming on the US economy:

I'm led by this to believe that Morris does not actually understand how global warming works -- that it is due to the slow accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over time. The only way we'll ever feel any greenhouse savings from any policy is over a considerable amount of time, which is why wonks discuss carbon reductions in terms of what we might be able to accomplish by 2020 or 2050.

Does Morris think that next year will be cooler thanks to "cash for clunkers"? I certainly hope not.

What Avent is identifying here is that these two economists, Glaeser and Morris, are not offering an assessment of the long-term needs of the US economy and transportation system. Economics as a field of study particularly suffers from a belief that acting on global warming is of less importance than providing economic growth. It's a false dichotomy - HSR is a perfect example of how one can do both at the same time - but it is what the New York Times has given its blogs over to promoting in recent weeks.

American economic policy, and much of American economic thinking, have become dominated by near-term concerns. The next month, the next quarter, the next year. Maybe the next four years if you're lucky. Longer-term policy is rarely discussed in the economic press and while it may get some ink among academic economists, the writing we see many economists offer for public consumption treats long-term infrastructure spending as wasteful, unnecessary, or both.

Hence the ingrown biases and flawed methodologies of both the Glaeser and Morris posts. HSR doesn't make sense in a short-term time frame. We all know that. Keynes may have noted that in the long run we're all dead, but many of us have quite a long way to continue running. It makes sense that we will want to secure sustainable economic prosperity and work to solve those broader forces that challenge that, such as global warming.

For the last 30 years US economic policy has emphasized the short over the long, the next few years over the next few decades. Even though the New Deal provided the basis for long-term growth and unprecedented national prosperity, that kind of big-picture economic policy work has been eschewed for a debate over how to best float the next asset bubble. 30 years of short-term fixes and neglect of the long-term strategy has produced a series of ever greater bubbles and successively more catastrophic results of that bubble's inevitable burst.

HSR pencils out when the full context is assessed. The fact that the NYT bloggers so persistently refuse to provide that context suggests they believe it is important to ensure HSR does not come out well in their writing. Avent again:

This exercise is, as best I can tell, an effort to show that investments in high-speed rail are not worthwhile, from an economic or environmental standpoint, based on extremely pared down models and faulty assumptions, with the goal of influencing how their readers view the high-speed rail initiative.

It's simply irresponsible. Times readers deserve to be better informed.

I have no idea why the Times has chosen to not provide better information to its readers. But that is what they have done. As we in California know, this is par for the course. In 2008 reporters frequently repeated the largely baseless criticisms of HSR and ignored or downplayed its more proven benefits. They share the right's skepticism of government programs, and while we all want government to be closely watchdogged - including those governments involved with the HSR project - there's a difference between honest oversight and a stacked deck.

The New York Times, when it comes to HSR, is playing with a stacked deck. But at least we in the blogs know how to identify which are the marked cards.