CSpec

Do you think that outcomes would be any different if voting rates were double what they are now? I'm skeptical.

It looks like the market agrees with people here: Contrast that with Ford, which has doubled in the same time period!

I have to scratch my head at Buffalo--I lived in Rochester for four years, and upstate NY ain't goin' nowhere fast. Niagara is awesome though.

Eh, this car still needs a lot of work IMO.

I think this point is a bit anachronistic--Clinton's welfare reform did substantially reduce the number of people living on the dole.

Parts of the interior look good, but overall it's still a couple years behind.

Could these things meet US crash regulations?

Japan has been stagnant for 20 years. They dithered at the beginning of the lost decade (the 90s) because the cozy relationship between big business and government didn't lend itself to rapid restructuring, and the honor thing is real over there. Also the government has wasted ungodly sums of money on useless construction projects, thinking they could spend their way out of it. Meanwhile they still maintain their protectionist trade policies. 30 years ago many in the West were shrieking that the US should also adopt a national industrial policy and actively protect favored industries. I'm glad the US had the sense to not follow Japan down that road to ruin.

I lived in France for five months. Standard of living is noticeably worse, prices are much higher, people are less mobile, and society is stuck in a caste system of those who have cushy jobs for life and those who can't break in and live on contract and temporary employment. Also much of the time the spoiled rotten public sector employees shut the whole country down when they have a hissy fit and go on strike. The truth is hard to swallow.

I voted interior quality...

No objections here. I think a lot of the pinned topics should be cleaned up as well.

A recent survey by a professor of his economics students finds the following: The median student believes that 35% of workers earn the minimum wage and a substantial fraction think that a majority of workers earn the minimum wage (Actual rate in 2007: 2.3% of hourly-paid workers and a smaller share of all workers earn the minimum wage) When asked about profits as a percentage of sales the median student guessed 30% (actual rate, closer to 4%). When asked about the inflation rate over the last year (survey was in 2009) the median student guessed 11%. Actual rate: much closer to 0%. Note, how important such misconceptions could be to policy. When asked by how much has income per person in the United States changed since 1950 (after adjusting for inflation) the median student said an increase of 25%. Actual rate an increase of about 248%, thus the median student was off by a factor of 10. And these are economics students! Those in other fields must be off even more. What is this, France?

An improvement, but I doubt this car can be saved. Based on the Durango interior, I don't have high hopes for interior quality here. Ford definitely did a much better job with its refreshes.

I was surprised at the rancor in the press over this. Who cares?

Aston Martin Cygnet, definitely.

Volt is definitely a more interesting design, but it was much cooler a few years ago.

Eh, not that great. Kia does better nowadays.

No... they're not green because the power grid isn't green. "replacing all of Britain’s cars with subsidised electric cars would cost the taxpayer £150 billion and, with Britain’s current fuel mix, cut CO2 emissions from cars by about 2%"

Highly charged motoring Electric cars, though a welcome development, are neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim The Economist DESIGNED especially for city and suburban motoring, this handsome automobile is smooth, quiet and easy to drive, and being powered by electricity it can be charged up at home. Tempting? The sales pitch is not for one of the new electric cars from General Motors, Nissan or Renault, but for a 1905 Victoria Phaeton from Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana. Electric cars have come and gone over the years. Usually an oil crisis has given them a boost; this time it is a combination of oil prices, fears about energy security and climate change. A decade ago the Toyota Prius took hybrid cars into the mainstream. Two years ago Elon Musk’s Tesla all-electric sports car made them sexy. Now the big car firms are pushing all-electric cars for the mass market. At the Paris Motor Show this week they unveiled electric vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Some go on sale in the next few months. This represents a huge leap forward for the industry, but the showroom patter will be misleading, for two reasons. First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages. Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim. The idea of recharging an electric car at home for only a few dollars and never again having to visit a filling station is enticing. For most journeys, the limitations of battery capacity are irrelevant. As salesmen will be quick to point out, 99% of the time people do only short runs—the daily commute, trips to the shops and to pick up the children—all of which are well within the range of most electric cars. But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative. And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range. Carmakers are taking different approaches to these limitations. The Nissan Leaf or Renault Fluence are powered only by a battery. Once they have travelled 160km (100 miles) or so, the battery needs recharging, which can take some eight hours. By contrast, the Chevrolet Volt’s battery has less than half that range, but it carries a petrol generator which gives the car another 480km. Micro cars with just two seats and ranges of only around 50km are also coming: they will charge quickly and work well in crowded cities. But for a combination of cheapness and efficiency, a petrol-powered car is hard to beat. And what of electric cars’ environmental credentials? Electric cars are being hugely subsidised by taxpayers—£5,000 ($7,940) in Britain and up to $7,500 in America—on the ground that they are zero-emission vehicles. Makers of electric cars claim that this is an efficient way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Road transport accounts for a tenth of such emissions worldwide; the sorts of biofuels currently in use are not much greener than petrol; and next-generation biofuels are proving slow to come to the market. Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven. An electric car in Britain today, for instance, produces around 20% less in CO2 emissions than a car with a petrol engine. Even if the generating mix gets greener, electric vehicles are so expensive to produce, that they will still be a relatively costly way of abating CO2 emissions. Sceptics therefore doubt that the subsidy is a good use of public money. According to Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, replacing all of Britain’s cars with subsidised electric cars would cost the taxpayer £150 billion and, with Britain’s current fuel mix, cut CO2 emissions from cars by about 2%. For the same money, Britain could replace its entire power-generation stock with solar cells and cut its emissions by a third. The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax. If electric cars are a good way of reducing emissions, a carbon tax will enable them to flourish. Taxes, of course, are not as popular as subsidies. But subsidies are almost always a waste of public resources. At this particular time, throwing more taxpayers’ money at the car industry seems a daft thing to do.

Well, you said initially that you would only be outraged if they guy didn't like the Tea Party. You then decided that he does (for some reason), so you want to go and dance on the ashes. But if he agreed with your political views you would be outraged. So you're saying that a rational analysis of the situation is contingent on the guy being offensive to you.

....right, that's what I said originally.

OK, so your complaint is that the town set up their outsourced fire protection scheme as an insurance product, not a universal good that is taxed. That's fine, most libertarians would agree that fire protection should be a universal good. But maybe the local people wanted it that way?

Way to be mature Croc. What's your response to the fact that no one would pay if they could get away with paying only if their house happens to catch fire?

I'll outsource analysis to Tyler Cowen: Any social system must, at some stage of interactions, impose some morally unacceptable penalties. If you are very hungry, and you shoplift food, they still might prosecute you. If you don't pay your taxes, and resist wage garnishes, they might put you in jail. If you resist arrest, they might, at some point in the chain of events, shoot you while trying to escape. Somewhere along the line there is a doctor who can treat your rare disease except he doesn't feel like working so much, and so he lets you die or suffer; you can find both private and public sector examples here. Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.