The paradox of collective choice

In the early 1950s, Kenneth Arrow published his PhD thesis where he demonstrated that it does not exist a method of converting individual preferences into a single group preference that is not limited by a 'voting paradox' at some point. Here is a great video explaining in layman's terms how Arrow's impossibility theorem works.

Needless to say how important this idea is for social choice theory and that it gave Arrow a Nobel Prize in economics. Curious fact. Five of Arrow's former students have won the Nobel Prize.

VotingParadoxes from Paul stepahin on Vimeo.

Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance

Interesting paper on computer vision & urban economics, by Cesar Hidalgo and colleagues. Ungated version here.

Naik, N., Raskar, R., & Hidalgo, C. A. (2016). Cities Are Physical Too: Using Computer Vision to Measure the Quality and Impact of Urban Appearance. The American Economic Review, 106(5), 128-132.

Abstract

For social scientists, developing an empirical connection between the physical appearance of a city and the behavior and health of its inhabitants has proved challenging due to a lack of data on urban appearance. Can we use computers to quantify urban appearance from street-level imagery? We describe Streetscore: a computer vision algorithm that measures the perceived safety of streetscapes. Using Streetscore to evaluate 19 American cities, we find that the average perceived safety has a strong positive correlation with population density and household income; and the variation in perceived safety has a strong positive correlation with income inequality.

Merry OXmas

Merry OXmas everyone! 

via Thomas Bauwens

Glaeser on Cities, Development, and Density

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project has been organizing a number of great seminars that cover interesting speakers at the intersection of urban planning and economics (Check their YouTube channel here). In December last year, they had Edward Glaeser talking about Cities, Development, and Density.

In case you want a more academic reference, much of Glaeser's presentation is present in his recent paper on 'the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries'.

Postdoc position, LSE and Oxford - Urbanization in Developing Economies

Prof Henry G Overman (LSE) points out to this great opportunity of a Postdoc position to do research on Urbanization in Developing Economies in a joint programme between Serc/LSE and the University of Oxford.

A major joint research programme on urbanisation in developing economies, with particular reference to Africa, has been launched at Oxford's Department of Economics and LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre with support from the World Bank. Professors Tony Venables, Paul Collier (Oxford) and Vernon Henderson (LSE) are seeking to recruit up to two postdoctoral research economists. This will involve conceptual and econometric work on the overall urbanisation process in developing countries and on the internal development of cities, in particular large African cities. There will be intensive use of satellite data (to classify land use), night lights data, demographic census data, DHS data, survey data, mapping and planning data. The programme offers outstanding opportunities to contribute to cutting edge research in the field, based in two of Europe's leading social science research and training institutions.

Assorted Links

1. Where on earth is the Berlin wall?   Full story here
   
   
2. You could fit all the planets of the Solar System within the distance between the Earth and the Moon
   
   
3. The gradparents of smartcars  via MR
   
   
4. A Visual Survey of Text Visualization Techniques
   
   
5. A Globe-Spanning Accent Map for the Word 'Potato'
   
   
6. OECD report: How was life? Global well-being since 1820 via Leo Monasterio
   
   
7. Varian on Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics via Gary King
   
   
8. The Twitter map of the Brazilian Elections

Assorted links

1. Lessons From Brazil’s War on Poverty
   
   
2. What makes most restaurant reviews worthless
   
   
3. The present and future of Google Maps
   
   
4. The world cup impact on porn websites traffic
   
   
5. 2014 total malware volumes in the first 3 months already surpassed entire 2013 total(via Anchises)
   
   
6. The Billion Prices Project - an academic initiative at MIT that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research (e.g. comparing Inflation in Latin American Countries). - via The Drunkeynesian
   
   
7. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
8. Watch 220 years of U.S. state population growth

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Assorted links

1. High resolution maps of urban perception of safety (via C Hidalgo)
   
   
2. The transformation of Colombia’s second city will be hard to copy
   
   
3. A peculiar photo session in Brasilia
   
   
4. Demography's 50th Anniversary! (via Bernarado Lanza)
   
   
5. Oxford University launches new online course on International Labour Migration: Economics, Politics and Ethics
   
   
6. How the Recession Reshaped the US Economy, in 255 Charts (in one chart)
   
   
7. 7 Hand Gestures That Make You Look Like a Real Intellectual (via Vinicius Netto) - I loved the 'The Tiny Dialectic' one.
   
   
8. Map Compare: a useful tool to compare basemaps and cartogrphic styles
   
   
9. Metions to equality, fairness, freedom and liberty in the Democratic and Republican platforms since 1948 

Research Vacancies, LSE and Oxford - Urbanization in Developing Economies

Henry Overman points out to some Research Vacancies on Urbanization in Developing Economies in a joint programme between Serc/LSE and Oxford University.

A major joint research programme on urbanisation in developing economies, with particular reference to Africa, has been launched at LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre and Oxford's Department of Economics, with support from the World Bank. Profs.Vernon Henderson (LSE) Paul Collier and Tony Venables (Oxford) are recruiting a Research Manager, Research Economists and Assistants and GIS Data Specialists to work on the programme. The programme offers outstanding opportunities to contribute to cutting edge research in the field, based in two of Europe's leading social science research and training institutions.

Your Language structure affect how you act

Chen, M Keith (2013) "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets." American Economic Review, 103(2): 690-731. (unloccked version on Keith's page)

Abstract

Languages differ widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages that do not grammatically distinguish between present and future events (what linguists call weak-FTR languages) lead their speakers to take more future-oriented actions. First, I show how this prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language on cognition are merged with models of decision making over time. Then, I show that consistent with this hypothesis, speakers of weak-FTR languages save more, hold more retirement wealth, smoke less, are less likely to be obese, and enjoy better long-run health. This is true in every major region of the world and holds even when comparing only demographically similar individuals born and living in the same country. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications of these findings for theories of intertemporal choice.

You may watch Chen presenting his study at a TED event here.