Why must I travel, why can’t I tele-conference

2013-05-172013-06-08 | David Levinson

Two times in two days last week I was asked to fly to an east coast city for a half-day meeting. The meeting organizers offered to pay my travel expenses. I asked to save the travel money and tele-conference in via some/any web-based video technology. The organizers declined, saying they weren’t set up to do that.

Seriously, you can pay more than a $1000 to bring me in considering airline tickets, hotel, ground transportation, and meals, but you can’t get your act together to have a room with wireline internet, a camera enabled laptop (aren’t they all now), and Skype or FaceTime or Google Hangouts or any of a hundred other services at a marginal monetary outlay of zero and a time outlay of damn close to that?

I hypothesize one source of the problem is the technological backwardness of the governmental/consulting/advocacy/transportation sector. This is a process of mutual causation. Technological backwardness deters the technologically advanced from entering the sector, reinforcing the backwardness. It’s a wonder there are PCs on people’s desks. It’s no wonder we see no progress. I fully anticipate major changes to the transportation sector to come from outside actors, much like the Google self-driving vehicle because of this innovation aversion.

The second source of the problem might be incentives. I hypothesize the meeting organizers budgeted for travel, and not for information technology. They have no incentive not to spend the budget, the money has to get spent.

The third source of the problem is also incentives. My travel time costs them nothing. My video conferencing takes them a few minutes. No matter their few minutes are a lot less time than my travel, they (not me) are spending it.

I realize video-conferences are not quite as high a resolution in audio or video as being present, and in the hands of the incompetent have meeting-disruptive technical difficulties. But they are good enough for the purposes of this kind of conversation, for which conference calls are often used.

It is not that I object to spending your money, or actually want to save you money. I am not noble in this regard. It is that travel is a major hassle, filled with danger and uncertainty. This is often not worth it for me anymore especially for a less than one-day meeting in a city I have seen plenty of times where

I am doing you a favor by being present (you asked me to attend, not vice versa). Moreover, I don’t want to eat another dinner at an east coast airport.

Update: Bill Lindeke suggests: @trnsprttnst perhaps transportation scholars are inherently biased towards transporting things/people

NLX Slides

2013-05-172013-05-26 | David Levinson

I was at a public forum in Hinckley, Minnesota last night (home of the world-famous Grand Casino), giving a talk on the Northern Lights Express (NLX). The crowd was, in the immortal words of Grampa Simpson “Agin’ it”. My slides are here, though readers of the blog have seen most of the material before.
It was fun, thanks to the many organizers from Pine County.

Economists get what they want

2013-05-172013-06-07 | David Levinson

Over at Price Roads, Lewis Lehe has a great post: Economists get what they want:

“Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen says:

Voters are getting more or less what they want, which is some spending restraint, mostly holding the line on taxes, not too much trust in government as a way of moving forward, and a love of entitlements. One can find that objectionable, and indeed I do across a number of fronts, but there you go. We are not going to elect a new people anytime soon, and in this odd sense you can see all the recent political gridlock as reasonably democratic, more so than its critics would like to admit (I know I’ll generate a bunch of criticisms citing poll data about how Americans really want this, that, or the other but I’ll hold my ground on this one).

Cowen has bemoaned the trend of declining public investment and rising entitlements. He says this in line with voter preferences. I disagree. Declining public investment and rising entitlement spending is exactly what we would expect from a government run by policy experts over the last 40 years. Nearly everyone would rather the government directly spent less in the domain of her expertise.”
For most of the 20th century, government had more public provision and more regulatory cross-subsidy than it does now. Economists hated this situation because it wasn’t pareto optimal. Government housing created hellholes so bad as to inspire movies like Candyman, so economists pushed for less spending and more direct aid. Price controls and protectionism (regulation), like the Interstate Commerce Commission and tariffs, created such yawning deadweight losses that economists pushed for free enterprise and direct aid for the ‘losers.’ These ‘swaps’ were better off for nearly everyone.
But both swaps will lower investment as a share of public spending.

Read the rest.