Incentives – Page 11 – artdiamondblog.com

“The Bulk of New Yorkers Do Not Have an Unlimited Appetite for Growing Their Own Kale”

“. . . , Ena K. McPherson holds the key to three different community gardens.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) There is some evidence, . . . , that the bulk of New Yorkers do not have an unlimited appetite for growing their own kale. Official counts of New York gardens are fragmentary. But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.

In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”
The truth, Ms. Stone said, is that at any giv-(p. D6)en time, perhaps 10 percent of the city’s current stock of almost 600 registered GreenThumb gardens is growing mostly weeds. “In East New York, I can tell you that there are basically many gardens that are barely functioning now.”
. . .
An honest census would reveal that many gardens (perhaps most) depend on just one or two tireless souls, said Ena K. McPherson, a Brooklyn garden organizer. She would know because she’s one of them.
Ms. McPherson holds the keys to three community gardens in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Ms. Stone appreciatively refers to these blocks as “the Greater Ena McPherson Zone.”) And she serves on the operations committee for the nonprofit Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, which holds the deeds to 32 garden plots.
“In an ideal situation, we would have gardens with everyone in the community participating,” Ms. McPherson said. “But in fact, a few die-hard people end up carrying the flag.”
. . .
The original gardens followed the city’s vacant lots, which by 1978 numbered 32,000. Mr. Ameroso, though trained in agronomy, pitched them as an instrument for community renewal. “How did you take back your block?” he said. “Put in a community garden and stop that dumping.”
Ms. Stone, who laughingly (and earnestly) describes herself as a socialist, continues to embrace something of this mission. “All the people who are marginal in society — and I’m not using that as a judgmental term, it’s children, senior citizens, people on disability, the 47 percent — these people are the main power people in the garden,” she said.
These days, Mr. Ameroso espouses more of what he calls an “urban agriculture” model: a food garden with a dedicated farmers’ market or a C.S.A. These amenities make stakeholders out of neighbors who may not like dirt under their nails and rural farmers who drive in every weekend.
“The urban-agriculture ones are flourishing,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement. They’re active eight days a week.” But “community gardens, as such, where people come in to take care of their own boxes — those are not flourishing.”
It’s almost a cliché to point out that this new green model seems to have attracted tillers with a different skin tone. “Back then,” Mr. Ameroso said of his earlier career, “when we worked in Bronx or Bed-Stuy, it was mostly communities of color. Now when we talk about the urban agriculture stuff, it’s white people in their 30s.”
What explains this demographic shift?
“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m still baffled by it, and I’m involved in it!”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL TORTORELLO. “IN THE GARDEN; Growing Everything but Gardeners.” The New York Times (Sat., November 1, 2012): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 31, 2012.)

Incentives Matter, Even in Refereeing Articles for Journals

(p. 678) A natural experiment in an economics fleld journal afforded time-series observations on payments to referees for on-time reviews. The natural experiment yielded 15 months’ worth of data with no payments and about two subsequent years of data with payments. Using referee and manuscript-specific measures as covariates, hazard models were used to gauge the effects of payments on individual referee’s review times. All models indicate statistically significant reductions in review times owing to referee payments. Reductions in review times translate into significant reductions in first-response time (FRT). Median FRT was reduced from 90 to 70 days, a 22% reduction in the presence of payments. With payments, only 1% of the FRTs exceeded six months; without payments, 16% of the FRTs exceeded six months.

For the full article, from which the above abstract is quoted, see:
Thompson, Gary D., Satheesh V. Aradhyula, George Frisvold, and Russell Tronstad. “Does Paying Referees Expedite Reviews?: Results of a Natural Experiment.” Southern Economic Journal 76, no. 3 (Jan. 2010): 678-92.

People “Reward the Providers of Dangerously Misleading Information”

(p. 262) As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.
The social and economic pressures that favor overconfidence are not (p. 263) restricted to financial forecasting. Other professionals must deal with the fact that an expert worthy of the name is expected to display high confidence. Philip Tetlock observed that the most overconfident experts were the most likely to be invited to strut their stuff in news shows. Overconfidence also appears to be endemic in medicine. A study of patients who died in the ICU compared autopsy results with the diagnosis that physicians had provided while the patients were still alive. Physicians also reported their confidence. The result: “clinicians who were ‘completely certain’ of the diagnosis antemortem were wrong 40% of the time.” Here again, expert overconfidence is encouraged by their clients: “Generally, it is considered a weakness and a sign of vulnerability for clinicians to appear unsure. Confidence is valued over uncertainty and there is a prevailing censure against disclosing uncertainty to patients.” Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality–but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Web Sites Expose Petty Corruption

“Swati Ramanathan, a founder of the site I Paid a Bribe, in India.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.
The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.
Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls “retail corruption,” the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.
Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.
“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery Worldwide.” The New York Times (Weds., March 7, 2012): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 6, 2012.)

“Antony Ragui started an I Paid a Bribe site in Kenya.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“What Success Had Brought Him, . . . , Was Freedom”

(p. 5) The success of Pixar’s films had brought him something exceedingly rare in Hollywood: not the house with the obligatory pool in the backyard and the Oscar statuettes on the fireplace mantel, or the country estate, or the vintage Jaguar roadster–although he had all of those things, too. It wasn’t that he could afford to indulge his affinity for model railroads by acquiring a full-size 1901 steam locomotive, with plans to run it on the future site of his twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion in Sonoma Valley wine country. (Even Walt Dìsney’s backyard train had been a mere one-eighth-scale replica.)
None of these was the truly important fruit of Lasseter’s achievements. What success had brought him, most meaningfully, was freedom. Having created a new genre of film with his colleagues at Pixar, he had been able to make the films he wanted to make, and he was coming back to Disney on his own terms.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in title was added.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“Whatsoever a Man Soweth, That Shall He Also Reap”

“A gardener’s recipe for vengeance at the Sixth Street and Avenue B Community Garden in Manhattan.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 20) At the 700 community gardens sprinkled through the city like little Edens, the first commandment should be obvious: Thou shalt not covet, much less steal, thy neighbor’s tomatoes, cucumbers or peppers. But people do.

“This was an inside job,” Holland Haiis-Aguirre, a key-holder at the West Side Community Garden, said after she arrived at her plot on July 24 to pick a “big, beautiful, full-sized cucumber” that she and her husband had tended from infancy. Instead, she found a denuded vine; her prize cuke apparently was in someone else’s salad. “So frustrating,” she wailed.
. . .
Sally Young shrouds her 18 heirloom tomato plants in bird netting, but it is not birds she is trying to outwit. Claude Bastide, who grows aromatic herbs, had his spearmint and rosemary plants stolen early in the season. He responded with a sign: “Dear Plant Thief: If I catch you stealing my plants, I will boil you alive in a cauldron filled with poison ivy and stinging nettles until your flesh falls off your bones!”

For the full story, see:
ROBIN FINN. “Peck of Pilfered Peppers in City Gardens; Tomatoes, Too.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., August 7, 2011): 20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was dated August 5, 2011, and had the title “Pilfered Peppers in City Gardens; Tomatoes, Too.”)

Source of the title of this blog entry: The Bible, Galatians 6:7-9 (King James Version).

Kiewit Corporation Earned Bonus from Los Angeles for Avoiding “Carmageddon”

“Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, at left of group, and other officials celebrate the demolition of two lanes of the Mulholland Drive bridge over Interstate 405 ahead of schedule last weekend. The event that many feared would result in epic traffic jams ended early and calmly.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 6A) They paid Kiewit to build the Mulholland Bridge.

Now they’re paying Kiewit to tear it down.
And they’ll pay Kiewit to build it again.
It’s all part of the billion-dollar Interstate 405 improvement project in Los Angeles, which caught national attention last weekend when the busy freeway shut down for 36 hours so workers could remove the first chunk of the bridge that spans the Sepulveda Pass.
Omaha-based Kiewit Corp.’s Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. is the main contractor for the project.
Traffic officials in Southern California, who had predicted “Carmageddon” and warned motorists to stay away, were relieved when the closure of one of the nation’s busiest freeways — the stretch is traveled by an estimated 500,000 vehicles on a typical weekend — ended on 11:30 a.m. Sunday instead of 5 a.m. Monday as originally planned.

Kiewit reportedly got a (p. 7A) $300,000 bonus for beating the deadline.

For the full story, see:
STEVE JORDON. “KIEWIT WORK ON ‘CARMAGEDDON’ BRIDGE; IT’S UP, DOWN AND UP.” Omaha World-Herald (Sat., July 23, 2011): 6A-7A.

In Medicine, as Elsewhere, What Pays Is Usually What Gets Done

“”I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems, and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.” Dr. Donald Levin, a psychiatrist whose practice no longer includes talk therapy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help.

But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.

For the full story, see:
GARDINER HARRIS. “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., March 6, 2011): A1 & A21.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 5, 2011.)

Partage Provides Incentives to Recover Antiquities and the Means to Preserve Them

Source of book image: http://press.princeton.edu/images/k8602.gif

(p. D1) In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable (p. D2) pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.
. . .
(p. D2) In his book “Who Owns Antiquity?”, James Cuno argues that scholars have betrayed their principles by acquiescing to politicians who have exploited antiquities to legitimize themselves and their governments. Saddam Hussein was the most blatant, turning Iraqi archeology museums into propaganda for himself as the modern Nebuchadnezzar, but other leaders have been just as cynical in using antiquities to bolster their claims of sovereignty.

Dr. Cuno advocates the revival of partage, the traditional system in which archeologists digging in foreign countries would give some of their discoveries to the host country and take others home. That way both sides benefit, and both sides have incentives to recover antiquities before looters beat them to it. . . .
As the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dr. Cuno has his own obvious motives for acquiring foreign antiquities, and he makes no apology for wanting to display Middle Eastern statues to Midwesterners.
“It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange,” Dr. Cuno writes. “And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.”
Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own.

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN TIERNEY. “FINDINGS; A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’.” The New York Times (Tues., November 17, 2009): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated November 16, 2009.)

The Cuno book discussed above, is:
Cuno, James. Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

“A Tax on Air and Light”

(p. 11) Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury Item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass–so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed–sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but ¡t cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically In limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that (p. 12) people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of man period
buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It Is sometimes rather a shame that they aren’t still.) The tax, sorely resented as “a tax on air and light,” meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live In airless rooms.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

College Does Not Improve Thinking or Writing for 36% of Graduates

(p. 10) In a typical semester, . . . , 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.
. . .
Too many institutions, . . . , rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk.

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD ARUM and JOSIPA ROKSA. “Your So-Called Education.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., May 15, 2011): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 14, 2011.)

Arum and Roska’s book is:
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.