At Pundicity, Bostonian Jeff Jacoby compares a city that builds to one that doesn’t. Dallas, Jacoby notes, has unapologetically expanded its road system and, consequently, the average Dallas resident wastes just 44 hours per year stuck in traffic. That’s barely half the average time spent idling in Jacoby’s famously congested hometown whose leaders, he notes pointedly, despise the automobile and halted major roadbuilding 50 years ago.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
