Wednesday Reads - 4/24/13 - Europeans and Americans and Car and Mistaken Austerity!

From Grist, I read that : Europeans are buying two bikes for every car

Europeans are not buying as many cars as they once did. They are buying bikes, though. A lot of bikes. In 2011, they bought 20 million bikes — nearly twice as many bikes as they bought cars.

The European Cyclists’ Federation explains exactly what that means:

In other words: for every car sold in Europe, almost 2 bicycles currently find a new customer. And these bikes are not just for decoration but they are used more and more: Germany saw a 50 % increase in cycling between 2002 and 2011; In the Netherlands, the success of e-bikes (pedelecs) contributed to an increase of 9 % in km cycled in just one year (from 2010 to 2011); Cycling in many capital cities doubled over the past decade, including in London and Dublin. Continue Reading

In defense of Americans though, it's probably a whole lot easier to get around in Europe on a bike than it is in the US, just because of the layout of the cities. With suburbia here most cyclist would have to travel a good distance even to get to a store, let alone work!

But then, we have folks out there in the US, like this Washington Sate legislator:  State lawmaker defends bike tax, says bicycling is not good for the environment

Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.Continue Reading 

Even though Orxutt has since taken back these statements he still supports the tax which is ridiculous!Rep. Orcutt says bicycle carbon emissions ‘not a point worthy of even mentioning

Speaking of ridiculous! Now I don't know all the ins and outs of economic policy but I know that the austerity policies are crap and have tanked the European economy.. but the fact that the conclusions of the two Professor's whose paper the conservatives follow is wrong because of errors in the spreadsheet is inexcusable!!

From Alternet: Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity

Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the academic champions of austerity, are exposed.

Here's the good part where the Grad Student discovers Reinhart and Rogoff's errors!

Herndon, a 28-year-old graduate student, tried to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results as part of a class exercise and couldn’t do it. He asked R&R to send their data spreadsheet, which had never been made public. This allowed him to see how the data was put together, and Herndon could not believe what he found. Looking at the data with his professors, Ash and Pollin, he found a whole host of problems, including selective exclusion of years of high debt and average growth, a problematic method of weighing countries, and this jaw-dropper: a coding error in the Excel spreadsheet that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin write: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49...This spreadsheet error...is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category."

In their newly released paper, " Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff” Herndon, Ash and Pollin show that "when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower." Full story

Arrggh!!