Solving World Hunger: Let’s Kill All the Hungry People!

Sure, that idea sounds like a bad solution. But The New York Times seems to think it works!

Politics Failed, but Fuel Prices Cut Congestion

Soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s ambitious congestion pricing was supposed to do: reducing the number of cars clogging the city’s streets and pushing more people to use mass transit.

I wasn’t a big fan of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan, but at least I understood the idea behind it. Pollution and congestion are externality problems; it has costs, but those costs aren’t borne particularly by those who create pollution and congestion. The idea is that if people actually have to bear the costs of those behaviors, they are more likely to adjust their actions. Some obscure economist came up with the idea. What was his name…. oh, right, Milton Friedman.

So, by the standard of the rationale behind congestion pricing, that high gas is reducing driving in New York City is not only not “working” by whatever standard the Times is inclined to use, but it is also besides the point. The idea wasn’t to reduce driving or to promote mass transit. The idea was to make drivers pay the cost their driving exacts from the rest of us, and that this might end up changing people’s behaviors was the bonus.

Ah well, they’re just the paper of record, after all.

~ by jamesfeldman on July 3, 2008.