Happiness, stress, and age: How the U-curve varies across people and places | Brookings Institution

From Carol Graham and Julia Ruiz at Brookings Institution:

…Numerous studies have found recurrent patterns between happiness and life satisfaction (while the terms are often used inter-changeably, the latter is a better-specified question) and important experiences such as employment, marital status, and/or earnings. These, in turn, lead to differences in investment profiles, productivity, voting incentives, and attitudes toward health (Graham, Eggers, and Sukhtankar, 2004; DeNeve and Oswald, 2012; De Neve et al., 2013).

Among these relationships, the one between age and happiness—often referred to as “the U-curve”—is particularly striking due to its consistency across individuals, countries, and cultures (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2007; Steptoe, Deaton and Stone, 2015; Graham and Pettinato, 2002). Happiness declines with age for about two decades from early adulthood up until roughly the middle-age years, and then turns upward and increases with age. Although the exact shape differs across countries, the bottom of the curve (or, the nadir of happiness) ranges from 40 to 60 plus years old. Blanchflower and Oswald (2016) find that some markers of ill-being, such as reported mental health and the use of anti-depressants, meanwhile, display inverse patterns, and turn down (as opposed to up) at roughly the same age range in the U.S. and Britain.

Further research is needed to confirm that the bottom of the U-curve coincides with teenage children 😉

Source: Happiness, stress, and age: How the U-curve varies across people and places | Brookings Institution

Valley of a Thousand Hills

I tried this as a test of Vimeo, but don’t you just love the attitude of these young Zulu kids. Few possessions other than a skateboard (most likely donated) but not a worry in the world.

Elon Musk’s Next Plan | Inc.com

By Kevin J. Ryan:

During Tuesday’s SolarCity earnings call, Elon Musk hopped in to let the world know what the company he co-founded plans to do next: create solar roofs. Not solar panels–entire roofs.

….”The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy,” Musk wrote in his recent Tesla “Master Plan Part Deux” blog post, “so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good.”

Now, that plan is beginning to crystallize a bit more. Should Tesla close its $2.6 billion deal to buy SolarCity, it will bring Musk’s vision a little closer to reality–especially the part that entails creating cars that get their energy from solar-powered batteries.

A home that powers itself and perhaps the cars parked in its garage–and in the process, helps the world lessen its dependency on fossil fuels in a very big way–might not be that far off. And it might not look that bad, either.

Source: Elon Musk’s Next Plan: Do for Roofs What He Did for Cars | Inc.com

High speed rail plan still needs to prove economic benefits will outweigh costs

Double-decker TGV leaving the Gare de Lyon of Paris

Double-decker TGV leaving the Gare de Lyon of Paris. Source: Alno

Geoffrey Clifton, University of Sydney

The CLARA private consortium claims a high speed rail network between Sydney and Melbourne could be paid for at no cost to the government through a technique known as value capture. What is still not clear is whether there will be enough value created by the project to capture in order to pay for the project.

Value capture is well established techniques used by governments to offset some of the costs of new transport infrastructure, for instance the taxes paid on apartments built near a new train station help to offset the cost of the transport investment. The taxes paid by warehouses or factories built near new freeways are another good example of value capture.

CLARA’s proposal is that the high speed rail can be paid for by purchasing land cheaply in regional New South Wales and Victoria then developing a string of new towns alongside the High Speed Railway. The sale of land would fund the High Speed Railway’s construction and the new residents would provide patronage for the railway.

This form of development was once common place with the suburban railways of London and the urban railways of Tokyo and Hong Kong being the most famous examples. However, this sort of value capture by private investors is much rarer today and unprecedented on this scale.

The first stage proposal involves a A$13 billion link from Melbourne to the Greater Shepparton region of Northern Victoria, the full link to Sydney with a branch to Canberra would cost many times this much. The CLARA consortium is claiming the exact figure as commercial in confidence, but a cost of around $200 billion has been suggested in the media.

CLARA haven’t released the full business case for the network but value of the project can be assessed by its benefits and whether or not the project will capture them.

High speed rail creates benefits for two types of travellers, longer distance commuters and intercity travellers. Previous proposals for high speed rail have floundered in Australia because the benefits to intercity travellers have just not been enough to justify the costs of developing and running it.

Australian cities are just too far apart for a high speed rail to be competitive on travel time and fares with aviation. Perhaps this will change over the 40 years that it will take to build the network but there is no evidence that this is happening at the moment.

Unlike previous plans, CLARA is emphasising the potential of the longer distance commuter market (e.g. Canberra or Goulburn to Sydney). There is a developing market for commuting by High Speed Rail in the UK amongst other countries.

There is no doubt that high speed rail would be faster over these sorts of distances than the alternatives (ordinary rail, coaches, private car) although it might be a challenge to schedule high speed intercity services alongside slower commuter services and building dedicated high speed rail lines into the Central Business Districts of Sydney and Melbourne will be very expensive. These travellers will gain benefits from a faster service and also from being able to purchase houses in more affordable regional areas.

Land prices are a capitalisation of the benefits that accrue to people who use that land. In the case of residential land, it reflects the benefits to be had in terms of access to schools, jobs, recreation facilities, etc.

Improved transport services reduce the time it takes to get to existing jobs and activities plus makes it possible to travel to additional jobs and activities within a reasonable time and, finally, encourages new jobs and activities to be created through the process of economies of scale and agglomeration.

Some of these benefits accrue to the travellers, others to the owners of the businesses who can hire from a bigger pool of potential employees and service a bigger pool of customers. Because of these benefits travellers and businesses bid up the price of land in places near the improved transport services thus sharing the benefits with the land owners (and with governments in the form of the taxes paid on income, property transactions and developments). It is this increase in land that CLARA hopes to tap into to fund the new high speed rail.

This project will only be successful if the new rail service generates enough benefits and this will only happen if people really will be prepared to pay higher fares for high speed rail or prefer lower fares on traditional train services from cities closer in (i.e. Wollongong). If not, will governments have to ban development in other cities to force people to move to CLARA’s townships in order to support the developers of the HSR?

Value capture is a rediscovered form of financing major projects that could prove an innovative source of funds but it does not remove the need for a project’s benefits to exceed its costs.

The Conversation

Geoffrey Clifton, Lecturer in Transport and Logistics Management, University of Sydney

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Hat tip to Macrobusiness.

Political Correctness and reverse intimidation | On Line Opinion

From Michael Keane:

Having to continually tread on eggshells for fear of doing something that will ruin your life, family or career, even something that no-one could ever reasonably predict would be wrong, is a well-known form of intimidation and causes chronic psychological torment. We could use the jargon of Human Factors Engineering or behavioural psychology, but it’s obvious. We’ve heard of reverse discrimination, but political correctness is causing a sort of reverse intimidation and is damaging both individuals and society.

….. The Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court famously warned that if you want to stop racial discrimination then you have to stop discriminating on the base of race. In other words, most 21st century Australians are well and truly over race. But if you continually discriminate on the basis of race with racial quotas, separate flags, separate clinics, separate scholarships, this will breed racial resentment…..

The same applies to all forms of discrimination, whether by race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

Source: Political Correctness and reverse intimidation – On Line Opinion – 6/6/2016

Richard Turnbull earns place in South African coaching hall of fame

Congratulations to a good friend and great human being for his induction in the South African coaching hall of fame. Richard Turnbull (pictured above [left] with middle-distance runner Matthews Temane), with a background in exercise physiology, achieved outstanding success as an athletics coach in the 1980s and 1990s. He also served as fitness coach, helping the Springbok rugby team to prepare for the 1995 world cup.

Emigrating to Australia in the 1990s Richard settled in Orange, NSW, where he again ventured into rugby, coaching the local Emus to four straight Central West Rugby Union premierships.

In a golden era for middle- and long-distance running in South Africa, Richard coached some outstanding black athletes (like Willie Motolo and Matthews Temane) who ironically were prevented from competing in the Olympics because of apartheid.

Source: Going the distance: Turnbull earns place in South African coaching hall of fame | Central Western Daily