Andrew Leigh

MEDIA RELEASE - STREET PARTY THIS SUMMER


Federal Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh called on Canberrans to get out and party this summer by having their neighbours around for a street party.

Over recent years Andrew Leigh and his wife Gweneth have hosted a street party for their neighbours on three occasions.

“Street parties are a great way for all the neighbours to get to know one another,” said Andrew Leigh.

“The festive season provides a perfect excuse to have the street around one weekend afternoon for drinks and a bit of fun.

“I’ll let you into a secret – it’s almost no work to organise. Pick a date, print a short invite and walk them around to the neighbours. And thanks to the magic acronym BYO all you have to do is provide the venue.

“To make it even easier I’ve put a template invitation on my website, www.andrewleigh.com.

“Knowing your neighbours makes life easier when you decide to replace the fence, host a noisy party, or hit a cricket ball into their yards. You’re also less likely to get burgled if your neighbours know you,” said Andrew Leigh.

Twenty-eight percent of Australian’s in a 2004 Hawker Britton poll answered that they have no social interactions with their neighbours. Over the past twenty years or so the average number of neighbours from whom Australian can ask favours from or neighbours they can simply drop in on have declined.  In the last two decades Australians have lost one to two close neighbours who will do them a favour and lost three close neighbours who they can drop in on.

“Street parties are a bit of fun and good way to build social capital in our suburbs,” concluded Andrew Leigh.

Gweneth and Andrew Leigh will be having their neighbours around for their street’s annual party in Hackett this Saturday afternoon.

And here's the template invitation:

With the holiday season upon us, our family is hosting the street end-of-year gathering. Please join us for neighbourly drinks and nibbles – to catch up with friends, meet new faces, and celebrate the festive season.

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<Your address>

Started the day by serving breakfast at the Uniting Church's Early Morning Centre on Northbourne Avenue. If you work in the city, and are looking for a volunteering opportunity before work one day, it's a rewarding thing to do.

A plethora of things that have caught my eye lately:

• The Canberra Diaspora (share your story)


• Professor Bob McMullan on climate financing


• Will the compromise US tax package help the economy? (think you can do better?)


• A new Lowy paper on Chinese diplomacy


• Ross Gittins' ACTU Whitlam lecture (which happened to generously cite some of my research on inequality and mobility)


• The Mirrlees tax review (summary)

My AFR column this week is on skilled cities. 

Future Lies in Skilled Cities, Australian Financial Review, 7 December 2010

One of my favourite Banjo Paterson’s poems is Clancy of the Overflow: a contrast between the life of the drover who ‘sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’, and the urbanite, who must put up with ‘the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city’. Published in 1889, the poem neatly sums up the Australian character – a nation of bush-loving city-dwellers.

By coincidence, one of the strongest defences of cities came out the following year. In his groundbreaking Principles of Economics (published in 1890), Alfred Marshall wrote that in cities, ‘the mysteries of the trade’ are ‘in the air’. As a result, Marshall concluded ‘if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas’.

Over the past decade, the most prolific urban economist has been Harvard’s Ed Glaeser. Through dozens of empirical papers, Glaeser has analysed the interplay between urbanisation, economic growth and skills. Drawing mostly on US data, he finds that cities have historically grown more rapidly than rural areas – but the relationship is strongest for ‘skilled cities’, where more than one-quarter of the population have a degree.

In skilled cities, size matters. Double the size of a skilled city, and wages rise by about 10 percent. This relationship holds even after taking account of price differentials. It is true that house prices are higher in cities, but wages more than make up for this.

Studying the wage profiles of metropolitan and non-metropolitan workers, Glaeser and co-authors find that the wage profile of city workers is steeper than for non-metropolitan workers. City workers aren’t smarter than their country cousins (in fact, those brought up in small towns have higher IQs than people raised in big US cities). But the productivity of city workers seems to rise more rapidly than their non-metropolitan counterparts. Partly this is because urban workers acquire job skills at a more rapid rate. Another factor is that it’s easier to find the perfect employer-employee match in a big city.

A key feature of skilled cities, Glaeser points out, is their ability to reinvent themselves as new technologies come along. He gives the example of Boston, which provided sailors and fishermen in the early-C19th, became an immigrant-fuelled factory town in the late-C19th, and has now evolved into a university and technology hub. Skilled cities, Glaeser contends, help people adapt well to change.

But what about the environmental impacts of cities? While it is true that for much of human history, cities were the main source of dangerous emissions, the reverse is true today. Combining data on driving, public transit, home heating, and household electricity usage, Glaeser documents the fact that per-household carbon dioxide emissions in the US today are lowest in big cities. In San Diego and Los Angeles, each household is responsible for about 17 tonnes of emissions per year. At the other end of the scale, households Oklahoma City and Memphis account for around 29 tonnes of emissions per year. The relationship holds up even within cities: for example, Manhattan residents are more likely than people in suburban New York to catch public transport, less likely to drive long distances, and more likely to live in compact homes that are cheaper to heat and cool.

Glaeser’s use of statistical tools has made him sceptical of some of the bolder claims made by other urban researchers. Reviewing Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Glaeser takes the unusual step (for a book reviewer) of running a few regressions. He finds that across US cities, growth levels are not predicted by the share of the population who are gay or Bohemian. By contrast, a city’s education levels are a powerful determinant of growth. Glaeser concludes: ‘mayors are better served by focusing on the basic commodities desired by those with skills, than by thinking that there is a quick fix involved in creating a funky, hip, Bohemian downtown’.

The model of skilled cities has a simple policy recommendation: get education right. Fifty years ago, how many people would have predicted that computerisation would transform the labour market, that trade would reshape our manufacturing sector, and that the advent of air conditioning would spur population growth in Queensland? We cannot be sure what the shocks of the next half-century will be, but it’s a fair bet that investments in new school buildings, teacher quality, and trade training will be essential to creating the skilled cities of the future.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser.

There's often an interesting-but-too-tangential fact that I'm unable to squeeze into my articles. This week, it was the finding by economic historian Gregory Clark that in the period 1500-1800, life expectancy at birth was around 40 in rural England, but just 23 in London.

Update: An friend reminds me that I've missed a key reference - Bradley & Gans's Economic Record paper which showed that during the 1980s, Australian cities with more human capital investments experienced more rapid population and labour force growth.

On December 3, the International Day of People with a Disability, I visited Pegasus, an organisation in Holt that provides horse riding to people with a disability. If you'd like to know more about Pegasus, here's their website.

(Pegasus are the site of this year's ABC 666 Saturday Spruce Up, and they're really looking forward to the team arriving on Sat 11 Dec. If I can squeeze it in amidst kid-minding and mobile offices, I'm hoping to pop in.)http://www.youtube.com/v/VaCNbcZF6t8?fs=1&hl=en_US

In Bamaga, discussing the Indigenous economic development hearings that the Economics Committee are presently conducting. If you'd like to make a submission, details are here.http://www.youtube.com/v/C3Wn5PswGJs?fs=1&hl=en_US

Speaking of social capital, today is International Volunteers Day. If you'd like to volunteer, check out:

• VolunteerMatch


• FIDO


• Volunteering Australia

A constituent at my Charnwood mobile office on Saturday made the suggestion that fiscal and monetary policy are working against one another. Since this isn't the first time I've heard this suggestion, I thought it was worth a short post. In fact, both fiscal and monetary policy are currently working in a contractionary direction. Here's the relevant quote from part 1 of the Mid-Year Fiscal and Economic Outlook, released on 9 November:

Fiscal and monetary policy stimulus is also being withdrawn. As robust growth in private sector activity is taking hold, the fiscal stimulus is being phased out as planned and monetary policy stimulus has been withdrawn. The withdrawal of the fiscal stimulus started to detract from economic growth in the March quarter 2010, and is expected to reduce real GDP growth by 1 percentage point in 2010-11 and ½ of a percentage point in 2011-12.

I'll be giving a lecture in December to the ACT Fabians.  For more details see flyer overleaf.