According to Walter Isaacson – the bestselling author of their biographies – it is this:
I started with Ben Franklin, and then Einstein, and then Steve Jobs—[they were all] innovative and creative. And I said, “Well, what pattern [leads to] that?” The pattern wasn’t that they were smart, because you’ve met lots of smart people, and they don’t usually amount to much. The pattern tends to be curiosity across disciplines.
This excerpt was taken from a conversation between Isaacson and Adam Grant, which you can read or watch here.
Here is another excerpt that speaks to the way in which Jobs prided himself on working at the intersection of technology and the humanities:
I’ll give you a tiny example. The Mac that came out in 2000 had a handle on it, and they say, “This is a desktop machine. We don’t need the handle—people aren’t really supposed to move it around. It’ll cost us another sixty dollars [per computer].” And Steve said, “The handle is there because it makes the machine approachable. My mom is afraid of her computer, but if there’s a little thing [where] she can put her hand, where she can touch it and she knows it won’t break, that makes her connect emotionally to the computer better.” And he was right. But it cost money, and the Mac didn’t make as much.
The entire conversation resonated with me partly because I think of development as being a career that, by necessity, requires you to work across disciplines.
I also sometimes wonder if I have too many broad-ranging interests. It can be overwhelming. But apparently that’s a good thing for innovation and creativity.
Access Magazine has a good piece on parking minimums and the cost they create for our cities. The article is by Donald Shoup, who is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is also the author of The High Cost of Free Parking.
Here is his argument:
“Minimum parking requirements create especially severe problems. In The High Cost of Free Parking, I argued that parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, degrade urban design, reduce walkability, damage the economy, and exclude poor people. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do have these effects. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.”
And here’s his summary of what it costs to build a parking stall in various US cities (both underground and aboveground):
To put these numbers into perspective, he also looks at the median net worth of US households (2011) to show just how expensive this parking is for some groups.
Because remember, these parking costs get embedded into the cost of housing, retail stores, and so on.
Wharton real estate professor, Mariaflavia Harari, recently published a paper that looks at the relationship between urban geometry (specifically compactness) and inner city commuting efficiency across 450 cities in India.
Consistent with previous research done in this space, she finds that people generally prefer compact cities and that they are willing to pay a premium for it. It increases overall welfare. Here’s an excerpt from her paper:
“My findings are broadly consistent with compact city shape being a consumption amenity. All else being equal, more compact cities grow faster. There is also evidence that consumers are paying a premium for living in more compact cities, in terms of lower wages and, possibly, higher housing rents.”
So her recommendations for the Indian cities she analyzed was that they should relax land use restrictions to allow for more vertical / compact development and that they should focus on improving urban transport in order to offset some of the negatives externalities associated with sprawl. This is no different than the approach that many cities in the developing world are adopting or looking to adopt.
One of things that really stood out for me in her paper though is the way people perceive commuting:
“The loss associated with non-compact shape appears to be substantial: a one-standard deviation deterioration in city shape, corresponding to a 720 meter increase in the average within-city round-trip, entails a welfare loss equivalent to a 5% decrease in income. This is considerably larger than the direct monetary and opportunity cost associated to lengthier commutes. Less compact cities also appear to attract fewer low-income immigrants, as captured by the share of slum dwellers.”
What this is saying is that we tend to overvalue the negatives of commuting, beyond the direct costs of gas, insurance, car payments, our time, and so on. We hate it so much that we also want to be compensated for the mental anguish. Here is that same idea said differently:
The estimated welfare loss from longer commutes appears to be large, relative to the immediate time and monetary costs of commuting. This is consistent with the interpretation that commuting is perceived as a particularly burdensome activity. The behavioral literature has come to similar conclusions, albeit in the context of developed countries. Stutzer and Frey (2008) find a large and robust negative relation between commuting time and subjective wellbeing, using German data. They estimate that individuals commuting 23 minutes one way would have to earn 19 percent more per month, on average, in order to be fully compensated.
So I guess I’m not the only one who thinks commuting and driving sucks.