Matt Yglesias commented on my post last week on the amount of wages left over after paying for housing. He noted that the analysis:

Shows that among U.S. metro areas not only is income correlated with housing costs, but the association is so strong that wages minus housing costs is positively correlated with housing costs (I wish they'd looked at income rather than wages, though, since the existence of adequate labor demand is a relevant issue here I think).

My colleague Charlotta Mellander re-ran the analysis using the per median household income (via the American Community Survey) of metros in place of wages and salaries. Income is a broader measure of overall wealth, including capital gains, rents, and transfers in addition to wages and salaries, and this provides a better measure of the overall effective demand for housing, though wage and salaries remain a better measure of underlying regional productivity and value-creation.

The guy keeps producing interesting research on urbanism.

Outlook Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

via Walter Bazzini

Halleluejah. I want to die like a doctor.