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NEW YORK—As America has long suspected, no one here can drive. Lawyers, doctors, day laborers, actors, psychotherapists: New York City has more able-bodied, non-licensed, car-phobic adults than anywhere in the United States. … More than half of the [Washington D.C.]'s residents are licensed drivers. In this city, approximately 25 percent of the inhabitants possess a driver's license. (How many of that select club actually can drive is another matter.) Caroline Hwang, 33, a novelist and editor, is one of New York's carless millions. She lives in Manhattan and walks, hails cabs, uses her subway card. She packs her beach towel and takes the Long Island Rail Road to the Atlantic Ocean beaches and bums a ride when friends insist on one of those bucolic weddings north of the Bronx. As a teenager in Wisconsin she had a license, but that seems so yesterday. Full story
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• As of last week's two-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, several assumptions about the events of that day were well known—but not true, says David Plotz in Slate. No, Zacarias Moussaoui was probably not the "20th hijacker." No, we don't know for sure that the hijackers used box cutters to seize the cockpits. No, the use of airplanes as weapons was not an unknown concept to the U.S. government (though it may have been legitimately unexpected). Plotz clears up these and other myths of September 11. Full story
• In the six years since it was reacquired by China, Hong Kong has taken comfort in three beliefs, writes University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Waldron in Commentary. One is that Beijing is more pragmatic than ideological, and thus permissive of some self-rule; two, that this was a sign of less restrictive policies to come; and three, that this guarded good will would translate to Taiwan. "These comfortable assumptions look to have been completely overturned by the mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in July," Waldron writes. Now, both China and Hong Kong need less ambiguous policies, and neither can ignore the "people power factor" the demonstrations displayed. Full story
• The coming Muslim majority in so-called Roman Europe—by which Arabs are predicted to dominate Spain and replace Italians altogether—has been overhyped, writes analyst Michael Vlahos at Tech Central Station. Nonetheless, demographic shifts will bring a more sizable Muslim minority in Spain and Italy, which, "from 2010 to 2050, could alter the nature of European civilization," Vlahos writes. His piece is repetitive, but it introduces a crucial theme. Although most commentators speculate that Arabs will either come to dominate European society or be segregated into ghettoes, the truth will lie somewhere in between; Arabs "will enter the middle classes and leadership elites [and] will also actively intermarry," transforming Roman Europe in a subtle but unmistakable way. Full story
• At times, the line between economic theory and psychology seems to disappear. Why do people do what they do? Acquire and use resources the way they do? The two disciplines are equally interested. The battle between "neoclassical" and "behavioralist" economists is a fundamentally psychological study; the former believes that people are rational and calculating in the way they use resources, the latter says we should allow for irrational human quirks. Recent research into how people are presented choices should help reconcile the two camps, says the Economist. Studies of the endowment effect find that people assign subjective worth to items they have owned for a long time or have been given as a gift. You may not need a study to tell you that a family heirloom is worth more than money can say, but does the same principle apply to a chocolate bar? Full story One question the article does not raise is this: isn't such research merely an attempt to rationalize the sentimental?
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