Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 774

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a new paper out talking about "urbanization and its discontents." In it, he argues that while cities today are working remarkably well for highly skilled people, they don't seem to be delivering the same upward mobility to lower skilled people. The "urban wage premium" for this segment of the population has seemingly disappeared.

The posited causes of this discontent will likely resonate with many of you:

Urban resurgence represents private sector success, and the public sector typically only catches up to urban change with a considerable lag. Moreover, as urban machines have been replaced by governments that are more accountable to empowered residents, urban governments do more to protect insiders and less to enable growth. The power of insiders can be seen in the regulatory limits on new construction and new businesses, the slow pace of school reform and the unwillingness to embrace congestion pricing.

Unfortunately, this paper isn't available for free online. If you're interested, you'll need to purchase a copy, here .

The Financial Times published the following chart last night. It shows the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases around the world, across the number of days since the 100th case in that particular country. The message here is that most western countries appear to be on a similar trajectory. (The grey dotted line represents a 33% daily increase.) Whereas in Asia, and in particular Hong Kong and Singapore, they have seemingly managed to slow the spread.

Now, there are a number of possible explanations for the outliers; everything from stricter quarantine rules to more rigorous testing. There's also an argument that Hong Kong and Singapore were better prepared as a result of the SARS outbreak in 2002. (More on these explanations, here .) But the other factor at play seems to be climate.

A recent study (by Jingyuan Wang, Ke Tang, Kai Feng, and Weifeng Lv) has concluded that, like the flu, the transmission of COVID-19 appears to be significantly impacted by both air temperature and relative humidity. In their research, they looked at the reproductive number (R), or the severity of infectiousness, for all Chinese cities with more than 40 cases between January 21 to 23, 2020. (Large-scale government interventions began on January 24, 2020 and would have therefore skewed the numbers.)

What they found was that for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature and every one degree Celsius increase in relative humidity, the reproductive numbers drop by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively. Air temperature, in other words, has more of a positive impact on containing spread than relative humidity -- which feels right. That is also apparent when you look at the above charts. Take note of Korea, Iran, and Italy near the top left corner of the temperature chart.

If you'd like to download a full copy of the research paper, click here .

In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interaction to describe the psychological relationship that people were starting to have with TV personalities. Though radio had already started this phenomenon, the television brought with it an entirely new dimension. People started to really feel as if they knew that person on TV. They had become a friend.

But as Christopher Mims points out in this recent article about loneliness during the coronavirus pandemic , the problem with parasocial interaction is that it's entirely one-sided. It also isn't real: "Sitting around the house watching television, parasocializing with our favorite news anchors or sitcom characters, didn’t confer the same benefits as socializing with real people."

The internet has further enhanced the way we parasocialize. Similar to how TV built on radio, the internet has built on TV. Instead of just scripted television shows, we now have Instagram Stories, TikTok videos, inappropriate Snaps, and many other methods of communication, some of which are maybe a little less scripted.

Of course, we also see our real friends online and those people we know, but never actually spend time with, maintaining only a loose "relationship" via the occasional emoji reaction. Mims argues that this has created a new kind of "mental equivalence." It has become harder for our minds to distinguish between our real friends and our parasocial friends.

Recently, we have all become familiar with terms like "flatten the curve" and "social distancing." But what is clear as we all start isolating ourselves at home -- whether mostly or entirely -- is this: it sucks . Even with all of the tech and social media that we now have available to us, we cannot replace what it's like to give someone a hung, look them in the eyes, and have a meaningful conversation.

That said, the Italians seem to have really mastered this whole self-isolation thing with their balcony orchestras and internet videos like this one here:

https://twitter.com/JamesAALongman/status/1239153242279460864?s=20

Stay strong, friends. Normalcy will return.