Envy the lucky travelers of London. As you may know, in 2003 the city imposed a congestion toll of £5 (later raised to £8) on all vehicles entering the central district. In 2007, Transport for London, a government agency, did a cost-benefit analysis of the impacts (find the full report here).

It found the following about costs per year to travelers in the central district:

In the 1960s, the U.S. prison population has increased fivefold. Prisons today hold one inmate for every one hundred adults — a record rate in American history, and one unmatched by any other country. But despite the high prison population, crime has stopped falling. Punishments can seem random in their severity and implementation, minorities and the poor still disproportionately become victims and inmates, and enforcement — particularly of probation and parole — is haphazard. How can crime be controlled?

Dan Mitchell writes: "In principle, information on individual UC salaries was always available. But without the Internet, it would have been difficult to obtain.  Actually, that is not quite so; without the Internet and the decision of the Sacramento Bee to post the information on its website, it would have been difficult to obtain. In short, it wasn’t just technology; a journalistic decision to post the information was critical."

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