A major problem I see in the US, compared to basically anywhere else in the world I've lived, is sprawl. Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas, which has all sorts of benefits, especially a lower cost of infrastructure/public transportation, and encouraging mixed-use development with small owner-operated businesses and markets within walking distance serving day-to-day needs.
All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs, mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive chain stores.
I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram line."
The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.
I kinda agree with you. One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop. Outside of that there's farmland, forests and small villages.
In the U.S. it seems there's a slow decrease in density from a city core out dozens of miles; from tall density out to suburbs, then individual developments and maybe around then you'll get the kind of farm environment you'd find in Europe.
It's not to say that all of Europe/Asia, or all of the U.S. is the same in this way. But it seems to be a pattern. In the U.S. people try to move away from cities once they can, in Europe people seem to gravitate towards historic centers.
I think lots of it has to do with livability. In France it might be convenient to take a daily trip to the local market to get some groceries for dinner -- not much more work than going through the pantry. Density might not be too high, and the environments are pleasant, relaxing and convenient.
In the U.S. cities built before the car are better, but can still be a grind. Big swaths of NYC are hard to do daily shopping in for example. Cities built after the car are a mess wholesale and people live far from each other and spread very far out, and the things they need to live are similarly spread everywhere.
In Korea, my parents-in-law live in a proper house (not an apartment flat), but a grocery store is a 2 minute walk, and a large commercial center with pretty much every other service you might want is about 5 more. I easily triple my walking-time in Korea even on lazy do-nothing days compared to life in the U.S.
Yeah, it's really weird, huge apartment buildings and then just greenery and farms. If you look back at the final row of buildings it looks like a realization of some sort of "the inevitable wave of progress" metaphor.
S Korea implemented whats called Green Belt decades ago. Basically large swaths of land where you basically cannot build anything. They were not designated such because of some specific species or such. They just wanted to ensure there is some unpaved land. Great planning looking back.
Some U.S. cities and counties do this, it's called open space. Thing is that it restricts the future growth of the tax base. Cities want more tax base, even to the degree they'll approve building permits when city doesn't have the funds for years or decades for things like flood management in those newly zoned areas. And then cities are also beholden to the existing voters who, by and large, are intractable in the U.S. when it comes to building high density housing, especially when it needs to go vertical.
Of course, but it's interesting that the pattern in different countries seems to be the way that it is. This is ultimately an effect of the local land governance practices and the U.S. seems fairly strange.
I don't see how your comment has any relationship to the actual article. That said, as someone who lived in central Kiev (Ukraine), Chicago, LA, San Diego, and now middle of nowhere off the grid next to Joshua Tree, I would have to say, living away from other people is the best. Maybe it's just me, but I am glad that in US I can still do this. I guess it's also possible in Europe, though there you are looked down upon for doing so and judged to be "part of the problem" by people like you.
It's definitely a good thing that one can do that if they so choose in this country, e.g. living far away from "civilization" and totally off-the-grid. But the real problem, in my opinion, is how the US made it not just possible, but actually easier, to live outside of the city after World War II. The combination of the GI Bill, developments in prefabricated housing construction, and the automobile allowed for the development of the sprawling suburbs that dominate the American residential market. But none of this would have been possible without the intimate cooperation of politicians, who used this as a means of benefiting their own careers. These politicians allowed almost every white person to own a brand new house and brand new car, with tax subsidies and kickbacks all the way down. A lot of people took this opportunity to give themselves and their families a better life, and moved out to the suburbs.
It continues today in my hometown of Philadelphia, where I still live. My friends and co-workers who are older all consistently move outside of the city, like my parents and their parents did before them, when they have children. This movement to the suburbs today is no longer caused by political intervention, but rather by the terrible school system that continues to be underfunded, which is primarily the effect of the richest Philadelphians moving outside of the city to raise their families (and pay taxes to the surrounding communities). It's no wonder there's such a major divide between people who "have" and people who "have not", or why the schools are so terrible and the transportation infrastructure is outdated by over 50 years. Perhaps if my generation chooses to stay in the city limits when we settle down and raise families, our kids won't have to deal with such dangerous and depressing environments.
On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy getting away from people and being out in the wilderness. Being off-grid sounds really interesting, and something I've always wanted to try in my life, just to see if it was feasible and comfortable. I'm not coming down on you for living your life the way you want to live it in any way. I think you would agree with me that if land around you suddenly became very valuable and apartment towers started going up, you'd feel a little unnerved right? Living off-grid, in my opinion, is not the problem. The problem is people who want to take a beautiful place and build it into a haven for human environmental destruction.
I'm a bit confused when you say "these politicians allowed almost every white person to own a brand new house and brand new car". What business is it of politicians to prohibit people from owning a new home or car? What right does anyone have to tell me what neighborhood I can live in? If you want to blame someone for sprawl, blame the politicians that subsidize the infrastructure that make it possible.
I believe the parent is referring to the fact that the GI Bill and home loans for returning WW II veterans were written in such a way to systematically discriminate against blacks in this country. The explicit prohibitions you mention obviously existed at that time in the form of segregation, but whites were also given extra advantages by the racist way these programs were implemented. The extension of these benefits overlaps precisely with growth of sprawl, as whites used the increased purchasing power afforded to them by these programs to buy homes in the emerging suburbs (essentially following the incentive). Ira Katznelson of Columbia University wrote a good history of this in his book,"When Affirmative Action was White"
It might be more accurate to say "these politicians subsidized home ownership and cars at the expense of those who don't choose or can't afford to partake".
It's hard to express in the space of a HN comment, but American society is built to encourage suburban sprawl and car dependence in almost every way imaginable.
* The mortgage interest tax deduction taxes renters to give that money to buyers
* Roads, once supposedly funded by fuel taxes, are now mostly funded by general revenue, meaning that they're an all you can buffet (so why not use all you can? Somebody else is going to, after all)
* Drivers who kill cyclists and pedestrians virtually never face any serious consequences for their actions
* Cities force amenities, jobs, and homes to be ridiculously - comically - far apart from each other through zoning. How the hell does central Dublin have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of pubs, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of jobs all within a couple miles of each other, while people in Mountain View are pissed off their neighbors might want to put a duplex on land that they own because hey, that's too many people!
* We make it ILLEGAL to build homes and businesses without ridiculous excesses of parking, meaning you have to pay for parking whether you like it or not
* The cost of parking is rolled in to the cost of goods and services. A grocery store's land is easily 70% parking. That land costs a lot of money. Why do I have to pay for everyone else's parking when I walk to the store?
* Auto companies normalized the idea that streets are only for cars with campaigns to popularize terms like Jaywalking. I mean, think about it - for all of human civilization streets were where kids played, vendors sold, people chatted, and horses, carts, and people moved. Then the car showed up, quite literally started killing everyone in its way, and we decided everyone else can just deal with it
* Safety standards in the US tend to worry about the safety of the vehicle's occupants without regard to those struck by the vehicles. That's almost as dumb as imposing safety standards on guns based on the threat to the firearm operator.
Edit:I should have said "based solely on the threat". Obviously it's important that guns don't blow up in their user's face. And I conflate safety standards with licensing, though the comparison to cars there is fairly apt.
* Carbon emissions are likely to cause trillions of dollars in economic damage and kill millions of people through increased disease, decreased food security, and increased drought, among numerous other things. The people who will bear most of this cost are not the ones who are causing it. Gasoline should be taxed at the rate necessary to remove its carbon from the air via proven means. This would probably make it around $15 a gallon, which much to the surprise of most in the US, isn't THAT much. Very healthy societies function fine with $10/gallon fuel. In those places it is not wasted so profligately.
* There's more, but I need to get back to other stuff.
tl;dr - if you live in the US, you're going to pay the huge, tragic cost of auto dependency whether you like it or not, so you better get with it and just buy one already.
It's hard for me to argue with you, because I do agree that living in the suburbs and traveling to work every day, more then an hour each way, is simply insane. If you add the average commute of say 45min one way each day, and multiply it by the number of days you commute, it comes out to 16 days per year. That's 16 days of 24 hour per day driving. If you put it in working terms, then we must actually multiply it by 3 times since people usually work around 8 hours a day. So that's 48 working days. Basically you spend roughly 1/10th of your working time simply driving to and from work.
That said, I would much rather drive 45 min than spend 45 min on public transportation. I grew up in Kiev, a place with by all accounts very good public transport system, at least during the Soviet days when they still took care of the system. And guess what, it was awful! I also visited Boston, lived in Lake View in Chicago for 6 years without a car, and traveled through Europe and lived for 4 years in the center of downtown San Diego. And I can honestly tell you, based on my experiences, I would NEVER want to go back to using public transport. Maybe I am selfish, or maybe I just hate people, who knows, but being in the mass of humanity, at the whim of some government agency running the system, just doesn't sit with me. I know the freedom the car provides is in some ways an illusion. We still rely on public roads (most of the time) and gas stations are still a prerequisite, but I can't help breathing easier knowing that my car can take me any place I want to go and I can fix everything about it my self. It's a freedom thing, even if it's an illusion, a feeling that perhaps is hard to understand for someone from Europe (I am assuming).
I am not saying it is right or wrong, but it's inline with the mythology of America, and I like it. I do understand that diversity is important though, and there is no clear reason why there couldn't be more mixed use places like you describe. Perhaps if there were more places like Dublin (as you described, I'v never been) in US, more people could move there and be happy. All I am saying is I am happy with my car in South California, a place that's in general in love with their cars, and I am quite happy here. What can I say, different strokes for different folks.
It's interesting to compare experiences with you, actually. I actually am from northern California, and have lived in Berkeley, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Dublin (IE), and most recently San Diego (South Park). My favourite commutes were either long bike rides or short walks, with a long BART commute somewhere in the middle. My worst commutes, by far, have been inching along car-choked freeways.
I think it's great that you have the ability to choose your lifestyle, but the whole point is that your lifestyle is being very heavily subsidized by taxpayers. I consider this unfair, and I'm sick to death of paying for it all while being told cyclists like me are the ones freeloading.
I'm aiming to return to Dublin now after a year spent very much disliking San Diego. I hated the hostility and threats I got as a cyclist. I hated how over 100 of us spoke to the two-faced Todd Gloria and the rest of SANDAG to fight for one. damn. bike lane on University ave, and he shot it down because the Hillcrest Business Association insists on taxpayer-provided parking welfare, dead cyclists be damned. I hate how people just took it for granted that they should put alcohol-heavy events in places with no access to transit (though admittedly Lyft/Uber are options, albeit expensive). I routinely witnessed drunk, or at least not sober, people hopping in their cars and driving off. I hated that I went to the Greater Golden Hill planning meetings where homeowners baldly stated that the reason NO new housing should EVER be constructed ANYWHERE in their neighborhood is because it could mean that their already $800k+ homes might not rise in value quite as fast. I hated conversations that consisted of people bitching about how horrible cyclists are because you know that some of them run lights? Nevermind the drivers who blast down 30th St. at 40+, ignore stop signs, and often are likely drunk. I hated the fact that the only halfway-livable neighborhoods in SD (South Park, Little Italy, etc.) would be ILLEGAL to build now because of parking minimums - San Diego's distinctive residential design where several cottages are clustered around a man courtyard doesn't work when every damn home is forced to have two parking spots by law. I hated the fact that if you ever suggested SD was anything less than sheer fucking heaven people took HUGE offence, as though you'd insulted them personally.
Also, I like SD beer (especially Lost Abbey), but c'mon people just saying "omg let's make a 16% ABV quintuple IPA which is basically just hop tea" isn't actually that innovative.
First, I absolutely love San Diego, so their we will not be in agreement, in guess. On the other hand, it looks like we would be buddies when it comes to beer :) But let me just address a few points.
1. It's not nice to shit on the city you live in, unless it's constructive, of course. I hate it when people come to whatever place I happen to live in and proceed to tell me that it's crap. My reaction is always: "Why the fuck are you here than?" On the other hand if someone says, hey, I have this idea that worked in other places, maybe it could work here, I usually tend to listen. Not sure how you pitched your critique.
2. Bicycle riders are hated in San Diego for a good reason. For full disclosure, for the years I live in Downtown San Diego, I used a bicycle to get around a most of the time, though I also had a car and a motorcycle. Yes, I used to run lights, split lanes, and ride on side walks. But I can honestly say that in all that time I have never been beeped at, cussed at, or hated, and I went out of my way to not inconvenience people.
Many bicycle riders in San Diego are just like me. However, there is also a group in San Diego called Critical Mass. I am sorry if you belong to that group, I hope not, but I literally want to punch every member of that group in the face, and I have at least one of them on one occasion. They organize these rides where they get 500+ people and they ride on University or down Market street for 10 min straight, running every light and blocking traffic. And I am not even talking about car traffic. This one time I was WALKING home from Hillcrest, and I was trying to cross University. These fuckers decided to stage their protest and were riding through the red light on University and 4th. I needed to cross the damn street, the pedestrian crossing light was on, and I had the audacity to try to cross while they were having their little protest. This guy ran up to me and tried to stop me. It didn't work out well for him.
On another occasion I was driving my car and I noticed a guy on a bicycle (fixy, of course) riding behind me, weaving side to side, with both hands in the air, flipping off people behind him, screaming at the top of his lungs "bikes rule, fuck you all." I stopped of a red light. The guy was too busy flipping off people behind him to notice such trivial things as red lights, and crashed straight into me. Cause me no damage, but it was hilarious :)
So, in short, I love bicycles, I ride bicycles all the time, I used to defend people who ride bicycles and get in trouble for stupid shit with the police in court, and yet I also consider the San Diego Critical Mass to be a bunch of entitled douchebags who hurt the reputation of San Diego bicycle community.
3. As for the tax payers subsidizing my love for cars, they are also subsidizing other peoples choice to procreate, and I am not bitching about that. And before you say that there is value in education, I am strong believer that school is nothing more than 12 year long obedience training for kids. It's a place where smart and intelligent little kids become obedient little consumer whores with no ability to think for them selves. Oh, hold on, I am bitching about that ;) Ok, in that case most people in SD have cars, most pay taxes, so if it is an injustice, it's a small one by comparison to the above mentioned public school situation. To be honest, I am not against public schools as a concept, just against the fact that out public schools are little factories for cogs.
In any case, I love San Diego because it's close to Mexico (where one can still by antibiotics for your dog without a fucking prescription), it has amazing weather, generally nice people, amazing beach especially the one by UCSD :), and a good mix of people. Yeah, you have to have a car or a motorcycle to enjoy the city fully, but that's SoCal for you. Different strokes for different folks, like I said. I promise not to come to Dublin and demand that they have more parking, as long as you stop trying to take my precious parking away :) After all, isn't the best kind of voting is voting with your feet? It's too bad it's so difficult legally to do that.
PS: Currently I am living off the grid (relatively speaking, still have satellite internet, obviously) near JT, and love it here too. So I am not defending SD just because I live there, it's a good city. My favorite parts are OB, MB, and Bay Park. By least favorite, PB.
I have never been to Philadelphia, so I have to wonder, is it the case that people are moving out of city into the suburbs to raise kids strictly because of the school system, or is it simply that Philadelphia isn't really all that safe and nice for the kids. I grew up in Kiev, and with all of it's flaws, I never felt unsafe playing in the streets, and my parents (extremely over protective) never felt uncomfortable sending me out to play on the streets for hours at a time completely unsupervised, even as early as age 7. We lived in what would be considered the second ring of Kiev. Not the very center, but just outside the center. I would compare it to midtown areas like Lake View in Chicago. Having lived in a few places around US, I would only be comfortable sending out my kids (future) out to play like that in areas outside the city. Well, for one, having lived in places like Chicago, there really isn't that many places in the city to really send your kids to play in the first place. There are parks, but they are spread out enough where you have to walk for blocks to get to them, unless you are lucky enough to live next to one.
Again, never been to Philadelphia, so I am picturing it to be similar to Chicago. And if that's the case, perhaps it makes a bit of sense to move out when you are ready to raise your kids. Is it so wrong to start out in the city, have your fun, and move out to the suburbs in your middle years. Of course, I do agree that the problem is the School systems being paid for by the property taxes instead of by the state. The state should collect property taxes uniformly and then combine it with other taxes and distribute it to schools based on child population in each school district.
I am also not a really huge fan of the Suburbs in general to be honest. I like the idea of small towns rather then suburbs. The difference is, a small town would, and should, have it's own economic engine, local services, and everything else to cater to your life. That way you can actually live and work in the same place, and raise your kids. The problem is consolidation of industry. So many companies, especially tech companies, concentrate around one location, forcing high density living to be the ONLY answer. What about medium density living? What about spreading the employment centers a little more evenly, allowing for lower density, but without the need necessarily to always drive to work, and if you have to drive for some (medical perhaps) reasons, it could be 5 min commute at most. That would be the type of society I would strive to build, but I am not in in the business of building societies, and I am guessing plenty of people would disagree with me.
Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?
The main reasons for zoning are cultural. For some reason or another, US households and governments have a greater preference for income segregation (keeping apartments away from wealthy neighborhoods) and "quiet" residential areas.
The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions.
It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification.
You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.
Bingo. A lot of the configuration is rooted in our racial history. Even sans zoning, black people have chased white people to the suburbs, back downtown again, and basically all over the map.
You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.
Didn't mean the phrasing literally, as much as in parody. That said, there is an element of upwardly mobile African Americans seeking opportunities for their children. While they are not explicitly "chasing white people", this search frequently lands them in the same suburban locales.
You're ignoring the lions share of zoning which is really about safety and conforming to standards. People like the money they spend to mean stability. And that means nice neighborhoods of houses don't want certain businesses because of trucks, unfamiliar traffic which equal danger to pedestrians. Some don't care about lawns or flags or color as much but it turns out the most insufferable people end up being drawn to the hoa boards.
What's interesting is that the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article. However, words like "business interests", "income segregation", and "racial segregation" seem to show up quite a bit.
The problem is that glass factories are "adjacent to a 100-child daycare facility, two public schools (Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8), and a city park."
These factories have been emitting metals such as cadmium and arsenic into the air. As you can imagine, this being Portland, everyone is quite upset. And rightly so.
You can argue about the quantities of emission that any given plant should be allowed. But you can't argue that, for any given emission level, society as a whole is much better off if these factories aren't adjacent to daycare facilities and schools.
Keeping schools and factories separated is a very legitimate "safety" goal of zoning.
People are constantly having issues with Japan building freeways over their populated areas, going right through their rice fields. The only difference is nobody can claim racism because Japanese are homogeneous.
Zoning and building codes are usually totally separated. For example plenum cabling adherence is required in many localities for industrial, commercial and residential zones regardless of income level. As for safety you of course don't want a chemical plant next to say an elementary school, but generally that kind of zoning is not what leads to what urban planners refer to as "exclusionary zoning."
Planning is an American tradition since before the Constitution. Territories West of Pennsylvania were organized by surveying, the "township" was a square plot of land of fixed size (6mi square). This is reflected also in the square shaped of counties in many Western states, the squares of Chicago's layout, and the presence of many streets called "base line"
The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.
the argument i've heard is that the highway expansion made it possible to live farther away from cities, and the connection with the nuclear scare is that the highways were constructed with transporting nuclear weapons in mind
This is silly. USA is sprawled (and has been since before WW II) because the USA has far more territory (and far more territory per person) than any other temperate-region nation.
This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.
I live an American city which has many of the benefits of high density living. But I am also envious of ppl who live in the burbs who don't have to put up with noisy neighbors, const traffic outside your home, high crime rate, not having to walk to train stop on below freezing days, a yard for the dog, place for kids to play ect
This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc...
As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.
> This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc...
West Berekely has (last time I checked) a 45 ft limit on building heights. They also have deliberate dead ends to discourage driving on side streets. Piedmont forbids multi tenant buildings and has a time limit of two or three days before a citation can be issued for a resident's parked car staying in the same spot. My buddy was openly criticized by his neighbor in Piedmont for the way he managed his lawn, which was not neglected. These are absolutely issues of politics and discouraging undesirables to live elsewhere.
This is in East Bay, where we tend to consider ourselves progressive, and it's called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The Berkeley tactics are a blatant example of, "It's ok when we do it because we're special."
I'm unclear why you include Berkeley's traffic calming (blocking off side streets) in your litany of NIMBY issues. Discouraging people from driving on side streets is a pedestrian-and-density friendly strategy.
There absolutely are hordes of NIMBY tactics used in Berkeley politics, with nearly zero coherency, attempting to stop dense development especially downtown.
assume for the sake of argument there is a constant amount of traffic. You can spread it evenly or lump it together. So... Berkeley has a large number of extra-busy boulevards carrying traffic farther than it would ordinarily have to go?
otherwise, what is happening is traffic is being discouraged/encouraged overall which has economic consequences.
Those "deliberate dead ends" often include throughways for bikes and pedestrians, which means Berkeley is one of the most pleasant places in the bay to get around.
Where I grew up (northwestern PA), there are suburbs where you can get a few acres and city water hookup. We don't consider it truly rural until you have double digit acreage and a water well.
Yes its not racism. I don't know why so many people on here assume so. They prefer to believe what a Michael Moore tells them instead of viewing cities, groups as complex as they actually are.
You don't think it's racist that white people were given the loans that let them move to the suburbs and black people were denied those same loans and thus kept in projects?
Because redlining was often an explicitly racist choice.
> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.
> During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.
I just went back to Britain and was shocked by how quiet everywhere was. The only real exception being central London. Most of the places I visited have fairly similar density to the non-downtown part of SF where I now live.
I wonder what the reasons might be? Some ideas:
* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in
* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable
* Larger, louder cars and trucks
* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets
>* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in
No. With proper insulation and good windows, wood-frame houses are extremely quiet inside. And they don't collapse in earthquakes.
>* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable
>* Larger, louder cars and trucks
>* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The cars are probably the biggest factor, plus the fact that "cars" here are frequently giant noisy pickup trucks and SUVs.
Another factor is dogs. I've lived in several places where people have big noisy dogs they leave outside to bark for hours on end. I imagine that's not a big problem in Britain. Everyone in America just loves huge, smelly, noisy dogs that bark all the time.
You can have whatever you want in most places in the US. You can live in a high-density urban areas with good public transit and markets withing walking distance, you can live in suburban settings with supermarkets and strip malls, you can live in rural areas where your nearest neighbor is miles away.
Note that most experiments here with forced high-density living (the high-rise public housing most big cities built in the "urban renewal" era), were unmitigated disasters.
The US has very little truly mid-density mixed use space. We are not talking about housing projects. Here's Valparaiso Chile[1]. There are very few places in the US with that medium level of density (parts of Boston and SF definitely qualify), and they are almost universally very expensive.
That looks like a place that has all the negatives of the city (small, cramped apartment living spaces) combined with the negatives of the suburbs (too far away from things)
Not at all. Standard living arrangement was e.g. some friends who rented a 3 bedroom, maybe 1000 sq ft house for $500/month (total, plus maybe $40/m for utilities). It was under a minute walk from two little markets with fresh produce, meat, cheese and beer. A few minutes walk to multiple bars, take-out food, larger markets and restaurants. Health care is also far cheaper / fewer barriers to access.
So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.
> So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life.
That's about 1.4 times the median household income in Chile. You can have a pretty good middle class life in the US at 1.4 times the median household income too.
>So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.
I want to live in this magical under-employed paradise
Comments like those really reinforce to me the notion that Americans really do have it easy.
A Chilean from a subpar city like Valparaiso could make maybe like 4$/hr, with similar hollidays as in the US. Would never be able to pay 500$ a month for rent.
Also Valparaiso is a "touristic" city, or more accurately used to be one, so not many lucrative carreers to be had -I imagine that the second something pops out there all prices would go up, too. The reason it's medium denisty it's more likely because of the sismic activity in the area.
What?? You can't possibly believe that the us has little mid mix density. Its all over cities. You're just trying to claim that some scheme would work awesome if only we allowed it. Come off it.
Maybe it wasn't the wisest idea for the state to fund an Interstate Highways System and all it's associated infrastructure 50+ years ago. I've always wondered what the U.S. would look like had we not taken that route. I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious. Who knows, maybe we'd be taking cross-country trips in hyperloops instead of automobiles?
No, having an Interstate Highway system is a good thing. I don't know if not having one would have led to a communal hippy utopia or not but if it I certainly wouldn't want to live there. :)
I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious.
Harmonious? Do you not have neighbors?
It's impossible to have a moment's peace in even a suburban environment. Between cars driving around with absurdly powerful subwoofers making their presence literally felt for a quarter-mile everywhere they go, loud truck engines and mufflers made purposefully loud, incessant backup beepers even in the middle of the night, neighbors with no respect for other people, cheaply built apartments, dogs barking...the list goes on and on. Surely ancient Rome was noisy, but they didn't have machines, and they didn't have people roaming around operating devices whose sole purpose is to make enough noise to be heard inside people's homes for hundreds of meters in every direction.
It only takes a small percentage of the population doing things like this to make everyone else miserable. And good luck legislating against it when powerful lobbies operate on behalf of companies whose existence depends on the legality of operating said equipment without restriction.
People weren't meant to be crammed together and stacked on top of each other. People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?
> Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas
That's because the US has the most habitable land of any country. Russia, Canada and China are all technically larger but most of their population lives in their small habitable areas. The other European countries are not much larger than most US states.
This is a dubious claim - similar to the falsehood trotted out about how America can't do public transport because it's bigger than European countries.
The size of the country isn't playing in to people's commute distances. The scale of infrastructure within cities and towns does, though. If your zoning laws mean that the nearest place to buy a box of cereal is 2 miles from your house, and for that matter if density restrictions, height maximums, and parking minimums mean you have relatively few houses per acre, your city (to use the term generously) is not going to achieve anything resembling medium density.
There were other factors as well like car culture and white flight. Until the last decade living in cities was something anyone wealthy enough avoided because of the high crime rates.
Try moving to the northeast; you'll find things a bit more similar to France. I used to live in New Jersey and I lived just down the street from a convenience store with a pretty decent selection of stuff, and about a half-mile from a real full-size grocery store (though it closed while I lived there; not enough business). Northern NJ is full of small "townships" that have a downtown section not far away from housing. But remember, these places were mostly built almost a century ago; the house I lived in there was built in 1930. They did things really differently back then.
* Density doesnt mean it cant be green and beautiful
* Conversely, a lot of suburban yards are ugly and people dont spend much time in them, they just stay in the big box in the middle and enter and leave thru the garage.
I can fall in the yard in Nevada and only end up with grass stains. I can play catch with my child. Each "yard" has their merits, but a real yard to me is much more than either of those.
Of course people have their own yards. They might be smaller, and the houses might be smaller, and the roads smaller. But houses have yards literally everywhere in the UK, even London. Of course, in London the number of people who can afford a house is shrinking every day, so many have to settle for an apartment, and many of these do not have yards. But apartments with yards are available, and outside of London a house is the norm, and houses all have yards.
And yet the parent comment's experience holds, typically, for somebody living in a house with a yard in a majority of the UK.
That's more a function of a very limited amount of desirable inner city housing (because this doesn't apply "those" areas, which are very cheap) and the abundance of suburban housing.
but consider this: america was built by people trying to leave europe and to a lesser extent asia, not rebuild it elsewhere. and it worked great, until it stopped working (recently). i think we'll figure it out eventually, it just won't be for a while.
see the resurgence of city centers and farmer's markets, for example. also, for what it's worth, american cities that are forced into small areas because of water or economics (sf, ny, isolated parts of LA and chicago) result in a euro-like end result.
Part of me wants to be a loyal Bostonian and defend my hometown- most of the evils described in the article could be found in any other state, Republican- or Democrat-run alike. But the point about innovation rhetoric does strike true.
The "innovation district" is full of big pharma and etc companies that would have had an easy time finding offices anywhere; most of the time when the i-word is trotted out, its because someone is either offering tax breaks to some giant corporation to entice them to grace us with their presence, or launching some gaudy public cheerleading event that no one really cares about.
But substantial issues relating to the "creative class"? Such as, for instance, effective public transit? Suddenly the state and city can't spare a dime; its not a "priority"; students and post-car intellectuals (and, incidentally, the working class) are stuck paying through the nose to get on a subway that's broken again. Or, taking an Uber because its past midnight. (Late night service was great for the six months it lasted!)
There are other issues of a similar bent; there's a fight going on in Somerville (the neighborhood of MIT, Harvard, and Tufts students, now that Cambridge property deeds come platinum-plated) to allow more than four unrelated individuals to share a house. And they're facing fierce resistance.
Most of us who can head to the west coast at the first opportunity; Boston would be SF if it wasn't for its outright hostility to the bright minds pouring out of its universities. The scale of the wasted opportunity is staggering.
> But substantial issues relating to the "creative class"? Such as, for instance, effective public transit? Suddenly the state and city can't spare a dime; its not a "priority"; students and post-car intellectuals (and, incidentally, the working class) are stuck paying through the nose to get on a subway that's broken again. Or, taking an Uber because its past midnight. (Late night service was great for the six months it lasted!)
I couldn't agree more. The area just absolutely does not give a shit about infrastructure. It took Google coming into Kendall square to get the jacked up sidewalks and roads fixed outside of MIT, and the Longfellow bridge restoration project has been consistently extended. Meanwhile, up the block in Central square we have major Novartis, Takeda, J&J, and Pfizer research centers going in with no apparent consideration for how these workers will commute in and out. Cambridge seems more concerned with forcing people to use reusable bags for shopping than they are with actually instituting useful change.
Inequality in blue states flows from housing policy. Boomers propping up housing costs regardless of the societal impact. Sneering at meritistrocats won't put fish back in the sea for the people of New Bedford to catch, but allowing developers to build a ton of housing would create a lot of jobs for working people, help lower the largest expense of poor and working class people, and make it affordable for college students to stay.
As for public transit, the city and state certain can spare many dimes. What they can't spare is the ten billion dollars it would take to actually deal with the MBTA's debt and deferred maintenance. It absolutely has to be addressed, for the sake of the entire regional economy, but investments on that scale, when they are not immediately relevant to the lives of 4/5ths of voters, are... challenging. If killing off an expensive but lightly used late night service that accounted for 0.4% of trips makes it marginally easier to deal with the root issues, then it should be cut. The T had four years (not six months) to make late night service viable, they failed.
>There are other issues of a similar bent; there's a fight going on in Somerville (the neighborhood of MIT, Harvard, and Tufts students, now that Cambridge property deeds come platinum-plated) to allow more than four unrelated individuals to share a house. And they're facing fierce resistance.
Wait... there is!? Because my roommate just got a girlfriend, and when she stays over, that makes four of us. I should probably start attending public meetings about this.
> [T]here's a fight going on
> in Somerville...to allow more
> than four unrelated individuals
> to share a house. And they're
> facing fierce resistance.
As they should. The solution is not to cram 17 students into a house. The solution is to build more housing. Boston is full of slumlords who gouge students, landlords who resist new development because it would force them to provide decent living conditions at a reasonable profit.
The law is Boston reads "4 unrelated undergraduates". The fight is to change the language in Somerville to match (it reads "4 unrelated persons" now). It's about allowing found-families and co-ops, not students.
Indeed, the ideal solution would be to build more housing in the places and price-points where they're so in demand- but that's a large material effort. Lifting the 4-people restriction would just require the town government to stop actively trying to make life difficult for people.
And its also true, this kind of rule exists for a reason- in my experience, the sardine-student-housing lifestyle stops being fun at about 8 or 9 people to half as many bedrooms. But I guarantee you that Somerville is already full of such situations, and they're all much worse off because they're illegal- these people's landlords can get away with anything, because if their tenant's complain to the town everyone living in the building will get evicted.
This is a complex topic but the article is dead-on. Scott Alexander wrote years ago that the US has created a divide that he calls Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe that is far deeper than Dem vs. Repub - it's cultural.
Today it is extremely common for someone in the "blue tribe" to know no one who is in the "red tribe" - people who (to use a few stereotypes) are Christian, enjoy NASCAR, and unabashedly eat at chain restaurants. People in either tribe don't encounter each other daily and as a result both tribes have little understanding of each other's worlds or the number of people who are not in their tribe.
Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism recognizes this. The problem is that the tribal line now runs along an economic fault line. Red tribe hasn't been doing well - red states are full of disadvantaged people. Worse, because of identity politics they have been made "the other" and rendered relatively voiceless.
Liberalism can champion the disadvantaged but it has to approach them with solutions. As technological displacement of workers continues it is hard to see what they will be.
I am blue tribe but I flinch when I see my colleagues in the tech industry complain about things like the injustice of having to go to a whiteboard in an interview to get a job in a Crèche-like work environment with play-balls while people outside the industry are lucky to get jobs driving cars, cleaning tables, or lifting boxes without health insurance. We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.
Unfortunately I believe the rise of the fourth economic stage, an information based economy, has turned the US into a uncomfortably divided state, just as you described. The red tribe not only doesn't know any blue tribe members, but also only reads red tribe books, and watches red tribe television, and vice versa. Simply because there is a big enough market for it to exist and be profitable, the American people are divided in thought (at least with the information they consume, which eventually does lead to thoughts).
>Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism recognizes this.
No, it doesn't. The article points this out very eloquently. Bernie Sanders recognizes it, but he doesn't speak for most liberals, who are all excited to vote for Hillary and Goldman Sachs.
(And before anyone downvotes me for directly bashing a political candidate, go read the article; I'm just repeating what the article says. Don't like it, downvote the whole article.)
>We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.
This is absolutely right. As the article says, this is exactly why Trump is so popular right now: he's playing directly to the working class that's lucky to get a job lifting boxes without health insurance. The mainline Democrats are not: they're telling everyone how wonderful the economy is, how unemployment is at record-low levels, how wonderful Obamacare is, etc. All those platitudes aren't helping actual working-class people at all, and they're not seeing any of these benefits.
I'm an outsider to this, but Obamacare seems like a tentative half-step towards a sane healthcare system like the rest of the developed world has. And as far as I can tell the only reason it's a half-step is because the red-tribe has been convinced for decades that it would help African Americans and so voted for people who worked against it.
Trump could be seen as these red-tribe members realising they'd been duped, but it could also be seen as the Republicans losing control of the racism they cultivated to win those votes in the past.
>I'm an outsider to this, but Obamacare seems like a tentative half-step towards a sane healthcare system like the rest of the developed world has. And as far as I can tell the only reason it's a half-step is because the red-tribe has been convinced for decades that it would help African Americans and so voted for people who worked against it.
Nope. The deciding vote against a public health-care option was Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and well-graduated meritocrat from Yale Law.
To me it felt like a complete betrayal of what most people, who were for it, wanted. Most people I know regard it as a failure or at best a mess. I know I certainly had a very different system in mind. I will say that it seems to have benefited some however.
It seems to have helped some lower-income people in some states get coverage they couldn't afford otherwise, with the downside that everyone else's insurance rates have skyrocketed and the insurance companies have had record profits.
The whole thing was a stupid idea by a right-wing thinktank. It tries to help by establishing a cap on profits and spreading the costs around by requiring everyone to be insured, but it depended on states increasing their Medicaid eligibility, which red states did not. It did nothing to actually decrease the cost of care.
I consider it a mess, not a complete failure. The problem is that we only have one candidate who's serious about fixing the situation, and it's unlikely he's going to get his party's nomination. His competitor thinks this system is wonderful and defends it. On the other side, one guy wants to repeal it altogether and just screw over anyone who can't afford insurance, and with the other guy no one really knows what he's going to do because he keeps changing his position, though he did say something in favor of universal healthcare a while back, but his current website has switched to some standard lame Republican ideas about letting insurance companies compete over state lines, so they'll all just move to the least-regulated state like Wyoming.
The problem is that the "red tribe" happily sold out the members of the "blue tribe" that were closest to them. When automation decimated manual labor in the early 1980's, the "red tribe" happily took up their pitchforks and stabbed the "blue tribe". Now, nobody left in the "blue tribe" has any really solid reason to give a damn about anybody in the "red tribe".
> What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of society.
This rings true, and explains a couple of the key failings of modern American society. Liberals' wholesale embrace of meritocracy combined with their traditional alignment with public unions has manifested in this bizarre fixation with education. Education has become the sole means for achieving traditional liberal goals within the framework of meritocracy. That trend has directly resulted in the college bubble: a society where everybody spends inordinate amounts of money getting an education that for most of them is a waste if time.
More fundamentally, the leadership of the liberal establishment doesn't seem to really believe in the idea of a flat, egalitarian society. Among the liberal elite in San Francisco, D.C., Boston, etc, there is an intense disdain for the folks who form the backbone of the middle class in other industrialized countries: non-college educated blue and white collar workers. In places like Germany, you can get a white collar job and live a middle class life with just 16 years of formal education. In the U.S., even the liberals don't seem to think that is a desirable state of affairs.
It's worse because 1) even with the "best and brightest" in charge, we've had one disaster after another and 2) the "meritocracy" we have is horribly broken on its own terms. Making the meritocracy we imagine should exist would require fairly radical reforms in terms of taxes, redistribution, college funding and regulation, youth economic and educational support, and a whole host of other interventions that supporters of the present establishment find anywhere from distasteful to anathema.
"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."
"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."
- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites
There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.
You should go ahead and read Thomas Frank's book that he pulled this article from. He spends an entire chapter on how regulators and economists from the well-graduated "meritocratic" elite simply aren't held to any kind of empirical standard whatsoever. When they're wrong, they consider it as a civilizational mistake. It's only other people who can be individually incorrect and responsible for intellectual mistakes.
Chris Hayes' book is a favorite of mine, and critical to understanding the current paradigm. To those unfamiliar with the book, I recommend Aaron Swartz's review which I was lucky enough to read as my introduction to Chris Hayes: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron-sw...
From what I've seen they are it's primary critics. It was hardly liberals pushing Github to end meritocracy and adopt whatever it's adopting now (there isn't really a name for it). In various recent court cases (Fisher vs Texas, Ricci v DeStefano) it was usually liberals opposed to meritocracy. When high merit people get rewarded it's usually liberals criticizing this outcome.
I can't think of a single modern case where liberals push people to adopt purely merit based systems, in fact. They seem to want some sort of spoils system - the closest word I can think of is corporatism in the old Italian sense (I'm being very careful not to use an alternate term, see this reddit comment for a good explanation of why https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...).
(Lets also distinguish credentialism from meritocracy. The tech industry has something approaching the latter - we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.)
What's "our culture"? Most of the nerds I know are intensely liberal, enough so that I count as "conservative" simply for favoring Clinton over Sanders. And my social circle in nerdery is infosec, the gun-lovin'est of all the nerds.
There's a really silly rhetorical trick Eric Raymond likes to play, where the definition of a "hacker" devolves pretty much to that of someone who shares Raymond's politics. Seeing him try to deploy it over and over again has made me allergic to attempts to assumptively foreclose arguments with appeals to ill-defined group identity.
...Eric Raymond...Seeing him try to deploy it over and over again has made me allergic to attempts to assumptively foreclose arguments with appeals to ill-defined group identity
The point you are taking issue with is completely tangential to the main point. You could delete that sentence and the rest of the post wouldn't be affected.
Now I don't read ESR except when you or someone links to him on twitter and it sounds like it might be interesting (it rarely is). So maybe I'm missing something here. But do you actually assert that any of my claims are false? Or are you merely attempting to raise your status and lower mine by criticizing ESR and associating me with him?
> Why do you believe liberals embrace meritocracy?
It's a little hard to discuss this in this context because the article talks about different kinds of liberalism and different kinds of meritocracy, that without specifics the question is a bit meaningless.
In particular, the word meritocracy itself is hard to describe because it was originally coined as a joke, and specifically defined to mean something that is satirical, ill-defined, and even oxymoronic[1]. Then the question becomes exactly how much of a joke is meritocracy in each circumstance. Many would say that in the GitHub case, meritocracy was a very extreme kind of a joke as it wasn't even self-aware. It was like describing a king's court as meritocratic. The liberals of the kind Frank talks about would be appalled at calling that meritocracy, and would want a "true" meritocracy. Frank would say (as would Michael Young, the sociologist who coined the term in a satirical essay), that even "true" meritocracy is a joke (and is also just a spoils system).
In any case, meritocracy is (intentionally) too ill-defined for comparing different kinds, but I think it is clear from Frank's article that the new kind of professional-class liberals he's talking about is definitely in favor of some sort of meritocracy (which, for Frank, is a bad thing).
> we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.
That is a very ridiculous thing to say, as the vast majority of "our culture" is generally liberal. While libertarianism and other right-wing ideologies are more common in tech than in other professional occupations, it is still a small minority. In any case, the criticism from the left of the culture you describe is that there's nothing wrong with idolizing a self-taught ubergeek as long as you don't marginalize other groups with no less "merit".
[1]: After all, every system is some sort of meritocracy -- most people actually believed that noble-born people have more merit than commoners -- and so calling it that shows a lack of self-awareness more than anything else (especially as in all such systems, merit is something that is 90% due to luck of being born to the right family; this is almost as true for ubergeeks as it is for aristocrats).
16 years is a timeframe that requires tertiary eduction. The longest non-tertiary education I've heard of is 13: K-12. How are you breaking down 16 years into 'non-college' education for white-collar workers?
I'm genuinely curious: what is the alternative here? Keep taxis around? Encourage people to take more manufacturing jobs? These don't seem like sustainable or viable alternatives. Over the coming years, all jobs are going to require an element of creativity, innovation, and probably some degree of higher education (not necessarily university-based, but some form of specialized, knowledge-intensive learning).
This is something that is inevitable, and it's coming up fast. To the extent that we subsidize and protect dying industries to maintain the jobs of their workers, we hinder their retrainment in new professions and further entrench the inefficiencies of the past. In even the medium term, this is nothing but harmful.
Now, I think there are things that probably can and should be done to help these people get into new jobs. Subsidizing retraining and education, providing interim assistance to help them get through these periods, and maybe eventually even a universal basic income (fundamentally the economics of this probably don't make sense quite yet, but I think they will in the future). But what is fundamentally not ok, what is never ok, is shielding dying industries under the aegis of employment.
The word "inevitable" always makes me uneasy. I think it usually embodies an actual observation, combined with a certain agenda and/or a lack of imagination. That technological progress is inevitable is one thing; that it benefits mostly a certain class of people is another.
On a more philosophical level, I am not at all certain that efficiency should be society's goal[1], but I think that at least for the foreseeable future, fighting such unquestioned axioms is an uphill battle...
[1]: It's fascinating how long it took in the early modern period to convince society that efficiency is a desirable goal at all; see Max Weber's classic 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Ya, I grant you that 'inevitable' is probably too strong. But it does seem that way to me, and that also seems to be the prevailing opinion.
And, at the risk of misinterpreting you or putting words in your mouth, I think you may be interpreting 'efficiency' as necessarily squeezing more and more out of workers. And this is, in general, true. However, efficiency can also ultimately mean a society where people no longer have to work at all - where only a comparatively small number of people need to be engaged in intense knowledge work, and the rest of civilization can live entirely from the fruits of those people's labors, and the automated production processes they operate and advance.
> However, efficiency can also ultimately mean a society where people no longer have to work at all
Indeed, that is an interesting concept, but at this point in time that goal is still far off and somewhat utopic, and so the question is whether there is only one path towards that goal (assuming it is achievable, desirable, or even if it is inevitable), and what and who we choose to sacrifice in the meantime.
Ya, I agree. To me the right thing to do looks like this: Efficiency at some (possibly significant) cost to workers, and then use some of the fruits of that efficiency to subsidize the migration of those people to new jobs, or just subsidize their lives.
I suppose the way I see it efficiency is an absolute goal - the debate should be about what we do with the product of that efficiency.
I think that society is excellent at finding new ways to find things that we can classify as work. All our needs and wants may be possible to meet, but people will still believe that everyone must work.
If you want that as a goal, social change may be more important than technological change. Who controls the automation? A small set of people.
The globalization process has nearly run it's course. In the near future we're going to need to pick one: tariffs, redistribution, or poor-people-with-pitch-forks.
I agree completely. My choice is redistribution. Tariffs and pitch-forks both shrink the pie for everyone. Striving for efficiency and progress at all costs, and then redistributing the results seems like the clearly optimal path to me.
I have very little incentive to give to charity when 40%+ of my income goes to taxes. It seems like poor use of resources at that point. Primarily because there isn't a well developed charity industry for helping the poor as government has taken over this role. In Canada I know at least we have a well run medical system and some low-grade social support systems I'm already helping support.
If I had 10-20% extra income and there was a well-run Kiva style system for local poor people in my neighbourhood, I would definitely donate. Probably beyond that percentage.
> I have very little incentive to give to charity when 40%+ of my income goes to taxes. It seems like poor use of resources at that point.
Some would say that 40% is itself a poor use of resources. When examples of government inefficiency and outright incompetence surround us, I don't understand why people have such faith in it doing anything else well.
> Primarily because there isn't a well developed charity industry for helping the poor as government has taken over this role. If I had 20% extra income and there was a well-run Kiva style system for local poor people in my neighbourhood, I would definitely donate.
I don't know what your criteria are, but it seems to me that you're overlooking the innumerable local charities that quietly go about their work helping people every day, with minimal overhead compared to government-run programs. Are there any churches where you live? Do any of them have programs to feed or clothe the needy in the area? Any homeless shelters?
Imagine if half of the money you pay in taxes that goes to government-run aid programs were given to these local charities instead.
Are you familiar with the tragedy of the commons[1]? It does a good job of capturing the strategic dynamics at play here. One very effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is for everyone to get together agree to submit to a common set of rules. Do you see the analogy here?
Because i'm not interested in making incremental differences. If it's me or one other faceless person, i'll choose me. Call me selfish if you like, but if it's not part of a sweeping policy that furthers civilization generally, or i'm not rich enough to personally make a significant dent, it's just not all that appealing to me to make small incremental contributions.
Now, you can disagree with that philosophy of personal charity. I'm not even sure I agree with it - but it's really of no relevance to the point under discussion.
> I'm genuinely curious: what is the alternative here?
Basic income. It would cause some inflation, but it would mean everyone could at least afford the basics.
It would remove an entire class of complexity from the government by reducing paperwork associated with all other assistance programs.
Personally I'm in favor of funding it with pollution taxes, but there are other ways as well. If done properly it could be a net-zero program - money in = money out, by law.
Ya I do agree, which is why I mentioned it at the end of my comment :). However, basic income, elegant though it may be, is likely impractical at the scale that would be necessary, consider a quick calculation:
$1k/month for every US citizen over the age of 18. That's roughly 235 million people, each getting $12k/year. That's 2.8 trillion dollars. Just for the basic income, not funding any other part of government (for scale, the entire federal budget is currently 3.8 trillion).
I am optimistic about the UBI, and I think we would recover an enormous amount of those dollars in increased economic activity, but I think it's not quite ready for prime time yet. It needs to be tested on a small scale to see whether or not the purported economic benefits will materialize and in sufficient quantity to counter the enormous cost of such a program (though i'm optimistic that they may).
I think the alternative (and we can debate whether it's the right choice) is to regulate companies like Uber that are monopsonies for a segment (in this case Uber is the only buyer of Uber drivers, and works to reduce the elasticity of labor supply so drivers will stay with Uber). That could take the form of a minimum wage for drivers, or regulation that establishes a separate market for drivers that ridesharing platforms would need to all use.
The issue is not the job loss, but that the benefits of the disruption accrue not only accrue mainly with the employer, but are less valuable to the employer and the economy then the loss of taxable income and stable jobs. The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony isn't a bad read.
Uber has a monopsony on Uber drivers in the same way that Apple has a monopoly on selling Apple devices, which is to say, not for any useful definition of the term. Plenty of Uber drivers also drive for e.g. Lyft.
As the other commenter did I might quibble with your description of them as a monopsony, but I think the spirit of your criticism is valid.
And I agree, I think we should think very carefully about how these companies are taxed and regulated, because ultimately it does make sense for them to consolidate to a single provider. Especially so once they start using self-driving cars and stop employing drivers at all.
I think what we need to think very carefully about is how we distribute and deal with the gains of this massive step-change in efficiency we are about to experience / are experiencing. What we must not do though is allow fears about those gains to prevent us from attaining them.
In other words, if you're worried about the plight of laborers or drivers, tax Uber and just give them the money. Don't enact protectionist policies for the taxi industry.
Here's the other extreme - the liberalism of the working class, the Union Pacific Railroad. 150 years in business. 40,000 employees. 86% belong to a union. 20% are military veterans. UP claims 3 million hours a year of training time for their employees, and that's all paid time.
It's not an easy life. Here's a recruiting video.[1] They open by showing workers in a railroad yard in Chicago at 5:47 AM in a snowstorm. Management training starts with jobs like that. They show a management training session on how to deal with conflict. There's a lot of travel. One of the trainees says "UP operates in 23 states, and I went to 21 of them in my first year."
It's the total opposite of the "brogrammer" culture. Not only does UP hire many women, the women go out in the field, wearing all the heavy protective gear and doing hard work. UP is insistent about this.[2] It helps that they're a union shop, where employee discipline is formal. And this is in a culture much more macho than programming.
My wife refers to this problem as the Alan Shore Democrats (Alan Shore from Boston Legal TV Show). People who care about the plight of the working poor, but then you find out that they only do so to appease the poor so they don't rise up and revolt against the status quo.
It's the politics of fear. Democrats yell "Vote for me, I will keep those evil republicans from making abortion and being gay illegal." And the Republicans yell "Vote for me, I will keep those sodomites and baby killers in check." They paint the other side as evil, split the poor people in half, and stay in power. The truth is, they desperately need each other, because, if people stopped hating their neighbor for a second, and turned around, they might realize that they are being fucked by their elected officials on both sides.
They might even realise that you can't have only two parties represent a population of 300 million people in a multicultural society spread all the way across a continent, sea-to-sea.
This is a political story that has a chance of clearing the 'unusually interesting' bar so let's give it a try. Frank's model of the 'professional class' (a.k.a. top 10%) as the key socioeconomic faultline is an interesting one that deserves a good discussion. If the thread turns into partisan or ideological bickering, we'll demote it. Let's stay substantive.
Maybe OT, but I think the main difference between this story and many other stories on HN is that this story is overtly political, while many other stories (from basic income, through what kinds of technology investors should invest in, to Bitcoin and OSS project governance) are not any less political, just less self-aware of that fact. Actually, HN has more political stories than any other tech-oriented site I'm aware of. I believe that doing and talking about politics while claiming to be apolitical or being unaware of the politics involved just guarantees bad politics. Politics is the practice of affecting how power and resources are distributed in society, and doing/discussing "inadvertent" politics -- a staple of HN, IMO -- is often worse than "unconstructive", polarized, overtly political debates, because while the latter may be futile, the former actively blinds people to politics; it makes them less aware of their role in society.
The central premise of the article is faulty: That Democratic policies (or "Innovation Liberalism") created the divide between the wealthy and the working class in Massachusetts, when in fact it has always been the opposite: The divide was already there, and the party in power serves to maintain it while playing lip service to some ideals.
You may be right, but an article with a faulty central premise can still be interesting and worth discussing. It would be better to post your observation as a top-level comment and better still to make it engage more with the specific claims of the OP.
(It's also possible that that's not really Frank's central premise, given that this is a excerpt from a book on a larger topic.)
> Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. [...] Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities --- an Amazon warehouse that is now in the planning stages -- will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.
Let me get this straight. The elite are bad for taking away working class jobs in industrial sectors (jobs which could be so brutal to workers that they basically spurred the invention of the labor unions). But they are also bad when they create new working class jobs.
There is definitely a problem for working class people today. Maybe it feels better for people to believe that it's because today's politicians and business leaders are uniquely malfeasant. But it's not really accurate. Technology changes the picture and we have to figure out how to respond to that. Read about the Ludlow Massacre and try and tell me that industrial America was "the good old days."
At a 2014 celebration of Governor Patrick’s innovation leadership, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that “if you want to solve the economic problems of the U.S., create more entrepreneurs.”
I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I totally agree with Eric Schmidt here. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the growing incubator/accelerator industry, of which YC is at the vanguard, is one of the most hopeful, encouraging things happening in the world today. I think it's ridiculous that Paul Graham has to defend himself against charges of exacerbating inequality, when he's done as much as anyone to start the economy down a new path. (Disclosure: I have not applied to YC or any other accelerator, but I might in the future.)
So -- is this too much of a contradiction, to be what this author calls an "innovation liberal" while supporting a populist/socialist candidate?
Economic change, of the kind the US is now going through, is always wrenching and painful; there are always people on the back side of the curve who suffer. I think the challenge for government is to craft policies that support the changes, and those driving them, while not excessively punishing those left behind.
I think that broadly, the pendulum in the US has swung too far in the direction of minimizing the safety net in support of individual responsibility, and the surprising success the Sanders campaign is having -- Bernie himself did not think, a year ago, that he could get as far as he has -- shows that the public mood is starting to swing back the other way. I think that's healthy, to a point, and that's why I'm supporting him.
Let's not make this a discussion about Bernie, though. I recognize he is not perfect, and I'm not even 100% certain he would make a good President. I just think the issues he is raising deserve a larger hearing.
It always puzzles me to hear people say that they think the social safety net "pendulum" has been swinging too far in the direction of personal responsibility.
By any measure, social safety net spending is significantly higher than it has ever been. News comes out every day of some new government mandate like paid parental leave, paid personal days, etc.
The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.
Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.
We just passed a massive, expensive, entitlement known as Obamacare, which provides (or was supposed to) health insurance to everyone in America.
Obama, during his first term, passed a massive expansion of government-subsidized student loans.
We are in the process of a significant expansion of home loans for low income and people with dodgy credit.
Except for the very limited, bipartisan, welfare reform under President Clinton (which has since basically been reversed), I'm not aware of any shrinking of the welfare state that has happened in the last 20 years.
Not in constant dollars [0]. It peaked in 1968. It's a bit lower than that now -- if you accept the official inflation estimates, which some argue are understated.
> Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.
True, though as a percentage of GDP, Social Security hasn't increased that much since 1975 -- it reached 4% then, and is around 5% now. [1] I'll let you look up the numbers on Medicare and Medicaid.
The situation with the ACA is complicated -- it is costing some money in the short run, but (a) it's less than originally projected, and (b) more importantly, it does seem to be curbing healthcare inflation (something is, anyway).
All that said, your point that the welfare state hasn't been shrinking, either, is a fair one. Perhaps it's fairer to say -- as I think the OP is arguing -- that economic conditions, particularly since the Great Recession, and especially the fact that the middle class has been shrinking in recent years, put us in a situation where the need for the safety net is arguably greater than it had been until recently.
>Let's not make this a discussion about Bernie, though. I recognize he is not perfect, and I'm not even 100% certain he would make a good President.
I'm a Bernie supporter too, but I recognize this too, but the thing is, thanks to our crappy political system, he doesn't need to be a "good President", he just needs to be the least bad one. I don't worry about just how great a President he could be: I just know that with any of the other three in office, it's going to be somewhere between terrible and a complete disaster. With Bernie, I don't think he'll be terrible, and that's good enough for me.
But yeah, I'm hopeful: I think the issues he's raising do deserve a much larger hearing and I think the only way we're going to do that is by electing him. The establishment politicians don't want to raise those issues and at best want to give them a little lip service while dismissing them as "not politically feasible at this time".
You can understand a lot of "progressive" policy as devoted to screwing the white working class as hard as possible (and in fact a lot of the white working class does see it through that lens, which is why, eg, Trump sees such support from that demographic). For instance:
- Hollowing out icky manufacturing & extraction-sector jobs, while ensuring maximal support for FIRE & "knowledge sector" jobs via IP protections & lax regulations.
- Importing vast amounts of cheap labor to compete for service-sector jobs.
- Ensuring that "live in an expensive neighborhood" is the only mechanism to ensure your children go to vaunted "good schools" (or even safe schools).
- Devoting recurring two-minutes-hates to attacking their cultural symbols.
The main claim is that today's liberal establishment has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society’s wealth.
Instead, what today's liberal establishment really pines for, the author writes, is a more perfect meritocracy.
Unfortunately, there is no solidarity in a perfect meritocracy, for the ideology of meritocracy negates any esteem society's winners might feel for poorly educated, low-achieving losers.
The article reverses the cause and effect of Massachusetts' divide between the wealthy and the worker in order to lay the cause at the feed of the Democratic Party. Take the examples: Universities, Banks, and Large Companies (Mills in the past, Pharma today) were dominant well before the Democratic Party become dominant [1], and were not somehow made powerful as the result of Democratic policies alone. We've really always has a "________ of the rich", where the blank is either "liberalism" or "conservatism" depending on the current party in power.
"The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women."
OK so assume these top 62 people give all their money to the poor. 1.76 trillion is distributed among 3.5 billion people giving $502 each. the average net worth of these people goes from $500 to about $1000. 1 year later what will have happened? probably not much. These people will increase consumption somewhat, some might invest a bit, but mostly the money will just disappear.
Huge swathes of the population have minimal net worth, like many of my friends, and live happy, comfortable lives. If they had an extra $500 they would spend it quick. This isn't the rule obviously, and there is a lot of poverty, but these statements don't really quite give a true picture of the issue.
If 3.5 billion people were to spend $500 quick, that would give an enormous economic boost globally. Most of those people would probably spend it wisely, improve their lives considerably, start businesses etc.
I read it has been shown that simply giving money to the poorest people is a very effective way of stimulating the economy.
It opens with the assumption that everyone shares the author's policy prescriptions.
How can anyone write about politics and think that it's full of issues with only one obvious answer? Is it through screening all interactions to avoid anyone with different opinions?
And there's no reason to single Frank out on this. Why does almost everyone on both sides of the aisle write and talk about politics in exactly this way?
It's always interesting to see rich liberal cities like San Francisco because there is really no middle class. You are either making lots of money in IT or some other business or you can't afford your rent and are barely scraping by.
You don't see this as much in cities that are not as liberally run.
I don't think Thomas Frank would view the kind of rich SF is as a positive. It is more unequal than rich -- unequal with a peculiarly liberal flavor -- and I believe he would agree to causality (relating to the "new kind" of liberalism).
"Liberal" has always been a word so loaded with ambiguity it's practically meaningless.
Socially liberal is not the same as economically liberal is not the same as politically liberal is not the same as anti-authoritarian is not the same as Democrat. (And so on.)
In fact I think the argument comes down to four positions:
I want as much as possible and I don't see why I should care about anyone or anything else
I want as much as possible but I suppose I have to care a little about other people because otherwise the non-winners will kill me and eat me
Exploiting other people is morally wrong
Exploiting other people creates economically and politically disastrous network effects so it's important to allow people the economic freedom to move beyond exploitation
They should be clearly distinct. But in the US they're all tinged with rhetoric of crusading personal heroism and slightly manic social signalling, so it can be paradoxically hard to tell them apart.
Socialism is another of those words. If you say, "that country is socialist" no one has any idea what you're talking about, you have to explain it. So better to use a different word in the first place.
Detroit is a city historically run by Democrats and is a very affordable. Chicago is relatively affordable and historically is run by Democrats.
There will continue to be going to be growing levels of income inequality as automation continues to increase. Either we focus on solving that (Minimal Viable Income sounds like a plan) or we face a true million man March on DC.
I love it how all the comments to your post center about the infighting between democrats and republicans, and no one wants to talk about the hot potato that is automation. I am not sure if MVI would even be enough at this point. I strongly believe that we are heading for a complete, world wide, economic collapse within the next 30 years. The collapse will not be caused by our failure to correctly apply our current economic theories, but the complete invalidation of the basic economic principles on which those theories are based. To be clear, I am not arguing that capitalism is an invalid theory right now, but it will become invalid with automation, and very soon.
And before people rebut this argument with: "this has happened before, and people will just get education and find better jobs" I challenge you, please do, tell me, what job will you get when the robot/AI replaces you? The answer isn't to fear the future though, but to embrace it and figure out how to make it work for everyone. It's a little hard to do that, and to have this conversation, when the overwhelming majority of people refuse to consider this inevitability as even a possibility and dismiss it. Oh well, rent over.
This is a fantasy. Productivity growth is catastrophically low, and over the last 40 years has averaged about half of what it was in the 30 years before - and since the crash in 2008, been slower than at any time after WWII.
"An alarming result from this year’s estimates in The Conference Board Total Economy Database(TM) is that the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the productivity of labor and capital together, continues to hover around zero for the third year in a row, compared to an average rate of more than 1 percent from 1999-2006 and 0.5 percent from 2007-2012. The challenge on TFP growth is widespread across the globe. Most mature economies including the United States, the Euro Area and Japan show near zero or even negative TFP growth. In China, TFP growth has turned negative, and in India it is just above zero, at 0.2 percent. Both in Brazil and Mexico TFP growth continues to be negative, respectively at -2.3 and -1.7 percent."
It's not a myth, it's a fact. What you are talking about is the Productivity Paradox [1]. But it doesn't change the fact that we are standing on the edge of the AI cliff. You can not compare computer advancements till now, which concentrated mainly on making computers faster, with new efforts to make the same computers smarter.
Problem with these "million man marches", and other mass movements is, even when they are successful, one oppressive elite is just replaced by another.
If 'un-affordability' caused million man marches, then we'd already have seen a dozen of them in San Francisco.
The solution, building more housing, is simple, well-known, and obvious, but the people who live there don't want it because it will hurt their property values. It's a classic case of entrenched power vs newcomers.
I have trouble imagining a policy resembling basic income being politically feasible in the U.S. People who rely on the major entitlement programs already in place (medicare, medicaid, and social security) have very humble lifestyles, and despite this nearly all the political dialogue around these programs is reduction of benefits. A concept like basic income would require the government to collect more taxes on an order of magnitude greater than it already does; I really don't see that happening in our current political climate.
Detroit is more or less a smoking crater at the moment, and Chicago is a smoking crater to come. For that you can thank the wise, forward-thinking stewardship of the Democrats.
Oh please. Democrats dominate those areas because the Republican party has made the conscious decision to not engage city dwellers[1]. Instead, they're used as a foil against suburban voters- who, incidentally, are demanding more "urban-like" amenities from their local government (Like robust walkable downtowns, bike paths/lanes, green space, and non-chain stores)
As for rural voters... they have no national platform, with both parties disengaged. It's really a battle between the city and the suburbs.
[1] "New York Values" is a pejorative yet "Small Town Values" denotes virtue.
It's actually about values: guns, abortion, God, gays...
Jewishness is but a teeny tiny part of that, and this mostly because of things that aren't directly related to the faith. We don't see too many Jews protesting outside abortion clinics and complaining about gay marriage.
That's a simplistic interpretation of the facts. Detroit is a burned out shell of a city for a wide variety of reasons; very few of those reasons have much to do with local politicians. Trade agreements at the national level probably tell as much of the story as any individual element. But, strategic failures of US car makers also plays a role. And, a rapidly evolving global economic environment also plays a role.
Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.
Note that I'm not a Democrat and not defending politicians in any general case. But, I do think it's silly to make the claim that local Democrats caused Detroit's decline, when there are clearly so many other factors in the story.
Okay, but isn't it fair to say that making the unions too powerful was a key part of the story? That ultimately greatly damaged Detroit's ability to compete on the world stage.
Not to say that the automakers weren't also badly run -- they were. There's an NPR piece about NUMMI that puts some great color on the situation -- ah, here it is [0]. See especially "Act Two", where GM completely muffs bringing the NUMMI success to the rest of the company.
Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.
That's true, because if mismanagement caused a city to collapse, then San Francisco would be a ghost town by now. There are stinky things in city hall.
DHH lived in Denmark when he created the first version of Rails. He didn't move to the US until the end of 2005. He was employed by a Chicago-based company, though.
That 70-story high rise apartment building being built across the street is certainly a harbinger of doom. Chicago has its problems, but it has one of the most vibrant downtown's in the country (and unlike NYC, Boston, DC, or SF, it's affordable to the middle class)
I'm no expert, but I just searched "income distribution in san francisco" and found [1]. The chart labelled "Distribution of median household income in 2013 (number of people)" indicates a multimodal distribution of income. The smallest bar on the chart is the 50k-60k bucket - a traditional "middle class".
Of course, there's plenty to quibble about. I've never heard of city-data.com. Maybe this distribution looks more normal if you don't bucket everyone >200k together.
But I'm curious where you were headed with your comment. Is there a more important distribution that I just didn't find?
The bar plot available at your link isn't helpful. It's not just the $200k+ group: the width of the income buckets jumps around from bucket to bucket ($60k-$75k, then $75k-$100k), so of course it has weird structure!
My point is that whenever people start mentally divvying up the population discretely (introverts vs. extroverts, rich vs. poor, etc.), this is almost always a mistake; it's a projection of their mental map onto reality, when in fact the variable under discussion is almost always smoothly distributed.
I thought it was very helpful: in my mind a healthy society would have some sort of bayesian distribution in income, where most of the people would fall into the middle, few would be rich and few would be poor . These charts look nothing like that.
What Thomas Frank does not realize, or is ignoring, is that it's still the 'elite' who create jobs, and antipathy towards them won't improve the situation for the millions who are without work. The reality is, without job creators, most people wold fail, as the success rate for entrepreneurship is very low.
Not sure that the whole ideal of job creators really holds up in the light of day. Or rather job creators as 'elites' with enormous amounts of capitalism and economies of scale dont drive jobs growth.
I guess its a matter of scale... A single WalMart certainly employs less people and provides lower salaries than the 20 small businesses it replaces...
If by elite we are including the typical small business owners then yeah they are job creators...
If by elite we are talking the investor class executive class then not in aggreememt
It's complex because there are job creators, and there are bankers and investors who create value in the country, and generally make the world a better place.
At the same time, there are also corrupt thieves wearing corporate clothes, who destroy companies and sell them off in pieces; there are bankers who lie and cheat and buy laws to make them money; there are senators who use insider information on the stock market, or connections in other ways to make money.
So how to keep the good while getting rid of the bad? That is the central question.
I think there's a difference between the general store owner displaced by Walmart and the manufacturer of Widgets that has all these factory jobs everyone talks about do much; these factories require enormous of capital.
> Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? [...]
...
> Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work [...]
...
> [...] Frank does a typically brainy thing.
You usually don't see people review their own books from a third person viewpoint, or point out how brilliant or brainy they are. The few times I have seen that have been in contexts where they were obviously trying to project an image of a giant ego for humorous purposes. I'm not familiar enough with this author to know if that's what he's going for in this review, or if he is seriously praising himself.
Nah, you are mistaken, and the article has led you astray.
The writer who wrote a few introductory paragraphs to the large book excerpt is not Thomas Frank himself. It's not 100% explicit, but the person writing these laudatory words is almost certainly Tom Englehart, the editor of TomDispatch.
I've seen Thomas Frank speak and followed him for many years, since he and others founded the Baffler in Chicago in the late 80s. He's a Midwesterner through and through, grew up in suburban Kansas City, and has the characteristic modesty of the area.
That does appear to be the case, based on looking at some other reviews. It looks like it works like this, at least for authors who are TomsDispatch regulars:
1. Author Foo writes a book.
2. Tom Englehart writes a review, which consists of introductory material and then a long excerpt from the book.
3. Englehart's review appears on the site, but it says "Posted by Foo" at the top. The only mention of Englehart is that it says "Tom" in italics immediately after the last sentence of the introductory material.
4. At the bottom it says "Foo, a TomsDispatch regular, is the author of <name of book>".
5. At the bottom it says "Copyright <year> Foo".
Basically everything on the page except for that lone italicized "Tom" after the introductory material makes it look like Foo wrote the review. In the case where firstname_of(Foo) == "Tom", everything on the page makes it look like Foo wrote the review.
I googled some verbatim sentences from the review, and it seems like various aggregators/wires have picked it up, and at least several are bylining the review to Tom Engelhardt (the "tom" of tomdispatch.com) and not to Thomas Frank himself. So maybe that's it. Here's one:
Maybe if the Republicans weren't in the pockets of anti science right wing religious nuts and climate change deniers, the well educated would be more willing to consider them?
All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs, mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive chain stores.
I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram line."
The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.