Does anyone out there have access to an archive of Time Magazine articles? I’m interested in this one.
Author: stevereads
…about The Great Inversion, I’d direct you to the episode of The Weeds dealing with gentrification (inter alia). The Weeds is a podcast on the Panoply Network, which also hosts the quite excellent Amicus podcast starring Dahlia Lithwick. The Weeds features three people from Vox: Matt Yglesias, Sarah Kliff, and Ezra Klein. It has rapidly become my favorite podcast, and I eagerly listen to every new episode right when it comes out.
In the gentrification episode, Yglesias makes the point that there are lots of cities that would dream of experiencing a “great inversion”, where wealthy people move in and poor people move out. When we talk about a great inversion (which, as I mentioned in the aforelinked review of the book, should more accurately be called a “marginal inversion”), we’re really talking about a small number of cities on the coasts: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, L.A. … maybe 15 cities if we were really generous about it. We’re not talking about Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo or Hartford or Erie. And when we’re talking about this “great” inversion, we’re really talking about a fraction of the rich people within those cities’ metro areas. But the media, the political system, and (I’m looking at you, San Francisco) too much elite discourse are dominated by people living on the coasts, so it’s not surprising that we’d be talking about a great inversion.
Now, granted, I’ve not looked at the data on this. Maybe Toledo and Gary are marginally inverting just as well as San Francisco and Boston. And maybe it’s more than marginal in New York and L.A. But my hunch is that it’s not. And The Great Inversion didn’t offer evidence in support of its claim.
This is a quick question. I read The Protestant Ethic a while ago, and found it very uninteresting. But everyone says that Weber is one of the founders of sociology. Francis Fukuyama’s most recent two books are entirely framed around Weber — specifically, that governments have reached their ideal form when they evolve out of clientelistic, patronage-based rule into professional, bureaucratized, meritocratic administration. As I recall, Fukuyama gave many hat tips to Weber’s Economy and Society; it seems to be Weber’s summa.
However, starting with Economy and Society wasn’t the right way to go. It’s a massive two-volume work, and I recall that it was actually lecture notes assembled by his students; it very much seems to be sociology for sociologists.
So my big-picture question is: how would you recommend that I get into Weber, assuming that he’s worth getting into? I hope the professional sociologists in the room don’t think that my dismissal of The Protestant Ethic is heresy; I’d be surprised if they did, so consequently I’d be surprised if they thought that that book was the proper entrée into Weber’s work.
So what is the right entry point? I am perfectly willing to read multiple books, if that’s what needs doing, and if the payoff justifies the investment. And of course, if the right answer is to start with secondary works — or to read secondary works in parallel with the primary works — I can absolutely do that.
(Those of you who think that the correct answer is “take a class” are probably right. However, my employer is not likely to pay for me to enroll in a sociology class. Hence: to the library we go.)
I’m reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, prompted in part by the 99% Invisible episode about the origins of Monopoly (the board game), but more prompted by having seen him cited many, many times; at the latest, I first saw him cited when I read The Worldly Philosophers as a callow youth.
Most of the attention the book gets is from its focus on land and the single tax. But I was really struck just now by his attack on Malthus. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve seen Malthus cited not quite approvingly, but more as though he had proven some basic truths about the universe that were beyond all questioning. The Malthusian idea, of course, is that humanity will always remain teetering on a knife’s edge: whenever we accumulate a little extra in agricultural surplus, we immediately fritter it away by making more children, who consume all the surplus and return us to conditions of famine. The most anyone bothers to engage with this idea is to say that it used to be true, that it stopped being true at the Industrial Revolution, and that Malthus was unlucky enough to have written it five or ten seconds before the Industrial Revolution really got going in the early 19th century.
George rejects the whole Malthusian idea. As far as I’ve read, he doesn’t reject it because it’s obviously false, but rather because there’s no evidence that it’s true. The examples Malthus apparently cites are India, Ireland, and China, all of which — George says — are examples of famine caused by the intercession of a brutal government. (George disdains equally the Mughals and the Raj.) It may well be that humanity eventually reaches the carrying capacity of the land, kills itself off through famine, rebuild its numbers, and repeats the whole bloody cycle, but we’ve certainly (George says) not yet seen this pattern.
It embarrasses me that I’ve never read Malthus himself. Indeed, it embarrasses me that I’ve never even read anyone who questioned Malthus all that much. Gregory Clark’s annoying A Farewell To Alms more or less takes Malthus for granted, then explains that we in the UK and its dominions escaped the Malthusian curse by good old-fashioned Protestant self-abnegation. Malthus is alive and well; Henry George, 150 or so years ago, tells us that he shouldn’t be.
More generally, George feels that Malthus and his ilk are yet more examples of people ascribing the sad fate of the poor to their bestial natures rather than to the institutions that continually grind them into the dirt. My having accidentally gone along with this is what embarrasses me the most.
…I want them to know that Donald Trump by no means had all of the U.S.’s support. In fact, many (most?) of us thought that he was a virulent racist who tapped into the worst parts of American society.
I need to do more and write more about this monster, but I wanted to write down something.
As is so often the case, this is a book whose argument I can accept up to a point; past that point, it’s not an argument, but rather wishful thinking.
The analytical core of the book is the observation that we used to live in a society where the wealthy lived in the suburbs while the inner city was for poor folks; today, when the wealthy choose to live anywhere, they choose to live in dense, walkable cities. The suburbs, meanwhile, are where new immigrants land. We’re experiencing a “great inversion” whereby the suburbs and the cities switch roles.
Well, hold up. What about the schools? The relatively affluent people I know are, at the very least, concerned about the quality of inner-city public schools. Lots of people in the Boston area move to Lexington or further out because the schools there are better. Ehrenhalt replies to this in a couple ways. First he says, intriguingly, “I think these people have it backward. The schools improve after the middle class arrives” (Kindle location 135). Unfortunately, I didn’t see any followup to this elsewhere in the book. The rest of the book is a survey of different kinds of cities and neighborhoods around the U.S., from Cleveland Heights, Ohio to Phoenix, Arizona to lower Manhattan to Philadelphia. I certainly hope Ehrenhalt’s schooling hypothesis is true; I’d love to see Boston’s public schools recover from their decades of white abandonment. But I see no further discussion of his hypothesis anywhere in the book.
Ehrenhalt’s second (implicit) reply to the schooling issue is more believable: the wealthy who are moving into the cities are either those without kids — childless young people or empty nesters — or families that form later in life and have fewer kids.
He repeatedly emphasizes that he doesn’t really know how this inversion will play out. E.g.,
We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings will have the option of living wherever they want, and many—we can only guess how many—will decide in favor of central cities and against distant suburbs.
Or
The real essence of demographic inversion is based not on numbers but on choice. Increasingly over the past decade, both before and during the recession, people with the resources to live wherever they wished began choosing to live near the urban center — just as Viennese, Parisians, and Londoners at the turn of the previous century elected to do.
(emphasis mine in both quotes)
“Based not on numbers but on choice” is an important tell. It says that he doesn’t have the numbers. And that’s fine! This book shouldn’t have been trying to make an argument about the direction of social change; I don’t think I’m smart enough to forecast the vector sum of that change, and I think Ehrenhalt realizes that he isn’t, either.
The truth is probably really boring. I analogize it to presidential elections: if one candidate beats another by a margin of 55% to 45%, we would consider that a landslide. But it’s still 55-45. The country is still basically half Republican and half Democrat, with some people peeled off at the margins in one direction or the other. It may be the same with the move towards or away from suburbs: a few more people may choose to move to the cities. But The Marginal Inversion would have been a rather less powerful title.
I’d gladly take this book with the weak predictions excised. What would be left is a perfectly lovely tour of a few American cities and their own peculiar approaches to growth. New York managed to fill up the financial district in lower Manhattan with actual residents. Phoenix, on the other hand, is trying (at some scale) to fill in its historic sprawl, with mixed results. Ehrenhalt paints a rather depressing portrait of Philadelphia, which matches up with my own experiences there: Center City is lovely and thriving, while much of the rest is a boarded-up wasteland; Ehrenhalt says that locals sometimes refer to it as “Bostroit” for this reason.
As a series of sketches of interesting cities, this book is lovely; as quantitative forecast, it falls flat on its face. And I have a hard time believing that any serious attempt at making this sort of forecast would grab any headlines at all. One of the much-cited inputs to this “people are fleeing the suburbs” story, for instance, is that “millennials” are increasingly shunning cars. But look at the graph in there:
90% or so of “Millennials” (I despise that label, and as I get older I come more and more to despise generational labels in general) drive cars at least once a week; their parents, and the generation in between, drive cars 95% of the time. The difference between 90% and 95% is a slender reed off of which to hang an argument about social change.
Or let’s compare a few counties around Massachusetts and New York: mostly suburban Westchester grew by 2.5% recently, while New York as a whole grew by 1.9%; Kings County (Brooklyn) grew by 4.7%; suburban Norfolk County, Massachusetts grew by 3.2%, to the Commonwealth-wide average of 3.0%; Suffolk County (Boston) grew by 6.3%, while Middlesex County (some of the denser parts of Metro Boston, such as Cambridge and Somerville, plus some distant suburbs) grew by 4.5%. Finally, Worcester County grew by 1.9%.
What’s the takeaway from all this? Nothing too exciting, to my eye: some people like living in cities, and some like living in suburbs. Both are doing reasonably well. There’s no landslide toward one or the other in any objective sense: it’s not as though the population of the suburbs is declining, or that the population of Northeastern cities is growing at a double-digit pace. To put it in context, Houston’s growth rate blows away the Northeast’s, even while its density is something like a quarter of a typical northeastern city’s. Likewise with Phoenix.
The claims for a great urban revival, it turns out, need to be hemmed in, bit by bit, with caveats and to-be-sures. “Millennials” might be moving away from cars, but if that’s happening it’s in small amounts; the move away from cars might also reverse itself as “millennials” get better jobs and have kids. (I’ve not seen any data that compares older generations and “millennials” at the same stage of life; what I’ve seen compares “millennials” now to older folks now.) Southwestern cities that northeastern liberal élites such as myself would scoff at continue to thrive, as they have for decades. Suburban counties continue to do just fine. Urban public school districts show no signs of significant improvement. Boston’s population still has a long way to go to return to its 1950 level. Urban development is still being hampered by restrictive development policies that forbid northeastern cities to grow in the only direction they have left, namely up. Gas is still too cheap. Roads and parking are still massively subsidized, and mass transit is still being starved. The one bit of data I feel more comfortable about is that cities really have become safer over the last couple decades, for reasons that I gather no one really knows.
You might hypothesize some long-term changes here. Maybe the U.S. government will eventually realize that a carbon tax is the smartest way out of its fiscal problems; maybe northeastern zoning will eventually get with the program; maybe, for reasons unspecified, “millennials” really are done with cars: Ehrenhalt writes that it “seems likely … that more of the social life of the next adult cohort, compared to that of the previous one, will be lived in a public realm, not a closed-off private one, in a more active and vibrant streetscape and in parks and other public spaces”, but really offers no convincing evidence for this claim. (Also, is the apartment I live in a closed-off private realm? Does my generation spend more time in parks than previous generations did? When I sit in a coffeeshop working with my headphones on, am I in a public realm or a private one? And where is Robert Putnam when you need him?)
I am deliberately being a killjoy here. I read a lot of books and essays and blog posts by people who love northeastern-style cities as much as I do, and they are too often filled with wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is quite useful — I personally pray that when it comes time for me to have kids, I’ll be able to send them to a quality public school rather than move to an inner suburb on the commuter rail — but a wish is not the same thing as a plan, nor is it the same thing as data.
I am also making a meta-point: you should be especially critical of ideas that you are predisposed to believe in. Don’t let wishful thinking get between you and the world.
On the other hand, I absolutely understand that there’s a difference between what members of a movement say to themselves and what they say to the outside world. Within a movement, people can, should, and very often do express reservations about the direction of the movement; to the outside world, any such doubt would be counterproductive. I get that. To the extent that Ehrenhalt’s book is trying to be part of the walkable-urbanism movement, maybe it’s justified in expressing certainty where there is little to be had.
So let’s take books like The Great Inversion for what they are: expressions of a wish. They are trying to be part of a movement for walkable urbanism, of which Matt Yglesias’s The Rent Is Too Damn High and Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking are a part. I wish them all the luck in the world as they try to form that movement, and I hope to be part of it.
…I give you a proof that by the n-th day of Christmas, the singer’s true love had given him or her n(n+1)(n+2)/6 gifts. In particular, in n=12 days he or she receives 364 gifts; if Christmas lasted all year, he or she would receive 8,171,255 gifts.
You are welcome.
A friend asked a probability question today (viz., if you roll six dice, what’s the probability that at least one of them comes up a 1 or a 5?), so I answered it analytically and then wrote a quick Python simulation to test my analytical answer. That’s all fine, but what annoys me is how serial my code is. It’s serial for a couple reasons:
- The Python GIL.
- Even if the GIL magically disappeared tomorrow, I’ve got a for-loop in there that’s going to necessarily run serially. I’m running 10 million serial iterations of the “roll six dice” experiment; if I could use all the cores on my quad-core MacBook Pro, this code would run four times as fast — or, better yet, I could run four times as many trials in the same amount of time. More trials is more better.
Most of the code uses list comprehensions as $DEITY intended, and I always imagine that a list comprehension is a poor man’s SQL — i.e., it’s Python’s way of having you explain what you want rather than how you want to get it. If the GIL disappeared, I like to think that the Python SufficientlySmartCompiler would turn all those list comprehensions parallel.
Last I knew, the state of the art in making Python actually use all your cores was to spawn separate processes using the multiprocessing library. Is that still the hotness?
I want parallelism built in at the language level, à la list comprehensions, so that I don’t need to fuss with multiprocessing. “This needs to spawn off a separate process, because of the GIL” is one of the implementation details I’m looking to ignore when I write list comprehensions. I’d have no problem writing some backend multiprocessing code, if it gets buried so far down that I don’t need to think about the backend details in everyday coding, but what I really want is to bake in parallel idioms from the ground up.
Thinking about what you want rather than how you want to obtain it is why I love SQL, and it’s why LINQ seems like a really good idea (though I’ve never used it). But even the versions of SQL that I work with require a bit more fussing with implementation details than I’d like. For instance, inner joins are expensive, so we only join two tables at a time. So if I know that I want tables A, B, and C, I need to create two sub-tables: one that joins A and B, and another that joins A-and-B with C. And for whatever reason, the SQL variants I use need me to be explicit about all the pairwise join conditions — i.e., I need to do
select A.foo foo
from A, B, C
where A.foo = B.foo
and B.foo = C.bar
and A.foo = C.bar
even though that final and-condition follows logically from the first two. And I can’t just do “select foo” here, or SQL would complain that ‘”foo” is ambiguous’. But if A.foo and B.foo are equivalent — as the SELECT statement says — then it doesn’t matter whether my mentioning “foo” means “A.foo” or “B.foo”.
The extent of my knowledge of declarative programming is basically everything I wrote above. I don’t even know if “declarative programming” captures all and only the things I’m interested in. I want optimization with limited effort on my part (e.g., SQL turns my query into a query plan that it then turns into an optimized set of instructions). I also want minimal overhead — a minimal gap between what I’m thinking and what I have to type as code; that’s why I hate Java. Granted, if adding overhead in the form of compiler hints will lead to optimizations, then great; I’d hardly even call that “overhead.”
At a practical level, I’d like to know how to implement all of this in Python — or, hell, in bash or Perl, if it’s easy enough.
My partner and I are obsessed with Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbooks. We have nearly all of them: Jerusalem, Plenty, Plenty More, and now NOPI. They’re all astonishing. The two Plenties are particularly great for vegetarians: they’re 100% vegetarian-friendly, and they’re all what you might call modern vegetarian. Up until at least 1990, and probably more recently (pre-modern), the “vegetarian option” in a restaurant or at a wedding was something really boring like roasted vegetables or pasta with something boring on it. There’s a virtuous circle here: the more interesting vegetarian options are available, the more appealing it is to be a vegetarian (or at least, the less appalling it is to skip meat at a meal), which in turn leads to more people eating vegetarian food, which leads to a greater market for vegetarian cookbooks and vegetarian meals in restaurants, which leads to restaurants and authors producing more desirable options for vegetarians. Ottolenghi is at the head of this generation of vegetarian-friendly restaurateurs and authors.
NOPI is a bit of a different cookbook: he starts with recipes that he makes in the book’s namesake London restaurant, and adapts them for the home kitchen, rather than starting with the home cook in mind. (Ottolenghi gets into this in a recent interview on the Bon Appétit podcast.) I would like to single out one such recipe from his restaurant, which seemingly isn’t on the Internet yet: the savory cheesecake made with queso de Valdeón. It is spectacular; you can find the recipe if you use Amazon’s Search-Inside-the-Book feature, and look for the word ‘Valdeon’ (the search feature is smart enough that you can leave off the accent and it’ll know what you mean). The only reason I didn’t eat the whole thing within 24 hours was that I have a modicum (and only just) of restraint.
The cookbook says that the recipe isn’t easy, but I thought it was. Just run some digestive biscuits, some Parmesan, and some toasted pumpkin seeds through a food processor, press them down into a spring-form pan like you would for an ordinary sweet cheesecake; then caramelize some leeks, add a few kinds of cheese (again, same as for a sweet cheesecake), blend the cheese-and-leeks together with a mixer, pour into the spring-form pan, and bake until it’s set. There’s a step in the recipe where you pickle some beets and let them sit in the fridge for at least 24 hours, but that’s time-consuming rather than hard. It’s also not strictly necessary; when I brought the cheesecake to work for lunch, I didn’t bother carrying the beets with me, and it tasted extraordinary even without them. Oh, and I didn’t make the cheesecakes in individual ramekins, because I don’t own any; I followed the instructions for a single large cheesecake. Maybe the recipe would work in a jumbo muffin pan, which I do have. But if you have a spring-form pan, in any case, you’re set.
The NOPI book fills a certain fancy niche. It doesn’t have much for everyday vegetarian meals, but it does have sections for cocktails, desserts, and brunches, all of which look delicious. The few vegetarian dinners that it does have are well-curated.
If you’re just getting started with Ottolenghi, I’d recommend trying Plenty and Plenty More first. They’re indispensable.
I saw the headline The unemployment rate doubled under Bush. It’s fallen by more than one-third under Obama. when I was reading Vox this morning, and I got ready to bust out the stat that “the labor-force participation rate is still way down” — as indeed it is:
That is, the fraction of Americans working hit its peak under Clinton, fell under Bush, really fell when the housing bubble popped, and hasn’t really recovered.
Some of that drop can come from young people deciding to stay in school and get graduate degrees when the economy is doing poorly, or from older people deciding to retire early. So what if you focus on ages 25 to 54, i.e., the “prime-age labor-force participation rate”? The story there is somewhat better:
The rate still took a noticeable hit in 2008, but we’ve regained some ground. Let’s zoom in on the period starting in 2005:
Moving slowly in the right direction. Now, much of the gain since 1948 can be attributed, one assumes, to women entering the workforce. Do the data bear that out? Seemingly yes:
That’s interesting: women’s labor-force participation seems to have flat-lined starting in 1990. Why? And what can be done to get it moving again?
On the flip side, how about the male labor-force participation rate? That’s quite striking:
It has decreased more or less continuously since 1960.
There’s no real moral here. I just find it interesting that, as you dig into the data, there’s something more going on than a story about the 2009 recession. Seems like, recession or not, men are leaving the workforce. And women aren’t entering it fast enough to offset that drop.
P.S.: A friend asks whether labor-force participation is really an end in itself. The short answer is probably “No, though it’s a good proxy for what we actually care about.”
Perhaps, for instance, people choose to stop working because they want to be full-time parents. Let’s call that a “happy” labor-force detachment. On the other hand, perhaps they drop out of the labor force because they know they’ll never get a job. Or maybe (I’ve seen this happen a lot) they’re mothers who want to spend time with their kids, but the only jobs that they could get would hardly cover the cost of child care; they want to work, but for economic reasons they choose not to. Call that a “sad” labor-force detachment: they’d like to work, but can’t.
It’s going to be hard to measure this in full detail, of course, and there are going to be almost as many boundary cases as there are people who aren’t working. But if you want to measure “how is the economy doing?” you have to set your boundaries somewhere. That’s why the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a number of different measures of unemployment:
U-1, persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
U-2, job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
U-3, total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (this is the definition used for the official unemployment rate);
U-4, total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers;
U-5, total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers; and
U-6, total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
U-6, for instance, has improved noticeably over the last few years.
There are a lot of terms in here with precise definitions, and the definitions matter, and you need to think carefully about what you’re counting and aren’t. For instance, what does “civilian labor force” mean? Who’s in it and who’s not? This isn’t secret or mysterious at all; the BLS explains it in clear language. Here you go:
Civilian noninstitutional population: Persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, who are not inmates of institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.
Civilian labor force: All persons in the civilian noninstitutional population classified as either employed or unemployed.
Note well: this means that if you’re in prison, you’re not part of the labor force. This is where unemployment definitions intersect with Becky Pettit’s Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress. To put it briefly: if every single black man but one were in prison, and that remaining black man had a job, then by the official statistics the unemployment rate among black males would be zero. Obviously we would consider this situation horrifying. So “a low rate of unemployment” is not necessarily synonymous with “a happy economy”. Maybe we want to add the institutionalized population to the current definition of the labor force. Or maybe not: those in prison surely cannot work and are not looking for work. And if we’re going to add those who can’t work for reasons of imprisonment, why then wouldn’t we add back lots of other people who cannot work and aren’t looking for work because, e.g., they’re permanently disabled? It’s certainly useful to measure all such populations. Different data series have different uses. Probably the best you can say is that different questions require different sorts of data, that no one data series can answer all questions, that you really need to look carefully at multiple sources of data, and that you should carefully look at the assumptions embedded in each.
What if you count the total civilian labor force (which, again, includes the noninstitutionalized population) and divide it by the overall population? You get this:
Earlier, we were tallying the “labor force participation rate”, which is defined as “The labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population.” As more people are imprisoned (“institutionalized”) or enter the military (i.e., they’re no longer “civilian”), the denominator goes down, which means the participation rate goes up. Whereas if you divide by the total population, an increasing prison population would cause the participation rate to decrease — arguably closer to what we actually want.
Again, this graph is likely dominated by women’s entry into the workforce. FRED seems to track the right thing here, namely the employment-to-population ratio over time for males. In the numerator, that’s going to include men who choose to stay in school longer, and men who choose to retire early, so one wants the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age males. In the denominator, it’s going to include the full U.S. population rather than just the labor force, so the ratio will decrease as more black men are imprisoned. FRED has the correct series, seemingly, but it’s via a different (OECD) data source that I’ve not dug into yet. It has the parallel data source for females.
The moral is just that there are many ways to measure unemployment, and which measure you pick will depend on which question you want answered. If you want to measure whether people are opting out of the labor force for happy reasons or sad reasons, the government tracks that. If you hear someone say that government statistics are bunk and that they don’t address Objection Objection x, your first assumption should be that the speaker is wrong.
Steve Reads 
