Steve Reads

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Reading Donald Shoup really changes subsequent reading — October 26, 2015

Reading Donald Shoup really changes subsequent reading

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Having read The High Cost Of Free Parking changes the way you read articles about parking. For instance, when you read an article like this, containing a quote like this:

On the campaign trail two years ago, Walsh pledged to look for ways to increase parking spots in city neighborhoods.

“We have to try to make parking more accessible,” Walsh told the Herald in September 2013. “I hear it every single day out on the campaign, the lack of parking. It’s an issue in every single neighborhood.”

, you realize that there’s a missing implicit word in there. The word is ‘free’. The newspaper — and maybe vintage-2013 Mayor Walsh — seem to assume that free on-street parking is a god-given right. Whereas if you admit the possibility of charging for parking, another solution leaps out: you can make parking accessible by charging for spaces. Some people will choose not to own cars. Some people will pay to put their cars in off-street parking. Then you’ll get your accessible parking.

I think vintage-2015 Mayor Walsh gets it. The article centers on residents’ anger over the city’s leasing parking spots to the likes of Zipcar. Mayor Walsh responds exactly as he should:

“The way that we’re doing this is to cut down actually on people having to own cars and driving cars and in the long run, it’ll actually save cars coming into the North End. People will be able to take a car and share community cars.”

There’s what you might call a “fallacy of simplicity” in people’s reactions to a lot of policies, including this one. The fallacy of simplicity says that if you want to achieve x, the way to do it is to do something whose immediate effect is x. Want to increase parking? Simple: dedicate more land to parking spaces. (Harder, and more likely to be correct: make it easier for people to live in a city without owning a car.) Want to cut the Federal budget deficit during a recession? Simple: cut spending. (Harder, and more likely to be correct: spend more money on public works, which pumps money into the economy, which gets business going, which restores a self-reinforcing economic boom.) Mayor Walsh isn’t subscribing to the fallacy of simplicity here. He’s aiming to reduce parking use by reducing demand, rather than increasing supply. That’s the right idea.

But if we’re going to look for simple solutions, how about not allowing every home to own unlimited parking permits?

Or to quote Lewis Mumford (from “Babel in Europe”), “The main issue is that the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”

John Oliver on the Canadian election — October 20, 2015
Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City — October 17, 2015

Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City

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Lime-green background, black text. Outline of a cloverleaf highway.

The thing to note about Lewis Mumford is that above all else he’s a moral theorist. This observation changes his books from what might otherwise seem like mere catalogs of architectural mistakes into something much more vital. He observes societies’ moral rot — the two books of Mumford’s that I’ve read don’t document any other direction of moral change — through the way they build their cities. And there’s a lot to be said for this point of view. If, like Mumford, you believe that the city is a place where people come together to form a community that’s much greater than the individuals who comprise it, then we’re not just talking about beautiful or ugly buildings and congested or empty roads; we’re talking about nothing less than the structure of civilization itself.

Even if you accept this in principle, it’s hard not to perceive cities in much more limited terms; I’m certainly guilty of this in day-to-day life. A city is a place where lots of people happen to live together; they are, more or less, just places where commerce happens. Cities are where you can go to buy more-interesting foods and expensive coffees. They’re where you go shopping. They’re where some beautiful homes are. At best they’re where you find gorgeous neighborhoods. That impoverishes much of the dialogue over the direction in which we should take our cities. On the one hand, these days, you very often have people arguing that home prices are too high, and that a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient!) way to solve this is to build more housing. I certainly make this point a lot, and I’m most familiar with it coming from Matt Yglesias.

On the other side you have people who make, to my eye, mostly incoherent arguments: the city is already too crowded (tell that to those who lived here in 1950, shortly before Mumford compiled this book); public services are already terrible, and more people will just make them worse (so improve the services!). Beneath this there may lurk the sort of moral argument that Mumford is making, but it doesn’t come out often enough.

I agree with some of Mumford’s proposed solutions, but I’m at least skeptical of the others. On the skeptical end of things: he believes that people shouldn’t live at densities of greater than 100 people per acre, which is about 64,000 people per square mile. I think you have to view this as a moral argument for it to really make sense: Mumford wonders, essentially, what the point of all this density is. Merely throwing people into a gigantic high-rise doesn’t create a community; those people may be just as isolated from one another as if they lived in the remote countryside. So along with all the housing, Mumford wants spaces where people can both ennoble themselves and enlarge their communities — parks, for instance. The appropriately designed park is healthy for the individual people in it, and gives them space to interact.

You can’t have a healthy park if the air is filled with fumes from automobiles; on this I couldn’t agree more with Mumford. I quote here one of many passages from Mumford that left me yelling, “Yes! This!”:

Like the railroad, again, the motorway has repeatedly taken possession of the most valuable recreation space the city possesses, not merely by thieving land once dedicated to park uses, but by cutting off easy access to the waterfront parks, and lowering their value for refreshment and repose by introducing the roar of traffic and the bad odor of exhausts, though both noise and carbon monoxide are inimical to health. Witness the shocking spoilage of the Charles River basin parks in Boston …

This, mind you, was written in 1958, 30 years after Helen Osborne Storrow donated $1,000,000 toward the beautification of the Esplanade and, while she was alive, objected to plans to build a road through it. It’s a cruel irony that a few years after she died, a road called Storrow Drive tore through that beautiful park. This is the sort of wanton destruction that Mumford observed just a few years later.

The automobile is the antithesis of the city that Mumford wants — the city that elevates the person. The automobile atomizes us, disconnects us as a society, pollutes our collective air, and frays our nerves as individuals. It has also slaughtered the American city. It may seem overwrought when Mumford puts automobiles in the same bucket as atomic weapons — which he does, repeatedly, throughout The Highway and the City. In fact he puts many of our society’s most destructive technologies and inclinations in that bucket. I believe he’s referring to something much greater than mere machinery when he discusses “the machine” or “technics”. He’s referring, I think, to the attitude of a society that finds one thing to optimize, then monomaniacally focuses on that one thing while destroying everything else; this is part of what Ernest Gellner referred to (not at all disparagingly) in Plough, Sword, and Book as the “single-stranded thinking” of post-Enlightenment rationalist thought. The Manhattan Project is the absurdly logical conclusion of that path; it is what results from committing 1 in every 250 dollars of national product to the task of efficient destruction. It is the engineer’s mindset made flesh: given this goal, this technology will get you there in the time allotted. Likewise, given the desire to move isolated individuals trapped in their private motorcars as fast as possible from point A to point B, this highway will do the job for you. Both of these ignore the broader world that they’ve created: a world in which the power to destroy all humanity lies anxiously in wait for someone to pull the trigger, or a world in which highways tear gashes through the city and still remain gridlocked.

Half of Mumford’s solution makes sense to me and half does not. The half that makes sense seems obvious to modern eyes: reduce drastically our dependence upon the automobile. Make our cities safe for pedestrians again. Resurrect our crumbling mass-transit systems. The half that doesn’t make sense centers on that 100-people-per-acre bit. In order to achieve that goal, he suggests — is forced to suggest — thinning out cities. They’d be thinned out, though, in a more-planned way than what we landed on in the U.S., namely moving people to car-dependent suburbs. Instead Mumford would have cities ringed by closely connected small towns, each with the parks and so forth that he views as so vital for the ennoblement of the person.

Here’s where he runs into Jane Jacobs; I had to revisit the index to Death and Life of Great American Cities to remind myself (if I ever knew it) that she and Mumford didn’t see eye to eye. Jacobs is basically an anarchist; she (and Jim Scott) believes that cities adopt the order that makes sense to them at the day-to-day street level. Based on what she’s seen of Moses and Haussmann, it’s only the eye of the planner, believing itself in command of greater intelligence than the grubby hordes, that views the city as chaotic and in need of rationalization. Sometimes the planner has the right idea — as when Mumford envisions a city with far fewer personal automobiles — but in some sense that’s accidental. The people, Jacobs would say, know what they need out of their city, and the planner merely imposes his own plan on their needs. Mumford would have to agree with at least part of this: anyone watching highways being erected throughout the United States in the 50s was witnessing planning run amok. On the other hand, Mumford had the sort of mind that envisioned a ring of green sub-cities; his was the mind of a large-scale engineer.

(An economist — Ed Glaeser, say — would side with Jacobs, and would ask: if typical urban densities are so bad, then why do people keep crowding in? He would turn this same question toward, say, the favelas of Brazil as well: if the slums are so terrible, then why do people seem so eager to live there?)

Maybe that sort of large-scale engineering is necessary, though. The world that we inherited from Mumford’s generation is a world in which the cities and the suburbs work at cross purposes. The suburbs need the cities for the jobs and cultural amenities that are available there, while the suburbs and further-flung rural areas are where people from the city go when they want peace, quiet, and better schools. The structure of many American urban areas is a central city joined to the countryside by highways that drain all the city’s vitality. Merging an entire urban area so that everyone is rowing in the same direction makes a lot of sense.

It’s hard to think that far ahead when cities are fighting a rearguard action to correct for the mistakes of the past — mistakes that Mumford was already denouncing almost 60 years ago. Before I’d think about bringing the suburbs along with my plans, I’d want to correct a lot of things in actually-existing Boston: vastly improve the mass-transit system so that it befits a major American city; remove Storrow Drive or put it underground; do to the tangle of highways separating the South End from South Boston what we did to Interstate 93; do something to the Mass Pike gash through Boston (e.g., fill in all its air rights); remove the insane intersections that prevent the Emerald Necklace from being a completely walkable path through the city that we love. And that’s just the architecture, which is what Mumford focuses on. Then we’d have to talk about the schools.

There’s a lot to do and a lot of challenges. It’s unreasonable to expect that every word out of Mumford’s mouth would be directly applicable to the world we inhabit, but it’s shocking that so much of what he wrote foresaw the sad state we’re in today.

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity — October 13, 2015

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

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Image of a measuring table winding its way back and forth across the page, proceeding from the bottom of the page to the top in a zigzag

Let me itemize what I think I understand better about relativity now that I’ve read Bertrand Russell’s book:

  1. One goal of the theory of relativity is to express the laws of physics in ways that are less obviously tied to the position of the observer. In this way, the point is not to establish that “everything is relative”, but indeed to find a standpoint from which objective facts about the universe may be inferred.

  2. Measuring things in feet rather than meters is one of those obvious differences that shouldn’t matter at all in an objective theory of the world. We should be able to measure things in a “human-independent” way; our laws of physics should remain unchanged if the coordinates change. If we choose to express coordinates in polar form or rectangular form, who cares? If we choose to make the origin of the coordinate system the earth or make the origin Mars, that choice is obviously a fact about us, not a fact about nature. Devising a system of laws that removes these obviously human traits is what the tensor calculus is for.

  3. I think I understand what the Michelson-Morley experiment showed. If there really is such a thing as the æther, and if that æther has any mass, then we’d expect light to take longer to travel in certain directions than in others. I gather that the M-M experiment found no evidence that light travels at different speeds in different directions. Hence, if the æther does exist, it must have no mass … but now that I write it out, why is a massless æther a problem?

    (Forgive my spelling it ‘æther’; I just find that spelling so charmingly British.)

Here’s what I still don’t really get:

  1. I still don’t know what a tensor is, really. So I get the abstract outline of the idea of the problem we want to solve, and the name of the mathematical tool that solves it, but I don’t know the actual math.

  2. Russell makes clear — as every other popular exposition of relativity theory that I’ve read has made clear — that relativity theory didn’t have any data to support it for at least a few years. Russell emphasizes that relativity theory would still need to be confronted — as a logical argument, rather than as an empirical one — even if we had no data to support it. I don’t entirely understand the parts that “should have been obvious” even to Newtonian physicists. Certain points about reference frames make intuitive sense — e.g., that Bob dropping a ball while standing on a moving train will perceive the dropped ball differently than will Jim standing outside the train watching “Bob, train, and ball” as an ensemble; Jim will perceive a ball moving in an arc whose forward velocity matches that of the train, whereas Bob will perceive a ball with no forward velocity at all. Someone standing on Jupiter watching “Jim, Bob, train, ball, and earth” as an ensemble will see it altogether differently: now this larger ensemble is moving around the Sun at a certain velocity, moving away from or toward Jupiter, etc.

    …Is that all there is to it? That certain quantities can only logically be described in the context of a given reference frame?

  3. It’s a postulate of the system that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. I don’t really know why we’d assume that. Something-something Clerk Maxwell. Also, possibly, the M-M experiment?

  4. Russell tries, I gather, to construct a vocabulary for what now can be described objectively — i.e., for those concepts that survive even after we realize that much varies with the reference frame. He defines things called ‘events’ and ‘intervals’, but I don’t really understand what these are. The Wikipedia doesn’t clarify these concepts, at least for this reader.

  5. I understand, formally, the Lorentz contraction. It would appear that if I’m traveling the speed of light, and you’re observing me in relative motion, then you would see me as an object of length zero. As I say, I understand the equation formally, but I don’t understand why this should be so. Likewise, I understand the idea that if I’m in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, and you’re back on earth, and we both carry clocks that were identical when we were both on earth, then my clock will show that infinitely much time has passed for every second that passes on yours — using the same Lorentz contraction, this time in the form of time dilation.

    If the principles of relativity theory should apply in a Newtonian world as well — if it’s a logical argument that Newton himself would have needed to confront even in a world without science-fiction spaceships — then how would time dilation and Lorentz contraction have affected the models that Newton himself advanced? Put another way: would Newton have dismissed all of this as irrelevant for objects traveling at terrestrial velocities? Or would he have seen the difficulties introduced by separate reference frames and reworked his entire conception of space and time?

  6. I understand that large objects in some sense distort the space around them. I understand, somewhat, the elegance of postulating that light travels in straight lines, and that it’s the space rather than the light that’s changing its path when it moves past a heavy object. But I don’t really understand what’s happening when space is distorted. In fact I don’t even know if “space is distorted” is a sensible way of expressing this.

  7. I understand that in some sense referring to “space and time” as four separate orthogonal axes is out of date, and that now one refers to “spacetime” as a single unified thing. In some sense I guess this means the dimensions are interdependent: where you are in space dictates where you are in time. But I don’t really understand this clearly.

It’s my own personal mode of comprehension that’s at fault here. Partly, I think Russell’s exposition would be a lot clearer if he allowed himself some mathematics. As it is, I think he’s in a partly-metaphorical / grudgingly-mathematical world, and to me it’s not a very clear world. (Similarly: Krugman tries in one of his books to explain power laws as elucidated by Herbert Simon, and to my eye Krugman only made the situation less confusing.)

I need to read more about relativity — more Wheeler, say, and less Hawking. (Real talk: has there ever been a more-discussed and less-understood book than Hawking’s?) More-mathematical relativity goes on the queue.

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice — October 11, 2015

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice

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A map of Venice in the form of a painting -- maybe from the 1200s or so?

There’s a lot about European history from, let’s say, the fall of Rome up to the French Revolution that I don’t really have a good handle on. I mean, I know a few individual events, but that’s never helped me to keep a history in my head. To understand history, I need to be able to place events in a coherent story. Without a story, for instance, I was never able to remember the order of U.S. presidents; with the story it becomes a lot more straightforward. After Washington you’ve got Adams, during the Federalist era (see the book The Age of Federalism, which is really quite extraordinary). Washington’s Secretary of State was Thomas Jefferson, who became the third president after an extremely contentious first few years of the American republic (see the Alien and Sedition Acts); the fighting between Jefferson’s men and Adams’s men is why Jefferson’s inaugural contains the line “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Jefferson’s Secretary of State was then James Madison, who was then president right after Jefferson. And so forth. With a coherent story, I can remember a good solid chunk of history.

Well, it turns out that the history of Venice is an excellent view into a single coherent story of European history. The lagoon, in John Julius Norwich’s telling, has always sat on the boundary between the Eastern Roman Empire — which became the Byzantine Empire, and eventually the Ottoman Empire — and Western Europe. Its existence has always been tenuous, and it has always relied on its seafaring prowess to keep it alive. As long as it was able to dominate the Adriatic, and as long as it maintained good relations with Constantinople, it did well; as soon as the Ottomans took over and sundered Venice’s eastern lifeline, the writing was on the wall. The miracle is that it survived as long as it did. (Napoleon fired the coup de grâce.)

In the most remarkable part of the story that Norwich tells, Venice seals its own eventual death warrant. It led the Fourth Crusade, which was supposed to go to Jerusalem around the year 1200 but which stopped at Constantinople on the way, sacked it, and fatally weakened the Byzantine Empire. Thus weakened, the Byzantines couldn’t effectively resist the Ottomans, who finally took Constantinople 250 years later. The ascent of the Ottomans destroyed the Venetian connection to the East.

I expected to see the formation of modern Western European states as a reaction to the rise of the Ottomans, but it didn’t happen. I expected all the little Italian city-states — Genoa, Milan, Venice — to put aside their differences and fight off the “Arabic menace”, but perhaps that was expecting too much. Instead, the story seems to be that Italy remained disunited until soon after Napoleon swept through. In the meantime, city-states seemed to be united only so long as their immediate interests demanded it. From the perspective of someone like Norwich, who clearly loves Venice in his bones, this is a great tragedy.

I do love the coherence that Norwich brings to European history, but that coherence comes at the cost of glossing over the lives of ordinary Venetians. Instead, we get an endless parade of doges, no matter how inconsequential. Venetian doges were usually elected to the role after a lifetime spent honorably serving the Serenissima Repubblica (Most Serene Republic, which is an awesome title); hence very often they’re in their 80s when elected; hence very often they’re dead within a few months. Yet I’m pretty sure Norwich discusses every single doge. He also discusses most every naval battle, seemingly regardless of whether that battle had any lasting importance. I would have liked, instead, to have understood what we would now call the social history of Venice. What did most people do for work? How did the government treat its poor and its sick? How was Venetian sanitation? (When we went on our walking tour of Venice, the guide stopped briefly at one of the city’s public wells and noted how much disease they spread.) Norwich writes a lot about how “the people” would cheer this or that doge or admiral; which people is he referring to? The gentry, or the landless masses? And Venice was in many ways a melting pot, it seems, again because of its status both as a gateway to the East and as the commercial capital of the world; so I’d like to hear about whether these various ethnicities lived together harmoniously. The plague struck Venice repeatedly, and sharply reduced its population; what was the lived experience of the plague? How did they dispose of so many bodies?

Finally, all the shifting alliances and invasions and changes of fortune make me wonder about the lived experience of, say, those who lived in Padua. I quickly stopped being able to keep track of how often Padua and Ravenna changed hands. Maybe it’s easy for a European author to envision what it’s like when your town is repeatedly bombarded and sacked, but it’s not easy for an American — living, as we have, with basically no threats to our domestic tranquility for our entire history. “They lay siege to it, and 3 months later [or whatever] it fell” appears countless times throughout The History of Venice. What’s it like to live in a besieged city? If the siege is successful, does it basically end when the residents are starving to death?

A subset of this book would be extremely useful for tourists. Whenever a doge dies, Norwich writes — usually in a footnote — about where that doge’s body is now buried; 90-plus percent of the time, the doge seems to be buried in one of Venice’s innumerable churches, basilicas, and cathedrals, and maybe most often in the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo or St. Mark’s. If you were to take the subset of this book that explains the artistic and historical backdrop to Venice’s countless churches, tombs, and paintings, it would dramatically improve every tourist’s experience of the city.

I know that I need to go back. Norwich says in the introduction that walking through Venice at night is one of his favorite things; I need to do that, and I need to do it fearlessly. The first time I encountered Venice, I was overwhelmed by the city’s, well, Byzantine layout, and it took me a few days just to feel comfortable with it in the daytime. Braving it at night requires an extra bit of courage. The city is almost incomprehensibly mysterious, and Norwich’s book only adds depth to the mystery.

Paying the full cost of a car — October 10, 2015

Paying the full cost of a car

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I wonder how much mileage (so to speak) we’d get out of compelling car owners to pay the actual cost of their driving into a crowded city. The actual cost includes

  1. The cost of parking, which is to say the value of the next-best use of that extremely scarce land. As I recall, Shoup considers only the cost of constructing a parking space within a surface lot or in a structure, and explicitly ignores the value of the land. But imagine what we could do with that land: if the parking weren’t there, we could, among other things, extend housing. The average parking space looks to be around 180 square feet. In Boston, it’s not at all uncommon for an apartment to be valued at $750 per square foot. Imagine putting four stories of housing on top of that 180-square-foot unit; the value of the foregone housing is $540,000 (180*$750*4). If you secured a 30-year mortgage on that $540,000, it would cost you $3.58 per hour; the price of parking ought to be at least that much. Then add in the cost of constructing the parking space in the first place, the cost of its maintenance (occasionally re-paving it, etc.), the cost of enforcing parking tickets on it, etc., and it adds up.

    The point of the numerical exercise is simply that the cost of a thing should equal the cost of what you’re giving up to get it. Since we treat parking as free, and we treat it as a god-given part of the landscape, it’s hard for us to remember that there are other, possibly better, uses for that land.

  2. The collective loss of time caused by our individual decisions to enter an already-gridlocked city. One fellow has estimated that every additional car entering Manhattan during the weekday costs $160 in lost time. (Obviously the amount decreases at night and on weekends.) This is not hard to believe: one additional car adds a few seconds to everyone else’s commute. This is not to say, unless I misunderstand, that the marginal driver should pony up $160 for the privilege of driving into Manhattan; it’s easy to imagine that a fee of $10 or $20 would discourage enough drivers from entering the city that the congestion problem would resolve itself. But regardless, it should be obvious that my decision to drive has effects on people other than myself, and that I’m not required to pay for those effects. The economists call this a “negative externality” — a term for which we need a more scolding replacement. A “negative externality” is “your not cleaning up your own messes” or “a tax you impose on the community.” [1]

    The positive externality corresponding to this, on the flip side, is what subway riders give to the community every time they get on the train. If, in lieu of riding the train, you would have taken a car into work, then your decision to take the train saves the rest of us time, and you ought to be rewarded for that. (I don’t own a car; in lieu of taking the train, I’d walk or take the bus, so I sadly shouldn’t be the beneficiary of this reward.) You could be rewarded, for instance, by cheaper subway fare. A fee levied on automobile drivers that goes directly to subway riders would make the point particularly clearly.

  3. Environmental costs. When befouled air causes children to develop asthma, I don’t pay for that. When leaded gasoline leads to increased levels of crime and stunted mental development, neither I nor the petroleum companies paid for that. When your backfiring engine rouses me out of a sound sleep and destroys my productivity the next day at work, you don’t pay for that.

Add up all these costs, and many others I’ve not articulated (e.g., how much of our military budget would disappear if cheap gasoline weren’t considered a birthright?), and I wonder what the actual social cost of driving a car is.

[1] — I’ve wondered for a while whether economists feel morally complete once all negative externalities have been paid off. Suppose I dump radioactive waste in a lake, then pay to relocate everyone around the lake to a nicer, less-befouled area. By hypothesis, that waste now hurts no one, and all present harms have been compensated. Does the economist smile and consider the work done, or does he feel a morally repugnant residuum? After all, I dumped radioactive waste in a lake. Simply paying off the negative externalities shouldn’t balance the moral scales. Yet so long as the townspeople and I signed a contract freely and fairly, I get the sense that economists sleep soundly.

Naturally there’s a question of those who weren’t around when the bargain was struck. My children now can’t enjoy that lake. A few generations hence, someone might drink irradiated water and die a horrible death; that person didn’t get to choose whether to sign the contract. So within the notion of a “compensated externality” there lurks, not far below the surface, the idea that I hold this world in trust for those who follow. If I’m going to sign a contract on their behalf, I’m also assumed to be a fair judge — in fact, the only permissible judge — of their will. After all, if I’m not in some sense their representative, then what right do I have to sign a contract on their behalf?

I’m sure someone has written about the moral assumptions underlying negative externalities. I’d love to read it. As is so often the case, what sounds like a neutral technical dispute — how much to pay for the messes I create — is soon found to be a moral problem rather than a narrow economic one.

Proof that Boston’s public parking is wildly mis-priced — October 3, 2015
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow — September 26, 2015

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

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Mostly white text on a black field. The black field is then rent asunder by what looks like a white lightning bolt, but could also be interpreted as a tear in fabric or in paper

There are many books I could recommend that overlap with the history of the civil-rights movement. J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground remains one of the three or four best books I’ve ever read, focusing on the tragic failure of desegregation in the North. John Lewis’s Walking With The Wind is the civil-rights movement as documented by one of its central participants — a man thrown in jail dozens of times, and on the business end of countless police truncheons. Then there’s Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s somewhat arch but mostly disheartened take on the whimper with which the civil-rights movement ended, and how Richard Nixon exploited white working-class fears to hasten its demise. If you’re looking for some hope that de facto school segregation will end, try Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools In Raleigh. If you wanted to follow the civil-rights movement past the end of the Nixon Administration, you could do worse than to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World And Me — a letter he wrote to his son, in the wake of Eric Garner and and Trayvon Martin, explaining that white society has always fought to control black bodies.

As long as U.S. history is the history of slavery and its aftermath — as long as we remain unable to free ourselves from systemic racism — there will always been a need for these books. C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow is in some ways the granddaddy of these books; it’s the book that Martin Luther King called “the historical Bible of the civil-rights movement.” [1] Even three-quarters of a century after it was written, and even in the light of all those other great works, I think it’s still well worth reading. Its power is in its concision: it was originally delivered as three lectures at the University of Virginia, and it retains that feeling of historical evidence being laid out, methodically and metronomically.

The main take-away is that the South didn’t have to turn to Jim Crow; for a short window between the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870, and the beginning of Jim Crow in earnest around 1900, Southern whites explored the possibility of living in harmony with blacks. Several events conspired to turn the South decisively onto the road to apartheid: Northern liberals lost interest in desegregation and instead sought reconciliation with the South, at the expense of Southern blacks; Southern radicals fought to create sectional discord, which drove Northerners into the arms of moderate but segregationist Southerners; and Teddy Roosevelt carried the white man’s burden to the Philippines, thereby awakening a theory of racial hierarchy (whites near the top, blacks toward the bottom). The point is that it could have gone differently. Woodward implies that, if the South could have been something other than violently racist in the late 19th century, then it could be something other than violently racist in the mid-20th.

None of this is to say that the South was ever a blissful idyll for blacks. As Woodward puts it:

It would certainly be preposterous to leave the impression that any evidence I have submitted indicates a golden age of race relations in the period between Redemption [what Southerners call the end of Reconstruction –SRL] and complete segregation. On the contrary, the evidence of race conflict and violence, brutality and exploitation in this very period is overwhelming. It was, after all, in the ‘eighties and early ‘nineties that lynching attained the most staggering proportions ever reached in the history of that crime.

Woodward shouldn’t, then, be perceived as an apologist for the South. As a historian from the South, however, he dumps some much-needed ice water on Northern pretensions. The North certainly ended slavery and fought official segregation well before the South did, and of course the North’s economy was not based on slavery as directly as the South’s was. All that said, Northern segregation was and remains of the de facto rather than de jure variety. We segregate by our white families’ fleeing to the suburbs and sending their kids to private schools; we thereby leave, e.g., the Boston Public Schools only 13% white.

None of this is to say that Southern segregation wasn’t real and violent and terrifying. Woodward’s book brought out details of legal desegregation that I hadn’t heard of before — e.g., that the Brown v. Board of Education decision, with its command that desegregation proceed with “all deliberate speed”, actually took at least a decade to be carried out. There’s a danger that most of us — certainly including me — carry in our heads a potted history of the civil-rights movement that goes something like this:

  • Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus. So segregation on buses ended.
  • Brown v. Board!
  • Martin Luther King had a dream.
  • King died. :-(
  • Now we have civil rights forever!

It’s the Whig Interpretation of Civil-Rights History.

It’s really worth adding complexity to this potted history. It’s worth, among many other things, throwing out the “one lone woman on a bus” story; the Rosa Parks incident was the product of a disciplined campaign of organization — and when I say “organization”, I mean “organization” of the sort for which people made fun of Barack Obama when he said he was a “community organizer.” This isn’t just re-learning history for re-learning history’s sake; the “one lone woman” story is part of a pernicious libertarian fantasy about the power of individuals. The civil-rights movement was the product of focused, organized political action, in large part centered on black churches. The decline of the civil-rights movement is the story of that organized movement’s fracturing, as a pacifist wing that sought to continue King’s work ran up against a militant wing (represented by Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and others) that was frustrated by the glacial pace of change. A white working-class backlash (heartbreakingly documented in Common Ground) led us to where we are now: people generally seem to acknowledge that progress toward racial equality has stalled; books like Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration And the Myth of Black Progress make the point that if you count black people in prison correctly, there has been virtually no change in black wealth or black civic involvement. I’m told that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness makes the point even more forcefully.

It’s hard to feel anything but desperation in the era of Trayvon Martin and the new Jim Crow. I don’t know how Woodward felt when he began writing his Strange Career; did he see himself in the middle of half a century when virulent Southern racism had only become more intransigent? Or did he see that new possibilities were dawning? And did he merely describe what he saw, or did his book contribute — in any small way — toward the revolution that was about to come?

We really feel stuck today. Few people trust the Federal government: many conservatives believe it can only do harm (e.g., Obamacare), and many liberals believe that even its good intentions will be watered down by the power of organized money (e.g., Obamacare). As for local government, Boston’s late Mayor Menino prided himself on being an “urban mechanic” — enacting small changes that maybe would add up, in time, to something big. Big changes, like desegregating Boston public schools whose enrollment fell by 35% between 1970 and 2000 (and whose composition changed from 64% to 13% white), even as the city’s population continues to rise, are implicitly off the table. So are any big public-works projects, even those that would help the poor and working class, after our slog through the Big Dig.

So that leaves off local and Federal government. Where else do we look for the next revolution. Corporations-as-saviors? Hardly. Civil society? Bowling Alone suggests that’s decaying as well. The fight against income inequality might be the spark that we need, but again: individual sparks here and there do not a movement make; we need organization.

All I’m getting at here is that I wonder what Woodward would make of the spot we’re in. Would he see something on the horizon that we don’t? Or would he be as dejected as the rest of us?

[1] – C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History, 1986, p. 92.

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking — September 24, 2015

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking

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A Monopoly board -- particularly the few squares around Free Parking, of course

The High Cost of Free Parking has changed a lot of minds in its few years on this earth. For a book about a seemingly dry subject, THCOFP‘s effect has been shockingly strong. The premise of the book can be laid out in a few bullets:

  1. Cities’ parking minimums on real estate are dangerous. This much is obvious, in that producing too much parking is exactly the point: if developers would produce that much parking on their own, then minimums wouldn’t be necessary.
  2. The usual argument for buildings to come with their own parking is that if they didn’t, the buildings’ users would spill over and use public parking. But the only reason to assume they’d use city parking is if public parking is free, as it is most everywhere. But what if cities charged the market rate for public parking? Then, presumably, people would be indifferent between off-street parking and public parking.
  3. The impact of free parking is devastating at many levels. It scars cities. It orients cities toward drivers rather than toward bicyclists, pedestrians, or those who cannot afford cars. And free parking (emphasis on the free part) isn’t good for the drivers, either: they spend minutes, on average, cruising around looking for parking, with expected effects on the environment and the drivers’ own state of mind. And the environmental effects go further: a world oriented toward drivers and parking is a world where buildings are more spread out, which is thus harder for pedestrians, which encourages more people to own cars purely out of convenience, which thus creates a larger lobby for car-centric cities, which makes the cycle start all over again.
  4. People expect to be able to park free everywhere, so the story is even worse than all of the bullets above would have it. Not only must there be one free parking space in the world for my car — there must be two or three. City planners seem to require enough free parking at every new restaurant, barber shop, ice-cream shop and café to accommodate peak demand; as Shoup quotes somewhere in The High Cost of Free Parking, “Do not build the church for Easter Sunday.” A typical standard for restaurants (in California, anyway, from which Shoup draws most of his examples) is four spaces per thousand square feet of dining area. At 200-300 square feet per parking space, parking area can easily swamp dining area.
  5. So parking should be market-priced. How much should we charge? Answer: charge enough so that there are always one or two free spaces available on every block; Shoup’s threshold is 85% full. This will stop people from needing to cruise, so the drivers themselves should be happy.
  6. But people are used to having free parking everywhere. How, to put it bluntly, do we buy them off, so that they’re willing to forego free parking? Answer: give them something for it. When a neighborhood charges for parking, some fraction of the parking proceeds should be returned to a Business Improvement District in that neighborhood — money that can be used to repair (or expand!) sidewalks, plant trees, and generally make the neighborhood look nice. People will see the benefits of paid parking returned to them. The people who will object to paid parking will be those who, for instance, drive into the neighborhood during the day to go to work and drive home to the suburbs at night — but those people don’t vote in that neighborhood, so their voice won’t have an effect.

Donald Shoup is in many ways like Jane Jacobs. One of the great joys of Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is that she turns what might be a huge topic — subject to pure moralizing arguments like “What do we want out of cities” — into a number of small, practical, answerable questions. She looks out her window and asks what value sidewalks have. You want sidewalks to be wide enough so that kids can play on them; wide enough that a restaurant can drop a couple tables on them; etc. How about buildings? How tall do you want them to be? Well, we want our neighbors to be engaged with what’s happening on the street; skyscraper apartments can’t do this. And so forth. After she’s wrapped her (and our) brain around low-level details, only then does she scale out and talk about cities generally. And by that point she has a much more concrete object in her head, which it’s much easier to reason about with a minimum of ideological pollution. So it is with Shoup: he hardly spends any time talking about grand issues like global warming; instead he keeps focused on an individual car searching for an individual parking space, asks us why the car is spending so much time cruising, and lands the blame on the fact that parking is free.

Of course this should be obvious. We see videos of Soviet-era breadlines, and we pin the blame on a price system that wasn’t allowed to work; we never turn the lens back on ourselves and ask what harm we’re doing by assuming that a scarce resource should be free. Others have probably pointed this out in the past; this sort of thing probably occurred to Lewis Mumford, but Mumford was a genius who was a few decades ahead of his time. It took Donald Shoup to really bring this issue into the public mind in a real way. Now I hope people will actually put his ideas into action.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society — September 16, 2015

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

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Just the text, with a photo of the author in his Thinky Pose at the top right

There ought to be a term for the sort of book that starts from a simple concept and completely shakes the cobwebs loose from your brain. The most recent two books by Francis Fukuyama are in that category for me — and shame on me for reviewing neither of them yet. [1]

Galbraith’s idea is simple, yet profound: economics arose in an era when humanity had just barely emerged from the problem of scarcity, and it bears the expected scars. From the beginning of time until about 1800, humanity’s main problem was ensuring sufficient supply — getting enough food in enough mouths. Now we’ve arrived at an era when exactly the reverse is the problem: we have insufficient demand. The whole problem of depressions is a problem of insufficient aggregate demand.

Depressions are one particularly bad manifestation of the problem of insufficient demand. There are more trivial ones: it was either in Chandler’s The Visible Hand or Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis that the author mentions the birth of breakfast cereals purely as a way to clear out inventories of unsold grain. Much of economic history since the mid-19th century has been the history of getting us to buy things that we don’t need.

Galbraith argues that economics still hasn’t caught up with this new world. Economics is obsessed with production, and with producing things more efficiently. Why the obsession with efficiency? Because when the main problem in life is scarcity, we’re very concerned that we produce everything with the minimum of wasted resources. What if, instead, we realize that much of what we produce is unnecessary? This is not in any way controversial; an economy has reached the apex of its sophistication when it develops an entire industry devoted to, literally, shoving more food down our throats than we need. (See Marion Nestle: food availability, measured as food produced within the United States, minus food exported, plus food imported, minus food waste, grew from 3200 calories per person in 1980 to 3900 in 2011. And we weren’t starving in 1980.)

Contrast this situation with the decline in public services:

The competition is especially unequal for new products and services. Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the nation’s most talented citizens to see if the desire for more merchantable product can be cultivated. No similar process operates on behalf of the nonmerchantable services of the state. Indeed, while we take the cultivation of new private wants for granted, we would be measurably shocked to see it applied to public services. The scientist or engineer or advertising man who devotes himself to developing a new carburetor, cleanser or depilatory for which the public recognize no need and will feel none until an advertising campaign arouses it, is one of the valued members of our society. A politician or a public servant who sees need for a new public service may be called a wastrel. Few public offenses are more reprehensible.

Then there are those products that derive some or all of their value, not from their intrinsic merit, but from the fact that others also own them. My fancy car derives some of its value from the fact that it’s larger than all my neighbors’ cars. A university education has some intrinsic value, but it seems clear that a college degree would lose much of its value if everyone had one. Or rather, at that point the fight would move to a higher level: now having an MIT degree, or a graduate degree, would set you apart from the pack. The supply of the product, in other words, creates its own demand. To use the term of art: many of the goods that we produce are “positional.”

Between positional goods, and products that we don’t need, much of what we produce is simply unnecessary. Deciding what to do with this observation is the central question in The Affluent Society.

Obviously we can argue over these central contentions. Not least, there’s the empirical question of how much of our economy is worthless. Is my iPhone worthless? Is the Internet worthless? We don’t have to believe that all of the supply side is worthless to agree that much of economics takes as its starting point the scarcity of supply in the face of unlimited demands. That’s simply not the problem that the industrial world faces anymore.

Galbraith notes also that economics is based on a blinkered view of human agency, according to which my own free will leads me to choose a larger car and 700 more calories rather than better subways and public schools. It seems obvious that that’s wrong: my “free will” here is dictated in no small part by advertising. Again, we don’t need to believe that advertising completely controls us to believe that economics as a profession has the wrong idea about how to judge what people want. It’s not as simple as a naïve “revealed preference” story would have it: if I choose to buy a larger car, and I also choose to vote for lower property taxes, and if in consequence the public schools in my town suffer, it’s not possible to read directly off this that I prefer cars to schools.

All Galbraith is after is a little balance between public and private goods. Even without any change in balance, the need for public goods is likely to increase in lockstep with demand for private goods: all those extra cars need parking spaces; all that extra wealth needs police officers to secure it; all that extra food needs reliable roads to carry it to market. Yet we as a society have not chosen to increase our spending on public goods, so we end up in what Galbraith famously called “an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor.” Indeed, we end up with public squalor because of our private affluence. The situation today remains sadly unchanged from when Galbraith first described it more than half a century ago.

We can follow where Galbraith is going here and ask simply: what is the point of all this economic production? Why bother producing more? Is it so that we can produce and consume more and larger televisions? Eat more breakfast cereal every morning? To John Maynard Keynes, one answer was that economic growth would free us to be more fully human: we’d have time to learn, and think, and create, and play outside in beautiful parks, and swim in clean water, and live long lives, and develop meaningful friendships. After taxes, Americans are six times as wealthy as we were when John F. Kennedy was president, yet can we say that economic growth has made us better people? We’ve chosen to convert those gains in economic production into a greater supply of possessions rather than a better society or more leisure. Galbraith would say that the root of this failure is deeply rooted in the way we’ve thought about economics since the time of Adam Smith.

It takes a mind like Galbraith’s to chase down this problem. Another mind, in some ways similar, whom I’ve likewise been derelict in reviewing, is Lewis Mumford; his The City In History reoriented the whole way that I think about why cities matter. If asked what the point of cities is, most of us would probably define them as centers of commerce and industry: San Francisco is the city of software; Boston is the city of universities; New York is the city of theatre and finance. We might go a step further and say that that concentration of people is the wellspring of greatness: put people near one another and watch as they create beautiful things together. Mumford goes well beyond that: the city, he says, is where humanity can fully flower; the city exists for the enlargement of mankind itself. He imparts an inspiring moral greatness to cities. I maybe take some of the piss from this if I tell you that Mumford thinks it’s all been downhill since Ancient Greece.

Like Mumford, Galbraith sees modern economies as distracted from the goal of ennobling man. Again because of the focus on increasing GDP and using resources most efficiently, Galbraith notes that finance is very good at directing material goods to where they can be optimally used, but not nearly so good at increasing human capital. An economic system geared at the betterment of humans would look a lot different than one aimed at the betterment of SUVs.

This goes quite deep, I think. First, what’s the point of improving “human capital” if the point isn’t to just produce more stuff in the next generation? We usually think of human capital as something that universities provide, and that poor neighborhoods lack. A liberal education can expand our minds, but we’re often in the trap of thinking that human capital is like real capital: it’s an investment on which we spend a lot up front, from which we then draw over many years. Do we want human capital that allows us to appreciate great literature? Or do we only care about the kind of human capital that slots us each nicely into the machine?

Our most fervent hope is that our kids will live a better life than we do. Do we only want them to be wealthier than we are? Or do we also want them to be smarter, more generous, more curious, happier, more creative, better companions? I’m sure we’d say that we want all these things. But there’s a danger that our preoccupation with production, which springs from some of our most unquestioned intellectual roots, will lead us to define our children’s success in only the most vulgar terms.

Of course, many of us are born with little and die with less. Our obsession with maximizing production has led us to believe that the only solution to widespread poverty is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Another answer is to produce less unnecessary crap and share some of the bounty with our neighbors. Rather than guarantee a larger car to everyone, we’d each take a smaller but perfectly lovely automobile and instead insure that our neighbors get decent health care. First we need to stop thinking about production and start thinking about distribution.

From both Mumford and Galbraith, there’s a real urgency coupled with great clarity about where the problems lie. You can see the outlines of a moral revolution in both of their visions.

[1] — Short version of Fukuyama: humans will always tend to favor their kin more than they favor others; the evolution of human government has been the evolution away from government that favors kin, which Fukuyama calls “patrimonialism”, to government by impartial rulers chosen on the basis of merit. The danger is always that government will revert to the less-impartial form, which Fukuyama refers to by the wholly infelicitous term “repatrimonialization.” (In keeping with “i18n” and “l10n”, perhaps we ought to refer to this as “r19n.”) Human self-government is essentially the unending struggle to break free of the bonds of kin favoritism and arrive at the kind of government that China had mastered a millennium or two before Christ.