Steve Reads

Why this is not quoted anywhere on the Internet, I have no idea — June 28, 2016

Why this is not quoted anywhere on the Internet, I have no idea

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I tried any number of reasonable Google searches to get this text, then finally gave up and found it in my paper copy of Anthony Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect. Lane is reading each of the top 10 New York Times bestsellers from the week of May 15, 1994. Hence I give you:

No. 5 on the list is Inca Gold, by Clive Cussler. The plot is some farrago about buried treasure in the Andes, and the characters, though intended to be as tough as old boots, are not quite tough enough to curse properly. “Those fornicating baboons” is about as close as they get. The fruitful comparison here is with Judith Krantz, who I thought would be partial to soft-core euphemisms like “manhood” and “moistness” but never hesitates to call a fuck a fuck. The only point of interest in Inca Gold, in fact, is Cussler’s attempt to out-Folsom Alan Folsom, sometimes in the most unsuitable places: “the underwater blast came like the eruption of a huge depth charge as a seething column of white froth and green slime burst out of the sinkhole, splattering everyone and everything standing within 20 meters (66 feet) of the edge.” I love that parenthesis more than I can say. Someone should ask Mr. Cussler to edit an anthology of English verse. He could start with Robert Frost:

And miles (multiples of 1.6 kilometres)
to go before I sleep.
And miles (multiples of 1.6 kilometres)
to go before I sleep.

(British spelling of ‘kilometers’ is [sic], by the way, because The New Yorker. These are the same people who spell it ‘focussed’.)

It’s odd — June 21, 2016
Happiest day of my life — June 6, 2016
Historical imagination and the gutting of Boston — May 15, 2016

Historical imagination and the gutting of Boston

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By now I’ve read quite a number of books and any number of blog posts — including this new good one on Vox — about the gutting of U.S. cities by highways. I know about the connection of highways to racism; I know that highways very often cut neighborhoods off from the rest of their cities; I know that highways were thought to be an important part of urban renewal, and as far as I know the people who used that term did not mean it euphemistically — they really did believe they were revitalizing their cities.

But that’s all abstract. I fundamentally have never been able to put myself back into the minds of people who thought that this was a good idea. When I walk around Boston and I find that large parts of the city have had the life sucked out of them by urban-renewal projects that are today universally condemned, I’ve not yet been able to put myself in the heads of those who made these decisions:

Of course I’ve heard all the benign explanations. The future was believed to lie in automobiles: people would commute into the cities for work and commute back to the suburbs at night, and the bulldozed parts of the city weren’t actually that nice anyway. But what I fundamentally have not been able to build yet is the historical imagination to put myself in their shoes. Books like Building A New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970 believe that pre-demolition Boston wasn’t anything worth writing home about, whereas books like A People’s History of the New Boston treat it as a problem of organization: plenty of people objected to having their houses destroyed, but they weren’t organized politically. By 1970 they had organized, and the orgy of destruction had ended.

So I still need to put myself back in the shoes of Mayor John Hynes, standing over the map of Boston and deciding what would be bulldozed and what wouldn’t; or of Mayor John Collins, agreeing to tear the Mass Pike right through the middle of the city. I need to understand how decades of mistakes — which we’re only correcting, piece by piece, today — didn’t seem like mistakes at the time.

This is some good-as-heck butter — May 3, 2016

This is some good-as-heck butter

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I would commend Beurre de Baratte to your favorable attention. To quote Jonathan Gold:

DTLA’s Lydia Clarke sometimes says that the Beurre de Baratte is her favorite cheese in the store.

It really does have the depth of flavor of a beautiful cheese.

I found out about this stuff from Gold’s appearance on the Bon Appétit podcast; his mentioning the butter comes within the last couple minutes. I apparently need to see the movie about Gold, having first learned about the man, I believe, from a New Yorker article which documents both the man’s gustatory adventurousness and his function as a food anthropologist:

In April, he announced a recent migration from Mexico’s Distrito Federal. How did he know? You could now get D.F.-style carnitas in Highland Park, “loose and juicy, spilling out of the huge $1.99 tacos like Beyoncé out of a tight jumpsuit.”
[…]
In the past year or two, Gold has noticed a surge of new restaurants serving very hot country-style food from Sichuan, a shift that he attributes to migration after the 2008 earthquake.

So three cheers for Jonathan Gold, and three cheers for the butter he loves.

Did someone say Canadian statistics? —

Did someone say Canadian statistics?

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A couple years ago I reviewed a book about Canada’s then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Among other things, I wrote:

Then there are Harper’s moves that just seem outright slimy, like getting rid of the long-form census and generally gutting Statistics Canada. Again, this seems to be part of a pattern: if you remove the fundamental tools underlying the welfare state, including its financing and its means of measuring the populace, then there are questions you just never think of asking. If you stop measuring the same people over time, for instance, it’s harder to say that income mobility has gone down.

Gutting the collection of official statistics is right out of the U.S. GOP’s playbook. Wells touches on this a little bit, but perhaps not as much as I’d like. Is Canadian conservatism very similar to its American cousin? Wells is more focused on Harper the man, and on the details of Ottawa politics, so The Longer I’m Prime Minister has more to say about the politics than about these broader questions.

Well look what we have here!

Canada’s long-form census, known as the National Household Survey, was made optional by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative government back in 2010. As a result, participation in the NHS plummeted from 93.5 percent in 2006, to 68.6 percent four years later. “Voluntary surveys are simply a waste of money,” Munir Sheikh, Statistics Canada’s chief statistician who resigned over the switch, told CityLab last year. “[They] cannot provide you the kind of accurate information that you need to make your policy decisions.”

Seems good!

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant — May 1, 2016

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

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I can recommend reading this book if you either

a) can somehow get your hands on just the highlights; or
b) are really into military minutiae.

It’s a highly detailed account of Grant’s time in the military, basically from the Mexican-American War through the end of the Civil War. Scattered throughout is this kind of thing:

About four in the afternoon I sent for the corps commanders and directed the dispositions to be made of their troops. Sherman was to remain in Jackson until he destroyed that place as a railroad centre, and manufacturing city of military supplies. He did the work most effectually. Sherman and I went together into a manufactory which had not ceased work on account of the battle nor for the entrance of Yankee troops. Our presence did not seem to attract the attention of either the manager or the operatives, most of whom were girls. We looked on for a while to see the tent cloth which they were making roll out of the looms, with “C. S. A.” woven in each bolt. There was an immense amount of cotton, in bales, stacked outside. Finally I told Sherman I thought they had done work enough. The operatives were told they could leave and take with them what cloth they could carry. In a few minutes cotton and factory were in a blaze. The proprietor visited Washington while I was President to get his pay for this property, claiming that it was private. He asked me to give him a statement of the fact that his property had been destroyed by National troops, so that he might use it with Congress where he was pressing, or proposed to press, his claim. I declined.

This man is cold-blooded. But then you get this sort of passage that I find devastating:

There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.

I learned a lot from this book. For instance, Grant says bluntly that “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican[-American] war,” and that “The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” And while I’d seen it referred to in other works (e.g., David Herbert Donald’s biography of Lincoln), I’d never appreciated just how consistently the Union refused to treat the South as a real nation: Grant consistently refers to “to so-called Confederate government,” and explains “that their object was to negotiate terms of peace between he United States and, as they termed it, the Confederate Government.”

Grant believed that the war could have been over in mere months had his bosses been willing to take advantage of their early successes; instead he and the chief military officer, Henry Halleck, were in conflict throughout the war, with Halleck constantly taking a cautious approach. Grant’s reserve throughout his memoirs makes me wonder what he really thought of Halleck; Grant must have believed that Halleck’s slow pace cost tens of thousands of Union lives.

Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes a number of other passages, including a long must-read passage about the lead-up to the Civil War, about a purported Constitutional right to secede from the Union, and about much else besides. It was the passages Coates quotes that drew me to read Grant’s book. I’m very glad I did.

One bit toward the end really puzzled me. Grant says that President Andrew Johnson started out wanting to treat the South as contemptible criminals — to punish them and isolate them. Soon, though,

Mr. Johnson, after a complete revolution of sentiment, seemed to regard the South not only as an oppressed people, but as the people best entitled to consideration of any of our citizens. This was more than the people who had secured to us the perpetuation of the Union were prepared for, and they became more radical in their views.

So Johnson’s about-face caused a counter-reaction among Northerners? At the time Grant wrote — 1885, completing the book just days before his death — all his readers must have known what he was talking about; 130 years on, I do not. Nor do I understand Grant’s reference to “legislation enacted during the reconstruction period to stay the hands of the President”. Joan Waugh’s Grant biography is next in queue, so perhaps she’ll explain these things to me. Or perhaps I need to reread Foner.

In lieu of reviewing Henry George — April 30, 2016

In lieu of reviewing Henry George

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…I’d like to direct you to a particularly good episode of my favorite podcast, Vox’s The Weeds. They discuss land taxes, soda taxes, and carbon taxes, and regrettably find themselves unable to produce a list of three things without concluding “…oh my!” One day some brave soul will figure out how to do that, but that day is not yet.

As with every episode of The Weeds, I agree with a lot, want to argue with some, and wish they had time to dive more into all. The discussion of Henry George‘s single tax is very good, and really had my head spinning. The soda-tax stuff was interesting, though the “paternalism” framing is less productive than they think it is. It’s “paternalistic” when the government tries to tell you what to do via tax policy; it’s not paternalistic when cigarette companies tell you what to do via advertising. I’d like to dispense with this word altogether. For similar reasons, actually, I’d like to dispense with “unintended consequences”. This term is used as a catch-all by which government policies are rejected with a shrug: “We’d love the government to do x, but, y’know, unintended consequences.” There are unintended consequences to everything; why single out unintended consequences from what the government does on our behalf?

One of these days I will review Henry George properly. I’ve just gone back and reread a lot of the passages I highlighted from Progress and Poverty, and I’m reminded both of how brilliant it is and how crankish. Definitely worth reading, thinking about, and reviewing.

A meta-note on reading biographies — April 19, 2016

A meta-note on reading biographies

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I’m reading a very, very, very good biography of Atatürk by Lord Kinross, which I’ll review when I’m finished. But a point about biographies in general occurs to me: you’d never really expect a biographer to have a negative or indifferent viewpoint toward his subject; you’d never expect the Kinross biography to be called Atatürk: the Grotesque Mediocrity.

So then maybe the best way to approach a subject like Atatürk is indirectly, via books in which he isn’t the main actor. You’ll get less detail about your specific subject that way, so you’ll need to read more books than just a single biography; for instance, Atatürk appears in Paris 1919 as just one of the figures — albeit a very significant one — controlling events while the allies grind through negotiations.

This approach will only get you so far: if you want to read about the creation of the modern Turkish state, about Kemalism, etc., it’s hard to think of an indirect way to achieve that. A book about the Ottoman empire, such as Caroline Finkel’s, will only touch on Atatürk at the end, and only up to the point when the sultanate disappears. Maybe there are books about Central Asia that I’ve not read, which treat Turkey as an important actor but not the only one. Or maybe I should read books about modern Greece? The Greeks surely don’t feel positively toward Atatürk.

Does this indirect approach seem correct to others? If so, is there some systematic way to apply it to any given subject?

What’s the argument against windowless hovels? — April 18, 2016

What’s the argument against windowless hovels?

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A New York Times article asking what Manhattan’s capacity is — which starts with the observation that its population was much higher during the tenement era, and ends with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — leads to a fascinating Wikipedia entry about Kowloon Walled City. It looked like this:

or like this:

It was demolished in 1994.

Presumably we have zoning limits on the sort of houses people can inhabit in Boston and New York. They presumably include access to clean water and ample sunlight; mandatory sewage connections; minimum square footage; and so on.

The argument against these sorts of limits would be that if people want to live in a closet, they should be able to. More generally — and this is an argument I think I saw in Ed Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City — if people are willing to pay good money to live in a closet, closets must be better than the other options that are available to them. And who are we to say that that’s not an option they should have? As terrible as favelas seem to us, they must be better than the alternatives available to those who live near Rio; if we forbid slums, we actually make life worse for those who believe that they’d have a better life in the slums.

Current Massachusetts law requires that

In each kitchen landlords must provide a sink sufficient for washing dishes and kitchen utensils, stove and oven in good working order, unless the written rental agreement states the tenant must provide this, and electrical hook-ups for installation of a refrigerator. The landlord is not required to provide a refrigerator, but if s/he does, it must be maintained by the landlord in good working order.

What if I eat all my meals out?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this would seem to say that if I want to live in Boston but don’t care about using a toilet or brushing my teeth (meh; I can shower at work), I should be able to pay less for rent to make that happen. There should be a spectrum of housing available, including windowless hovels (“PUBLIC TOILET MERE STEPS FROM THE FRONT DOOR!”). Whereas current law says that

Landlords must maintain the foundation, floors, walls, doors, windows, ceilings, roof, stairwells, porches, chimneys and all structural elements so as to exclude wind, rain, and snow; so as to be rodent-proof, weather tight, watertight, and free of chronic dampness, in good repair and fit for human habitation at all times

, you can imagine the argument that tenants should be allowed to rent structurally weak buildings so long as the tenants are completely aware of the risks they’re taking. Matt Yglesias made what sounded to many people like a similar argument in an international context after the deaths of many people in a Bangladeshi factory:

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

A lot of people, myself included, objected to this. Matt’s reply was that different U.S. states have different safety regulations, so it’s not absurd to have this sort of regulatory flexibility in the U.S.

Well, if that‘s not absurd, why stop with U.S. states? Why not allow flexibility between cities? Why not allow flexibility within cities?

One tautological response is that Boston shouldn’t allow regulatory flexibility because that’s not something that Boston does. The people, in their wisdom, have decided that Boston is the sort of place with high standards for housing safety.

Another argument would be to ask what this sort of flexibility is meant to obtain. Is the point just to create more cheap housing? If so, then we should create more cheap housing — either by building more housing, period (which means building up), or by subsidizing existing housing for those who can’t afford the high-safety-standard housing we have.

In general, there’s what the economists would call a “distributional problem”; this is a fancy way to put what Anatole France famously called the majestic equality of the law, “which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Allow landlords to build subpar buildings, and it won’t be the rich who die when their floors collapse.

On the other hand, maybe you have to assume that people have agency: they know the risks available to them, and they make decisions appropriately. Suppose that in this libertarian paradise, the government doesn’t regulate building construction, but does honestly evaluate the risk of building collapse, and then provides this risk assessment to potential tenants: “You have a 10% chance of dying in a fire,” say. Even suppose the government frames this in a suitably severe way: “If you live here for ten years, you can expect to die in a fire.” What then? Are we happy with this?

It seems pretty clear to me that we’re not happy with this. Even if we brush away various economic trifles, I still think we’re not happy with this. Suppose there are no unpriced externalities, for instance — that when my apartment burns down, it doesn’t take yours down with it. And suppose that corruption isn’t a problem — that if we allow slumlords to build defective buildings, they won’t bribe local politicians into underrating the risk of a fiery death. I suspect that people still don’t believe that different cities should have different safety standards; and they especially believe that safety standards shouldn’t vary within a city. Even the thought that different states have different safety standards, I would wager, strikes most Americans as offensive.

If I’m reading the public’s intuitions correctly, shouldn’t that same moral outrage extend to international safety standards? Shouldn’t we be upset that the accident of having been born in the United States buys you a safer workplace than someone who’s born in Bangladesh?

At the same time, why not reason as follows? Different nations are differently wealthy. As their incomes rise, they choose to spend their money on different things. Maybe (I can’t speak to the details) Bangladesh as a society has chosen to spend its limited funds on control of infectious diseases, on sewage treatment, and on clean drinking water. As it gains more money, perhaps it will spend some of that money on improving workplace safety. After that, maybe it will spend some money on guaranteeing retirement income. And after it’s solved public-health problems, maybe it will spend money on the diseases of affluence, like heart disease and diabetes. Should we object to their workplace safety any more than we do to their not providing 401(k)s? My intuition to this line of argument is no, we should allow them to spend their money where they wish. I think most Americans would agree, and I’ve just conducted a thought experiment (thought poll) where 99.2% of Americans agreed with me.

So then turn the lens back around: if it’s perfectly okay for poor nations to choose where to spend their scarce resources, why isn’t it okay for poor people in the United States to choose where to spend their scarce resources? The tautological answer that Boston isn’t the sort of city that allows poor people to live in substandard dwellings doesn’t feel complete: “Boston” doesn’t make decisions. Its voters make decisions through their elected representatives, and the question is why its elected representatives shouldn’t allow tenements for those who believe that tenements are their best option.

Maybe the best answer I can come up with is not a normative one (which is what I’m looking for above — an answer about what we should do), but rather empirical and historical. The argument comes in two parts. First, some decisions are collective and some are individual. We, as a society, have decided that food safety and building quality, among many other things, are too important to be left to the whims of individuals. The scope of what is collective increases with affluence. And in the United States, at least, a choice’s becoming collective means, sometimes, that we set universal floors: merely labeling Sinclair brand sausage with “caveat emptor: may contain rat droppings” no longer suffices once food safety has become a collective decision. This is still uncomfortably tautological: it doesn’t answer whether a certain decision should be collective; it only predicts, on the basis of recent history, that certain decisions do become collective as affluence rises.

What happens as markets become interconnected? Consider the international food system, for instance. As a legal matter, I imagine that food which could end up on U.S. consumers’ plates is subject to U.S. food-safety regulations, because U.S. food-safety has become a collective decision with a universal floor. How about food produced in the United States for consumption in other countries? Can U.S. manufacturers produce ground beef with rat droppings in it for consumption in China? Or does the scope of this collective decision extend both to U.S. consumers and U.S. producers?

Have I missed any arguments for allowing everyone to choose the safety standards that fit them best?