Squalid is the choice of the Mandarin Class

Interesting to compare the reality on the ground and the prissy conceptualizations of progressive thinkers.  

On the one hand, there is this piece, Why American cities are squalid by Chris Arnade.  The subheading is Human flourishing is seen as dirty.  

The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to New York’s JFK. My plan was to get the last bus upstate that evening, so I could be in my own bed a little after midnight. But it would only work if the flight landed on time — and if passport control took under an hour and a half.

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. Of course, flying internationally is still a luxury, and complaining about it is a bit elitist. I really wish the US, and JFK in particular, would make an effort to meet global standards of air travel — but it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

After crashing at a friend’s house not far from JFK, I got up to take a 4:39am subway train to the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, so I could catch the first bus home. The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

The train slowly filled at each subsequent stop, until it was standing room only. I was seemingly the only person on the train who didn’t have to be there. Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city. United in fatigue and quiet frustration with the squalor, with the unconscious men taking up multiple seats.

I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.

The whole thing is interesting and worth a read.  I agree with his focus on the class implications.  Our urban planners, effective altruists, and the ranks of NGOs and progressive think tanks are all heavily populated with the Mandarin Class who do not have to live with the consequences of their failed utopian dreams.  The working poor do.  Hence the hidden of allure of a populist like Trump.  

But if not Trump, anyone who promises to alleviate what ails those who suffer from the coercive imposition of bad ideas and bad policies by those preening their virtues while actually doing bad things.

Speaking of which.  From Snow day mailbag by Matthew Yglesias.  The subheading is Sewer socialists, what MLK got wrong, and how to get kids to go to school

But we have a broad problem in contemporary American life around enforcing rules, not enforcing rules, and information cascades surrounding the non-enforcement of rules. When I wrote about shoplifting, one thing I said is that to the best of my understanding, it has always been the case that getting away with shoplifting was pretty easy. The big change is that social media allowed for rapid dissemination of the fact that even if store personnel observe you stealing, they won’t stop you. By the same token, if very few people are jumping fare gates, it doesn’t make sense for transit agency personnel to risk violent confrontations with the occasional fare-jumper. It also doesn’t make sense to incur large policing bills in order to reduce a rare crime. But if people start to notice that transit agency personnel won’t confront fare-jumpers, then more people start jumping the fare gate. In DC, WMATA is now installing new gates that are harder to jump.

My concern is that now that people realize that nobody will stop you from climbing over the gate, so making it logistically harder to climb over doesn’t do much. Posting a security guard at the CVS is an effective deterrent — until people realize the guard won’t do anything. To squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube, you need to go for the high-cost option of deploying law enforcement personnel.

Truancy is the same. Nobody wants to see tons of parents hauled into court. But once the norm is broken, only hard enforcement measures can help to restore it. At the same time, you can’t pour more resources into everything simultaneously. We had a big increase in murders in 2020 and 2021, and that kept police departments busy. In 2023, homicide fell to below its 2019 level. Hopefully that means more resources are available to crack down on shoplifting and other problems. Kamala Harris had some good ideas about truancy interventions in lower grades that I think she should talk about and work with politically friendly state and local officials to promote.

But I also do think that political and cultural leaders should try harder to change the vibes and reset norms.

"Change the vibes and reset the norms."  What almost everyone wants is for the government to establish the rule of law and ensure equality before the law (and clean out any bad laws that are gumming up the system.)

Public pundits are almost always against the rule of law and for the dispensing with rule of law and especially eager to enforce the law differently between citizens based on class or race.  

A few years ago the Obama administration, to much fanfare on the left, got rid of rule enforcement in school because African-American students were committing more infractions than other races.  If you are not going to enforce the law in school, then what are you teaching the students, what will they learn?  And how will that change the vibes and reset the norms?  Well, it did reset the norms.  Downwards.

Eliminating bail?  Vibes and norms sink lower.  Defunding the police?  Vibes and norms sink lower.  Legalizing drugs?  Vibes and norms sink lower.  Charging those defending themselves and others?  Vibes and norms sink lower.  Dismissing property theft below $1,000?  Vibes and norms sink lower.  Tolerating public vagrancy, substance abuse, exposure, defecation, etc. Vibes and norms sink lower. 

If you want to change the vibes and norms, you enforce the law.  You put the law breakers in jails or in appropriate programs which will heal their ills or modify their behaviors.  Everyone understands this except the Mandarin Class as articulated through the public pundits bewailing vibes and norms instead of championing rule of law and equality before the law.

To get back to rule of law for everyone, the utopian Mandarin Class will have to abandon the naïveté and obsession with imaginary systemic racism, with misunderstood disparate impact, and the delusion that wishing will make things better.