The Greenwoods New Year's Resolution by Dahl

The Greenwoods New Year's Resolution by Dahl from The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1959.

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Youthful mental models which are hard to update.

An interesting observation. From Still saddled with the politics of the Seventies by Michael Barone.

Not since James Monroe left the presidency in 1825, 48 years after he fought in the Battle of Princeton, has America had political leadership with careers running so far back in the past. Our current government leaders have political pedigrees going back to the 1970s.

Consider the Senate. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was first elected to the New York Assembly in 1974. Republican leader Mitch McConnell was elected Jefferson County judge — the county administrator for Louisville, Ky. — in 1977.

Consider the House. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was elected Northern California Democratic Chairman in 1977. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1966 and was elected state Senate president in 1975.

Or how about California’s leading Democrats? Senator Dianne Feinstein was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1970 and became mayor in 1978. Governor Jerry Brown was elected California secretary of state in 1970 and to his first term as governor in 1974.

Technically, President Trump is an exception, never having held public office until 2017. But his public career began in the 1970s, a terrible decade in which New York City’s population fell by 823,000. That’s when Trump refocused his father’s business from the outer boroughs, whose white ethnics were fleeing into Manhattan, where low real estate prices, other people’s money, and political pull enabled him to flourish, in anticipation of an eventual upturn.

It’s when Trump developed his disdain for establishment liberal opinion and penchant for outrageous tabloid-style disparagement thereof. That left him an odd man out in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton high contentment years and a natural fit for post-2007 discontent.

The entire elected leadership of the party are late septuagenarians and octogenarians. That has been commented on to some extent for a while, principally from the perspective that they have a thin bench and that the old stalwarts are preventing a reinvigoration of leadership with newer, younger talent.

Barrone focuses on a slightly different issue. He is making the case that their current values and opinions were shaped by the problems of a different era and how that disconnect between the problems then and now represents a challenge. Possibly. Interesting argument and it necessarily has to have some degree of truth, but I am not especially convinced.

I wonder, instead, about a slightly different issue. These are the children of the sixties, of the youth movement, of the rainbow coalition. The coalition of blue collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays, and public employee union members. It is hard to recall now, but American politics in the 1970s was a Democratic Party dish with an occasional Republican seasoning. Democrats had controlled Congress more or less uninterruptedly since the Great Depression in the 1930s. They controlled the statehouses and/or governorships of most the states. Republicans got an occasional presidential look-in but they were not a nation-wide force nor was their tent particularly expansive. That was the world in which the gerontocratic leadership of the Democratic Party came of age.

I wonder about the extent to which that old understanding of the world might be coloring their views today. It has been rather a mystery to me that over the past decade or two that the DNC has not been more concerned about the erosion of their support, the thinning of their ranks, the decline of their leadership bench, and their loss of institutional power.

The political playing field has reversed itself since the 1970s. Republicans are now the diverse and big tent party. Republicans dominate the state houses and while they do not have a lock on the federal Congress as Democrats used to do, they are very powerful there in a fashion that is relatively recent.

2008-2016 was disastrous. Democrats lost more than a 1,000 state and federal seats in less than a decade. The red tide swept across the electoral map. Democrats are losing the judiciary. Why haven't they undertaken more fundamental institutional reform to maintain their relevance. I wonder if it isn't a certain blindness to the erosion of the rainbow coalition. Democrats used to be both demographically and ideologically heterogeneous.

Today that description more and more belongs to the Republicans. Look at that old Democratic Coalition - blue collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays, and public employee union members. The social justice postmodernism purity of the past couple of decades has driven out critical elements of the coalition. The insistence on tribal identifications has generated conflicts. The more ideologically pure (and extreme) the base becomes, the smaller is the Democratic tent.

Blue collar workers have defected or moved into the position of unaffiliated swing voters. They were the largest single block of voters in that coalition. Feminists, when it was about equality of rights, used to be a large and powerful force among voters. But the meaning of feminism shifted from a focus on equal rights to a focus on equality of outcomes. Today, 85% of the adult population support equal rights but only 18% self-identify as feminist. Feminists no longer speak for most women. Pro-life women, religious women, Second Amendment women are all being slowly squeezed out.

Not dissimilarly with Hispanics. The ties between Democrats and Hispanics have been more recent and more complex. The whole racial categorization of "hispanics" has been a problem. The more Hispanic immigrants put down roots, start businesses, integrate into the community, the more they self-identify as white and the looser become their ties to the Democratic Party. They are still solidly in the camp, but the erosion is marked.

LGBT are not a material electoral base in terms of numbers. Public sector unions remain a backbone and critical foundation for the party but they are at risk of collapsing. Their position has been secure all this while owing to Depression Era legislation that is almost certainly about to be held unconstitutional. Without a legal obligation to pay union dues which are then used to support Democratic candidates, it is not improbable that public sector unions will collapse to the same degree they did in Wisconsin when reforms led to a 40% decline in union membership when people were freed to exercise their choice of whether to belong to a public sector union or not.

African Americans remain a solid bulwark of the Democratic coalition but even there, there is a thawing of the ice at the margins. Republicans have a suite of African American public intellectuals, party elders, and leadership (Condoleezza Rice, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, etc..) There is no sea change yet back to the Republican Party but even a couple of point decline, election to election, will be devastating to Democrats based on our federal and republican structure of government.

So I wonder if the DNC lack of concern about the erosion of the Democratic Party electoral position is not perhaps a function of the fact that their gerontocratic leadership have the picture of that Rainbow Coalition locked into their mental model from their political youth and have not fully taken into account how the coalition has eroded.

An interesting thought. I don't set great credence to it but something has to explain why the leadership has not reacted more energetically to their own party's decline.

Birches by Robert Frost

Birches
by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Defining themselves through their hatreds

Mitchell Gunter reports in Texas students launch 'No Whites Allowed' magazine:

A group of students at the University of Texas, San Antonio plans to start publishing a “No Whites Allowed” (NWA) magazine.

According to a Facebook event titled “Zine Release,” the magazine will be revealed on March 1 at La Botanica, which describes itself as “Texas' first vegan restaurant with a full bar and performance and event venue.”

“Thursday at La Botanica from 8-11pm there will be the NWA Zine release party! This zine specifically features and promotes black and brown lgbtqa creatives,” the description states. “We hope to showcase our talent and create an open space for our voices to be heard.”

The description goes on to explain that “for a very long time, black and brown people, especially those who are queer, have been told that they don’t have a space. That they don’t have a voice or a say. With this we would like to create a space.”

Student Kayla Ramey further elaborated on the event’s purpose in a comment.

“I keep having to make this post but I'll try it one last time so everyone clearly understands. The name of the zine is No Whites Allowed. It's a zine for QPOC and by QPOC,” Ramey wrote, noting that while “white people are welcome to come to the event,” the “main goal is to celebrate and empower people that society routinely ignores and rejects.”

Like so many foolish things, it pops up, makes its splash and then will disappear, either never launching or launching and then folding. An initiative with no market and which can only sustain itself via other people's money, obtained through deception or coercion.

But what immediately leapt to mind reading this was a phrase I had not thought of for a couple of decades. Bantustan. Bantustans were a product of late stage apartheid under the white South African regime, an attempt to herd the bulk of the black South African population into semi-autonomous micro-states where the South African government would not have to deal with them.

From the mid-1970s through the abandonment of the policy in the mid-1980s, four of some ten planned bantustans were declared independent. Only one had even a single redeeming feature and that was its tongue twisting name - Bophuthatswana.

What is the sickness of social justice postmodernism which is driving people to tribally identify and isolate themselves from the nation and their fellow citizens? To create their own self-imposed bantustans. The inherent racism of their policies are, of course, repugnant, but the tragedy is even more striking. It is not just racial hatred which will destroy these people's lives. It is defining themselves through their hatreds.

Astonishing.

It is centuries of happy accidents

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 62.

“On the larger scale, however, things have improved enormously in London. In the space of twenty years or so, London has acquired an interesting skyline, for one thing. It isn’t that it has a huge number of tall buildings, but that the tall buildings it has are distributed over a wide area. They don’t jostle for attention, as in most cities, but stand alone so that you can admire them in isolation, like giant pieces of sculpture. It’s a brilliant stroke. Now you get memorable views from all kinds of places – from Putney Bridge, from the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens, from platform 12 at Clapham Junction – where there never used to be views at all. Scattered skyscrapers also have the incidental benefit of spreading prosperity. A new skyscraper in central London just adds more bodies to crowded streets and Underground stations, but a big new building in Southwark or Lambeth or Nine Elms gives a jolt of economic input that can lift whole neighbourhoods, create demand for bars and restaurants, make them more desirable places to live or visit.

None of this was precisely intended. It is the by-product of something called the London Plan, which decrees that tall buildings may not impinge on protected views. One such view is from a certain oak tree on Hampstead Heath. (Well, why not?) No one can build anything that interrupts the view from the tree to St Paul’s Cathedral or the Houses of Parliament. There is a similar view from Richmond Park, miles from the city – so far out that I didn’t even know you could see any of central London from there. London is criss-crossed by protected sightlines, which effectively requires tall buildings to be spaced out. It is a happy accident. But then that is London. It is centuries of happy accidents.

Reducing program dependency of adults improves life outcomes of children

Interesting. I am a big fan of natural experiments which allow insights that normal protocols might preclude. From Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance by Gordon B. Dahl and Anne C. Gielen. From the Abstract.

Does participation in a social assistance program by parents have spillovers on their children's own participation, future labor market attachment, and human capital investments? While intergenerational concerns have figured prominently in policy debates for decades, causal evidence is scarce due to nonrandom participation and data limitations. In this paper we exploit a 1993 policy reform in the Netherlands which tightened disability insurance (DI) criteria for existing claimants, and use rich panel data to link parents to children's long-run outcomes. The key to our regression discontinuity design is that the reform applied to younger cohorts, while older cohorts were exempted from the new rules. We find that children of parents who were pushed out of DI or had their benefits reduced are 11% less likely to participate in DI themselves, do not alter their use of other government safety net programs, and earn 2% more in the labor market as adults. The combination of reduced government transfers and increased tax revenue results in a fiscal gain of 5,900 euros per treated parent due to child spillovers by 2014. Moreover, children of treated parents complete an extra 0.12 years of schooling on average, an investment consistent with an anticipated future with less reliance on DI. Our findings have important implications for the evaluation of this and other policy reforms: ignoring parent-to-child spillovers understates the long-run cost savings of the Dutch reform by between 21 and 40% in present discounted value terms.

Those are some pretty sizable long term cumulative benefits.

Kiosque, circa 1930-1932, Paris by Brassaï

Kiosque, circa 1930-1932, Paris by Brassaï

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Well, that New Year's resolution you kept exactly eighteen minutes by B. Tobey

Well, that New Year's resolution you kept exactly eighteen minutes by B. Tobey from The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1959.

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Wish by Caitlin Doyle

Wish
by Caitlin Doyle

I told him I needed time –
he gave me a cuckoo clock

(I couldn’t work the winding key)

I told him I needed space –
he gave me a telescope

(or make the moon look back at me)

I told him I needed change –
he gave me a penny jar

(or stop from spending every cent)

I told him I needed more –
he led me to the well

(or count up every wish I’d spent)

Now I have so much time,
the cuckoo’s flown away

(the moon’s a clock that’s come unwound)

Now I have so much space,
it’s night for days on end

(the moon’s a shadow on the ground)

Now I have so much change,
the well’s just one more wish

(the moon’s a coin the well has drowned)

Source: 2017 Frost Farm Prize Winner

The hungry eyes of centralized planners on the property of citizens

Richard Florida seems a nice fellow but he always grasps the wrong end of the stick. His is the view of the self-anointed Philosopher King - "Here is what I want to do and the ignorant proletariat are always getting in my way." His case is not helped by his track record of being serially wrong about virtually all of his past theories and proclamations. He has one of the more severe, or at least, obvious cases of oikophobia among the chattering classes.

He has also long been an urban core booster. He likes density and centralized city planning and appears to have an unspoken abhorrence of emergent order. Presumably, in part, because emergent order has no place for central planners. The passion for central urban planning is mysterious given its own tragic record of repeated and persistent failure.

From America's Other Housing Cricisis: Undercrowded Suburbs by Richard Florida.

In a recent survey, America’s mayors named housing, and housing affordability, as the number-one problem facing their cities. This concern was not only voiced by mayors of expensive coastal cities, but in diverse communities across the nation. The biggest culprit, according to a large and vocal chorus of urban theorists and economists, is outmoded and overly restrictive zoning and building codes—not to mention politically powerful “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) groups—which hold back new housing construction.

But according to a report released Thursday by the urban-housing economist Issi Romem of Buildzoom, a platform for finding contractors, many urban cores are actually developing and growing denser. And lots of housing continues to get built at the suburban periphery. Romem argues that America’s real housing problem—and a big part of the solution to it—lie in closer-in single-family-home neighborhoods that were built up during the great suburban boom of the last century, and that have seen little or no new housing construction since they were initially developed.

[snip]

The development of what was once the great suburban crabgrass frontier (to use the historian Kenneth Jackson’s evocative phrase), providing upward mobility and a path to a better life in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, has essentially been choked off. The urban core is growing denser, while the inner-ring suburbs are increasingly dormant, and in many cases distressed.

Florida then rolls out a series of maps to support his argument that residential neighborhoods should be repurposed for high density housing.

Development in Los Angeles, 1940–1960

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Light blue represents areas of new single-family construction; orange indicates areas of medium-density developments, of two to 48 units; red shows areas of large multifamily construction, of 50 units or more; and dark blue indicates virtually no construction at all.

Development in Los Angeles, 1960–1980

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Development in Los Angeles, 2000–2016

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Florida's interpretation:

While L.A. provides a particularly useful illustration of America’s dormant suburbs, it is far from unique. Romem’s study shows how this pattern fits virtually all U.S. metropolitan areas. Over time, a larger and larger share of their land is taken up by dormant single-family neighborhoods that are failing to add any new housing.

[snip]

The reality is that most of the housing stock and most of the land area of America’s metro areas is made up of relatively low-density suburban homes. And a great deal of it is essentially choked off from any future growth, locked in by outmoded and exclusionary land-use regulations. The end result is that most growth today takes place through sprawl.

Florida looks at those maps with the central planner's hunger to repurpose and optimize and make better. With the central planner's will to power. Why let those people continue living in those little quarter acre plots of paradise when we can put in freeways and apartment blocks

Why put up with this?

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When you can have this?

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Or This?

Florida looks at those maps and sees an opportunity to take people's land and use it for better purposes, i.e. use it in a way that he prefers. There is another way to look at those maps though. Those dark blue patches? Sure looks like people have built things that they are happy with and would prefer not to change.

Instead of looking at the cancerous spread of continual knocking down and building up, it looks like people have built and are pleased with what they have built. Zoning? An effort by citizens to protect what they have built from the rapacious appetite of centralized urban planners in cahoots with opportunistic developers.

I am being pretty dismissive of Florida. There are obviously real urban planning issues. Cities are complex systems that are never fully comprehensible. There are always enormous trade-offs between resident desires and city efficiencies, between communal well-being and external forces, between generations, etc. My objection is not to Florida per se but to the totalitarian inclination to take decision making away from citizens and put it into the hands of centralized insiders and rent seekers.

Complex urban systems are too complex for a central planner. This is Hayek's classic Problem of Knowledge. Central planners think they know best but they rarely do. The emergent order of the competitive market economy, constrained by the rule of law, has a by far better record of serving the needs of citizens.

Zoning is analogous to patents. We wish to accord some window of security to a person when they have built something (zoning) or invented something (patents). From an economic perspective, it makes sense to give people a planning horizon to give them stability and confidence that allows them to make effective personal and commercial investment decisions. How long that protection should exist is a valid question that presumably ought to resolve around empirical evidence of the value of that window of confidence. But it should not arbitrarily extinguished at the expense of residents for the benefit of the rent seeking central planners.

What is egregious is when centralized, non-transparent, rent seeking, changes are coercively imposed on citizens without their consent, all under the auspices of a select inner group imposing their wishes on their ostensibly equal fellow citizens. And that is what urban planners do. See Kelo for an example how this fails morally and fails commercially.