Blog Posts

Order without Design by Alain Bertaud

6/9/2019

Alain Bertaud is an urban planner who’s had a long career designing cities all over the world. Along the way, unusually for someone from a design background, he picked up a lot of economics. Order without Design is his careful explanation of the forces that shape cities, forces that are beyond planners’ control. Economists deal in trade-offs, and Bertaud in this book seeks to illuminate the trade-offs inherent in urban design so that planners can avoid utopianism and make the best of the limited options they face.

His key argument is that a city is, above all else, a labor market. Any design or plan that ignores that reality is doomed to fail.

The rule of thumb he operates by is that the labor market will be defined by the number of jobs that are available within a one-hour commute, making the success of the city a function of its density and its transportation system.

From an urbanist perspective, Bertaud’s arguments are welcome in the sense that they demonstrate the impracticality of radical plans like those of Le Corbusier, or less extremely, plans for “smart growth” or greenbelts around cities. In that sense, they favor markets and bottom-up processes like those that built most of the neighborhoods and cities that are the most beloved by urbanists today.

On the other hand, Bertaud’s logic entails an unavoidable clash with urbanists in that it calls for much denser cities, eventually, than could accommodate the kind of human-scale neighborhoods extolled by Jane Jacobs and others. It’s also a “mobility first” perspective that weighs in favor of major public works and investments in highways and transit to allow commuters to cross long distances in a regular commute. In other words, he sees a need for most cities to become like Shenzhen, not Paris.

Bertaud endorses regulations to limit externalities, but is skeptical of rules and designs meant to boost “affordable housing.” Having worked in developing nations, he sees rules mandating a certain standard of housing as untenable. He argues that housing, again, is necessarily tied to work, and that people who cannot get “affordable housing” near where the jobs are will simply get their needs fulfilled in the informal market.

Order without Design would be a good starting point for anyone interested in urban planning (I write as a beginner myself) because Bertaud walks through the logic of the economics very carefully, both through theory and data. In fact, I fear that he made this fairly comprehensive book too short-lived by including so many up-to-date statistics.

The book also contains many great examples, especially in the section comparing the affordable housing strategies of New York, Johannesburg, Shenzhen, and Indonesia.

A few notes:

Rather than bulldozing informal settlements -- i.e., doing the kind of “slum clearance” that so many cities have done, Indonesia, starting in 1969, improved the infrastructure of its “kampungs,” or traditional villages, without removing or restructuring existing housing, no matter how small or inadequate. In other words, the government would roll up pipes and roads, but otherwise leave housing untouched. It was a successful strategy in terms of affordability -- no wait lists for housing.
Shenzhen is an example of radical libertarian zoning. Homeowners banded together to create ultra dense “handshake buildings” so close together that dwellers could practically reach across the streets and shake the hand of their neighbors. The average interiors street width was less than 9 feet. The population exploded from from about 30,000 in 1980 to 14 million today.
Housing was considering a factor of production rather than a unit of consumption in the Soviet Union and communist China. But egalitarianism is impossible even with identical housing, because some housing will be in better locations, meaning that the workers in those house will have higher consumption.
Mies van de Rohe’s Seagram building, 1958, in New York, which has a plaza at the bottom, created new category of land use: Privately owned public space. NYC planners then thought they could replicate plaza using the regulatory tool of giving floor-to-area ratio bonuses to developers for including public plazas -- in other words, leveraging forced scarcity for their own plans. But instead they created a surfeit of plazas and plazas in places where no passerbys would naturally be.

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Eating high-fat

3/8/2019

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Last year, I experimented with eating keto/low-carb, high-fat.

I became curious about it after a family member told me he lost a lot of weight with the diet, and after I listened to Nina Teicholz’ appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. I wasn’t looking to lose weight, but rather was intrigued and open to a little self-experimentation.

Over the course of a few weeks, I ramped down my carbs by cutting back on deserts, bread, etc. Then, I went full keto for two weeks, adding fat to my diet and almost totally eliminating carbs. After that, I reintroduced some carbs back to my diet, but sparingly.

Here’s what I found:

I lost fat very rapidly.

Just a week or two into keto, I lost enough fat that I had to order new belts. I had not previously been "fat" by any standard. But I lost fat I didn’t know I had.

2. I stopped experiencing cravings.

While eating low-carb, I stopped experiencing cravings for food. I would eventually start to get hungry if a long time went between meals, but in a way that did not make me feel unhappy or desperate.

3. I could go without food no problem.

I could, and did, easily go days at a time without eating while eating LCHF. Before, I would struggle to get through a day at work without packing myself a snack like a protein bar for the afternoon. But while on LCHF, I could power through a whole day and not even really think about food. The only exception was if I worked out — in that case, I would get hungry enough to need food.

4. I stopped thinking about food.

Food stopped being a preoccupation. I enjoyed the meals that I had, but I didn’t think about food unnecessarily. The thought of breaking from work, for instance, to find a snack never really crossed my mind.

5. I felt less brain fog

I rarely, if ever, felt brain fog or torpidity while on the LCHF diet, a welcome change.

6. It didn’t make me weaker.

I maintained my regular lifting routine while on the diet and didn’t notice any drop-off in progress.

7. It is sustainable.

I only quit LCHF, months after I started it, by making a conscious decision to feed myself more carbs. I wasn’t having any trouble maintaining it.

I found that the diet, when combined with a moderate amount of exercise at least, could include enough carbs to live a normal lifestyle and still get the benefits of the LCHF diet enumerated above. For instance, moderate sides of grains with dinner, bread, and occasional desserts all work within the diet/lifestyle. Some things are always off-limits, such as soda, but you will never miss them.

The most difficult part of maintaining the lifestyle is the logistics. High-carb, high-sugar foods are just much more accessible. But the fact that you don’t need any snacks makes it much easier to cope.

There is absolutely no need to eat weird foods, count calories, or follow strict guidelines, as I’m seeing some people do to follow misguided keto advice. Just load up on meat, eggs, cheese, vegetables, etc. — eat all you want, that’s the entire point of the diet.

Some social events become tricky if you’re trying to avoid carbs, but even that is manageable. As for drinking, in my case, I love drinking whisky and was happy to give up beer in favor of more bourbon, Irish whiskey, etc.

8. It makes you realize you are addicted to sugar and carbs.

Having been re-sensitized, I now am shocked at the sweetness of some foods and drinks. I’ll never drink soda again -- it just tastes way too sweet, unpleasantly sweet and harshly acidic.

I’m also now aware of how often people interrupt themselves and break their concentration to seek out processed foods and sweets, often while visibly struggling with their own self-control and feeling miserable. I hadn't previously noticed. I used to be the same way -- I used to be unable to concentrate on what was in front of me because I was wondering whether it would make me feel better to walk down the hall and grab a twix or whatever. Those kinds of temptations simply didn’t cross my mind when I was eating low-fact, high-carb.

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Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, by Tim Carney

3/5/2019

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Alienated America is Tim Carney’s collation of Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Murray, W. Bradford Wilcox, David Autor, and his own reporting in bars, diners, and places of worship throughout the U.S.

The central theme is that social cohesion and economic well-being are together on one end of a spectrum of which the other end is alienation and isolation. Drawing on social science and his own reporting, Carney concludes that all good things go together with civil society -- the institutions that existing between the individual and the family and the government, such as unions, sports teams, recreational groups, and, above all, churches. Apart from civil society, you have the opposite of flourishing: Unemployment, distrust, resentment, drug use, and suicide.

By thinly slicing voting data from the 2015-2016 GOP primary, Carney concludes that it is the people who have lost strong civil society who were President Trump’s earliest and strongest supporters. Republicans in economically strong areas weren’t interested in Trump, and Republicans in tight-knit, church-going communities, such as Dutch Wisconsin, weren’t either. But to voters with neither material prosperity nor strong civil society, Trump’s pessimistic rhetoric, his call to make America great again, sounded compelling.

How did a significant chunk of the country end up so alienated and ready to turn to Trump? Carney, a staunch conservative, places some of the blame on the government. He argues that government is necessarily in tension with civil society, and that government services cannot substitute for human ties created in a church community -- and that, in some cases, the government services meant to liberate poor or dependent groups may actually deprive them of human ties.

Yet liberal-leaning readers skeptical of that conservative narrative should read on to the second half of the book, in which Carney also blames big finance, big business, and a general libertarian-tinged atmosphere of individualism for the rise of alienation. He says that big business, aided by big government, has had a homogenizing effect on the country, making it harder for local institutions and ways of life to thrive.

He notes, for instance, that the rise of contingent work, such as driving for Uber or contracting for Amazon, has made us materially richer but has also weakened the human ties we used to make via the workplace, threatening to stratify and dehumanize the economy.

In his conversations with voters, Carney says, he’s found that some of Trump’s strongest supporters are veterans, former cops, and laid-off union workers -- all people who once worked in ultra-cohesive units, in which they relied on each other for their livelihoods or lives, and then lost it. Forced then to acclimate to a hyper-individualistic society in which people’s relationships with each other are largely contingent, those vets, cops, and union workers have a difficult time adjusting.

Overall, Alienated America is a convincing portrait not only of the factors that led to the rise of Trump, but also of some of the most serious problems with our country, which the past three years have shown we are only just now learning how to discuss, thanks to the efforts of people like Carney. Maybe in another three years, his next book will help show the way out.

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The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman

10/21/2018

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The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman

This biography accentuates the role that Louis the XVI’s own sense of fate, combined with a few chance setbacks, played in his own demise.

Hardman makes clear that, from the beginning of his reign in 1774, Louis was haunted by the example of Charles I of England, who was executed by his own people in 1649. He was keenly aware of the possibility of the monarch losing favor with and control of the people and worked to try to avoid that specific fate.

On coming into power in 1774, Louis actually backed a slate of economic reforms that would have rationalized some aspects of France’s government and alleviated some of the inequities that would later prompt outright revolution. He empowered Turgot, a Physiocrat who, viewed through the lens of history, was an economic reformer and liberalizer -- the Library of Economics and Liberty describes him as the “French Adam Smith.”

Turgot’s ambitious agenda included deregulating the grain supply, undoing the corvees or conscripted labor for public works, and curbing the rights of guilds, as well as larger tax reform. The poor harvest of 1774 made the grain reform politically unpopular, though, hurting his standing. When the nobility recoiled at the reforms, he ultimately lost the support of Louis.

Louis’ defining character trait was indecision. He wasn’t dumb or lazy or cruel. He understood the threat to France and his monarchy, and worked hard to avoid it. But he failed through indecision and waffling.

That is clear from his marriage, and his initial incredible standoffishness with respect to Marie Antoinette, who he later coddled to a fault.

Later, his inability to stand up to the nobility or the third estate, and his general waffling between factions and groups, would prove his undoing.

When he did make a timely decision, he second-guess himself and often backtracked. Of note, Hardman suggests that he turned down the opportunity to back an Indian revolution against British rule, fearing that it would be a repeat of his involvement in the American revolution, which he regretted.

Other notes:

-- Hardman speculates that the higher interest rates the French government faced under the stewardship of Jacques Necker might explain why France suffered a revolution and England did not.

-- Louis’ advisers warned him that anti-religious “philosophes” did have followers among the third estate

-- Nevertheless, Hardman claims that Enlightenment ideas actually played little role in the Revolution. Rather, they were invoked by some revolutionaries as a pretext or rationalization for taking power from Louis

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“The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” by Jane Jacobs

7/29/2018

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I’ve seen other urbanists, architects, and economists reference this book over the years that I thought I might not even have to read it because I already understood what she had to say. Turns out that is basically right, but I'm still glad I read it.

The basic premise, in my own words, is that healthy cities exhibit emergent order, a vitality that cannot be reduced to its constituent parts and copied for use elsewhere or scaled up.

She writes that the conditions for a healthy urban area are density, a diversity of uses, a diversity of buildings, and human scale.

The classic example from the book of one of the emergent properties of a health neighborhood is that it allows for many “eyes on the street,” meaning residents, business proprietors, etc., all self-policing the street and subtly interacting in a way to provide safety.

A point I haven't seen referenced as much else where is that Jacobs believed that older buildings were needed in every neighborhood in order to provide lower rents for smaller businesses. I.e., to allow for the survival of mom and pop places that can’t afford the amenities that come with new buildings.

While Jacobs is known as the great rival to Robert Moses, who sought to impose big plans on cities and clear the way for cars, she doesn’t dedicate too much space to him or his ideas in this book (except to discuss at length the trade-off between car-friendly and human-friendly places).

Instead, her bigger intellectual foil is Le Corbusier and his idea of the “Radiant City” -- the ultimate top-down, abstracted, centralized approach to city planning.

In the last chapter, she warns against viewing a city as a work of art (as Le Corbusier did) or thinking of urban planning as a science.

Instead, she recommends:

Thinking about cities in terms of processes. That is, considering the interactions between people that shape a space for commerce, residence, leisure, etc.
Relying on induction rather than generalization.
Learning about the average from the exceptional cases.

Jacobs was writing in 1961. At that point, some of the major problems in U.S. urban planning were already apparent, but just in their very early stages.

Jacobs was aware of some of the malign incentives created by the system of housing finance. And she expected those problems to persist, including as manifested in urban sprawl. Yet I don’t think she anticipated, in this book (she died in 2006), just how much sprawl would reshape U.S. metropolises. The book is about issues in urban neighborhoods, less so about cities as a whole.

One prescient passage, though, notes that the favorable financing for surburbia was not purely a market phenomenon, but rather an outcome desired by “high-minded social thinkers.” She notes that Herbert Hoover opened the first White House Conference on Housing, in 1931, with a “polemic against the moral inferiority of cities and a panegyric on the moral virtues of simple cottages, small towns, and grass.”

Density is a major advantage for neighborhoods, in Jacobs’ view. She notes that, at that time, people confused high density and overcrowding. Her model neighborhood is Boston’s North End. The North End is one of the very few American neighborhoods that is almost medieval in the density of its physical layout.

Confusion about density vs. overcrowding, which probably still persists today, is one of the factors that led authorities to entertain the idea of slum clearance.

Jacobs, on the other hand, counted on organic processes to “unslum” bad neighborhoods. No need to push people out and radically rebuild.

Sadly, she was mistaken about the prospects for poor African-American urban neighborhoods. She thought they would be gradually improved and “unslummed” the way other neighborhoods were. If she was aware of the possibility of what we would now call gentrification, it’s not reflected in the book.

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From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe

6/21/2018

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After Tom Wolfe died I felt an overwhelming need to read something of his, and have also been on an architecture/urbanism kick, so I took this out of the library.

It’s basically a very long essay/short book-length screed against the internationalist/modernist style brought to the U.S. by Walter Gropius and other architects from the Bauhaus in Germany. Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe come in for the most sustained criticism.

There may be some subtle subtextual argument that went over my head, but Wolfe basically suggests that Gropius and Mies took over U.S. architecture and steered it toward boring, interwar-style worker housing box structures through sheer status games. As always, it’s about what’s said in the most elite settings and exclusive parties that sets the entire agenda. Architects who tried to deviate were sneered at as inferior.

A big omission, though, is how these architects got builders and developers to actually pony up the money for their projects. That’s the detail I’m most interested in, coming from a finance/economics perspective. But Wolfe does take care to note that many of them did not in fact get many very buildings built.

As always, Wolfe tries to get inside the heads of the people he’s writing about, architects, and their thoughts on status and their neurouses. One notable passage is his description of the necessity for any aspiring architect of owning a chair designed by Mies:

“The Barcelona Chair. The Platonic ideal of chair it was, pure Worker Housing leather and stainless steel, the most perfect piece of furniture design in the twentieth century.... When you saw the holy object on the sisal rug, you knew you were in a household where a fledgeling architect and his young wife had sacrificed everything to bring the symbol of the godly mission into their home. Five hundred and fifty dollars! She had even given up the diaper service and was doing the diapers by hand.''

Although at times the book reads like a condemnation of all modern architecture, it’s not. The heroes of the story are Edward Durell Stone and Robert Venturi -- architects who would still be considered modernist but who defied the orthodoxies of the time and opted for greater ornamentation or more variation.

From Wikipedia:

Venturi is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more".

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The Prince of Darkness, Robert Novak

5/31/2018

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Robert Novak’s autobiography is really a political history of post-WWII U.S.

The legendary columnist and reporter’s firsthand experience with the key figures of politics of that time is simply incredible. He had access to the main characters that would be unthinkable today, if only for logistical reasons.

In his early years reporting at the Capitol, he would join Everett Dirksen and other senators for off-the-record happy hours, just talking over the day’s events. Decades later, Novak mentioned the sessions to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Lott was astonished it could have happened. He had personal relationship with a succession of presidents, as well as with key members of Congress, cabinet members, and White House aides in several different generations.

When Novak began in journalism, politics was also a much smaller universe. He mentions that Dirksen monitored every bill that advanced past the committee level, and would personally prepare briefs on the legislation. That’s unthinkable today. But back then, there were just fewer people in politics. When Novak began a decades-long career on CNN, he was one of the first to appear in that format.

Even into relatively recent history, though, Novak maintained amazingly close ties to the highest-profile politicos. Bill Clinton once gave him a lift on his plane when Novak got stranded on the campaign trail.

I borrowed the book from former Novak protege Tim Carney hoping to pick up on some tricks of the trade and some insight into journalism. Here are some things I learned:

-- Novak grew up in Illinois and not long after moved to D.C. But he spent time, while in the military, right near where I went to high school, at Fort Devens in Lancaster, Massachusetts.

-- D.C. used to be much more of a drinking culture and participating led Novak into what he acknowledges was probably high-functioning alcoholism. Source lunches with three-plus drinks were the norm for him, followed up with heavy drinking at night. He described campaign plane and bus trips, during the Nixon era, as a group binge session. He later curtailed his drinking after suffering spiral meningitis.

-- Novak was an opinion reporter for most of his career. As he grew older, he became more and more outspokenly conservative. Espousing that point of view sometimes hurt his ability to develop sources, although it also helped in cases.

-- Novak always wrote about horse race politics and gossipy insider information. The fleeting newsbyte was his bread and butter. Because those are the things people like reading, it helped him maintain an audience and -- on my own reading -- helped to keep politicos coming to him to talk shop and serve as sources.

But he wasn’t a lightweight or inconsequential, and he took his work and journalism seriously. He tried to travel each year to stay informed about world affairs. He put himself into danger in Vietnam and felt personal responsibility for the war ending badly for the U.S., on the grounds that better reporting could have helped lead to a better outcome.

-- Novak admits to breaking and compromising on several key rules of journalism ethics. For instance, he says he lied about sourcing to protect sources. He hints several times in the book that he allowed personal relationships color his reporting, or that he shunned legitimate stories of public interest for his own purposes.

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The French Revolution

12/29/2017

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I tried something I’ve never tried before: Rather than read one book on a subject and not retain anything, I decided to read several book on one topic -- the French Revolution -- and see if I’d actually gain comprehension. I set out planning to read histories, biographies, and fiction.

Having finished, for now, I think it was worthwhile but I went about it the wrong way. I didn’t use any recommended reading list, and as a result the books I chose were probably not the best selections, and I definitely read them in the wrong order.

Here’s the list:
The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, William Doyle
The French Revolution, Christopher Hibbert
The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, A Life by David Lawday
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr
Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke
The Ancien Regime and the Revolution: Alexis de Tocqueville

Some notes:

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was written contemporaneously, as a long rambling letter meant to lay out the case against revolution in England, and accordingly read as sort of a hazy and and amateurish history. But what is distinctive about it is that it represents a first statement of conservatism, a concept that may not ever have been needed in history before the revolution.

For that reason, some of the points he made sound obvious, because conservatism is a now well-established political reality. For instance, he pointed out that the French might be summoning up unintended consequences by hurriedly getting rid of all their institutions, including the monarchy, religion, and laws. Obvious point, but apparently it had never needed to be made before.

Key claim by Burke: There is an overarching law that should not be changed by the people who happen to be living and controlling government at any one time. Unlike business partnerships, which are set up to take advantage of a given opportunity in a moment in time, the state “is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Burke argued against the French appropriation of private property on the grounds that depriving someone of economic independence he had already achieved was worse than killing him. He argued against the expropriation of the Church -- and predicted that it would be the overreach that turned off the British people from revolution -- on the grounds that the Church, like private property, is a permanent institution rather than a creation of the state and that its privileges are not meted out by the government.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the Revolution is probably the most valuable high-level, critical history of the revolution. I wish I’d read this after some of the other histories, rather than before. Writing in the 1850s, he went through the trouble of digging up tax rolls at the parish level and unearthing administrative letters to try to reach some generalized descriptions of the Ancien Regime.

Part of his thesis is that the revolution brought about a collapse of civil society:

“...in such communities where men are no longer tied to each other by race, class, craft guilds or family, they are all to read to think merely of their own interests, ever to predisposed to consider no one but themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism where all public good is snuffed out.”

Despotism, he said, makes that situation irresistible, because everyone to run afoul of the despot is to lose wealth and wealth is the only basis for standing in society.

Other notes:

He viewed the French revolution as a political revolution with the character of a religious revolution. He compared the growth of the ideals of the French revolution to the religious revolution of Christianity: Unlike the pagan religions that were part of the social order in their respective city-states, Christianity didn’t limit itself to just one area or one political entity.
The French middle class chafed more at remnants of feudalism than other nationalities because they had some property rights, and thus had “skin in the game” and felt the burdens of feudal rights and mis-administration acutely.
Administrative overreach was a serious problem in the Ancien Regime. Quote: “The Ancien Regime in a nutshell: Strict rules, lax implementation.” The most glaring example, in his eyes: Prior to the Revolution, at the same time as Voltaire and other irreligious thinkers were on the rise, France actually has a law on the books imposing the death penalty for writings antagonistic to religion.
Prior to the Revolution, the middle class was actually becoming wealthier, in relation to the stagnating nobility. It was also becoming more homogenous with the nobility, in the sense that both were reading the same materials published in Paris and taking social cues from the king. Both were also increasingly out of touch with the poor.
De Tocqueville tried to explain why France went from being highly religious to murderously anti-religious within two decades, but didn’t really reach a satisfactory answer on irreligion. He thought that the Catholic faith was a casualty of the revolution because most people saw the church as tied up with the old guard. That’s one reason the revolution went so far, because the Church wasn’t able to exert moderating influence.
Although administration was arbitrary, the middle class and nobility also had some freedoms in France that similar classes in other countries didn’t enjoy
He argues that Britain was inoculated from some of the revolutionary sentiments by political liberty. Without the centralization and arbitrariness of the French government, British rule didn’t provoke revolt.
Meanwhile, the rural poor areas had long suffered brain drain. Increasingly, the nobility congregated in Paris, which was socially hegemonic, and anyone smart enough to achieve success would flee the poor outskirts. In some poor rural areas, the only educated person might be the priest, and he could grate on the population if perceived as an example of the distance of the other rich, educated people. The taille, a direct tax, hit those poor people. Partly as a result, de Tocqueville suggests that those rural peasants were not necessarily better off economically than three centuries before.

Christopher Hibbert’s The French Revolution contains far more detailed and gory descriptions of specific highlights and lowlights of the revolution, with less of a focus on what drove events and which decisions proved pivotal.

One note that stuck with me is that he writes that, in 1789, before the Terror and the other major violence, the revolutionaries had basically carried out a successful constitutional reform, bringing the king to Paris to change the constitution. But, crucially, at that point, the peasants didn’t perceive any benefits, having happened to suffer a bad harvest and high unemployment. Their unrest helped precipitate the major shake-up of the constitutional order on August 4th and began the sequence of events that led into the bloody part of the revolution and the more radical changes.

One note from The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, A Life: Lawday notes that that Thomas Paine was a hero to the Jacobins for predicting in The Rights of Man that the French Revolution would take over all other countries as well. That prediction didn’t pan out.

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$2.00 a Day by Kathryn Edin & Luke Schaefer, Evicted by Matthew Desmond

5/13/2017

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Evicted by Matthew Desmond is in many ways a model of what a scholarly, opinionated book should be.

Desmond, a Harvard social scientist, provides two major pieces of evidence in this book on the toll that evictions take on poor people.

One is that he spent several years living in poor Milkwaukee neighborhoods, developing incredibly close ties to poor renters and studying first hand how housing scarcity affects poor people.

The other is that he helped run a survey that includes new information about evictions that aren’t available anywhere else. Most importantly, it counts not just people who were forcibly evicted by law enforcement but everyone pushed out by landlords.

Both approaches suggested that eviction is a much more frequent and damaging experience for poor Americans than commonly appreciated. Desmond reports in incredibly detail how evictions come at the worst possible times for poor families, adding just one more source of desperation and compounding difficulty into their lives. And the survey showed that, in the past two years prior, more than 1 in eight Milwaukee renters were forced to move.

The anecdotes are especially impressive because you get the sense that Desmond is trying to present a comprehensive picture of the forces at work in people’s lives that lead to evictions, rather than stacking the deck in one way or another.

He makes it clear that many of the problems that his subjects encounter are their own doing. He doesn’t gloss over drug use, shortsightedness, laziness, negligence, violence, and all the other mistakes that the people make. At times, Desmond describes the interior thought processes and feelings of his subjects in greater detail than I would be comfortable writing.

At the same time, he manages to touch on a simply astonishing number of different traps and dead-ends that poor people encounter at work, in their family lives, and especially in contact with government programs. He runs down how some families use disability payments as a substitute for welfare, and how doing so discourages them from working and saving in some circumstances. He explains how slumlords profit off of poorly designed voucher programs.

After assembling all this evidence that evictions are a regular source of trauma that leads to cascading problems for poor families, Desmond concludes that people should have a government-guaranteed right to housing.

It’s an argument that is very appealing to me in many ways. As I went to write this post, though, Kevin Corinth wrote a piece laying out the opposite perspective that is worth taking note of. Corinth argues that housing programs should be limited to short-term housing to prevent homelessness and programs for the mentally ill or other people who can’t find their own way, and otherwise the goal should be cash assistance.

Also, a few notes on where Desmond’s perspective, I thought, was not fully fleshed out. As Desmond has noted, only about a quarter of the people eligible for federal housing assistance receive it, because of supply problems. That, to me, is an argument for supply-side reforms rather than for government subsidies. Desmond’s case that evictions are particularly harmful suggests that providing for very cheap construction, even if it’s low-quality and cramped, would be better than the current system, in which evictions are frequent.

At different times, Desmond briefly touches on arguments that I think turn the economics of housing on its head. At one point, he suggests that construction of luxury apartments bids up rents, worsening affordability for poor families. Outside of rare exceptions, I think the opposite is true: More supply means lower prices throughout the market. Elsewhere, he creates a narrative that there is a proliferation of slumlords who evict and abuse tenants because it’s profitable and economically efficient in equilibrium. My guess is the far more efficient use of that urban land would be for high-quality housing for high-earners, and that what’s going on here is something else.

That’s not to diminish that this is an eye-opening book, definitely worth the attention and praise it’s been given.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, by the sociologists Kathryn Edin of Johns Hopkins and Luke Shaefer of Michigan, is structured similarly to Desmond’s book in that it draws on both one major datapoint -- that the number of families surviving on just $2 a day or less has doubled since the 1990s welfare reform -- and a wealth of anecdotes taken from first-hand observation of poor families. The authors argue that a lack of cash, as opposed to in-kind benefits like food stamps, creates scarcity and compounds problems for poor families. Cash, unlike in-kind benefits, allows families the flexibility to stave off short-term crises that might arise. They conclude that the the minimum wage should be raised, housing should be subsidized more, and that states should be required to promote cash welfare more.

The anecdotes are incredible and sometimes heart-rending, as they narrate families trying to get cash by auctioning off food stamps, selling blood, engaging in prostitution, and more.

The big issue with this book, though, is that the case that extreme poverty has risen in the U.S. since welfare reform, based on the data, is not conclusive. The evidence Scott Winship has assembled appears to indicate more strongly that, based on cash alone, $2-a-day poverty probably hasn’t risen significantly since welfare reform. Taking into consideration the in-kind benefits that expanded after welfare reform, it seems virtually nonexistent.

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"Holding ourselves accountable"

12/8/2016

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That is the title that the editors put on my alumni column for my student newspaper, the Irish Rover:

I’m worried that the instant communications available today have harmed our ability to be honest with ourselves.

Specifically, I fear that because nowadays we are rarely forced to spell out what we are thinking and experiencing, we can avoid the necessity of coming to terms with our circumstances and ourselves.

It’s harder to evade reality in the kind of long-form correspondence that everyone took part in not too long ago. In other words, the fact that we can communicate with our families and friends without having to write out a letter telling them what’s happening in our lives means that we can avoid ever leveling with them or ourselves.

Think of the difference between checking out someone’s Facebook page and visiting them in person. Anyone can maintain a decent-looking public persona on Facebook. In real life, we are capable of living with a lot of disorder and slovenliness in our lives if we’re left alone. If a parent or friend were to drop in and see the reality firsthand, though, we’d feel embarrassed at the way we’re living.

The same is kind of true for a letter—it’s like a substitute for an in-person visit. You can’t hide everything about yourself in a letter. Omissions will stand out to your correspondent. You can keep up appearances forever through texts and tweets, though.

Maybe this is just my own experience, but I get the sense that we are doing a little worse in gauging our own hopes and fears, and that it’s harder for all of us to maintain a sense of direction and purpose.

As Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel has documented, there has been a massive shift within the U.S. toward delayed adulthood, especially among men. Compared to the 1960s, men today are far less likely to be married and starting their own families by the age of 30 and far more likely to be living with their parents, trends that appear to have accelerated since the financial crisis. Men are increasingly delaying adulthood for a prolonged stay in what Kimmel calls “guyland”—an extended adolescence in which young men trade the responsibilities of marriage for low-risk, low-reward comfortable lifestyles heavy on video games and hanging out with other guys. Guys lacking the advantages of strong familial or social networks or rewarding, meaningful work are at special risk of slipping into that rut, but it could even happen to privileged Notre Dame grads.

The causes of this mass delayed adulthood are probably complex and numerous. But maybe one of the factors is that young men rarely, if ever, are forced to to be honest with themselves and with others about who they are and where they’re going.

Maybe writing a letter could force a reckoning. One example from the past that has stuck with me, as a history buff and Massachusetts native, is that of John Adams. Adams exchanged over 1,000 letters with his wife Abigail during the times that he was stationed in France, Holland, and England as a diplomat and in Washington as a politician, while she stayed behind in Massachusetts.

Skimming through their correspondence, it’s possible to see key moments in which writing with Abigail forced John to examine his own intentions and think through the implications of his decision not just for his life but for the new country.
For example, in one letter sent while working in the Continental Congress in 1775, Adams acknowledged that his judgment about national affairs was clouded by his hometown pride in New England—a bias that he admitted was partly irrational. (Adams did argue, though, that New England was in fact better than other places, in part because it had “purer English blood,” less mixed with Irish and other less-desirable ethnicities.)

Many of the letters that the Adams sent each other contained far more about their circumstances, hopes, and fears than could be captured in many text messages.

In fact, before the cost of communications dropped to almost nothing, a single piece of correspondence could easily provide the sole basis of a major life decision.

My great-grandmother, the daughter of Irish immigrants, was working as a nurse on the frontier in Saskatchewan when she received word that her sister in Boston was sick. She made the 2,000-plus mile journey by horseback, at one point getting caught in a blizzard outside Cleveland and knocking on random doors for shelter. She met my great-grandfather in Boston, and my dad’s side of the family has been there since.

In comparison, I’ll exchange 50 group texts with my siblings and we’ll discuss … nothing in particular.

Not that those messages or snaps or whatever are not meaningful, or that long-form letters are the only way to honestly describe what’s going on in your life.

But maybe we need to start either writing letters or find other ways to hold ourselves accountable.

For me, maybe this column could be a start.

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