Drug Stores Selling Groceries, Lifestyles (15 Nov 2010)

I haven't yet figured out how to synthesize Rob Walker's column about the drug-store chain Walgreens starting to sell fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods neglected by traditional grocers and produce sellers and my somewhat mind-blowing experience at the brand-new Duane Reade (a NYC drug-store chain) in the hipster haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Neighborhood activists have encouraged a boycott (on Facebook at least) of this particular Duane Reade location because it apparently represents the wrong sort of gentrification and is uncooling the area with its non-mom-and-pop-ness. It sits across from another local pharmacy that has served the neighborhood since before it was colonized by 20-somethings and is therefore acceptably authentic.

To counter the bad vibes, Duane Reade apparently did some market research and concluded the way to win over locals was to hide the pharmacy in a remote corner and stock the store with a beer counter where one can have growlers filled; a huge walk-in beverage cooler that features, as it says above the entrance, "retro brands"; haute niche brands in both the food and makeup departments -- Ronnybrook Farms, Skyr Icelandic yogurt, Demeter fragrances (including Paperback, Dirt and Riding Crop) -- in the immense and gleaming K-mart-size basement-retail floor with luxuriously wide aisles. We can't give you mom-and-pop authenticity, the store seemed to be saying, but we can collect more of your lifestyle accouterments in one store than you ever dreamed was possible. People were audibly cooing and gasping in delighted surprise as they wandered around and saw just how much Duane Reade was willing to pander to them.

It's at this point that I want to draw some righteous parallel between poor neighborhoods and crypto-bohemian ones, between the food desert on the one hand and the desert of the real on the other. Whereas the Williamsburgers apparently want to see their warped integrity reflected in their neighborhood retailers, the people in food deserts see only society's general intention to ignore them until they disappear. The oversaturation of symbols and the esoteric plane on which the lifestyle war is being fought in the one neighborhood reflects the dearth of social resources in the other, the misplaced energies of a social order seeking profit opportunities and thus reinforcing hyperindividualism among the privileged.

A defense of foodie-ism (21 Sept 2010)

Almost incidentally, in the course of positing the value of a liberal-arts education, Tyler Cowen presents a sort of defense of foodies:

I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself. I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole. I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects. I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education.

Grasping food as a cultural system and understanding how it works makes one smarter, as long as you agree that smarts are a matter of mastering these kinds of decoding and recoding procedures. Liberal arts education, to put it as technocratically as possible, teaches students how to process information in a number of different codes, how to manipulate their idiosyncratic structures of meaning. The problem with foodies (and perhaps libaral-arts types like myself generally) comes when they attempt to assert a kind of dominance through the mastery of these codes -- they try to make the possibility of mastery exclusive, a zero-sum game. That is, they try to impose a status component to the coding/decoding that shifts the original or inherent or latent meanings of the food (or whatever) in a new way that suits their pretensions to becoming an elite. Then connoisseurship threatens to become the only relevant meaning possible to decode from a certain practice. (This is what Baudrillard feared in his ruminations about the consumerist code.) In other words, foodie-ism threatens to take all that rich cultural information inherent in making and enjoying food and flatten it out so that it only indicates where you stand in relation to some food-related trend, as an early adopter or an arriviste. Worse, we can only interpret it that way, and the original data begins to become inaccessible.

I think this sort of pattern fuels a lot of the culture-war animus directed at university-bred "elitists," who are seen as reducing/reifiying the richness of traditional everyday life and making it a big status game.

Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (16 Sept 2010)

This is not apropos of anything in particular and not in any way conclusive, but I recently re-read sociologist Georg Simmel's 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (pdf) and thought of a few things that seemed worth mentioning. That is to say a marked-up printout of it has been sitting by computer for a week or so now, and I want to be able to put it away.

In the essay -- a thoroughly turgid read, but essential -- Simmel offers a theory of what happens to people when they live in cities, and how it relates to the "resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism." Simmel regards this kind of ontological insecurity -- the fear in part of becoming so anonymous as to seem to have never existed -- as the characteristic modern struggle, the "deepest problem of modern life." Modernity means having to struggle against determinism rather than revel in it as part of a Providential plan. Because of industrialization and the romanticism that sprung up in reaction, Simmel writes, "No longer was it the 'general human quality' in every individual but rather his qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability that now became the criteria of his value."

Simmel highlights city life's "violent stimuli" -- the "swift and continuous shift" of impressions that deplete people's energy. (This is the subject of this Jonah Lehrer piece that made the rounds a year ago -- sort of surprising he doesn't mention Simmel, actually.) This swirl of stimuli develops a urban "intellectualistic character" that Simmel contrasts with small-town life "which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships." Simmel argues that people in cities must be able to adapt so often to changing circumstances that their feelings are never engaged the way they are for people in more conservative settings.

Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by it.

Thus city people react with their heads and not their hearts, and don't engage the "depths of the personality." Basically, that's another way of saying that life conditions in the city prevent the development of customary ways of living, of deeply held traditions that pattern life, allowing people to saunter about feeling deeply about everything since the "rational" response to everyday events is already encoded and has been passed down through generations. All relations are personal, and thus emotionally mediated. Whereas city people must deal with ever-shifting contexts, and therefore they must adopt what in comparison seems a blasé attitude to protect themselves. Their relations are mediated through impersonal means -- money. An upside of this is that no one is nosy about what you are buying; your money is green and theoretically spends everywhere without people asking questions about what you are buying. A downside is that they will draw their own conclusions based on a shallow understanding of what your possible motives could be. Rational behavior appears as that which the economists say it is -- utility maximization for yourself only, as your social relationships are not developed to the point where self-sacrifice or concern for another's well-being can be imagined. (Cosma Shalizi makes a related point in this post criticizing the rational-actor assumptions of most economic models: "Does any agent in any such model care at all about what any other agent gets to consume? No; it is a matter of purest indifference to them whether their fellows experience feast or famine; even whether they live or die. If one such agent has an unsatiated demand for potato chips, and the cost of one more chip will be to devastate innumerable millions, they simply are not equipped to care") In cities, our selfishness is presumed as a matter of course, Simmel suggests, because our relations are streamlined and instrumentalized. Money becomes the measuring stick among people and the presumed motivation for people, because anything else would be less universally applicable. A nuanced understanding of motives and status can only come against a less fluid social backdrop, such as is found in, say, sleepy villages. Still, Simmel claims that "the bodily closeness and the lack of space" in cities "make intellectual distance really perceivable for the first time" -- but it seems that "intellectual distance" is a kind of quantitative difference (measured in terms of fungible, abstract information?) rather than the qualitative differences suppressed or made irrelevant by traditional modes of life.

Simmel claims that the cash nexus and the "psychological intellectualistic attitude" are inextricably linked. There are no intellectuals, one might be tempted to conclude, outside of the urban-capitalist milieu. I wonder whether, when Simmel writes of "intellectualism" and "metropolitian intellectuality", we should read that today as "mediatization." Information becomes fungible like money does as it is driven to become mobile and circulate among exchange partners with no social ties. The classic Hayekian idea that prices are information is related to this -- market economies reduce knowledge to information, or prioritize the economic ramifications of information and suppress its other aspects. Markets mediatize knowledge, in other words, and technology seeks to make that mediatization more thorough in the name of economic efficiency. Cities were one of the original ramifications of that process. (If I ever get around to reading Fernand Braudel, I suspect I will have more coherent things to say about that.) Also intellectual isn't just a rough synonym for cosmopolitan, as that implies. Cosmopolitanism -- or rather the connoisseurship and cultural omnivorousness that attend it -- just becomes the intellectual project for any self-styled cognoscente who is not invested alternatively in doing away with urban-centric capitalism. Nevertheless, the link between money's fungibility and the proclivity for abstract thought seems interesting to me -- seems to lead to a "marketplace of ideas" framework for how we quantify our thought process, prove to ourselves that it is really happening. It also points to how thought develops in the suspensions of the realization of exchanges that money permits. Less cryptically -- money opens up a period for goods to circulate and "valorize" themselves, in Marxist jargon; the same process, if I am reading Simmel right, allows for a urbanized intellectualism to flourish. Money makes general alienation possible, and that general alienation allows also for a ferment of thought otherwise impossible -- the vaunted creative destruction that capitalism unleashes. Simmel declares: "To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler -- it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair." This is why he sees it as antagonistic to "real" qualitative individuality, prompting a pseudo-differentiation based on quantities of things and possessions.

Also, Simmel claims that the complexity of city life and the multiplicity of competing interests brings about a rise in time-consciousness and the death of spontaneity.

Punctuality, calculability and exactness, which are required by the complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life, are not only most intimately connected with its capitalistic and intellectualistic character but also colour the content of life and are conductive to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of receiving it from the outside in a general, schematically precise form. Even though those lives which are autonomous and characterized by these vital impulses are not entirely impossible in the city, they are, none the less, opposed to it in abstracto.

It's worth considering that claim in light of the increasingly real-time nature of city life, as facilitated by gadgets. Real-time attempts to invert this, so that city life nurtures spontaneity with its many possibilities, which can be seized at whim. Spontaneity is thus set against the traditional, organic way of life with its deep emotionality. That deep feeling once marked a spontaneous nature, but now the urban blasé attitude instead characterizes spontaneity in the form of "keeping options open." Likewise, real individual idiosyncracies that are replaced with efforts at coming up with contrived ones -- attempts to get noticed in the urban world. Because the city is so impersonal and objective -- Simmel even sees a "regression of the culture of the individual" in his era -- individuals try extra hard to be unique in whatever ways remain open and haven't been legislated or subordinated to economic efficiency.

From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention, present themselves from all sides and carry it in a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing. But from another angle, life is composed more and more of these impersonal cultural elements
and existing goods and values which seek to suppress peculiar personal interests and incomparabilities. As a result, in order that this most personal element be saved, extremities and peculiarities and individualizations must be produced and they must be over-exaggerated merely to be brought into the awareness even of the individual himself.

The internet has made that condition perhaps even more acute; it seeks to automate the ways in which we are stimulated, bringing ever more content before our eyes, giving us an endless stream of novelty and taxing the limits of our attention span more than anything has before. In a sense, the Internet is an extension of the metropolis as Simmel saw it. It becomes the site where autonomy struggles with anonymity, where social recognition struggles to remain uncommodifed. The Internet Metropolis strips away opportunities for individuation and gives us commodities and geegaws and such to compensate for it, keep us distracted. Consumerism's recent innovations have been geared toward making individuation of products unobtrusive to the system -- so we have small batches instead of mass-produced goods, customization options, locavorism, etc. Technology has allowed individuation to be a product sold rather than a personal struggle conducted outside the economic sphere, but this is cold comfort. The Internet milieu prompts us to package ourselves likewise, in an effort to stand out amid the chaos, even to ourselves, so that we ourselves can recognize ourselves as even having a identity. Of course, that is where Facebook comes in.

Gentrification and Justification (25 June 2010)

Historian Claude Fischer makes some interesting points about gentrification in this post, a response to a review essay from the Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz, on books about Greenwich Village. Both critique the sentimental idea that certain urban neighborhoods once were really authentic and "had soul" but now have been yuppified with the wrong sort of gentrification that hasn't respected the neighborhoods' special uniqueness and have instead imported suburbanized blandness -- chain stores, class homogeneity, a rigid separation from the world of manufacturing, and so on. It's a version of the golden-age fallacy that posits a time just at the horizon of memory when things were the way they should be, everything and everyone in their proper place. It's not an especially dynamic vision; it regards change as inherently corrupting, even though nothing could be more natural than for neighborhoods to evolve over time.

Not to impugn the motives of preservationists, who don't always seem to be acting in bad faith, but neighborhood-preservation efforts are often attempts to entrench power relations, enhance property values, and widen the gap between well-to-do and struggling areas of the city instead of allowing a more egalitarian equilibrium to emerge -- or at least acknowledging dynamism in urban development. There is no platonic ideal of, say, Greenwich Village, just contested ideas that represent competing visions and interests. Fischer describes how authenticity becomes a stalking horse for less lofty concerns:

Struggles over gentrification, even if rooted in matters like rents and loft space, also entail ideological battle. Spokespersons for the current residents invoke local color; they seek to preserve this moment by investing it with historical authenticity; we, they say, are the traditional people of the neighborhood. (One generation’s “traditional” residents are, of course, usually an earlier generation’s outside “invaders.”) The developers, merchants, and middle-class newcomers may be bringing change, but they also often invoke history, a history that looks back before the current residents. One tactic is to use Historical Preservation, to protect the original architecture of a neighborhood, that is the styles that preceded the current residents, for example, the single-family Victorian gingerbread houses, not the stuccoed-over Victorians divided into three flats for immigrant families.

Schwarz deplores the proposition that "the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience." In other words, it's a way of using aesthetics to disguise a conservative politics, even, perhaps, from the purveyors themselves.

Preservationists, Schwarz argues, try to freeze a particular transitional moment when the gritty aspects of neighborhood have only just begun to give way to revitalization. Fischer points out that struggles over the evolution of a neighborhood often involve competing static visions of its "real" character, all of which should be regarded skeptically. Fischer writes:

Schwartz suggests that this balance of working-class grit and a cleaned-up bohemia was attained only in a few places – the Village most famously – and for just a brief moment before the neighborhoods tipped over into “inauthentic” yuppiedom. (In the Village, that moment came around 1960, just about when Bob Dylan showed up.) Schwartz is impatient with those who, in slamming gentrification, imagine that those thrilling moments could be preserved in “amber.”

These moments shouldn't be privileged over other moments in a neighborhood's life cycle, in part because they can't be artificially constructed -- they are cherished for their organic juxtapositions of unlikely elements. Remove the spontaneity, and these become contrived Urban Outfitters moments.

Gentrification nowadays is more readily experienced and lamented by a broader group of people because, as Schwarz argues, neighborhoods evolve much more quickly than they did when Jane Jacobs was making the case for preserving their organic character. "Indeed, what has changed since Jacobs’s day ... is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression ... and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy."

That acceleration reflects consumerist capitalism's permanent imperative to increase our cultural-consumption throughput, which is achieved on a number of fronts. Digitization and mobile communications make it easier for us to be always consuming and producing new consumer meanings that invalidate the old ones and intensify the need to consume more. More-thorough mediatization makes for faster fashion cycles. Retail outlets start to come and go as if they were art installations. People delay in starting families, extending the period of fashion-conscious adolescence and the period in which they want to live among strangers in an urban environment displaying and "discovering" themselves. And so on.

How does consumption become the "dominant means of self-expression"? The division of labor in modern society is partly responsible, removing the meaningfulness from work. That meaningfulness crops up instead in consumption, the symbolic resonance of what we buy, display, and use. Along with that change, identity becomes provisional and open-ended rather than constrained by traditional limits. Rather than having an identity assigned by the conditions of our birth, we become responsible for creating a series of roles for ourselves. The self becomes a goal we never can quite reach but are always moving toward through various experiments with lifestyles and purchases and attitudes. We seek distinction through the pursuit of novelty and originality, which fill the void left by retreating traditional values (which are ushered out by the creative destruction of capitalism).

And therein lies a contradiction: we want to consume the traditional values of our neighborhoods precisely at the moment that we have become the sorts of selves who can't exist in traditional settings. Just as the authenticity of our identity has become something we feel required or anxious to establish over and over again through careful outward displays, so our neighborhoods begin to be held to the same standards, as they are transformed primarily into settings for our personal narratives expected to reflect our self-image. But at the same time, to cater to our identity needs on a practical level (food, clothes, cafes, bars, tchotchke shops, etc.), neighborhoods lose the local color that supports the idea that we are somehow on the urban frontier, pursuing an edgy lifestyle distinct from the safe, boring, blah lives of our parents who fled cities.

Anyway, it's quite possibly better that gentrification tends to temper the edge of contemporary bohemia in America. Otherwise we might have in the U.S. the "alcoholic agoras" of England that Dragan Klaic mentions in this article -- "where young people get drunk by 10:00 pm, vomit in the streets, get into fights and are taken away by ambulances and police or totter into taxis to get back home. This is the daily reality of the creative city pipe dream."

But What About the Tract Homes? (2 Feb 2010)

Suburbia (not this one, alas) seems to be in the news, prompted by Joel "New Geography" Kotkin's essay claiming that the Obama administration (aka "the president’s cadres") is inveighing a "war against suburbia." This is so ridiculous it almost needs no comment. Atrios sums it up well: "This is completely idiotic for mostly obvious reasons, including the hundreds of billions devoted to propping up single family home prices." (I think Kotkin needs to watch Over the Edge is he wants to see what a war on suburbia really looks like.)

Mike Konczal puts some specific numbers behind some of the other obviousness, the idea that money for Obama's high-speed-rail initiatives threatens pro-suburban transportation policy.

From the ProPublica Stimulus Spending List:
Highway infrastructure investment $26,725,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds distributed by states $60,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds for the Indian Reservation Roads program $550,000,000
Highway infrastructure funds for surface transportation technology training $20,000,000
Highway infrastructure to fund oversight and management of projects $40,000,000
Additional capital investments in surface transportation including highways, bridges, and road repairs $1,298,500,000
Administrative costs for additional capital investments in surface transportation $200,000,000

High speed rail capital assistance $8,000,000,000
Check that out: Over $28 billion dollars allocated to highway spending, with over $26 billion allocated to “Highway infrastructure investment.” That’s over three times the amount spent on the $8 billion for “high speed rail capital assistance.”

Factor in all the ongoing support and tax breaks for mortgages and single-family homes, and it's safe to say that the suburban way of life is going to remain heavily subsidized and under no particular threat from the current regime. No one is planning to run rails in place of the highways. And as Amanda Marcotte points out "some of the biggest beneficiaries of public transit by rail are the very suburbanites in middle American cities that Kotkin claims to fiercely defend."

Kotkin goes to great lengths to sell his bill of goods: he quotes right-wing economics writer Robert Samuelson, he evokes Europe as a boogeyman, uses the "elitists hate it, so it must be okay" argument, and deploys insinuating rhetoric, as in this passage:

These efforts will be supported by an elaborate coalition of new urbanist and environmental groups. At the same time, a powerful urban land interest, including many close to the Democratic Party, would also support steps that thwart suburban growth and give them a near monopoly on future development over the coming decades.

Yes, there is a vast left-wing conspiracy implementing the urbanist agenda and unleash its "deep-seated desire to change the way Americans live" behind the backs of voters, who are nonetheless so outraged that they voted for Scott Brown.

Kevin Drum, who seems to think it is glib to remind suburbanites of their subsidies, argues that these suburban voters are waiting for some more explicit and unwarranted handouts, mainly because they are too myopic to see the ways existing policies already benefit them. Drum writes that "there's a real tension between good policy and good politics" and seems to imply that we must inevitably surrender the former to the latter. What has happened over the past few years gives us no reason to think about things less cynically, I suppose, but I would hope there is still something useful in arguing the merits of policy, in acknowledging that suburbanization is unsustainable in the form it has taken up to now. Why give respect to Kotkin for providing an ideological smoke-screen for suburban-voter selfishness? Marcotte also makes a good point about the ideological cover Kotkin provides for suburban racism of the sort that apparently animates a good portion of the Republican party: "You can really tell what the agenda behind this article is when author Joel Kotkin puts 'white flight' in square quotes, implying that liberals made it up because of our irrational hatred of the suburbs." (I always thought they were "scare quotes," though they are sort of for squares, as well.) It always seemed to me that suburbs are about the fantasy of escaping from the presence of poverty or any feelings of social responsibility over inequality. You move somewhere where "those people" don't exist. Then you can practice a me-first, NIMBY-style politics as if it's rational and "natural."

Of course suburbanites don't like the idea of having to change their lifestyle. Ideally economic, demographic and environmental realities will end up driving the change, not a government cabal. Incidentally, it's at least as plausible to argue that zoning restrictions, various state-funded incentives and the relative underinvestment in cities that forcibly "changed the way Americans live" in the past 60 years. Ultimately, ideology and habitus shape where and how people choose to live more than any explicit raft of social-engineering programs -- in a class-inflected society, residential spaces will mutate to continue to reflect and reproduce the various distinctions.

The "protocol economy" and the recalculation argument (30 Dec 2009)

In the NYT, David Brooks has a column about what he calls the "protocol economy":

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

That sounds a lot like a conservative take on what Italian Marxists like Virno and Negri call the "post-Fordist economy," which relies not on raw manufacturing capability but on "immaterial labor" produced collaboratively in the "social factory." Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude calls this "the general intellect," drawing on some tentative formulations Marx made in the Grundrisse.

In so-called “second-generation independent labor," but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and “linguistic games.” In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive “machines,” without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve. The general intellect becomes an attribute of living labor when the activity of the latter consists increasingly of linguistic services.

Labor, that is to say, now consists mainly of interpersonal communication and consumption skills. As more-traditional economists would put it, we build various forms of communication skills to reduce transaction costs, increasing the trust between parties to various inter-organizational exchanges. When we have drinks with co-workers, we have an easier time working with them efficiently on the job. To translate into the terms Brooks uses, "a nation has to have a good economic culture ... what really matters [are] attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders." In other words, labor practices in the capitalism we know are often about building the hierarchy, reinforcing the chain of command while disguising the coercion involved. The value of an enterprise more and more lies precisely in that discipline, which promises that the organization can spring into action and work quickly to accommodate demands.

Not only is hierarchical communication important; Brooks claims that "a strong economy needs daring consumers." By working at our consumption, making sure we do it more efficiently, we become more valuable to our employers. When we use computers at home, for instance, we become more efficient users of them at work. And by being "daring" about what we consume, we help sustain the cycle of novelty -- making old but still functional goods seem uncool and thus obsolete. (This seems at odds with the New Austerity position Brooks occasionally pushes, but that's another topic.)

Both of these tenets of "good economic culture" point toward the end of the hard-and-fast division between work and nonwork time, since we are constantly working on building trust and "innovating" in our relationships with people and the products we use. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure then changes what it means to be employed. More and more of us are producing value in our leisure time (filling out customer-satisfaction surveys, writing product reviews online, disseminating information about what trends are hot, file-sharing, mapping out our social networks, etc.) -- and finding ourselves otherwise unemployed, without a traditional wage-paying job. The media industry is particularly implicated in this change -- reporters are being laid off while the work of unpaid "citizen journalists" is being harvested. (See here.)

Among the economists Brooks cites is Arnold Kling, who for some time has been developing the argument (derived from Austrian economists: Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, etc.) at the blog EconLog that the current recession can be explained in terms of "recalculation" (and not in traditional macroeconomic terms as a "lack of aggregate demand" or "liquidity preferences"). Unemployment is thus structural rather than cyclical. The gist is that people can systematically plan their investments poorly, including how they invest their "human capital," as Kling explains coldly:

people take a lot of idiosyncratic risk, particularly in terms of their human capital, which is for most people their biggest asset. I think that in the last 18 months, an unusually high number of people have had their plans go awry. They wish they had made different choices in terms of their education and occupations. Digging out from these mistakes is going to take a long time. A lot of recalculation needs to get done, and the problem is really daunting.

The analysis hinges on the problems incipient in the time lag between production and consumption (the period in which capital is circulating and surplus value is realized, from Marx's point of view -- when the exploited are definitively separated from the exploiters). Producers plan today for uncertain demand tomorrow, without guarantee that what's produced is socially necessary. The future's uncertain and the end is always near, as noted economist Jim Morrison put it. When the planning has gone poorly, the economy will begin to painfully reallocate resources (including labor) by means of the market sending some blunt signals -- i.e. lots of layoffs.

This view has a kind of pitiless frankness going for it; it plays as a promise not to reinflate the same bubbles or protect moribund industries or embedded rent-seekers. It seeks to rid us of unsustainable economic practices -- in our case, perpetual consumer borrowing to sustain a consumerist-driven economy. At the same time, though, it makes a deity of market signals: the divine plan indicated by these signals must be obeyed. But of course the whole recalculation problem arises because we can't reliably discern what we should do from the signals the market conveys. The signals themselves encode various distortions and asymmetries and scams that lead us to misallocate our financial and human capital. There seems to be a need for government industrial policy of some sort to corral those signals, simplify them, supply them with parameters that allow the message they send be more easily interpreted.

In the U.S., the call for industrial policy often ends up being a plea for a return to the glory days of manufacturing -- when America actually made stuff instead of easily copied "protocols;" when we made steel, not software and entertainment goods that can be pirated; when labor was material and delineated, not immaterial and uncompensated in a nebulous service economy. Ryan Avent, at The Economist's Free Exchange blog dismisses this (and articles like this TNR piece) as a liberal-left shibboleth:

What about the question of whether manufacturing ought to make up a set share of output? Think about this. Technological innovation has significantly reduced the cost of many technologies; in real terms (and especially in quality-adjusted real terms), televisions, computers, phones, appliances, and so on are far cheaper than they used to be. One consequence of these reductions in cost is that such products contribute less to measured output.
For many service activities, by contrast, the principal cost factors aren't easily reduced. Many health care services, for instance, are skilled-labour intensive. Until technology can reduce the labour inputs required for such services (or until their is a significant increase in the supply of the necessary skilled labour) it will be hard to cut costs, and meanwhile, demand is steady or increases. As a result, prices go up, as does the value of the contribution to output.

Avent is basically restating the recalculation thesis with a slightly different emphasis: workers need to retrain for the service economy, not ask the government to protect their outmoded, deskilled manufacturing jobs now being exported to countries where labor (and human life) is currently cheap. The U.S. apparently needs to focus even more on education (the customary panacea for economic ills), but this threatens to produce an education arms race instead of increase in the skill set of the workforce. People need higher and higher education degrees to do the same simple office work. (This seems to threaten an education bubble, where people stay in school as long as possible and then graduate to become educators themselves.) (Avent has more worth reading on this subject at his personal blog, looking at the American Prospect's special issue on urbanism.)

The fetishization of education also has the effect of encouraging the plethora of highly educated people to manufacture complexity for its own sake, in order to justify bigger salaries for then managing that complexity. This seems to be what happened in the finance industry, which dropped all pretense of serving an intermediary function (matching investments with spare capital) and nakedly served itself, sullying the market signals that are supposed to aid economic recalculation and ease/prevent structural unemployment in the first place. (See here for a good explanation of why the financial sector's norms are out of whack -- basically bankers care about earnings only, their "mission" precludes an ethic based on the rewards of their work itself.)

It seems like economic/industrial policy should be geared toward fixing the "economic culture" in such a way to prevent the elaboration of "protocols" of self-serving complexity. We need to encourage education while discouraging the abuse and perversion of the advantages and innovations it can supply. Hence the focus on income inequality, arguably the evidence of such perversions -- at least if one holds to the ideal that knowledge is its own reward rather than a mere tool to get money, which is then presumed to be able to buy something better than wisdom.

The craven creative class (18 Feb 2009)

If you are familiar with Richard Florida, much of his engaging essay in the new Atlantic, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," will not surprise you -- those in cities lucky enough to be populated by the creative class will only be mildly discomfitted by the recession, while those Rust Belt unfortunates are basically doomed. As Florida points out, "innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant," and New York will continue to innovate in the vital fields represented by these creatives: "fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and—yes—psychiatrists."

My reaction to this is similar to Arnold Kling's: "I don't think that the arts are all that important. To me, creative innovation that matters is somebody in a lab at MIT coming up with a more efficient battery or solar cell. It is somebody at Stanford coming up with a way to make computers smarter or cancer more preventable. I just can't get excited about some frou-frou fashion designers and the magazines that feature their creations."

Even though it makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I tend to adopt that same skeptical sneer for pseudo-innovations of the fashion cycle, for casual abuse of the word innovative and creative. When Florida writes about cities incubating "idea-driven creative industries" I wonder what he means specifically. Obviously he doesn't mean the swell financial innovation conjured up by the creative class of Wall Street bankers that helped put us into this recession that, as Florida rightly notes, will dump misery mainly in other parts of the country. But I can never grasp in my noncreative mind what is so beneficial about ideas as ideas, regardless of whether they are good or bad; about innovation for its own sake. Florida is undoubtedly right that cities allow ambitious people with money to find more easily other ambitious people full of conviction in their own ideas; they can then socialize in such a way that they can puff each other up with that right amount of trust and nepotistic networking confidence that's necessary to launch implausible startups. They can be intimate enough to truly believe each other's bullshit and craft an excellent marketing plan for it. And they can fashion a richer culture of social signifiers (the art world, etc.) that can alienate and put at a disadvantage those not fortunate enough to breathe in that rarefied air.

But when Florida writes of people "in the intangible sector—what I call the 'creative class' of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals," it's hard not to wonder, what are they engineering? What are they managing? Isn't their creative success ultimately contingent on the poor rubes doing the dirty work under them? Doesn't their white-collar creativity at some point touch something tangible, a level at which actual human needs are being fulfilled through socially necessary labor? Felix Salmon remonstrates Kling with the implied point that libertarian economist types can't go around judging businesses in moral terms, as long as they are generating jobs and income. But it seems a fair question to ask whether the fashion industry's "value added" is more socially useful than a Las Vegas construction worker's. Florida argues that the Sun Belt building boom, frighteningly efficient and innovative and "highly metabolic" as it was during the bubble, was built on a kind of lie, but I wonder if the same isn't true of the dubious innovation coming from the media and fashion industries favored by the creative class. It all seems vulnerable to a more rigorous accounting of what is truly socially necessary.

Florida's core argument is this:

The economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism.

But what are ideas about if not things? Ultimately, any idea must find tangible expression in human labor reworking some piece of material in a way that deemed socially necessary. Otherwise it never gets realized; it never enters the economy. Is haute couture any more necessary than McMansion developments in Mesa, Arizona?

Maybe there is a way for the ideas not to yield things, but an overarching ideology that's not tangible but is nonetheless very valuable for those it protects. The ideas that are generated by that density of creative people working with fast-moving ideas are perhaps merely those that establish the hierarchy by which they seek to be judged, and the means for putting it over on the people who would otherwise prefer to play by different rules. The velocity is a matter of keeping the fashion cycle one step ahead of the populace they seek to dominate. As long as they succeed it putting this cycle over on outsiders, they "thrive," because they then get to manufacture the ideas that make them gatekeepers to modern identity.

So much of the New York creative class may amount to no more than an entrenched group of ideological workers, manufacturing tokens of prestige to preserve the class structure while those in the noncreative classes suffer without recompense. So no wonder it won't be such hard times for us here. The class structure is likely to need more propping up than ever. But I think this dooms Florida's prediction that creative-class cities will assimilate the economy's losers; these cities may thrive precisely by preventing those people out from peeking behind the curtain.

Following up (16 Feb 2009)

Catching up in my RSS reader, I've come across a few things that would have been nice to mention in previous posts. So I'll mention them now, and make this sort of thing a regular feature. (Please let me know if this is worthwhile or not.)

1. A few days ago I wrote about the Amish in response to a Kevin Kelly post about their relationship to technology. This Boston Globe piece by Jonah Lehrer from January (Andrew Hearst's link reminded me of it) about overstimulation in the city seems relevant to the exploration of technological withdrawal (in both senses of the word). Lehrer reports on research that has found that the overstimulation we face in urban environments hampers our mental functioning.

After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

Just as the urban envornment dulling, nature is an essential refresher for our minds. Apparently, the mind needs trees. I personally find this sort of hard to accept -- I felt half-alive until I moved to New York City, and the thought of going camping seems like living death. Lehrer notes that "the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the 'concentration of social interactions' that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists." But it seems that the city is a machine not merely or innovation but for creating impulsive individualists, the anti-Amish.

Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

Does innovation in practice, in capitalist society, simply mean the production of impulsiveness? Is there another way to incite innovation without the capitalist structure of mandated competition? Is that need for innovation what produces cities? These seem to be the questions the Amish present to us, and it boils down to this: Should society reject unfettered innovation in an effort to preserve a certain harmony among a given community? Or is it better to promote a maximum amount of innovation, even if it has deleterious consequences for the community? A general thrust of Marxist theory is that technology will improve to the point where it will rescue authentic individuality from the depredations of class struggle. It's one of the chief attractions of his philosophy, this ideal of finding individual integrity at the heart of community. As Kolakowski describes it in Main Current of Marxism, Marx believed that "The abolition of dependence on alienated forces will restore to man his social nature, i.e. the individual will accept the community as his own interiorized nature. But the community, consciously present in each of its members, is not intended to be a merging of personality in an anonymous, homogenous whole." But that sounds a little like the Amish, when they are idealized by outsiders. But rather than the faith in technology to galvanize proletarian struggle and achieve an individuality never before realized, the idealized Amish glamorize the rejection of technology altogether as a way of escaping alienation and preserving an individualism not yet lost. Both seem like fantasy projections of the alienated soul trapped in the egoism of capitalist subjectivity.

2. In the NYT, media analyst David Carr wrote about the same insane CNBC clip with Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb that I mentioned in this post. Carr notes that in the recession, "Being a financial news anchor must seem like owning an ice cream parlor where spinach is the only flavor on the menu." This is because tehy are not in the business of reporting news but of conveying hope and good feelings.

The news media in this country are often accused of being contrary and pessimistic, but rarely is that the case. Amid carnage, economic or otherwise, reporters are trained to look for “glimmers of hope,” “signs that the worst is behind us” and “miraculous tales of survival,” especially those that involve a baby — or in this case, a 401(k) — somehow making it through a hurricane, tornado or mudslide.

This makes it pointless to try to keep oneself informed by watching commercial TV, which has long since figured out that it is profitable only to entertain audiences, not inform them. Pessimism doesn't help a show's sponsors.
What strikes me as insane is the cynicism. Carr talks to all these business jounralists who all note how awful the cheerleading coverage of the stock market is, yet nothing has changed. And TV stock pickers just seem to act as though what they are doing is performance art:

To engage their audience, business journalists need to act like things are changing all the time. As it turned out, what didn’t change much was the fundamental lessons: have a diversified portfolio, don’t buy more house than you can afford, don’t take on more debt than you can support, or trade on the margin.
But that’s not what we want to hear from the experts. “You aren’t doing your job right if you don’t have an in-box full of hate mail,” said one financial columnist who didn’t want to be identified. In this market, who does?

Maybe audiences should not need to be engaged about finance; their "skin in the game" is encouragement enough. In fact, if the news outlet is trying to engage you, you have to be skeptical about the bias in the information you are getting; they are trying to reach spectators, not participants. That is why the WSJ seems so dubious these days. I knew it had changed irredeemably when A-Rod's picture was on the front page the other day.

3. I wrote some theses about Hipster Runoff a week or so ago. This seems insufficient. So I'm planning to start a side project offering some exegesis of Carles's ruminations, in the same spirit as Marmaduke explained. I hope to get the first few entries up some time this week.

The enduring creative class and the myth of samizdat (9 August 2008)

In a riposte to tech pessimists like Nicholas Carr, media blogger Jeff Jarvis argues that "the myth of the creative class" is in the process of being extinguished by the internet.

The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

Pretty to think so. This is internet ideology at its most inspirational: the Web allows us to be individuals rather than part of a mass addressed by media monoliths, and it allows meritocracy to at last become a reality, and no one will be any more famous than he or she deserves.

The playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

A look back at the history of internet fads makes one skeptical though. And it seems that the power networks of the offline media replicate themselves online -- the commercial media has a more vested interest in drumming up traffic and integrating content production with advertising support, so they invest money and effort accordingly, with the effect of reproducing the offline mode of production online. Independent bloggers are adopted by national publications, and their content is branded by the big media companies, and the power of branding to confer authority begins to exert itself over the once-wide-open sphere of communication. It becomes harder to be some random person with a blogger account and still get discovered and linked to -- it can happen, but then so could my letter to the editor be published as a column on the NYT opinion page. It's just not very likely.

As Jarvis would have it, Web space has replaced the hip urban centers celebrated by Richard Florida as the site where inspired minds congregate to inspire one another.

This link ecology does potentially change the nature of creativity. It makes it more collaborative, not just in the act but in the inspiration. Coelho’s Witch of Portobello is the spark that leads to a movie made by its readers. Same with Stern, LonelyGirl, Colbert. Perhaps the role of the creative class is not so much to make finished products but to inspire more to be made. It is the flint of creativity. It’s the internet - Google, Flickr, YouTube, and old, mass media as their accessories - that bring flint and spark together.

This sort of thing plays out as the much heralded "remix culture" -- consumers become producers by using digital cultural products as a language for their own creative expressions. This undermines the old allegiances that paved the way for subcultures anchored in various nexuses of music and fashion and zines and so on, and introduces a more motley pastiche form of culture that is at the same time more homogeneous than ever. The internet -- the link economy, the amateur parodies and homages of culture industry product, etc. -- becomes a hegemonic form for cultural expression even as it become more heterogeneous in its composite parts. You might make a steampunk rap video with snippets of sitcoms mixed in, but it will still be posted on YouTube in the end. It has become so much easier to publish samizdat that samizdat now no longer has any meaning as a form.

I'm not sure this more democratic access to the means of distribution ultimately frees up an abundance of heretofore suppressed talent or shifts anything away from the established creative class -- the anointed ones who shape the culture that consumers remix. Yes, the internet provides uncolonized space for cultural activity, a space that is ever expanding. You never reach the Western shore. There is always more room for "creative" pioneers to stake claims. But the majority of cultural consumers aren't interested in lighting out for the territories, and the creative class continues to run what is recognized socially as the civilized portion of that vast online space, and it is slowly expanding its control assimilating the more promising outliers. This seems no different from how things have always worked in the culture industries; if anything the dependence on the law-giving creative class strengthens with so much chaos lurking at the fringes.

"Letting the dandelions grow" (30 May 2007)

Today's Wall Street Journal has exactly the kind of story I've been hoping to eventually see about the troubles with subprime lending. It's a case study by Mark Whitehouse about subprime lending's impact on a block in a Detroit minority neighborhood. Lenders, having detected lots of untapped equity in the neighborhood (itself a product of discriminatory lending practices in the past -- "redlining" -- which forced blacks to buy homes outright or put down big down payments), decided to unleash a massive marketing campaign in order to earn risk-free fees for writing a bunch of lucrative adjustable-rate loans, which could be packaged and resold on Wall Street.

Suddenly, mortgage lenders saw places like West Outer Drive as attractive targets for new business, because so many families either owned their homes outright or owed much less on their mortgages than their homes were worth. Lenders seeking to tap that equity bombarded the area with radio, television, direct-mail advertisements and armies of agents and brokers, often peddling loans that veiled high interest rates and fat fees behind low introductory payments. Unscrupulous players had little reason to worry about whether or not people could afford the loans: The more contracts they could sign, the more money they stood to make.

Generally speaking, lenders used deceptive sales techniques or preyed on the borrowers' financial ignorance.

"A lot of people were steered into subprime loans because of the area they were in, even though they could have qualified for something better," says John Bettis, president of broker Urban Mortgage in Detroit. He says a broker's commission on a $100,000 subprime loan could easily reach $5,000, while the commission on a similar prime loan typically wouldn't exceed $3,000.

Borrowers were easy pickings, as well, because many feared financial insecurity stemming from downturns in manufacturing and the auto industry. They could be sold a line of credit as a way of maintaining a standard of living in the face of economic adversity.

For many who already owned their homes, offers of easy credit came at a time when a severe economic downturn had left them in need of money to maintain middle-class lifestyles. Since the year 2000, the decline of the auto industry has cost the Detroit metropolitan area about 20,000 jobs a year, helping turn the shopping areas near West Outer Drive into scenes of defunct businesses, payday lenders and liquor stores. According to the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service, households in the 48235 ZIP Code reported an average adjusted gross income of $32,902 in 2004, up slightly from $32,817 in 2001 but down 6% in inflation-adjusted terms.

A few of the locals quoted in the story seem willing to take responsibility for accepting the credit on bad terms -- "I knew better than to be stupid like that", "A lot of people took the cash. I wish I'd never done it myself" -- but it sounds as though the evidence is strong that advertising created a destructive demand for credit, leading those with the least-stable long term economic future into the most-destabilizing of all possible loans. It's hard to see the sense (other than the cold, hard business sense, that is) in giving the loans that are most difficult to keep up with to the people least likely to have the means to do it. It's pretty depressing that they then blame themselves for falling into the trap.
After detailing how many homes on the block are affected, Whitehouse suggests some of the consequences.

Both Ms. Williams and Mr. Walker have found themselves in a predicament now common among homeowners in Detroit: They've tried to sell their houses, but can't find buyers willing to pay what they owe on their mortgages. After two years on the market, Ms. Williams says her house has attracted a high bid of $140,000, nowhere near the $211,000 debt she must settle to avoid eviction. That leaves her with no option but to abandon the house -- the worst possible outcome for the neighborhood, because it means the property could end up gutted with a big red debris bin out front....
Now in foreclosure, Ms. McNeal has until early July to come up with the money or be evicted. She doubts she can sell the house, and the missed payments have dented her credit to the point where she can't get another loan. So she's letting the dandelions grow.

And just like that the neighborhood begins to slide past the point of salvation, at least for a generation or two: As one of real estate agents quoted remarks, "Nobody's going to want to buy into a neighborhood with 20% foreclosures." The question is whether the easy money from subprime loans delayed the inevitable or inflated the bubble so that it would pop more easily, and once and for all.

Supercities and trustafarians (20 Feb 2007)

A week ago Joel Kotkin wrote an article for the WSJ about fading American "supercities" (New York, San Francisco) and the B-list cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Charlotte) that are gaining population at their expense by providing better value (mainly via cheaper real estate) and catering to a more family-oriented middle-class lifestyle. That is, they are pseudo-urban suburbs.

I lived in Las Vegas and Tucson and have been a frequent visitor to Phoenix, and I am always struck by how similar these places are: they all feature walled-in middle-class housing-development fortresses, a logical rectilinear street plan which makes finding shopping zones seem almost instinctive, chain retailers predominate, but small businesses pop up in the interstices if you are looking for them. What makes them most suburban-like is how one's insulation from the lives of others is upheld pretty well -- traveling in cars assures that. More than anything they resemble the interzones between Eastern cities -- take away the climate and mountain views, add some trees, and they become indistinguishable from the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut. Suburbs often get a bad rap, obviously, which may be unfair (but then again…)

That B-list cities would thrive seems to fly in the face of theories about the so-called creative class who flock to urban centers in pursuit of alternalife and almost incidentally happen to fuel all sorts of innovation that business can seize upon. As much as I am suspicious Richard Florida (though since when is he a leftist?) and his cheerleading for the supposed creative class, I think cities such as Phoenix are geared toward ordinary life and ordinary aspirations; they are no place for the unusually ambitious or curious.

According to Andrew Beverege, a sociologist Kotkin cites, New York must find "ways to address the basic issues that affect the middle class — high housing costs, taxes, regulation, schools and lack of support for diverse small businesses, particularly in the outer boroughs. How else can New York hope to create opportunities for a population already overwhelmingly minority and predominately working class?" And that would probably be a good thing (though it will only make the outerboroughs more like suburbs and less like the city), but it has little to do with the larger premise of the article, that Manhattan has become, in the mayor's words, "a luxury product" and this bodes ill for its future. The city, it seems, is not necessarily threatened by the loss of a middle-class at its core. Instead it is a magnet for those unsually ambitious people who want to work on a cosmopolitian scale, who aren't particularly motivated (at least yet) by procuring middle-class security and Wobegonian above-averageness.

New York seems necessary not only to siphon off the self-aggrandizing egomaniacs (like me) to prevent them from spoiling the pace of life in B-list America, but also to put the pleasures and benefits of Middletown in proper perspective. That such big-dreaming people will live beyond their means and be surrounded by outsize examples of luxury and wealth may only help to motivate them; such accoutrements provide the backdrop necessary to sustain the whole overachieving ideology that values global influence or essentially unspendable wealth over the refreshments of a quiet, steady life.

What drives Kotkin's piece is instead a chance to heap scorn on "trustafarians":

The high-price trend is further exaggerated by the large concentrations of "trustafarians," or those with large amounts of inherited capital, in these areas. Many of these people have multiple residences — in some Manhattan buildings as many of half of the owners are non-residents — but can still drive up prices. Together with top-end business types, they can create what Mr. Gyourko describes as "the Vailization" effect: that is, turning part of the city into something akin to a high-amenity resort area, a "scarce luxury good" for a relative few and those who must remain behind to service them.

This has obvious middle-class populist appeal (the poor middle class, always under assault if you listen to American politicians) and seems to suggest that there is something galling about inheritance in general. Which calls to mind this astute remark economist Brad DeLong made on the subject:

The very first thing that any society's wealthy try to buy with their wealth is a head start for their children. And the wealthier they are, the bigger the head start. Any society that justifies itself on a hope of equality of opportunity cannot help but be undermined by too great a degree of inequality of result.

What we see in New York's "trustafarians" (and it would be nice to see a figure on their numbers) is a group who are so far ahead, they presumably no longer need to run the race. The waste (Bataille-style expenditure?) is evident and seems to express a kind of contempt on the hard-working burghers who carry more than their share of the economy's productivity load. It exemplifies the income inequality, much discussed recently, that has supposedly begun to sour the mood of the average bourgeois (the article's target audience). Presumably the dead hand of inherited capital would work to dissuade those ambitious types who give New York its specific character, and trustafarians also are assumed to drive up the costs of everything in pursuit of their meaningless and inefficient status displays. Still, the trustafarian seems like a straw man; if anything they probably serve to patronize the production of nonmainstream culture, not stifle it as this response at BoingBoing suggests.

Kotkin's article brandishes its antielitism:

This is something of an oddity, where the fashionable "left" defines successful urbanism by its ability to lure the superaffluent, the hypereducated and the avant garde — or what Dr. Florida calls "the greatest number of the most skilled people." One wonders what true progressives like Harry Truman or Fiorella La Guardia would think of such an approach.
La Guardia or Truman understood that great cities become so, in large part, due to the strivings of the upwardly mobile middle class and families, not the elites of any stripe.

But this smacks more than a little of flat-out anti-intellectualism, stopping just short of championing mediocrity. Middle-class existence is not incompatible with intellectual pursuit; I wonder why commentators like Kotkin imply that it is.

Modern life in Maricopa County (30 November 2006)

Whenever I come back from my annual Arizona vacation I feel a bit like a cliche from a David Brooks column, ready to patronizingly lampoon philistine provincial life and point out obvious atrocities like the local news broadcast (this just in: snow is cold; also: car chase in Dallas ends in collision), the ubiquity of paycheck loan kiosks (some retrofitted into Mexican restaurants that were themselves retrofitted into moribund fast-food chains), the relentless sprawl (it's practically filled the valley past the Maricopa County line to the south and well into Carefree to the north), and so on. I tend to be seduced by the idea that New York City is the capital of the free world and as its media center originates the cultural ideas that trickle out to places like Phoenix and Tucson. And sometimes this is true; one can see the hangover of trends that have already exhausted themselves back East.

But this time I've returned enamored of a different cliche about the postmodernity of edge cities: that in fact Phoenix is an ongoing project in manufacturing the cutting edge suburban lifestyle, in pursuing and distributing the state of the art in middle-class amenities -- retail plazas with organic-food markets and parking lots with giant spaces -- and New York City is an antiquated version of modern life, one that's terminally threatened and holds on merely through the tenacity of tradition. Out in Arizona we rented a crossover SUV (the poetically named Chevy HHK) and drove the brand-new freeway loops and did a bunch of shopping and dining in new commercial developments on what used to be the outskirts of town. I felt like a character in a car commercial or something.

While everyday life in New York is a thicket of nuisances, dealing with crowds and lines and the ceaseless imperative to rush and put yourself first lest you never get what you're trying to do done, the ease and convenience of the quotidian in Arizona is palpable, which to me seems a product of the redundancy of shopping centers. Also the expanse of open desert space (while it lasts) allows one to take scorched earth policy toward communities -- when it ceases to be convenient, when it starts to feel encrusted with idiosyncratic necessities or complications, one can simply strike out for the latest development on the fringe and partake of the hottest enticements -- four-car garages, cathedral ceilings, etc. The driving forces of contemporary consumer capitalism -- novelty, convenience, the desire to feel independent from the impact of other's decisions -- seem to culminate in the dynamic system on display in Maricopa County.

For me this plays out as a kind of vacation listlessness, some of which must be blamed on my lack of imagination. But since so much of the region seems devoted to convenient transportation and shopping, I feel like there is nothing to do but drive around and shop. Sure, I could leave the valley altogether and go hiking or something but it seems easier to pivot from cable TV to shopping to dining to sleeping. Imagination itself is reconfigured as a nuisance; best to glide along without the trouble of it, finding fulfillment in the safe and predictable, in the pseudo-novelty of new franchises of chain stores and restaurants.

Update: Via The Economist's new blog comes this defense of chain stores by Virginia Postrel: "Chains make a large range of choices available in more places. They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain." The idea behind this is that each chain represents some local brainstorm made national or global. (That ingenious idea to have all you can eat breadsticks is now available at the Olive Garden in your town.) Postrel argues that "the contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character." A fair point, but it still seems to me that the ubiquity and density of chain stores evokes the criticism; the individual chains don't matter so much as the blanket they spread over a locale, rendering it familiar to travelers and encouraging the idea that interaction with any locale is primarily a matter of shopping. The contempt for chains stems from the fact that it blots out a city's individual character, which is not merely a matter of driving local companies out of business or obscuring what the local industries consist of.

Postrel and The Economist blogger (Megan McArdle) seem to want to emphasize the vanity of urban planners (and activist consumers) who reject chains as inauthentic and the sound sense of "ordinary Americans" who appreciate their virtues. Perhaps they are right; the development of cities such as Phoenix certainly seems to bear out their assumptions about what Americans prefer; Phoenix suggests what all American cities would be like if they could instantaneously rebuild according to current consumer preferences. And perhaps the accessibility of the various successful retail strategies of so many different chains at once accounts for my feeling of being intoxicated (if not incapacitated) by convenience. The corporate interests behind the chains are able to induce us to accept values amenable to the corporations' thriving because they offer us the least resistance and we as individuals are ultimately more flexible than corporations (which aren't as flexible as market theory typically proposes). What we lose is any interest in local idiosyncrasy, or the kind of complication that arises from tradition and history. Phoenix (appropriately named in this regard) allows us to believe that the community in which we live was invented to suit us personally -- it flatters our own vanity; the world, for me -- because it so compellingly convinces us to reduce ourselves to the consumer desires it is optimized to service.

Suburbanal pals (14 November 2006)

Tyler Cowen links to a study that asserts that, counter to the American Beauty/John Cheever view, living in the suburbs can enhance your social life and yield more and deeper friendships. According to a news story about it,

The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 percent. "We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower," says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. "What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city."

I'm not sure that last bit of logical jujitsu is all that useful, but my empirical observations of living in New York City, where the density is fairly high, bears out the idea that interaction decreases with density -- other people are simply too numerous to be acknowledged, and too likely to be strange (from some totally unknown origin, with some utterly unexpected agenda). One naturally raises one's guard against the people who press against you, and for better or worse, one derives methods to assess people by their looks and use those judgments to insulate oneself. Where density is lower, the population is more homogeneous and the interactions occur in more manageable numbers and at more manageable intervals so that one is willing to make oneself present for them.

I suppose it makes sense the hobby-group joining behavior would be higher in the suburbs as well, because special effort must be taken to join things in order to participate in social life -- otherwise you can remain isolated in one's private household, sealed off from neighbors by yards and cars and all the rest of the infrastructure of the atomized nuclear family. Whereas in a dense city, a walk down a street is enough to evoke that feeling of social connection. (To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, "Too much fucking connection".)

The very obviousness of how our choices impact one another -- the pressures other people's decisions put on you -- in a city may make us balk at social activity, dream of withdrawal, dream of passing a day without other people distracting us so much from how we might feel, or worrying about how what we do inevitably afflicts others. The pressure to conform, be different, be in fashion, be considerate, be aware of what you are doing, etc. -- all these are palpably acute in the city, and we are routinely confronted with our choices yielding disappointing outcomes due to the presence of so many others making similar decisions. (You can tell I've been reading about game theory, I guess.) In the suburbs, where the communities are planned to mask that (and thus encourage us in a naive faith in the sovereignty of individual choice) we believe we can choose the terms on which we interact and are affected by others, and this likely plays out in voluntary associations that are organized around hobbies. (Not sure though how this meshes with Putnam's findings in Bowling Alone -- it seems unlikely that he could have been so far off.)