Author: Tom Slee

I don’t have much to stay about this – I just need a place to keep a quote.

Here is an paragraph from Saturday’s (May 6) Kitchener-Waterloo Record, which ran a survey about the most important issues that Waterloo Region will have to deal with in the next five years.  The big ones are public goods: transport, healthcare, population growth, and clean water. There is a significant fall-off after that to taxes, almagamation, infrastructure, education, and housing.

Anyway, here it is:

Statistics from Waterloo regional police suggest residents here are fond of their cars. Since 1993, the region’s population has increased about 15 per cent while the number of cars registered in the region jumped about 34 percent. Registered vehicles in the region totalled 228,000 in 1993. Today, that figure is 390,000.

You do see this logic all the time. It uses an implicit revealed preference argument: we have bought more cars, so we must like them (be fond of them). It’s at the root of a lot of the claims about consumer sovereignty and the economy.  But it’s wrong, of course. Buying a car (or not) is a reaction to the transport system you live in, not an expression of some kind of fondness, and a small change that helps to shape that transport system.

There have been many reflections on JK Galbraith and his impact on economics over the last few days, of course. They provide some insights into how the course of the economic mainstream is guided, and the role of politics and culture in that guidance.

From this morning’s Globe and Mail appreciation on page B1, B4 (not from the obituary).

But for the last 30 years of his life, Mr. Galbraith was increasingly a voice in the wilderness, as the conventional wisdom grew ever more skeptical of the ability of government to intervene constructively in the economy, and ever more confident in the marketplace.

In a similar vein, here is Brad DeLong in his review of the Galbraith biography [J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Sisyphus as Social Democrat: The Life and Legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith," Foreign Affairs 84:3 (May/June) ]

The right-wing claim that the most efficient
economy is one in which the gales of perfect competition scour the land
is, in Galbraith’s view, nonsense. Modern industrial and
post-industrial production is a large-scale process, large-scale
processes require planning, and planning requires stability — which
means that the gales of the market must be calmed.

This
political vision, however, has been in retreat since the early 1980s.
Nobody wants to hear about the importance of Big Government, Big
Bureaucracy, or Big Labor (which hardly even exists). Galbraith’s
economic views have undergone an even more distressing eclipse. Among
economists (excluding economic historians), the 70-year-olds have read
Galbraith and think he is very important; the 50-year-olds have read
Galbraith and know that the 70-year-olds think he is important but are
not sure why; and the 30-year-olds have not even read him.

…

What has survived throughout is the American
myth of rugged individualism, and it is this that Parker’s political
story neglects. The power of this myth has meant that the United States
is not, and never will be, a European-style social democracy. People
may come together for barn raisings, but America is still the land of
upward mobility and opportunity, where the most common questions are,
I’ve done it, so why haven’t you? and Doesn’t this social solidarity
stuff mean that I’ve got to pull more than my share of the weight? In
spirit, it is still a nation of upwardly mobile immigrants blessed with
an abundance of resources (free land) and an absence of government
constraints (free labor).

Galbraith
would say, sardonically, that this national self-image is just another
fraudulent piece of conventional wisdom — nurtured by the delusional,
who cannot see reality, and the rich, who see it all too well but know
that such delusions make them richer and more powerful. And Galbraith
would be more than half right. But this self-image is also a very
powerful social fact, and this more than anything else explains his
waning influence on U.S. politics. It is not that the Democratic
establishment has lost its nerve or been seduced by law firms and
lobbyists; it is that the old Horatio Alger myth has proved
extraordinarily durable.

Amartya Sen, not talking about Galbraith, said some of the same things about the way that economics has changed in the last 30 years:

There was a time — not very long ago – when every young economict "knew" in what respect the market systems had serious limitations: all the textbooks repeated the same list of "defects."  The intellectual rejection of the market mechanism often led to radical proposals for altogether different methods of organizing the world (sometimes involving a powerful bureaucracy and unimagined fiscal burdens), without serious examination of the possibility that the proposed alternatives might involve even bigger failures than the markets were expected to produce. There was, often enough, rather little interest in the new and additional problems that the alternative arrangements may create.

The intellectual climate has changed quite dramatically over the last few decades, and the tables are now turned. The virtues of the market mechanism are now standardly assumed to be so pervasive that qualifications seem unimportant. Any pointer to the defects of the market mechanism appears to be, in the present mood, strangely old-fashioned and contrary to contemporary culture (like playing an old 78 rpm record with music from the 1920s). One set of prejudices has given way to anoother–opposite–set of preconceptions. Yesterday’s unexamined faith has become today’s heresy, and yesterday’s heresy is now the new superstition. [Development as Freedom, p 111].

The role of myth, political outlook, and cultural climate is clear. One would think that in a discipline claiming to be objective that there would be a real effort to challenge its own assumptions, but such efforts appear to an outsider to be peripheral. Until such time as they are central, economics remains unscientific.

Author of one of my favourite books of all time, and one of the clearest and most original thinkers I’ve ever read. A real loss.

Link: CBC News: Urban thinker Jane Jacobs dies.

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

• RELATED: Remembering Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North
American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a
generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobs had made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect
Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she
began writing during the war.

Known for protesting sprawl

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to
expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the
support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while
protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in
1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban
planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the
economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Inspired ‘Ideas That Matter’ gathering

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments
such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for
people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane
Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is "a grave warning to a
society losing its memory," jurists said in awarding her the $15,000
Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

"In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers
facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the
professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography,
and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and
observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline," the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American
culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and
the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen
Prize, Jacobs said, "People really know themselves that the dark age is
ahead. They’re worried, and they haven’t articulated it, but they feel
it."

"I think it’s late but we don’t need to go down the drain," she said. "But we will if we aren’t aware. It’s a cautionary book."

So far as I know, there is only one person in history who can legitimately claim to have saved the world. We only found out about him in 2002, and still seem to know very little about him (here is the little that Wikipedia has to say – no birth date, no indication when he died, even the rank is not clear).

He was some kind of second-in-command on a submarine during the Cuba
missile crisis and made the call not to launch a nuclear torpedo when it
seemed like perhaps the US had attacked them with depth charges.

It is wonderful that the person who can make this singular claim was so unlike the usual idea of a hero. Not a "visionary leader", not at the pinnacle of a career, not a Dirty Harry/Rambo go-get-em type. Basically he was a civil servant doing his job, calming someone down (in this case the captain), and advising caution and wait-and-see.

How very non-heroic for a hero.

Update: perhaps Stanislav Petrov can make the same claim.

Following up a fine article on why the BBC should make video games, I came across the McDonald’s Video game, which looks like an enjoyably subversive pastime.