Libraries. Parks. Bike paths. Monuments and memorials. Historic preservation. Museums. Public art. Why should government waste our tax dollars on such nonessentials? Let those who want these amenities pay for them!
Libraries. Parks. Bike paths. Monuments and memorials. Historic preservation. Museums. Public art. Why should government waste our tax dollars on such nonessentials? Let those who want these amenities pay for them!
Before the values debate was highjacked by theocrats and government’s role redefined by technocrats, it was possible to discuss quality of life issues without preaching or smirking. It may no longer be possible, but the next mayor should try, because there is more to public infrastructure than roads and sewers.
My colleagues who are economists talk about something called "collective demand." Collective demand is different from aggregated demand, which simply adds together individual desires for such goods as soap or taxicab rides or toothbrushes. Collective demand is the amount citizens are willing to spend to obtain things that enhance the quality of our collective lives: clean air, landscaped medians, flower-pots on Monument Circle. As it happens, citizens are quite willing to pay for these amenities, recognizing–as many of our politicians do not–that they add value to the community as a whole.
That value is fiscal as well as psychic.
Ask anyone involved in economic development whether quality of life matters when Indianapolis is trying to attract new business. Ask students who graduate from our Universities and take their skills to cities offering richer cultural resources. Ask the staff at the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau which attractions draw the visitors whose money lubricates the local economy. Ask a realtor about the comparative value of homes accessible to parks and public facilities and those without such access.
Other outcomes are less easily measured, but no less significant. The poor child who hides from an abusive parent in the library and becomes an upstanding citizen; the athlete whose skills are honed during summers at the local park; the scholar whose interest in history grows out of trips to local monuments–each of them contributes something back to the whole. This isn’t charity, any more than protecting my children’s health by vaccinating yours is charity. It is recognition of the urban ecology.
Cities arose because people wanted an environment that could only be developed collectively. As Samuel Johnson remarked to Boswell back in 1785, "Men, thinly scattered, make shift, but bad shift, without many things… It is being concentrated which produces convenience." In cities, we create an environment available to all of us that would otherwise be out of reach for most of us. In the process, we create what my colleague John Kirlin has called "a sense of place" and what Morton calls "community."
By choosing to support libraries, museums and other communal resources, we give content to our civic values. We signal to ourselves and future generations that history and education and aesthetics and cultural literacy matter. We create our own unique sense of place, and by doing so, we construct an urban context within which we can be better people, better neighbors, better citizens.
Supplying collective demand is how mayors create great cities.