We Are City

We are City is an effort focused on our urban fabric; they send out a daily newsletter with informative items and thought-provoking short essays.  Today’s “Think” piece comes from Brad Beaubien, an urban planner, and it is well worth sharing and contemplating.

The agora was a public space filled with government buildings, religious temples, and public markets. It’s where the great philosophers of western civilization developed their arguments. It’s where the priests, military commanders, and legislators ruled. But it’s also the place where you did your daily shopping. While I don’t want to overlook or diminish the fact that in Greek society women and slaves were prohibited from public life, the concept of the Agora is vitally important. It’s a place where citizens of all means had a part and a place. They all mingled. And that was a critical physical manifestation of democracy.

You see, people only know what they know. And they only know what they experience. The value of the agora was that the rich and the poor, the aristocrat and the laborer, and the philosopher and the priest, all co-mingled in one physical place. While they certainly did not agree with one another, that experience and exposure helped provide the grease that makes a democracy work—compromise.

Fast forward to today. We get into our cars, leave our garages, drive with our windows rolled up and music playing out of our subdivision where everyone looks just like us, down highways and streets designed to minimize disruption of our travel, into the parking lot reserved for our coworkers, and into our cubicles, where we promptly put in our earphones and get to work. The design of the modern city and its transport systems has virtually eliminated the necessity to experience anyone other than those just like you. The main street shopping districts where the beggar and the banker co-existed have been replaced with sanitized malls we visit if permitted. The streetcar the businessman and the immigrant youth both waited for has been replaced with a city built solely for the private car. Our grand public parks crumble while private HOA’s tax themselves to maintain members-only trails and swimming pools. Even our old stadiums, where some seats were better than others but all got wet when it rained and everyone ate the same hot dog, now have luxury box suites with climate control and a catered feast. We don’t have agoras anymore. We don’t experience one another anymore. And as a result, we don’t understand one another anymore. It’s easy to demonize the poor when your only experience with them is driving as fast as you can through their neighborhoods on the way home. It’s easy to demonize the 1% when your only experience with them is glancing up at their feast in the glassed-off skybox.

I’m in the design professions, and I see things through the eyes of a designer. I know there are other lenses. But when I look at the state of our democracy, the state of our legislatures, and the state of our public discourse, I see the consequence of the decline of the American agora. We can’t work together because we don’t understand one another because we don’t experience one another. It’s a vicious cycle.

Fixing our zoning code, our transportation network, and our natural systems are noble and necessary causes for a host of reasons. What I’m most encouraged by is their ability to again create places, neighborhoods, and cities where we again experience one another, again understand one another, and again are able to have a thriving democracy.

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Culture War Governor

I see from the morning news that Mike Pence is promising to attack Indiana’s economic woes by focusing like a laser on “protecting marriage.” If the nexus between those things seems a bit…shall we say “attenuated”…he explains that children of intact marriages are less likely to live in poverty.

That’s true enough. The question is whether we elect a governor to address a long-standing social issue with complex causes rooted in social change–social change a Governor is unable to affect (or evidently, in Pence’s case, understand), or whether we elect a chief executive of our state to manage budgets, pave roads, maintain state parks and improve underperforming social service agencies. Those mundane tasks clearly do not interest Mr. Pence.

We all recognize that Pence’s interest in the health of the institution of marriage rests less on his belief that intact families will lead to a better Indiana economy than on his determination to keep GLBT folks from forming those families. If Pence really cared about the health of families, he wouldn’t be waging war against Planned Parenthood, opposing access to contraception, or even more adamantly opposing the Affordable Care Act.  The availability of affordable health care and family planning do have a demonstrable impact on families. Same-sex marriage just as demonstrably does not.

If Pence’s unctuous concern for the state of Hoosier marriages actually extends to the prevalence of divorce, how does he plan to insert the Governor’s office into that issue? Will he make it more difficult for the woman leaving an abusive spouse to exit that relationship? Work toward restrictive divorce policies that keep children in intact, unhappy homes?

There really are public policies that are family-friendly, that support women and children and ameliorate some of the predictable effects of single-parenting. Income supports and social services for impoverished children would make a real difference. SChip has been a godsend to thousands of them. But those aren’t policies Mike Pence has ever supported. In his case, “concern for marriage” is just a euphemism for policies that discriminate against gay people.

If Pence becomes Governor, it is going to be a long four years.

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Mitt’s “Macaca Moment”

Wow. Just wow.

By now, half of America has seen and heard the surreptitious recording of Romney telling a group of well-heeled donors that 47% of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they were non-taxpaying moochers who depend on government for handouts.

A few thoughts–none, I’m sure, original.

First of all, in an age of pervasive digital technology, why on earth would anyone be stupid enough to say something like that? No matter how congenial the group, no matter how hand-picked, in today’s world the odds of your “confidential” statements staying confidential are exceptionally low. The days when political candidates could say one thing to one group and something very different to another are long, long gone–and failure to realize that is probably as great a sign of being “disconnected from reality” as the actual sentiments being expressed. Ask George Allen (he of the “macaca moment.”)

Second, how immensely ironic that a man who pays far, far less than his fair share of taxes would characterize people who don’t pay taxes as moochers. Forget how inaccurate and unfair his statement was–forget the fact that even people who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes nevertheless pay all manner of other taxes, from payroll taxes to sales taxes to gas and property taxes. Forget the fact that most of us in middle America not only pay income taxes, but do so at a far higher effective rate than Romney. Here is a man running on a platform that would decrease his own tax liability and the tax rate of people like himself; a man who has used offshore accounts and other tax avoidance strategies, and who has defended that behavior by saying he’d be stupid to pay more than he owed, denigrating  Americans who don’t pay because they don’t owe. (And where are your tax returns, Mitt? How do we know you paid anything in those years you refuse to release?)

Finally, this dismissive and self-satisfied man seems utterly oblivious to the extent to which he and his wealthy donors are themselves “moochers.” Recent articles have detailed the extent to which Romney and Bain used debt and public subsidies of one sort or another. It is particularly distasteful to watch crony capitalists who have benefitted from multiple public and private privileges crow about how they are “self-made” men. Can we spell “un-self-aware”?

Before the GOP convention, we were told the American public needed to be introduced to the “real Romney.”

I think we just were.

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True, But…..

Over at Masson’s blog, Doug addresses the misunderstandings that underlie the outsized reactions of Islamic fundamentalists to “provocations” like the amateurish film (or trailer–no one is yet certain an actual film was ever made) that set off the latest round of murderous rage:

Part of the problem seems to be, culturally, a lack of understanding and appreciation for our First Amendment. The Middle East is full of places where government can and does suppress speech it deems troublesome. When the U.S. doesn’t suppress something here, it probably looks to them like an endorsement on some level. In addition, our exposure to so much garbage because of the First Amendment gives us a sort of strengthened immune system we take for granted.

True on both counts.

But folks in the Middle East aren’t the only people who confuse a failure to censor with endorsement of the message. I spent six years as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, and I can attest to the fact that far too many Americans share that confusion. I wish I had a dollar for every time the ACLU was accused of being for pornography because we defended someone’s right to choose his own reading material, or the times we were accused of being “the criminal’s lobby” because we were insisting on someone’s right to due process, or the many, many times we were accused of being “godless” and against religion because we were defending someone’s right not to be coerced into some government-imposed religious observance.

It’s understandable that people in other countries don’t understand the most basic feature of the American approach to individual rights–our right to make our own decisions about what to read, watch and believe, free of government involvement. It’s less understandable, less forgivable, that so many Americans don’t get it either.

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A Different Kind of Economic “Bubble”

In my Media and Public Policy class last week we were discussing the ways in which the Internet has given us the ability to live in “reality bubbles” of our own choosing, when an older student made a perceptive observation. She pointed out that when she grew up in Martinsville, she’d been surrounded by a “bubble” of bigotry–she’d lived in a small community of homogeneous people who all thought alike. In her case, the Internet had provided an escape from the bubble.

We all live in bubbles of one kind or another, and that ability to isolate ourselves from those with whom we do not share geography, religion, common interests and experiences can stunt our human empathy. When our distance from each other becomes too great, civility and self-government suffer.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel-winning economist, and he has just written a book called The Price of Inequality, examining the effects of  the currently huge divide between the rich and everyone else on our ability to sustain a democratic government.

He isn’t sanguine.

According to Stiglitz, the vaunted American market is broken. It has been overwhelmed by politically engineered market advantages—special deals that economists call “rent-seeking.” The term refers to politically-achieved “exemptions” from the market that allow certain individuals to reap economic returns above normal market levels– profits derived from favorable political treatment rather than competitive success.

In The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz chronicles these blatant tax and spending giveaways–the special deals and corporate welfare enjoyed by big agriculture, big energy, and many, many others.

Stiglitz also argues that much of the rent-seeking that plagues our economy takes a more subtle form. In many cases, the production of a product produces what economists call “negative externalities.” These are costs that are incurred during the manufacturing or development process that end up being imposed on society rather than paid for by the producer and included in the price of the goods or services involved. The most commonly cited example would be a manufacturer who discharges his waste into a nearby waterway rather than properly disposing of it, shifting the costs of cleanup and disposal to others. Society pays for the pollution, and that cost is not included in the market price of the manufactured goods.

The bottom line is that markets don’t operate properly when some participants are in a position to game the system, and societies don’t operate properly when markets are rigged.

As he points out, one of the consequences to society is that when those at the top–the 1%–enjoy the best health care, education, and other benefits that come with greater wealth, they fail to realize that “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

They live in a bubble.