Well, I think it's more about liberty than leisure.
Is it an indiscretion error to thank by pseud the person who posted this on Facebook? Thanks to them, at any rate.
I agree that the tyranny of business class destroys our freedom. But I think that's a difficult message to get across without concretely saying "Do you get to use your resources the way you'd like to? Or are you constrained?" That's how I got to the free time angle.
This is a perfect example! I saw that it posted w/out a link. I fixed it, updated the page, and clicked the link to make sure it worked. And now the link is gone again!
I'll go retrieve it, but fixes to posts never save right for me the first time.
This reminds me of those "Unions: the people who brought you the weekend" bumper stickers.
See, this is what I'm always on about! As Bob Black wrote: "your boss gives you more 'or else' orders in a week than the police do in a year".
This is one of those great truths that those of us on the far left are always surprised that other people don't get, so surprised, in fact, that I think we often assume that rather than a tacit acceptance of this mode of life, the majority of people in this society are active supporters of it. Which makes us depressed and angry and ever-more alienated.
Seriously, if procedural liberals ever want to reclaim the discourse, y'all have to start saying stuff like this all the time.
Linky?
It sounds like the old familiar libertarian canard that there is a massive reservoir of votes out there just waiting for someone to make a socially liberal, economically conservative appeal. Yggles is very good on the empirical emptiness of this claim.
The 2010 election can't be taken as evidence that a generic platform of "freedom" will appeal to any meaningful segment of the electorate, once you separate it from the context of generic social conservatism, selfishness, and fear of the other.
I would confidently wager that a straightforward appeal to pocketbook interests (e.g. "double pay for overtime" or "two weeks paid vacation for every full time employee" would crush any variant of "live free from government interference" at the ballot box. That the Democrats do not avail themselves of such an obvious vote-winner tells you a lot more about the state of our politics than any libertarian bromides.
... You aren't free if you sit in traffic for an hour to get to work. (Public transit.) ...
The idea that public transit gives you more freedom than a private vehicle is pretty eccentric.
So, as an illustration, okay. But I think it could detract - just as it's not free as in beer, it's not free as in time either; did anyone ever rebel over unfairly occupied hours? - and I'm not sure it is that difficult a concept to get across to Americans. The expectant look of your boss, the weariness you feel every Monday morning, the car expenses that never seem to stop growing: all these are feelings that can be tapped into.
The link is in the word "this" in the first sentence.
It sounds like the old familiar libertarian canard that there is a massive reservoir of votes out there just waiting for someone to make a socially liberal, economically conservative appeal. Yggles is very good on the empirical emptiness of this claim.
Heaven forfend! This is about how freedom is the true end of policies like progressive taxation, labor laws, guaranteed health care.
The reason we value equality is that inequality is the throughway of domination: someone with vastly more resources than I--an employer, for example--can coerce and control me, abridge my freedom.
9: The idea that public transit gives you more freedom than a private vehicle is pretty eccentric.
You're kidding, right? I can get anywhere I want to on public transportation, and if everybody paid a couple cents more in taxes, I could get there any time of day or night. And even with the criminal increases in fares that we've seen in the recent past, it still only costs ~$60 per month. Compare that to owning a car: $60 a month is less than a lot of middle class people spend on parking alone. Plus gas, insurance, repairs and the initial cost of the car itself (plus interest, often). How do those people get all that money? They work. That is, they engage in an activity that they wouldn't otherwise engage in, subject to a frankly staggering array of strictures and indignities, for more time, just to have the money to refuse to ride the bus or the the train. And the worst part is, they don't even have a guarantee that they'll be able to continue! At any time, based solely on the caprices of their masters bosses, they could be thrown into the gutter to starve. A lot of good their "freedom" to drive a car will be doing them then!
And, meanwhile, everyone is "free" to breathe in more and more poisons...
Rush hour commuting has a certain mass appeal that reaches far further than car-fee-as-a-way-of-life.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2011/04/different-breed-of-rider.html
Alas, Mr Santelli has informed me he's not going to pay for the losers oil changes.
National pride in infrastructure better than the third worlds is another untapped aspiration.
Obviously the tag was supposed to close after "masters".
Unions: the people who brought you the weekend
I would very much like to see a massive resurgence of these.
I would like the freedom to deploy poorly conjugated Spanish without being relentlessly mocked.
11: OK, now I've RTFL, and I'm still unconvinced. The part of the electorate that genuinely values freedom in the abstract, and not as a fig leaf for protecting the rights of property, already votes for the Democrats. (Not that the Dems do much to earn those votes most of the time, but that's another matter). The part of the electorate that uses freedom as a convenient banner under which to rally xenophobes, plutocrats and (improbable, but somehow true) theocrats already votes for the GOP, and isn't persuadable.
The persuadable part of the electorate, I assert with no evidence beyond my own impressions, is not motivated by an abstract appeal to freedom. Some portion of it might be motivated by a direct promise to relieve the burden of economic coercion, but there's no need to wrap it up in abstractions about freedom. To the extent that you want to wrap it up in any abstraction at all, the language of power and conflict would be just as good ("when corporations try to screw you over, band togetther and fight back!").
I do buy the author's endorsement of Rooseveltian rhetoric, but I think it's a mistake to identify the unifying theme as "freedom" rather than fairness. FDR had already won three of his four elections when he spoke about the Four Freedoms, and that was IMHO more a way of thematically unifying his domestic and foreign policy visions than of selling his domestic policy to the electorate.
The idea that public transit gives you more freedom than a private vehicle is pretty eccentric.
Public transit gives you to the freedom to binge drink outside of your own home. Without public transit (ok: or a reasonably thick layer of taxi-coverage), such an act would be license, not liberty.
12
You're kidding, right?
No. Most people who can afford a private vehicle have one.
... How do those people get all that money? They work. That is, they engage in an activity that they wouldn't otherwise engage in, subject to a frankly staggering array of strictures and indignities, for more time, just to have the money to refuse to ride the bus or the the train. ...
Which goes to show that they desire private vehicles (and the other things) that money can buy.
Which goes to show that they desire private vehicles (and the other things) that money can buy.
I don't think anyone's going to deny that there's some value in having a private car. But pushing any sort of revealed-preferences-represent-Truth bullshit here is just that, bullshit.
Buy this car to drive to work / drive to work to pay for this car.
the language of power and conflict would be just as good ("when corporations try to screw you over, band togetther and fight back!")
Please please please please please oh maybe if I'm good please please please...
17
... and I'm still unconvinced. ...
I also was not impressed with the link. Much political analysis on the left is just wishful thinking. (This is true to some extent on the right also of course.)
I'm with Shearer on this one. People love their cars. Always have. They have to be trained not to love them (i.e. to appreciate the downside of a world dominated by individual transport compared to the possible alternative worlds).
Europeans love their cars just as much as Americans do. It's just that public policy in Europe contrives to make driving unaffordable or inconvenient (compared to available alternatives) for a larger fraction of the population, thus making the anti-car aspects of public policy more politically sustainable.
This really is a case where the Left needs the overweaning nanny state to teach people what's good for them, whether they like it or not. Which means bribing them with other taxpayer financed goodies to vote the right way. Sorry, James.
20
I don't think anyone's going to deny that there's some value in having a private car. ...
Because it gives you more freedom.
I think the car=freedom thing functions much the same way that the "no taxes for the rich because I'm just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing works: that is to say, stupidly, but with consequence. The idea is you could just up and go anywhere, if you needed to (say, because of zombie hordes or something), or hell, if you just wanted to. High Fidelity leads me to believe this is also why 30-something man-boys can't commit, or something.
I'm probably just not giving you enough credit, DQ, but it strikes me that begging for the rhetoric of militancy and struggle as a reward for good behavior is sort of missing the point.
26: Heh. Sometimes that works for women. I mean...smash the patriarchy.
People love their cars. Always have.
On the veldt, owning a car conferred massive reproductive-fitness advantages. A bunch of beta-males are spending all day trying to run down some antelope, and then, boom, Crom with his Landrover just goes and runs that sucker over, throws it in the trunk, and fucks all their wives. No joke!
23
This really is a case where the Left needs the overweaning nanny state to teach people what's good for them, whether they like it or not. Which means bribing them with other taxpayer financed goodies to vote the right way. Sorry, James.
Which is why the left has trouble running on a freedom platform, they don't actually believe in it.
29: As opposed to the right, which is all about freedom.*
*For white men.
Which is why the left has trouble running on a freedom platform, they don't actually believe in it.
Comity, brother.
Sorry. "Freedom" in our culture links too closely to our cowboy, homesteader, glibertarian, power over other people darkside. It will be co-opted by the ruthless individualists into Randism. Walden freedom is one I myself enjoy every day, but it isn't politics.
Freedom in solidarity, and the solidarity and communalism must come first in rhetoric and politics. It is about not what we want, but about what we want to share.
Because it gives you more freedom.
I'm taking this more seriously than it deserves, but look: insofar as the freedom here is the capacity to go places, it should be obvious that we're certainly not in Hobbesian-negative-libertyland; we're talking about freedom is precisely the same sense that poverty is unfreedom. Which, okay, valid and time-honored usage, but it's not usually the one typically stressed by the taxation-is-theft crowd. And more importantly, a thick public-transit network gives you exactly the same sort of freedom: the ability to go somewhere. Because unless we're talking some sort of ATV, the car can't be considered in isolation any more than can the subway car: both are useless without roads/track. If you scoff and say, 'with a car I can go where I choose, not where some central planner has decreed that I ought to go!' you're just being obtuse: no, you can go where somebody has laid out a road. And while road-building has often been pursued in a less-centralized fashion than public-transit-construction, that's hardly a matter of conceptual necessity, and hasn't been true at all times or places.
33: The Landrover commercials on the veldt have lied to me?
Which is why the left has trouble running on a freedom platform, they don't actually believe in it.
Dead freaking wrong.
Crusoe isn't free, he's alone. As is Ghaddafi. "Freedom" only makes sense in a social setting of responsible communicating agents, and it is granted, not taken. Freedom grabbed is just rebellion. No one can be free til all are free, because a freedom not shared is mere power. Blah-blah
33
... And more importantly, a thick public-transit network gives you exactly the same sort of freedom: the ability to go somewhere. ...
Not quite, with a private vehicle you can go at any time, you can set the heat/AC/radio as you prefer, you have more route flexability and you can carry a lot of stuff with you.
Yeah, all told I don't think the rhetoric of freedom is very useful for transportation policy in particular, all told.
At the root level, aren't all forms of transportation government-provided freedom, due to the public investment involved without which we would be limited to walking or riding? Yet another reason to think of government as an essential part of freedom, not a constraint on it, but it also makes it hard to say (to the public, not in the wonkosphere) that lessening the use of one and promoting the use of another is freedom-enhancing; it's an adjustment to the mix of what's provided, and that's bound to be a nanny-state proposition.
The idea that public transit gives you more freedom than a private vehicle is pretty eccentric.
Natilo's points notwithstanding, what I see Shearer getting at here is twofold:
1. People prioritize different things. My sister heavily prioritizes freedom to listen to her own music and have her own space. For her, any amount of sitting in traffic is worth it. Telling her that public transit is "more freeing" is just telling her that her values are wrong, and nobody reacts well to being told that.
2. People's priorities are also affected by their responsibilities. I've been a heavy mass transit user (rail, trolley and subway, and less often bus) for 23 years. I regularly walk, wait, and navigate mass transit in lousy weather, bad neighborhoods, and extremely uncongenial circumstances, and most of the time I'm pretty serene about it (when I'm not e-mailing SEPTA to point out a specific issue that needs addressing).
But when I have a toddler with me, I am massively less willing (and sometimes less able) to wait 40 minutes in the sleeting rain, stand for 25 minutes on the train, and then schlep past angry, cursing, coughing, aggressive panhandlers. Young children are heavy to carry. They need diaper changes (and sometimes more urgently, bathrooms). They can't walk as far or fast as adults. They're more vulnerable to illness. They are less able to regulate their body temperatures, and can get overheated or chilled more easily. If I were a parent, my use of mass transit would drop substantially.
And I don't think that's unreasonable. Here's an example: I was riding the regional rail (aka the high-end of mass transit in Philadelphia, by far the most expensive and most-used by affluent people) when two women got on with a stroller, a car seat, and a baby.
The train car was crowded. The women were standing. The stroller and car seat were in the aisle. The baby stank of poop. There was intense rearranging of people and equipment every time the train stopped, so people could maneuver past them to exit. The baby cried, and needed to be transferred from one woman to the other. Nobody was particularly rude about it, but the stress and disruption to everyone -- most of all, the women and the baby -- were obvious.
These are aspects of this sitution that could be slightly mitigated by designing train cars that could accommodate large items, but the fundamental problem remains. And this is the best case scenario -- the most spacious, expensive, accommodating mass transit my city has to offer.
In conclusion: Freedom good, transit freedom more complicated than you might think.
With public transit you can go anytime, so long as it's a good enough network--in the US, that basically just means NYC, but the point is quite general: you're comparing good-private-car to badly-done-public-transit, and pretending that implementation problems of the latter are essential features.
Similarly with heat/AC/radio: not if you can only afford a shitty used car with barely functioning heat/AC/radio. And these days, everyone's got their own private radio station in the form of an mp3 player. Moreover, if you're the driver, you really shouldn't be listening to anything that requires attention, so audiobooks/podcasts counts as license rather than liberty, in my mind.
This last is rather important: public transit allows you to be *doing stuff* while in motion, in a way that, as a driver of a private car, would involve imposing risks on innocent 3rd-parties in a way that--while sadly not unusual--is really quite immoral.
In conclusion: Freedom good, transit freedom more complicated than you might think.
Very pwned, bah.
I should reformulate what I was trying to get at with my jokey 'on-the-veldt' thing: in the US, where really, only one city has a truly great public transit system, it's hardly surprising that everyone can appreciate the freedom-enhancing aspects of private car ownership, and few can appreciate the FEA of public-transit. Because almost nobody has experienced the latter; if you only *visit* a place with a great transit system, it's hardly the same, because dealing with an unknown system is often stressful and confusing.
Whereas if you grow up in Iowa, having your own (even 20 yr old, broken down, used) car is a freedom-enhancing thing almost everyone gets to experience at one remove or closer. And the freedom this gives you, at the time when most start to experience it--teenage years--really is quite closely tied with liberty-as-freedom-from-interference/domination. Only by owning your own car, or having friends who do, can you do what you want without asking permission of those despots who otherwise control so much of your life, your parents. Indeed, car-ownership is particularly valuable for teenagers if you take a republican-liberty-as-non-domination perspective, since it makes clear the vast difference between having accomodating parents who are willing to drive you wherever versus not needing to ask and thus being 'really' free.
Plus, most parents really are petty tyrants in the sense of demanding obedience to unjust and unjustified diktats, and insofar as car-ownership lets you evade these, it enhances freedom along that other dimension.
OK, now I've clicked through to the link.
This part strikes me as balderdash, although maybe that's just my ego talking:
Many liberals have failed to overcome their sense that however much they might question the bona fides of the other side, they lack the intellectual wherewithal to manage the economy. Roosevelt's Brain Trust had a self-confidence born of the widespread belief that the business class had discredited itself, and a conviction that it had the answers where the businessman did not. That will to power, rooted in ideas, is hard to find on the left today. When it comes to the economy, too many liberals agree in their heart of hearts with conservatives: let the men of money decide.
This, on the other hand, is much more interesting:
Conservative political economy envisions freedom as something more than a simple "don't tread on me"; it celebrates the everyman entrepreneur, making his own destiny, imagining a world and then creating it. Speaking before Congress in April 1981, Reagan sold his package of tax and spending cuts with a line from Carl Sandburg, that emblematic voice of the Popular Front: "Nothing happens unless first a dream." The entrepreneur is the scion of freedom, the reincarnation of Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln; the welfare state, its most potent enemy, the successor to King George and the slaveholder.
It's exactly right that people who are in objective terms tremendously constrained -- as small-business owners, as homeowners, etc. -- nevertheless think of themselves as highly independent and free.
In some sense, it's a conflation of having autonomy over daily activities -- for example, it is certainly true that a small business owner can decide whether to mop the floors or rearrange the display window first -- with a more substantial freedom to structure your long-term obligations and debt.
Huh. Not really sure where to go with that observation, though.
... which is one reason I feel like it must be so much better to be a teenager in NYC than most anywhere else in the US; from the moment you've got your Metrocard, you've got the kind of independence the suburbian kids can't get till they're 16 or 17 or however old it is, and even then only if they can somehow aquire a fairly expensive piece of heavy machinery.
40
With public transit you can go anytime, so long as it's a good enough network- ...
It is not feasible for public transit to go everywhere at any time.
And trains every half hour (for example) is not any time.
it must be so much better to be a teenager in NYC than most anywhere else in the US
which is one reason I feel like it must be so much better to be a teenager in NYC than most anywhere else in the US;
Or live someplace that's walkable. I have fond memories of the couple of times in HS that I walked home at 4:00 from the house of a friend that was about as far from my house as you could get in town -- a two hour walk as the sun was coming up.
(And, to preempt the obvious thought I wasn't up to anything untoward, just staying up talking and, once I realized that I had missed the last bus, why not keep chatting?)
Whether people really prefer a car to public transit, or feel that one or the other gives them more freedom, is all contingent on location. I don't like driving, but where I live now, I choose to have a car because the other choice would have been to pay much higher rent for a much smaller apartment, and then to have to deal with the very limited local transit. If I didn't have a car here, just getting from my workplace to the local institute where a lot of my colleagues to work would involve a 45-minute walk both ways, or a bicycle ride that would be especially unpleasant in winter, or a taxi, or constantly bumming rides from people with cars. Getting groceries would also be a major pain. So that would constrain my free time in a way that the 10-minute drive to and from work each day doesn't.
On the other hand, I really hate driving, and am delighted that in the fall I'll be moving to a place with plenty of walkable neighborhoods and decent public transit. I'm planning to sell my car, because I don't see parking and the annoyance of city traffic as being worth dealing with. In general, I expect that I'll have a lot more freedom in terms of how I can conveniently spend my time once I'm living there.
So, you know, context matters. Shearer is largely right that in large parts of America, having a car is essential for a sort of personal autonomy that most middle-class people now take for granted. But, I think policy decisions can push us back in the direction of having more accessible and livable cities in more places, and once those options exist, a lot of people will be happy to take advantage of them.
I think I'm with Knecht in 17: I do buy the author's endorsement of Rooseveltian rhetoric, but I think it's a mistake to identify the unifying theme as "freedom" rather than fairness.
Once you focus on the persuadable portion of the electorate, the freedom theme becomes problematic to the extent that these independents tend to feel their freedom to be constrained just as much by government as by our economic overlords, and it's difficult to make the case then that (liberal) government policy is an answer.
On the other hand, the article's emphasis on personal agency strikes me as valuable:
The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it
This seems a promising rhetorical line, and I'd venture that a vast number of those currently angry and upset in the US are driven by an overriding sense of oppression -- massive income disparities will do that to you -- but are struggling to identify its source.
Abstract appeals may be needed for electoral purposes, but really what we're pointing to is our failure or refusal to engage in (economic) class warfare by identifying the source of oppression as capitalism corporate power. We seem to think it's gauche to say so, or something.
I was recently explaining to a friend that one of the things that I associate with adolescence is the experience of being out wandering around with a group of friends and creating a bubble of private conversations in public spaces -- at the back of the bus, or on empty-ish streets or trails, or just being in a corner of larger spaces where you could be separated from the flow of people.
I was very surprised to learn that this wasn't a universal experience. (In the case of my friend, they grew up in Alaska where most gatherings were indoors, so there was less of that experience of being social with friends while passing through the world).
43: I totally disagree. I'd far rather be a lower-middle-class teenager in Kansas than in NYC. NYC teens are constantly harassed by cops, are terrified into obedience by their terrified parents, and aren't really welcome anywhere. No one is glad to see a bunch of teens in NYC, and they know it. Unlike where I grew up, where teenagers were often among the coolest people around, and were treated with some amount of respect by the places we hung out in, New York seems to make teens just feel really shitty and worried. In Kansas, I started working when I was 13, got a shitty car to drive around when I was 16, and could get out of town if I needed some air or wanted to see a punk show in Lawrence. Here, teens can't get jobs, especially not doing any kind of decent non-soul-killing work for a humane wage.
If you were rich, I guess being a teen in NYC would be cool.
It wasn't so bad even without a lot of money.
XT, with all due respect and as someone who has advocated for better funding for mass transit for most of my life, I just think you're nuts.
Let's stipulate that NYC is the gold standard. Imagine that every major city in the US diverted, I dunno, 50% of what is currently spent on highways to build or improve mass-transit systems.
That should help a lot of people, right? After all, most of the US population lives in metro areas.
Oh. Metro areas. Not cities. Let's use my city as an example: 1.5 million in the city proper, 5.8 million in the 11-county metro area. Many commuting in the old-fashioned manner, traveling from the inner-ring suburbs to the city center. Many more commuting between suburban destinations, or from exurbs to new suburban office parks. Tens of thousands of shift, retail, and service workers reverse-commuting from the city to suburbs.
Then there are all the non-work trips: school, picking up and dropping off kids, errands, caretaking.
Now you've got economic shifts, such that new businesses are appearing, old ones are dying, and existing businesses are moving within the metro region and expecting employees to flow with them.*
*Myron Orfield is especially biting on this, with stories of shopping malls moving from county to county at 10- or 20-year intervals in order to get tax abatements.
Pretend you're the transit planner. You've got the Census Bureau's fabulous OnTheMap tool, so you can see to a fairly good approximation where your population is commuting to and from, and in what industries. You've magically got a robust budget due to those diverted highway funds. And let's even say you have complete freedom to redesign roadways, install surface trolley tracks, light-rail, dictate bus routes, etc.
I just don't believe that it's possible to design a transit system that is going to reliably meet even 50% of the population's needs. You could boost it significantly from where it is now, and maybe even get it to meet 60% of people's commuting needs, but it's just sheer craziness to imagine that you can get much beyond that.
I don't live in NYC, so maybe someone from there can weigh in, but my impression is that even the system there is heavily tilted towards the needs and convenience of Manhattanites.
Maybe I'm totally wrong. This is not my field; I come to it from the angle of having been a transit user and having spent a boatload of time trying to figure out commuting routes for patrons and clients dependent on mass transit. I'm open to someone who knows more than me telling me I'm the one who's crazy.
And yet, when given the opportunity to relocate to Kansas, 4/5 teenagers in New York City chose to stay right where they are.
And I think the teen working thing has gotten harder everywhere, but I'm not sure it's much harder in NY than outside. I babysat from twelve on, worked in a restaurant at 13 or 14, can't remember which, and worked afterschool as a research assistant when I was 15 and 16.
We've secretly replaced the morning NYC with Kansas. Let's see if they notice.
I'm kind of amused at the amount of horror at the thought of having to do what your parents tell you when you're 16.
53: You can't really serve a non-dense area with mass transit -- to serve most of the population, people in low-density suburbs and exurbs would have to move into higher density towns. But you're right that with current living patterns, it's an insoluble problem.
51: That was not my experience at all.
AWB: The terrified parents bit is making me wonder who you're getting your impression from? Most people who I know who raise kids in the city aren't terrified about it.
55: and thank god, really. Just imagine the choked highways if they ever figure it out. It'll be like the Exodusters times a gazillion.
We recently made the decision not to move back to the East Coast. In the end, one of the only things, other than friends and family, that really drew us there was mass transit. And not because it would have increased or decreased our freedom -- that's not a metric that means anything to me, to be honest -- but because we liked the idea of our kids being able to get around without our help. Our friends who grew up in New York, and a lesser extent Boston as well, all talk about how great it was to be able to get around without asking for rides/asking to borrow the car. Not to mention, because of the decreased time driving, city living is apparently much safer for (presumably UMC) teenagers than suburban/rural living. But in the end, the draw of Kansas, teen paradise that it is, was just too great. So we've packed up the wagon, and we're on our way. Wish us luck with Donner Pass. We figure to clear it before the snows come, but you never know.
60: My students, mostly, and not just the religious ones. I've worked at five different colleges in NYC, and the students seem to get increasingly innocent and moralistic. Almost none of them has ever had a job, few have been to Manhattan, and they all seem to expect to live with their parents until they get married. The idea of leaving home to go to college doesn't seem to have occurred to them. I have MA students in their late 20's who talk about how the only way they can get out of their parents' house is to apply for PhD programs overseas because otherwise it will be impossible to move out.
Obviously, it's a self-selecting population; my students are mostly LMC children of immigrants or immigrants themselves living in outer boroughs or Long Island, with very little access to life outside their home.
The idea of leaving home to go to college doesn't seem to have occurred to them.
Well, given where you teach, you wouldn't meet any NYC kids who didn't leave home to go to college, if you see what I mean. Possibly your students, as the ones who went to a school that allowed them to stay at home, are a self-selected population of delicate flowers.
...the students seem to get increasingly innocent and moralistic.
Could this impression possibly have anything to do with one's own aging and acquisition of experience?
XT, with all due respect and as someone who has advocated for better funding for mass transit for most of my life, I just think you're nuts.
Quite possibly!
Basically, what LB said: living patterns are endogenous, and policy in the US has been pushing sprawl for >60 years now.
I was, and continue to be, rather shocked at how car-ownership doesn't seem to be all that much more necessary in Heidelberg--a city of 150k, part of a metro area of 2.4m whose other two main cities have 300k and 160k; we're not talking megacities here!--than it was in NYC. Which is not to say that it's not useful or valuable, merely that it seems lots of people do without, or don't use their cars all that much. That said, my perspective is a very limited one. I suppose I could actually read some reports about actual transit patterns in Europe, but that sounds like a lot of work.
64 my students are mostly LMC children of immigrants or immigrants themselves living in outer boroughs or Long Island, with very little access to life outside their home.
And how many of the Kansas kids you're comparing them to were LMC children of immigrants who were expected to live with their parents into adulthood?
my students are mostly LMC children of immigrants or immigrants themselves
Yeah, this isn't just a NYC or LMC thing; you could be describing a bunch of my high-school classmates.
I'm liking AWB's contributions, as correctives to the perspectives of those who are puzzled about how large portions of the populace live.
NickS and AWB are totally right about living in smallish towns: wandering around in the evening with groups of friends was a regular thing, and while I couldn't wait to get out of that town, in retrospect, anyway, it wasn't bad, and once I got a car (at 16), well, boo-ya! Of course there was nothing to actually do except hang out, go to the lake, go to the woods, go to the cemetery. But that was okay.
I was riding the regional rail... when two women got on with a stroller, a car seat, and a baby.
That joke didn't turn out to be very funny.
68: It's pretty uncommon for LMC children, of immigrants or not, to live with parents beyond 17 or 18, where I grew up. In fact, moving out while especially young was usually a sign that you grew up in uncomfortable quarters. There were certainly some people who were encouraged by parents to stay in town or not go far, but I didn't know people who lived with parents during college, even if they stayed in town. I think it's just housing costs; if you can make enough at your part-time job at TGIFriday's to get a little apartment, you do.
45-minute walk both ways, or a bicycle ride that would be especially unpleasant in winter
I did that for two years, between snowdrifts. I would fire one up, and it was great. Time spent walking outdoors is never wasted time. Sometimes it seems everything else is the waste. Limited choices and options can be a very big plus.
But not cities. I walked for twenty years, and I don't think I have ever lived anywhere that essentials (but not always high-end or cheapest, which is a good thing) were not a walkable distance away, and in the medium towns to villages, they were pleasant walks, past houses with trees not concrete canyons with hipster bars.
TLC is getting very weird. h/t Rittholz, should make you laugh
Time spent walking outdoors is never wasted time.
Agreed.
Time spent walking outdoors is never wasted time.
I never admit having got lost either.
Time spent walking outdoors is never wasted time.
Unlike time spent reading blogs.
I suppose the advantage of living in a small town is that you can read blogs while walking, so the two cancel each other out. In big cities that will likely get you run over.
Indeed, car-ownership is particularly valuable for teenagers if you take a republican-liberty-as-non-domination perspective, since it makes clear the vast difference between having accomodating parents who are willing to drive you wherever versus not needing to ask and thus being 'really' free.
Quite right. Also, you can fuck in a car. Until mass transit accommodates that adolescent need (and this doesn't count), cars will carry unrivaled associations of personal liberation.
The idea that public transit gives you more freedom than a private vehicle is pretty eccentric.
I'm astonished how everyone has bought James's bogus frame of this issue. The ability to drive a car, plus the ability to ride a bus, gives you more options than simply the ability to ride a car. More freedom.
New York City could not exist in its current form without a robust mass transit system. People choose to use that system - a choice that the Jameses of the world would deny us.
and once I got a car (at 16), well, boo-ya! Of course there was nothing to actually do except hang out, go to the lake, go to the woods, go to the cemetery. But that was okay.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but as written, it seems to reinforce my point that, for teenagers, the value of the car is more about getting away than about getting anywhere in particular. The advantage of the car over the bike is heat in the winter, greater range, and the ability to hang out in the car when it's late and there aren't any quasi public spaces open. (Where I grew up, I seem to recall that the only place open after 11 where teens could hang out was an IHOP on Soldiers Field Road, which was really a bit grim.)
Time spent walking outdoors is often nice, but it's not so nice when you have to get from one place to another in a fixed amount of time.
For me, these choices really are choices, so I don't have much to complain about. But the car-dependent culture really hurts people who are low on the income ladder. At the suburban elementary school where my mom works, it's often difficult for teachers or administrators to schedule meetings with the parents of the students who are most likely to be struggling, because for those parents, going to a meeting often means spending a couple of hours on one bus after another and then walking thirty or forty minutes from the nearest highway to the school. This requires them to take a full day off work, and those are often the parents for whom that's most difficult to do. The more well-to-do parents who tend to have the better-performing students can easily take an hour off work and drop by the school to talk to teachers anytime, though.
I think Shearer mostly makes reasonable points about the benefits middle-class people derive from having cars, but the collective actions of the middle class tend to hurt the poor in ways that I think most people don't really think about.
Also, you can fuck in a car. Until mass transit accommodates that adolescent need (and this doesn't count), cars will carry unrivaled associations of personal liberation.
But surely this counts, right?
No one believes in a freedom platform. That's an order.
79- They're opening a 2-story Starbucks in Harvard Sq. that will be open from 5am-1am every day.
79: I remember that IHOP. God, it was foul.
83: sure, but that doesn't help me *now*.
I find it rather amusing that the equivalent here in HD seems to be a McDonald's in Bismarckplatz. (On the other hand, you can go to bars at an earlier age here, so I think the demographic is slightly younger.)
This may be too obvious to bear mentioning/discussion, but a rather large number of American voters tend to articulate their hermeneutic of freedom in terms of firearms and the various rights to own, carry, use, etc. same.
but the collective actions of the middle class tend to hurt the poor in ways that I think most people don't really think about.
Hear, hear.
Also, of course cars are associated with freedom in places where transit is so shitty you're basically trapped on a daily basis until you can drive.
79: Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but as written, it seems to reinforce my point that, for teenagers, the value of the car is more about getting away than about getting anywhere in particular.
Roughly correct, though when we went to the lake, or the cemetery, or the woods, we were going somewhere in particular, which was indeed a place away -- where you could be free! There were a few IHOP-like places open late (chiefly McDonald's, Burger King, a couple of pizza joints), but honestly, who wants to go there? Some people did, but bleh.
Having a car just gave me and my friends greater range in our wanderings, and the places we went and the things that we saw (and created) were excellent in their own right.
Anyway. I had no idea you were from Mass., Trapnel.
While I think there's a successful appeal to be made to Americans that they deserve more breathing room than they have, no one is going to do well selling him/herself as the candidate of more free time. It would come off as insufferably frivolous.
The idea that a car in the abstract doesn't provide freedom is totally baffling. I've lived in both Paris and NYC, ie, places with the world's best public transit, and in both places having a car is great, if expensive; unless you're envisioning some kind of PRT utopia there's no way public transit can match the ease of getting around, point to point convenience, ability to set off on a road trip, etc. Moreover, even in the worst traffic, cars are in general a faster way of getting around -- even if you live in Manhattan, it's often faster to drive, if you can afford the parking.
Natlio's point that cars are expensive to buy and maintain, and that therefore one has to engage in too much wage slavery to buy one, seems well taken, though -- you might very well be more free with less work and no car (and a decent public transit system) than with more work and a car. And of course cars have all kinds of negative externalities, etc.
In general, I think Knecht probably has the right political analysis, but I do think that "freedom from want" and "freedom from the excessive ravages of capitalism" are underused tropes on the left. Is Sweden in any meaningful sense less free?
19, 20: Cars do NOT equal freedom. When my father was a child, you could take the streetcar from any part of this city to the train station downtown and get on a train that would take you, with connections, anywhere in the US, even to the 1,000 person town in Wisconsin where my grandmother's family lived. You could do this whether or not you owned/could drive a car. Now, the only way you can get to or from that small town is by private automobile. Saying that cars=freedom is a sneaky way of saying "I value the freedom of people who are in a position with regards to their health, wealth and preference to drive cars, over the freedom of everyone else in society."
And again, the fact that the alleged positive liberty of being able to get in your car and go (unless, you know, it's snowed in, or it's broken and you can't fix it, or gas is $4.50 a gallon and you can't afford to fill it up), is valued over the very real negative liberty of everyone to not have to breathe the poisonous fumes that your supposed freedom generates is breath-takingly (heh) outrageous. Your rights stop where my nose begins, James.
There have been successful movements built on other things, namely fear, usually.
This is a particularly apt punchline. The author's book is recommended.
I think I am the indiscreet Facebook poster mentioned in 1. Would love to stay and get in there, but they've closed a bunch of streets for use by bikes and feet only and I just bought a brand new Fuji Absolute 2.0 yesterday. In general I think this is less about public transportation and appealing to a slice of the electorate in the next cycle than it is about whatever Natilo's saying.
Now I'm going to go dump the bosses off my bike.
no one is going to do well selling him/herself as the candidate of more free time. It would come off as insufferably frivolous.
European social democrats have that one figured out: it's not "free time", it's "time to spend with family". No one can accuse you of being frivolous then. Even if, as one of my Euro-conservative friends likes to point out, a vastly disproportionate amount of paternity leave in Finland is granted during reindeer hunting season.
When my father was a child....
Doctors made housecalls; children addressed their elders as "sir" and "ma'am"; schools taught citizenship when by God that mean something, I tell you what.
Even if, as one of my Euro-conservative friends likes to point out, a vastly disproportionate amount of paternity leave in Finland is granted during reindeer hunting season.
I think you'll find that's technically known as...freedom.
Also, I'm enjoying Bob's contributions at the moment.
90 no one is going to do well selling him/herself as the candidate of more free time. It would come off as insufferably frivolous.
Would it? I would have thought most people were pretty sympathetic to wanting to have more free time. At least, the attitude of academics on this issue has been striking me as way out of the ordinary, because it's clear that to most of the professors I know the only acceptable uses of free time are (1) having children or (2) mountain-climbing, bicycle-racing, ultramarathon-running, or other relatively solitary athletic activity, the acceptability of which is directly proportional to its risk of leading to major injuries.
Anyway. I had no idea you were from Mass., Trapnel.
Yes, I credit my hardscrabble upbringing on the mean streets of Newton for instilling in me a sympathy for the working man and an intuitive grasp on the class struggle.
In all seriousness, Ortiz didn't move to my neighborhood until I was already in grad school.
I prefer to think that Finnish mating patterns are related to reindeer hunting season- maybe it's 3 months long and when it's over people are looking for other things to do?
The fact is that large numbers of people do not enjoy their work, if they have paying work, but are compelled to continue in said work on pain of eating cat food and dying long or short deaths. Actually, even if they continue in said work, they may wind up eating cat food and dying long or short deaths.
I don't see how anyone can be blind to the fact that we're in an economic class war in which the majority is consigned to something very like serfdom.
That many people here on this blog are doing fine themselves is no excuse for failing to acknowledge and address these things.
99- You missed the new Starbucks and the $200 million new high school building? You grew up at the wrong time.
unless you're envisioning some kind of PRT utopia there's no way public transit can match the ease of getting around, point to point convenience, ability to set off on a road trip, etc.
My particular love affair with public transit may have a lot to do with moving to NYC shortly before discovering the joys of binge-drinking and dancing. I may have made a lot of bad decisions, but endangering others by piloting 3000lbs of steel while inebriated wasn't a part of that, thankfully.
99- You missed the new Starbucks and the $200 million new high school building?
I got to hear all about the new high school from an aunt and uncle who lived here, believe me.
no one is going to do well selling him/herself as the candidate of more free time. It would come off as insufferably frivolous.
Would it?
Well, possibly this is what Van Wilder does. I'd have to rewatch / go back in time / be really stoned to be sure, but, you know. Close enough.
78
I'm astonished how everyone has bought James's bogus frame of this issue. The ability to drive a car, plus the ability to ride a bus, gives you more options than simply the ability to ride a car. More freedom.
And the ability to drive a car plus the ability to ride a bus gives you more options than simply the ability to ride a bus. More freedom. And between the ability to drive a car and the ability to ride a bus most people value the ability to drive a car more. Which means a political agenda which involves shifting people from cars to busses is going to be unpopular.
New York City could not exist in its current form without a robust mass transit system. People choose to use that system - a choice that the Jameses of the world would deny us.
If the people in some location would prefer to spend federal transportation money on mass transit rather than roads that should be up to them. Just as if they would prefer to spend it on roads. I do object to federal projects like high speed trains which are a ridiculous waste of money.
80
I think Shearer mostly makes reasonable points about the benefits middle-class people derive from having cars, but the collective actions of the middle class tend to hurt the poor in ways that I think most people don't really think about.
And the middle class will see attempts to restrict their freedom of action as an infringement on their freedom.
93
Cars do NOT equal freedom. When my father was a child, you could take the streetcar from any part of this city to the train station downtown and get on a train that would take you, with connections, anywhere in the US, even to the 1,000 person town in Wisconsin where my grandmother's family lived. You could do this whether or not you owned/could drive a car. Now, the only way you can get to or from that small town is by private automobile. Saying that cars=freedom is a sneaky way of saying "I value the freedom of people who are in a position with regards to their health, wealth and preference to drive cars, over the freedom of everyone else in society."
And how many people could afford to take a train anywhere in the US back in the day?
107 And the middle class will see attempts to restrict their freedom of action as an infringement on their freedom.
Nonetheless, our highly car-dependent society imposes high costs on the poor, and it would be nice if policies would reflect the existence of these externalities.
109: I take the bus or walk for about a quarter of my trips, so poor people must love me.
|?
101:Digby is on fire today or something. I hope you read her
While the Democratic Party very well "win" from time to time and the party will play its role in the kabuki dance -- that of "protector" of an ever dwindling handful of ever smaller signature programs to keep the desperate progressive faction on board --- liberalism itself has suffered a terrible and perhaps mortal blow. To have a Democratic president of the United States adopt the necessary austerity and extol it as an historic victory the midst of ongoing high unemployment and a moribund economy means that the argument is basically over. This is not Franklin Roosevelt's puny GOP opposition and the Democratic Party does not have the middle class loyalty it had in 1937 to withstand making this kind of monumental error. Neither are we likely to be rescued by a war machine --- it's already cranked. No, the Democratic Party is formally relinquishing its historic claim to represent the economic interests of working families. The best we can hope for is that they "protect" us from a full blown Theocracy or a return to Jim Crow. (After all, they need to get elected somehow or they won't get a share of the spoils.)
and
Throw Grandma from the Gravy Train
President Obama will lay out new plans this week to reduce the federal deficit in part by seeking cuts to government programs for seniors and the poor, a top political adviser said Sunday, adding that Americans expect both sides to work together....(not Digby, some link at Dig's)"You're going to have to look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get," Obama adviser David Plouffe said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The presidential speech on Wednesday will come during a week in which official Washington pivots from a painful standoff over this year's budget to next year's and beyond, focusing on competing plans to shore up the nation's fiscal health in the long term.
This was written in stone when he signed the tax bill. Stimulus? Eliminated in this budget deal, so we got nothing for 4 trillion in tax cuts.
|>
You know, if you kids keep cheering this motherfucker as he savages Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security why should I give a fuck about war, abortion, gay rights, or black issues? The contract is being broken, and I don't even give a shit about SCOTUS anymore.
112: bob, which kids are you talking to here?
Perhaps this is pointless, but...
You know, if you kids keep cheering this motherfucker as he savages Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
Who the FUCK is cheering about this? No one. Not one single person on this blog that I can tell. What the hell are you talking about?
why should I give a fuck about war, abortion, gay rights, or black issues?
Because when other people decide to be assholes or moral failures or whatever, it does not change the morality of your own positions. You should give a fuck about war, abortion, gay rights, and black issues because there's still very clearly a right and wrong, regardless of what Obama decides to fuck up this week. The only reason to stop caring about those things is if you either don't regard them as moral issues but as marks of tribal identity, or because you're feeling petulant and never felt a moral commitment to them in the first place.
Cue shitstorm.
Because when other people decide to be assholes or moral failures or whatever, it does not change the morality of your own positions.
Thank you, DQ. If you only support the rights of people who aren't you as long as they do what you tell them, I'm not sure they want your support.
114,115:Okay so I vote for Obama in 2012, knowing it probably means my premature death in order to ensure your rights and privileges after I'm gone?
When, looking at Yglesias and Klein, you certainly would not sacrifice your interests for me or mine?
You been studying Republicans for a while?
Oh, I see, you're having this conversation with Yglesias and Klein, but seem to have opened the page for the wrong blog! That's a funny mistake to make. I'm actually AWB, and that's donaquixote above me. We're not Yglesias and Klein in costume or anything, promise.
I vote for Obama in 2012, knowing it probably means my premature death in order to ensure your rights and privileges
In arcane political theory terms, this is known as a "win-win."
You know, there are days when I find myself wondering if bob mcmanus just might be a troll.
118:I have been, for forty+ years, the most solid dependable liberal that at least I have ever known. I have never even considered voting for a Republican. There is no tax cut I would support, no social program I would cut. I argued civil rights in 1965, I was actively pro-choice in 1968, I marched in 1970. I hated all wars and defense spending, I hated Clinton's welfare reform. Douglas was always my ideal justice.
You will miss us.
Back to the public transportation = freedom question -- I don't think it's ground zero for reframing, but it's good to point out that when I take public transportation, you are more free in your car. Shifting subsidies from cars to mass transit pays dividends for drivers.
I'm closer to Shearer than most people here and I've never even bothered to get a driver's license and far prefer riding mass transit than being in a car. However, except for high density urban areas, a comprehensive mass transit network that goes everywhere and runs frequently is not viable. Even those who live in such areas will need access to rentals and a decent road network to go elsewhere. Those who live outside need to own cars or will suffer a significant loss of freedom. Back under communism, rural Poland had a pretty good mass transit system. Buses ran every hour or two and you were rarely more than 2k from a route, with the buses happily stopping to pick up passengers away from official stops. In spite of the fact that most people in such areas didn't own cars and rentals weren't an option, it still required massive subsidies and was a huge pain in the ass relative to owning a car. Switzerland has a comprehensive and well run train network, a system of 'postal buses' that take you to the rural areas, and good, though not NYC level great urban mass transit. Yet pretty much everyone except the poorest of the urban poor owns a car because it still makes getting around outside of the urban cores much easier. Cars are wonderful things; freedom enhancing ones even.
The ideal situation is one where you have good mass transit in urban areas, plus commuter rail for the suburbs, and government policy that encourages geographic centralization of places of employment. Those living in the urban cores can then rely on rentals for the occasional need to get out of town, the suburbanites can sharply reduce their driving, and rural areas will remain completely car centric.
Also worth noting that car-sharing is something that communications-tech has made much, much more viable (as a hassle-free experience, at least) than it once was.
I also think TKM is right--MY does this, too--to emphasize that it's not either/or. Having a car is great; not having to use it for everything is also great. (Not feeling you need two+ cars for a family, also great.)
122: I could weep for rage over the state of American infrastructure envy of the Swiss trains. The clean, convenient buses are just icing on the privately-banked cake.
122:and rural areas will remain completely car centric.
I don't know, I don't see it that way. I am no expert, but from what I see in Japanese movies (many contemporary), cars are still pretty rare, perhaps especially in the rural areas. Japan is a bit of a special case, with mountains, oceans, and insane fuel costs. But trains are the game, even for the rural UMC.
But every neighborhood, every town has a doctor/GP, grocery and drug store. If you want a special kind of rice, you order it and get it in a couple days. I lived in Smallville, and even though Bigtown was thirty minutes away, we still went shopping only once a month. Yes, you lose some things and take some risks.
Look, you don't concentrate, you re-distribute resources. Death to Walmart. When the big city loses its advantages, that is when I think mass transit and universal rail become practicable and green. Yggles is completely wrong.
I could go on, 70% of Japanese manufacturing is in places of less than 10 employees, and with good transpo, they don't need to be in Tokyo. Bring back Toffler.
111: This was written in stone when he signed the tax bill. Stimulus? Eliminated in this budget deal, so we got nothing for 4 trillion in tax cuts.
Bob, slow way, way down. The 4 trillion dollar thing is Paul Ryan's 2012 budget proposal (or at least, I don't know where else you're getting the 4 trillion figure from). It hasn't remotely been agreed to -- and it won't be -- by Democrats. Obama is not, I repeat, not going to propose himself the privatization of Medicare.
As for the acceptance by Dems of the need for spending cuts, yeah, I'm not happy either, but let's wait to see what Obama has to say in his own proposal later this week. If it includes some kind of radical restructuring of Medicare, I'll join you at the barricades.
According to google over three quarters of Japanese households own a car. A quick search didn't reveal rural vs. urban numbers, but I'm willing to bet that it's higher in the former than the latter.
128: A friend in college reacted with bitter hilarity when I asked, innocently, how much parking cost in Tokyo, if that helps.
128:Japan has gone downhill recently.
Japan is one of the major developed economies, where automobile ownership is continually decreasing. Vehicle buying has decreased by more than 30 percent since 1990 and this trend is labeled as 'kuruma banare' in Japanese. The young urban Japanese consumers no longer consider cars as status symbols. Also, their interest is shifting toward personal computers, mobile phones, and internet.
I'll stand by my principles. If you have a decent living environment, there should be no need to go anywhere beyond walking distance, and any excursions should be covered by mass transit and trains.
Yglesias is right about that. What he is wrong about is whether it works better in concentrated than distributed systems.
(Oh. Do I live this way? No, though in my suburb I could (and maybe should). I still get my food and clothes in a car. I now have 28, 684 miles on the 1993 car.)
117:Right.
No, on thinking the question was half-answered. Even though I was fairly certain that Obama would be horrible on taxes, the economy, war; even though I knew he would start a generation war and hurt old people...yet I still voted for him.
Now would the new so-called liberals vote for and support Obama if he made homosexuality illegal, overturned Roe v Wade, denied property and divorce rights for women, repealed the voting Rights Bill? Or made big moves in his administration toward those goals?
Yet was a fullcore FDR/Truman/LBJ redistributionist full-employment big social safety net liberal? And ended all the wars and slashed the defense budget?
I have already answered my half. I voted for you. Now you can answer yours.
And this is why he was chosen to run, why he was elected, and why he can get away with the horrors he is perpetrating. He has your vote, easy.
See Digby above
"Throw Grandma Off the Train" was an allusion to "throw women/gays/blacks under the bus." Digby has been on the power of Obama's identity politics for a long time.
The former has become acceptable, the latter impossible. I find that interesting.
Not many people know that the Special Patrol Group have been instructed by Margaret Thatcher to kill everyone in the world.
If you have a decent living environment, there should be no need to go anywhere beyond walking distance...
What is walking distance set by? How far I can go? My dad? My four year old? In January or July?
Bob has never once come to visit me.
128 According to google over three quarters of Japanese households own a car.
Yeah, if you think things like "statistics" are more accurate than movies. I mean, actual video evidence, right there in front of your bob's eyes!
137:Yeah, if you think things like "statistics" are more accurate than movies.
It would be a long argument, but I do believe movies are more accurate and important than statistics. We are not talking Iron Man, we are talking about how a society portrays itself. We are talking Grapes of Wrath or Twelve Angry Men or Network as opposed to Milton Friedman's Monetary History of the United States, which is the science you love and depend on and what motivates you.
Science fucking sucks. Art rules.
I'm going to watch Oshima's Boy tonight.
but I do believe movies are more accurate and important than statistics.
How could they not be?
We are not talking Iron Man, we are talking about how a society portrays itself.
I find this statement exceedingly amusing.
The obvious implications of 142 make me want to drink a whole bunch and sleep until noon tomorrow.
Milton Friedman's Monetary History of the United States, which is the science you love and depend on and what motivates you.
flapflapflap
To that last bit in the OP:
As a minor point, I think the article overstates the message "FREEDOM!" in American history. There have been successful movements built on other things, namely fear, usually.
I think it's important to point out that the American conception of "Freedom" is closely tied with a cultural fear of being historically enslaved or ruled over (there's some projection involved here, obvs.). Invocations of "Freedom" are themselves based on fear. They're not two separate things.
Pointing out that the "free market"* does not have our best interests at heart is a good idea suggested by the linked article. Fear is the great mover, in the end.
*Notice how there's been no push towards a different term. "Unregulated" is our worse term of abuse with what could be called the "savage market", the "heartless market", or the "pathological market", which are no more flights into poetic silliness than the appellation "free". Or not much more, anyway.
116: Okay so I vote for Obama in 2012, knowing it probably means my premature death in order to ensure your rights and privileges after I'm gone?
132: even though I knew he would start a generation war and hurt old people
These are pretty goddamn rich given that just about everything being thrown around this side of Ryan's straw man is generationally working the other direction, protecting current and soon-to-be senior citizens at the expense of younger people.
And even if that weren't true, for fuck's sake grow a pair you big. blubbering crank. Is your motherfucking snowflake that fucking special compared to anyone else on this fucking blog that they should give one fucking rat's ass about your "oh so special" angst and disappointment that things have not turned out as you would have preferred?
anyone else on this fucking blog that they should give one fucking rat's ass
Nah. Me and maybe one hundred million other people suffering under these sociopaths are no concern of yours. Were you the one telling us about foodstamps before you got a good job so you can spit on the vulnerable? I can't tell the yuppies apart.
Go have a fucking meetup at some fern bar.
Go have a fucking meetup at some fern bar.
Bob, again, please calm down and slow down. You're just contributing to the circular firing squad. And Stormcrow is in his 50s (I think) and is not a yuppie.
150.last: But I sort of almost was once. Back in the early '80s! Before yuppiedom sold out.
151: Wow, you're like ancient, dude.
152: Yep, I'm out of the advertiser's favorite demo and into the politician's. They can all blow me.
Plus gas, insurance, repairs and the initial cost of the car itself (plus interest, often). How do those people get all that money? They work.
I hate to break this to you, Natilo, but Europeans have work to support their mass transit utopia, too. And it's more than "a few cents more per month in taxes".
A modern, high-speed EMU costs $70,000-$100,000 per seat. That's about 4X the cost of an S-Class Mercedes, for those keeping track at home.
Look, I'm as pro-rail and pro-public transit as it's possible to be. But I recognize that it can only meet a fraction of the mobility needs of the population, even when the built environment is specifically designed to favor mass transportation over the automobile.
Anyway, this discussion isn't about whether subways are better than cars. It's about whether restrictions on cars (the inevitable, unavoidable concommitant of good mass transit) can be sold as part of a rhetorical "freedom" agenda.
It can't. As Shearer says, this is wishful thinking. Even where good mass transit options are available, the individual automobile is perceived as a symbol of freedom.
Freedom's just another name nowhere left to go.
"the individual automobile is perceived as a symbol of freedom. "
a very large percent of conservative bs is based on conflating average and marginal.
I would love to go to a fern bar. Retro! Maybe they'll make a comeback, along with those weird ruffle nectie things that women used to wear with suits in the 1980s, and a musical revival on Broadway of Family Ties.
I'll bet Stormcrow, that O.G. Yuppie, spent a bunch of time in fern bars. Probably drinking Heineken and talking about junk bonds.
And lusting after Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, of course.
If the people in some location would prefer to spend federal transportation money on mass transit rather than roads that should be up to them
Shearer, dude, you would so fucking hate it here.
A modern, high-speed EMU costs $70,000-$100,000 per seat.
OTOH, I'm not about to try to verify this guy's estimates, but it does seem plausible:
I spent a lovely evening aggregating the statistical tables found at the USDOT website for Highway Statistics Publications. (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohpi/hss/hsspubs.cfm)
The answer is that approximately $3.5 trillion has been spent--by all levels of government--on highways, roads, and local streets since 1945. This figure is supposed to represent all construction, maintenance, traffic services, and highway law enforcement. Of that $3.5 trillion, roughly $2.2 trillion came from user revenues such as tolls and excise taxes on fuel and tires. So the total net public expenditures for roads from 1945-2009 is $1.3 trillion.
I'd have guessed higher. I suppose at some point gas prices are going to make our existing trains a lot more competitive for regional travel.
I grew up in the most spread-out area of Philadelphia, without a car, and I fucking loved it. I saw my parents only at dinner-time. As teenagers, we'd heard stories of what it was like to be a teenager in a rural area, and even at that age it sounded horrifying. When I went to college, the people I met who had the most experience with (non-pot) drugs were people who grew up in rural areas, who invariably said it was "because there's nothing else to do."
bob, if Obama signs up for the Ryan plan or anything substantially equivalent, I will not vote for him in 2012, and I will actively support efforts to primary him. I find this scenario pretty unlikely, but if it happens, then Obama is dead to me.
Btw, something like half of Japan's population lives in just three urban areas: Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Of that 35 million are in Greater Tokyo alone. I really don't think Japan is a poster child for a country that has dispersed rather than concentrated its resources. They do make excellent movies.
161: That does seem low (especially for all of those services)--I suspect it is not adjusted for inflation (CPI was ~10x over that time period). Don't have time now to really look at it, but that would be only $50B a year, or for an average population of say 200 million through that time, only $250 per capita/year. Does not add up.
Petrol prices are much higher here than in the US, but I'm not quite at the tipping point yet re: personal travel costs. Driving is still cheaper and quicker than the train. It'd only take another 10-15% or so on the current price of petrol for the calculation to flip the other way. However, UK public transport is, I think, pretty expensive by EU standards.
161, 165: Found what looks to be the 2008 version of the chart the guy used and it had $180B total. Still seems low--I'm going to have to think about that on my drive in...
154: So, we're basically just back to an argument that conspicuous consumption trumps everything else then? I mean, that's what I've been thinking all along. People want cars because they want cars. And to hell with the consequences. Obviously, yes, there are resource and time costs for other modes of transportation, but what we're talking about here in the factual world is a situation where the vast majority of people have been convinced by advertising and social pressure that they can't possibly survive without a car, and therefore they work more and more to support their car addiction. And that leads to all these other social and environmental ills, many of which are part of the very feedback loop that causes people to prefer private automobiles in the first place. We may indeed be too far gone in this country to ever change without a social catastrophe, but it has to be said that whatever fraction of transportation "must" be provided by cars is far, far smaller, even now, than the fraction that is provided by them.
[T]he vast majority of people have been convinced by advertising and social pressure that they can't possibly survive without a car, and therefore they work more and more to support their car addiction.
If people are so easily persuaded to their disadvantage, what keeps liberalism/progressivism/socialism/Ye Olde Wellefare Staterie & Medium Dry Goods Shoppe from talking them out of those sinful, sinful personal machines and into collective vehicles of virtue?
I suspect it is not adjusted for inflation
Ahhh, that would make it much more in line with my ex recto guess. Whatever the solid number is, it's an enormous subsidization of the automobile-based transportation system, especially given that the user revenues are overwhelmingly gasoline taxes that are figured into the price of nearly any purchase made anywhere. And that doesn't price carbon emissions from vehicles at anything remotely reflecting their environmental costs is another huge effective subsidy:
The report estimates that two mid-sized vehicles emit more than nine metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year into the atmosphere, where it blankets the Earth, trapping the Sun's heat close to the planet. The authors present the image of a coal train that stretches 55,000 miles, long enough to circle the globe twice, carrying 314 million metric tons of carbon - the amount of CO2 emitted by U.S. cars and trucks in the year 2004.
Not that any of this represents a strategy for moving toward better transportation policy, since even acknowledging the true costs would be a big step for many Americans.
161
... I suppose at some point gas prices are going to make our existing trains a lot more competitive for regional travel.
Trains use energy too you know. And long distance car travel is relatively efficient (compared to all car travel) as the vehicles are more heavily loaded and getting better mileage than the overall average.
re: 171
Less energy per passenger, though, and they can use energy from sources other than fossil fuels, and even where fossil fuels are used [e.g. in coal powered electricity generation] the pollution is largely displaced from the route of transport.
Trains use energy too you know.
So do butterflies and puppy dogs.
172: the pollution is largely displaced from the route of transport.
ttaM invokes the rarely used NIMFY defense. (Not inappropriately, however.)
long distance car travel is relatively efficient (compared to all car travel)
Yes, but not compared to long-distance train travel.
they can use energy from sources other than fossil fuels
IIRC, our train fleet is almost all run on diesel engines, which can be easily converted to biofuels.
169: If people are so easily persuaded to their disadvantage, what keeps liberalism/progressivism/socialism/Ye Olde Wellefare Staterie & Medium Dry Goods Shoppe from talking them out of those sinful, sinful personal machines and into collective vehicles of virtue?
Because the corporations are the ones actually running things.
long distance car travel is relatively efficient (compared to all car travel) as the vehicles are more heavily loaded and getting better mileage
What? Obviously constant-speed travel dramatically increases mileage for the same average speed, but increasing the loading increases the mileage?
That does not make sense to me.
177: I assume his metric is something like pound-miles/gallon.
178, yeah, I suppose so. I think he might want to revisit the trains, then, and marvel at the difference.
I could go on, 70% of Japanese manufacturing is in places of less than 10 employees
*cough* bullshit *cough*.
I incorporate by reference all my comments in this thread, especially the ones where I take Shearer to the woodshed.
Having finally clicked through to the original link, I was surprised to find nothing about cars, transit, or transportation. Also, as k-sky pointed out, the author has previously written about the history of the political uses of fear. He might be wrong about how to use the language of freedom for progressive purposes, but I don't think it's a coincidence that he's moved from one subject to the other.
IIRC, our train fleet is almost all run on diesel engines, which can be easily converted to biofuels.
When I take the train north, there's a change of engine cars (to diesel I think) at DC. I keep meaning to ask what's up with different engines. This seems vaguely relevant.
181: whoa. Those were some great comments.
I know I need to reRTFA, and check Bridgeplate's blog and all that, but - do you do logistics stuff professionally?
180:Like this better?
Sugimoto, Japanese Society, 2nd edition, Cambridge 2002
As Table 4.1 shows, nearly nine out of ten employees work in businesses with fewer than three hundred workers. Furthermore, more than half of private sector workers are employed by establishments with fewer than thirty workers.Large corporations with three hundred or more workers employ one-ninth of the labor force in the private sector.
Numbers are as of 2001, and the trend has been even more pronounced toward decentralization, outsourcing, etc
182: yeah. I like a good public transportation debate, but it's interesting to me that that was the main point of connection between freedom and liberalism over here. I think Natilo's 7 was more on point. My question is does "your boss" expand to "financial capital" more generally and what does that look like? But StayFocusd (a sorry substitute for Leechblock) is going to keep me from wading in too deep.
Oh, and getting back to the OP: here's a good exchange from 6 years back by Bill Gals/ton & Michael Lind on the same topic. Probably worth reading!
Like this better?
Still bullshit.
You said "70% of manufacturing", not "more than half of private sector employment" (leaving aside the difference between "less than 10" and "less than 30").
According to the Japan statistics bureau, 97% of manufacturing output is produced by firms with more than 10 employees (numbers as of 2008).
"But value of output means nothing to me," I hear you say. "I am a revolutionary humanist. When I say 'manufacturing', I'm talking about workers."
OK, fine. Measured by employment, 91% of Japanese manufacturing is in establishments with >10 employees.
If you insist on just making shit up, at least make it remotely plausible.
But Knecht, how do you account for all the anime where mothers are doing industrial piecework at home? Hm?
But what was the point and purpose?
The question, or assertion, was whether manufacturing could be more widely dispersed, or needed to be concentrated in Tokyo (or Dearborn). Now if you were to talk about just-in-time or scale efficiencies, you might be interesting, but focusing on 10 or 30 or 300, all of which work quite well in Onomichi, is the academic equivalent of discrediting based ion a comma splice. Credentialism.
Useless and worthless and actually pernicious.
Like I have long said, there are those who wish to make the (any) discourse more inclusive, and those who want to use expertise to establish privilege and power.
The inclusive ones attempt to listen for what might be useful or informative, or increase empathy, or establish community and solidarity, or any number of other reasons. In a democracy, yes, some speakers will be wrong, or not entirely accurate. The horror.
The technocratic elite want to disempower everyone else. Since they aren't rich, and the privileges of race and gender disapproved, they have to gain status somehow.
Hey, bob, what country's next in the queue for your attention? I'm getting bored of hearing about Japan, so maybe we could do Madagascar. Or maybe another planet! That'd be sorta neat.
Got some real Science for ya, right here
Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.This is much more to this paper. For instance, at the U.S. national level, racists tend to be pro-income redistribution on net. Anti-capitalist attitudes are associated with higher levels of intolerance.
Golly, neither a social scientist or professional pollster, so how am I to judge?
I think you can judge by the title of the paper. "What Drives Views on Government Redistribution and Anti-Capitalism: Envy or a Desire for Social Dominance?"
194: Stop disempowering bob!
194:Was that based on a close and careful study of the data and methodology? Or ad hom, tribal identity, and/or ultimately for those with the expertise to counter it fairly...authority. As in, "trust me, as a social scientist, it's bad work and a bad paper" Trust me.
This does not make me anti-intellectual, nor does it mean I'm confused. BSD, TTS.
Nor is the author of op cit in 193 anti-intellectual or confused.
Or maybe another planet! That'd be sorta neat.
If you're bob, you already contribute to the discussion facts taken from Uranus.
Or maybe another planet!
I would actually be interested/entertained if Bob got onto a Mars Society kick.
198: Perhaps it hangs low, but what a fruit, amiright?
As in, "trust me, as a social scientist, it's bad work and a bad paper"
As in, "one of the Volokh Conspiracy contributors wrote a paper and pretty well announces right in the title that anti-capitalism must spring from either material envy or a desire to subjugate others. Which isn't really surprising from one of the Volokh Conspiracy contributors."
I'll be happy to cop to both tribalism and ad hominem about that.
It took some work for me to find the link, but that paper's hilariously stupid.
Law Professors: Is there anything stupid they can't do?
192:I live to entertain you, Stanley.
Week 1:Atkins Induction, down 9 lbs
Week 2: Increase yard and house work, lengthen and speedup dogwalks
Week 3: Add more protein, a few carbs, crunches and push-ups
Week 4: Add weights
Week 5: Add cardio
Week 6: Like Arnie!
Week 7: Dead
183: Amtrak is diesel in most of the country except the Northeast corridor, which is electric (requiring the overhead wire). In DC going North, the trains change engines to remove diesel and add electric. It's barely noticeable, but the ride is quieter after that point.
205: Huh. Thanks. They also change conductors there, so you often go from someone based in Lynchburg to someone based in Boston, with all the concomitant accent switching.
I mean, seriously, a paper that stupid is written by a tenured professor at one of the absolute best law schools in the country. Is there any other academic discipline that remotely looks this bad? It's so ironic that English took it on the chin for so many years when the law schools are full of morons doing half-baked economics and literally insanely dumb social science like the thing by Lindgren linked above.
Alanis-ironic, I guess. Just to anticipate you bastards.
Is there any other academic discipline that remotely looks this bad?
Well, Tyler Cowan is an economics professor.
I mean, seriously, a paper that stupid is written by a tenured professor at one of the absolute best law schools in the country.
But apparently not actually submitted to a journal or any other kind of peer review? Am I reading that correctly?
I guess Cowan could use the Glenn Reynolds defense that he's merely linking, not endorsing.
It's fucking science, Halford, which just proves that it's true. And no, I don't know what the hell to make of the fact that it was produced, either.
On preview: not peer-reviewed?
any other kind of peer review
Not an issue for getting published in law journals!
(I actually liked law school. But good lord is legal academia a mess).
Disciplinary prestige seems to have a lot to do with social power plus earning potential. I get the sense that professional school academics produce a lot of bullshit and make more money than, say, humanities academics in the established disciplines.
Obligatory hedge: There are always exceptions, in every direction.
"a lot" s/b "more, proportionally"
Not an issue for getting published in law journals!
And people publish crap like this in law journals? I figured those were full of, like, case reviews and so on.
Yes, people do publish stuff like that in law journals. Where the peer review consists of having your paper read by second and third year law students with no relevant background who obsessively check your grammar and citation formatting.
Usually the stuff in law journals has at least some weak relevance to legal scholarship. I've only skimmed the abstract, but this looks like pure non-legal social science. (Conducted at an undergraduate level of competence.)
Hey, it takes a lot of work to make absolutely sure that no wrongfully italicized punctuation makes it through.
216 gets it right. Are law journals havens for dilettantism, given that I already know law professors are not judged on scholarship? Economics with no notion of economics beyond Freakonomics, sociology with no notion of sociology beyond Freakonomics, philosophy with no notion of philosophy beyond Freakonomics...
this looks like pure non-legal social science
In addition to his JD, Lindgren has a PhD in sociology (both from UChicago).
Tyler Cowen is worth reading IMO. Not always right, but often very informative. He's not a doctrinaire markets-fix-everything thinker, and definitely not a Republican hack.
Where the peer review consists of having your paper read by second and third year law students with no relevant background who obsessively check your grammar and citation formatting.
The fact that it's just grammar and citation formatting isn't always by choice! I spent a full semester in law school arguing with an author about the fundamental stupidity/incoherence of his paper, and asking for a complete re-write. His basically told me to stuff it, noting that if we didn't like his paper we shouldn't have agreed to publish it. That was a fair point, although I'd had nothing to do with the decision to accept it for publication.
221: okay, but am I wrong or does this look like something that would be more at home in a sociology journal than a legal one? (If it weren't stupid, I mean.) It really has nothing to do with law.
Hmm, his faculty page actually says "PhD Student in Sociology, University of Chicago" so maybe he doesn't have a PhD?
Has it actually been published in any journal? Or is it just 41 pages of bullshit he put up on the internet?
I don't know, but you can purchase a hard-bound copy of it for just $9.99 plus shipping.
and pretty well announces right in the title that anti-capitalism must spring from either material envy or a desire to subjugate others.
To be fair--and the title is ambiguous here--he's actually saying it's either envy -> egalitarian sympaties, or desire to subjugate others -> pro-capitalist sympathies.
And I suspect that plenty of us here are actually more or less on board with the latter explanation, no?
The SSRN page indicates it was last updated this year, so I don't think it's been published.
But it does appear to be a part of his dissertation, which was filed in December 2009.
228: I'm not reading it that way at all. How do you get that from the title?
And the definitions of the various groups examined seem pretty specific (which is a good thing). I'm not actually going to read it.
228: I'm not reading it that way at all. How do you get that from the title?
I don't get that from the title, I get it from the abstract, which is why I say that the title is ambiguous (worse than ambiguous, since while the 'right' interpretation is 'sound,' it's definitely the least natural one). But the idea is that envy might "drive views on Government Redistribution and Anti-Capitalism" one way, while desire for social dominance might drive views the other way (towards capitalism, against redistribution).
From the abstract:
According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one's lot in a capitalist system.
233: My understanding from the abstract was that the hypothesis that "opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance" was, according to Lindgren, disproven by the data he looks at. In other words, the conclusion of the paper is that what he describes as the social psychology conventional wisdom, that economic conservativism is associated with an orientation toward social dominance, is wrong, and that the data really shows that economically left-wing views are motivated by envy.
Right or wrong, I'm not sure that this is likely to make anyone react to the paper as evenhanded.
Sorry, that should be envy and racism.
235: that's correct, that's what he's claiming. The abstract is pretty clear about this. The title is not at all clear, as demonstrated by the fact that many of the commenters here interpreted it as a "threat or menace?" kind of sentence.
My gut feeling about Lind/gren has always been that he's clearly someone whose research is driven by his political feelings--but then, so are tons of good researchers. His work on the 'Arming America' thing was probably Good For Academia, all things considered. And it certainly speaks to... something surprisingly un-hackish that, having already gotten tenure at NU Law, he decided to start a PhD in sociology of all things.
-- Err, correction, when he started it, he was still at Chicago-Kent. But he was already a full professor, and he decided to finish the damn thing even if it took him 15 years. So I don't think it's reasonable to call him a hack; based purely on his CV, he seems like someone genuinely interested in bringing good empirical research into law. That doesn't mean he can actually carry it out himself, but hey.
158: [my dark pseudo-yuppie past + fern bars]
This made me reflect back and I realized that there was really only about one 2 year stretch in Houston where I/we had the requisite income and location* to possibly qualify. I'm not sure if I ever was in a fern bar... although the Algonquin might have had ferns when I went there once. It all seems so distant and quaint like the post-'87 crash joke: "What do you call a yuppie arbitrageur? Waiter!" Who knew they would take it personally and come back and fuck us all in the ass 20 years later.
*In Houston that meant something like being within walking distance of a place that served gelato. When we left Houston we moved to the suburbs and became authentic.
I had never heard the term "fern bar" before this thread. The things you learn on the internet!
he seems like someone genuinely interested in bringing good empirical research into law
So he went into sociology, of all things?
[bracing for impact from Gonerill...]
177
What? Obviously constant-speed travel dramatically increases mileage for the same average speed, but increasing the loading increases the mileage?
It increases the passenger miles traveled per gallon of fuel used. Cars and trains are both more efficient in this sense when fully loaded. See here (section C-3.3) for more:
... This is because intercity auto trips tend to be relatively efficient highway trips with higher-than-average vehicle occupancy rates -- on average, they are as energy-efficient as rail intercity trips. ...
[actually table c-3.3 shows trains are still 3% more efficient]
242: that's precisely the point; econ would have been the hackish thing, because it has far more value as a credential, and would be much less likely to trouble his ideological commitments. And you're likely to be exposed to more variety in empirical social scientific research methods as a sociologist.
The most methods-ignorant econ phd knows more about multivariate statistical estimation than the most methods-ignorant soc phd, because the former has to pass a year-long econometrics sequence, and the latter likely won't have an equivalent requirement, but if I wanted to get intelligent answers about some random soc-sci empirical problem, I'd rather ask a methods-prof in a soc department than a methods-prof in an econ department.
I still think we can and should expect better things from our law professors at top schools than putting out shitty, obviously stupid papers while serving as students in some Ph.D. program. Seriously, would any other discipline put up with this?
245: I don't disagree, exactly, but he's presumably written at least some less-shitty and not-as-obviously stupid things in the past. Maybe he just writes shitty, obviously stupid papers on the side, and his colleagues forgive him for it, because his legal research (which, for the upteenth time, this isn't) is respectable.
Honestly, I'm not willing to draw too many conclusions from the abstract, and I don't care enough to read the paper. It's packaged as ideological red meat, but it's an intervention into a social-psych debate that's not exactly a model of disinterested investigation. The entire "people who believe X really believe it because they also believe Y (ie, because they're bad people)" literature is, from what little I've seen, something of a swamp. It's hard to believe his advisor would have let him get away with complete BS on this.
My basic view on this guy is: I dunno if he's personally creating much of scholarly value, on the one hand, but his institutional trajectory--work for the ABA, &c.--looks like he's trying to encourage better stuff being done in law schools.
It's packaged as ideological red meat, but it's an intervention into a social-psych debate that's not exactly a model of disinterested investigation
WHAT! How dare you talk about social psych that way. I... hurk. Flurp. I....
Hgllllulk.
What?
because his legal research (which, for the upteenth time, this isn't) is respectable.
Yeah, also, this. When was the last time you were cited seven times in a supreme court opinion, Halford?
People, people. Hang on. Let's just look at something we can all agree is idiotic propaganda.
When's the last time I did your mom seven times?
I... hurk. Flurp. I.... Hgllllulk. What?
Ok, I didn't state this very well. What I meant is that the whole 'Authoritarian Personality' research program is/was one driven by very clear ethical/political concerns. And that's fine! I mean, christ, in 1950, you ought to be studying why people become fascists, and if someone asks you why, it seems a little weird to make some abstract argument about the autonomy of academic inquiry; no, the reason is because fascists just murdered millions upon millions of people, and we want to know what the fuck is up with that.
I don't think that part is really all that controversial.
What I said about it being "something of a swamp" is probably just me not knowing what I'm talking about. The psychoanalytic roots of the original research, and the difficulty separating the affective/dispositional from the political and situational elements involved, just make me very skeptical about any strong claims. (As against a null hypothesis of: people mostly continue to believe what they were told when young.)
People, people. Hang on. Let's just look at something we can all agree is idiotic propaganda.
I dunno. My mother retired recently, and boy am I envious. What a life!
I think we can usefully separate out two parts of that post:
1. Retirement now is probably way better than in 1950. Even aside from health improvements--and it actually seems like the big change from 1950-1990 was the % of folks who make it to retirement, not how long they live in retirement, but that doesn't factor in quality of life--the advent of air conditioning, HDTV + cable/satellite TV, internet, cheap and easily available film/music/theater, cheap airfare and cheap long-distance phone service seem on the face of it a huge change for the better for retirees. Against that, increasing mobility/social norms may mean retirees don't see their kids as much. (But I'm not even totally sure about total quality of interaction, what with phone/airfare/email changes.)
2. It's too good, unsustainably good. Yes, this seems hackish propaganda.
Yeah, also, this. When was the last time you were cited seven times in a supreme court opinion, Halford? / When's the last time I did your mom seven times?
Oh, hah, I fucked up the link.
252: what? No. I was kidding. Social psych is a junkie and a sellout.
Retirement now is probably way better than in 1950.
I mean, think of what a great life Bob has. Walking his dogs, watching the greats of Japanese cinema, waging holy war against the neoliberal sellout pundit class--a far better life than two generations previous, no?
Yeah, without knowing anything about the topic, that looks like a pretty legitimate article that the SCT is citing. But it still reflects poorly on law schools, I think, that doing crappy social science scholarship instead of things related to the law.
I mean, think of what a great life Bob has.
But what about all the negative externalities?
257: But the paper seems to have become a chapter of his dissertation in sociology, so it's not clear he was doing it as law professor legal scholarship at all.
Well, but a lot of "law professor legal scholarship" really does look like this kind of thing*, and it's almost certain that much of his attraction to law schools is his ability to do law and sociology or empirical legal studies or run regressions or whatever.
*More precisely, there's usually, but not always, a slight amount of gussying up to make it fit a legal theme. But any of us could do that in a second. I.e., he could use this research to shoehorn into some theory of why antidiscrimination law should be focused on formal legal equality and not redistribution.
I do not believe bob has gotten sufficient credit for 204.
I also don't know that there's much in the way of malagasy cinema. but by mastering madagascar, bob would be well on his way to controlling the world, were we playing risk.
Speaking of important articles written by law professors, I dont believe we ever discussed this article:
262. Looks as if malagasy cinema could use all the support it can get.
263: now published in Stanford Law Review.
She has an earlier one, too (in Northwestern LR):
The Price of Pleasure - Condoms break. Diaphragms malfunction. Even hormonal contraceptives aren't 100% effective. Three million American women become pregnant unintentionally every year, and the rate of unintended pregnancies is especially high among young unmarried women. What is the legal relationship between these women and the men with whom they conceive? Current law treats unmarried lovers as strangers, leaving women to bear most of the costs of "free love" on their own. This Article argues that a different default should apply. Unmarried lovers who become pregnant are neither spouses nor complete strangers; they are something in between. Sex creates a unique type of relationship, and sex that results in pregnancy extends this relationship. Unless the parties agree on a no-strings-attached rule, the law should reflect this reality regardless of whether the pregnancy ends in abortion, miscarriage, or childbirth.
The abstracts seem rather interesting, though I suspect will, as divorce lawyer, has more to say about it all.
I do not believe bob has gotten sufficient credit for 204.
It was cute, especially coming from bob, but a bit too derivative of The Onion's 1998 classic, "I lost 32 pounds in 15 days and died!"
265
... Current law treats unmarried lovers as strangers, leaving women to bear most of the costs of "free love" on their own. ...
This isn't in fact true although in my opinion it should be.
263: As a skeptic of the traditional marriage model I'd really like to see some sort of formal recognition of the fact that relationships exist on a continuum between perfect stranger and absolutely committed monogamous heterosexual spouse. I have no idea how that would be done, but I'd like to at least see some acknowledgment of the real complexity of human relationships.
OTOH at the other extreme I can see how the law could completely bollox it and create a situation where a single sexual encounter had the weight of common law marriage. Given our current Supreme Court I wouldn't want to chance it.
I have no idea how that would be done,
I'd think problems of proof would be insurmountable, or at least nightmarish in practice. Do you remember a conversation here about Pennsylvania child custody law? They have some bizarre standard whereby an adult can become a 'de facto parent' of a child and acquire legal rights similar to those of a non-custodial parent against the biological parents' will, even where there is no finding that the biological parents are unfit. That seemed like a nightmare to me, and any kind of soft legal regime by which non-formalized sexual relationships gave rise to legal rights (beyond those relating to children of the relationship) seems likely to turn out badly as well.
It is certainly an interesting argument. I havent read the entire article yet, but that shouldnt stop me from giving my quick thoughts on it.
I believe that she argues for a different default: ie sharing of costs of pregnancy and assigning financial numbers to the physical aspects of pregnancy.
My first reaction is that if you do that, then you provide ammunition to the argument that men should have increased decision-making authority pre-birth.
Other thoughts:
would you end up in disputes about representations about birth control?
Does apportioning the costs of pregnancy result in increase births or decreased births?
If you cant collect child support very well, what makes you think you can collect pregamony?
Identifying the actual father will lead to a boom in business for lab corps.
More later.
270:
Shorter 270: I LOVE the idea! It would be fabulous for business.
Yeah, that was what I suspected. The problem with lawyers/profs doing social theory is that the answer is typically "more law!"