I’m reading David Frum, Comeback Conservatism
Here is Frum, protesting the notion that John Edwards is a friend of the poor, or in any sense an economic egalitarian:
Voters sense this truth. It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.” These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.
Meanwhile, the most unequal parts of Missouri, the cities and especially the city of St. Louis, voted heavily Democratic. Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money. (p. 37)
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Do you suppose this is what he’s referring to?
Equality centers were defined as areas having inequality/Gini scores that were 1.0 or more standard deviations below the mean. This low inequality, or income equality, indicates that there is little concentration of income in any one category – it is more evenly distributed across categories.
The authors don’t seem to be saying that these are “communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money.” Rather, they’re communities in which one might most easily remain in denial that the invisible hand has its thumb on the scale.
(Yes, I realize this is not the problem you were going after….)
The authors don’t seem to be saying that these are “communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money.”
Yes they are. Even though the authors give a very confusing explanation of the gini coefficient, it’s still true that the gini coefficient is lowest when everyone earns exactly the same.
Man if you think I’m actually going to watch a bloggingheads with JGo to see the top two dumbest arguments, you’ve got another thing coming.
Number 3 was pretty damn good though, I must admit. Frum’s quite the pillock.
OK, thanks. So we can return to mocking the idea that living in a homogeneous county means you “care about equality”.
After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity?
Orwell predicted we’d get here, didn’t he?
I only could watch 6:58 of the bloggingheads, but here are my nominees for the stupidest claims (all Jonah):
“what’s gotten much less attention [from scholars of Nazism] is that [German anti-Semitism involved conspiracies of Jewish control of the economy*]”
Yes, few have dared remark on this particular fantasy of Hitler IN ALL RECORDED HISTORY.
“supposedly he [the white, heterosexual male] has rigged the system …. it’s [Hollywood and academia] all about how these evil, pale penis-people [snuffle-smirk from Will that makes me depressed for humanity] are controlling things from behind the scenes…”
Yes, because white men do not actually hold any public positions of real power, this is an extremely paranoid world view. Whereas in Nazi Germany, THE JEWS ACTUALLY RAN THINGS FROM VERY PUBLIC, VERY POWERFUL POSITIONS.
“I shouldn’t say that no one is talking about liquidating white people, the entire academic discipline of Whiteness Studies is aimed at getting rid of the concept of Whiteness”
Yes, so that they can ELIMINATE THE VERY SUBJECT THAT THEY STUDY AND DEPRIVE THEMSELVES OF THE OH-SO-CUSHY JOBS THAT ACADEMICS ENJOY.
Will was talking out of his ass, too, but I couldn’t take any more of it to find any other
gemsturds of monstrous idiocy.*Jonah’s locution is not brief, here.
“I don’t think public education is inherently fascist”
Well that’s mighty white of you Jonah.
How delightfully totalitarian. Just when I thought that I was going to have to pawn my jack boots.
“After all, what is inequality but another form of ‘diversity’? And what is ‘equality’ but another word for homogeneity?”
Bwahahahahahaha. In the future, when these wackos ask for “equal time”, we have a perfectly good reason to simply bludgeon them to pulp. It’s all for the sake of “diversity”, baby.
Honestly, what could be more egalitarian than “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”?
A couple of threads down someone mentioned Walter Benn Michaels and his ‘diversity’ book. In that book he extensively describes this neat trick – to conceptualize inequality as a form of “diversity”.
Some people happen to be black and some white, some gay and some straight, some rich and some poor. Something to embrace and be proud of.
Right-wing intellectual has become an oxymoron. It’s really truly shocking the kinds of extremely daft arguments these guys make. John Edwards is not an advocate of equality because Missouri communities vote Republican? That’s very logical isn’t it?
What about diversity?
Da longer you’ve been here, da verse it gets.
The impression I get is that there must be a Supreme Being, because It in Its Majesty is assembling all the idiots together in one place and getting them to say the same thing in unison.
Now, if only they weren’t in charge, we might be able to get somewhere.
A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.”
Googling ‘Missouri “Equality Center”’ brought up natch. There were lots of “Racial Equality Centers” and “GLBT Equality Centers” to be found, but “Equality Center” as a redefinition of “Homogenous Community” – no.
I’m getting pretty suspicious as to the existence of this “study”. John: does Frum cite it in any way, shape or form?
The impression I get is that there must be a Supreme Being, because It in Its Majesty is assembling all the idiots together in one place and getting them to say the same thing in unison.
If there is, in fact, a Supreme Being, and if It has any sense at all, It will be dropping a Big Rock, having assembled all the idiots in one place.
Watch the skies.
To be fair, I live in a small city where, until the bursting of the real estate bubble, housing prices had been rising rapidly in the past decade and a half, and many here have, indeed, been worried about a loss of socio-economic diversity. Was that concern misplaced?
This does raise the issue of whether or not it is desirable for people to live near those with mostly similar incomes or with widely diverging incomes. It seems like those who worry about ‘positional goods’ and the effects of zero-sum status competition ought to like homogenous enclaves where nobody has much more money than anyone else. However, I just recently ran across a study (I thought it had been mentioned on Marginal Revolution, but I can’t find it there) which suggested that the percentage of income devoted to status symbols was highest when families were living near those with similar incomes. That is, people compete this way more if they think they have a chance of ‘winning’ but don’t bother if they have neighbors who are much wealthier than they are.
Ah, here it is in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2181822/pagenum/all/#page_start
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To test their theory, the authors look at how much a white family spends on conspicuous consumption when it is surrounded by white families making a similar amount of money. They find that this white family spends the same portion of its income on visible goods as a black family surrounded by other black families with similar incomes. They also find that the further a family of either race slips behind the average income of nearby households of the same race (becoming too poor to compete in the signaling game), the less it spends on these visible goods.——————————-
“To be fair, I live in a small city where, until the bursting of the real estate bubble, housing prices had been rising rapidly in the past decade and a half, and many here have, indeed, been worried about a loss of socio-economic diversity. Was that concern misplaced?”
No, but if Frum wanted to make that case, then that’s quite a different argument to be having.
“I’m getting pretty suspicious as to the existence of this “study”. John: does Frum cite it in any way, shape or form?”
The book is at school. I’ll check it tomorrow.
What we need now is for Greg Mankiw to use Frum’s observation to argue that progressive income taxation is not socially optimal, because it would reduce diversity.
Looks like Frum is trying to encourage John Holbo to write a sequel to his review of ‘Dead Right’,
Whether he cites it or not, he’s pretty clearly talking about this (per the first comment, above):
http://ded.mo.gov/researchandplanning/community/misc/sa-1102-1.stm
It seems that Frum doesn’t know what the word ‘egalitarian’ means – or this supposed to be some form of newspeak?
“… organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.”
So:
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/8571.html
I think we’re dismissing Frum too quickly. There is a real, important puzzle here.
Internationally, countries with broadly progressive politics also tend to have egalitarian distributions of income. No surprise there. What is surprising is that in the US this is not the case at all.
Look at New York City. Little island of European social democracy somehow stuck to America. Political culture about three standard deviations to the left of the US average. Union density two or three times higher than the US average. And yet income inequality is also higher here than anywhere else in the country.
You can see the same thing across the country. Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all. This, to me, looks like a genuine problem.
“Since Corrado Gini was a Fascist and liberals care about diversity, that proves that opposing tax cuts is facsist!” I’m pretty sure that is the point Jonah would take from this discussion.
Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality.
So, diversity is the new “inequality”?
… communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread”
Straw man.
Yes, low information voters are easily exploited. Well-informed voters, not so much. I guess this has become so obvious that it now needs to be spun?
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those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Communists are voting for neo-Trotsyites?
That’s not news.
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Lemuel, maybe I’m missing something, but doesn’t your point just show that New York City doesn’t run a welfare state sufficient to make up for the lack of an adequate one on the Federal and State levels?
After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity?
And what is “fascism” but another word for “government by female grade-school teachers with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore”? And what is “freedom” but another word for “nothing left to lose”?
Wow. That’s deep.
So all men are created…homogeneous?
Where you really find inequality in St. Louis is between the city (St. Louis City County) and the county (St. Louis County).
In terms of municipal boundaries, St. Louis is something of an anomaly compared with other urban centers of similar size. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the city was teeming with relatively wealthy residents, St. Louis was legally incorporated (the city becoming it’s own county) so as not to divert tax dollars to developing infrastructure in rural areas. In the mid-twentieth century whites (Frum’s “egalitarians”) fled to the suburbs in droves (in 1950 the city’s population hovered around a million, whereas today it’s approximately 400k), leaving behind a large black underclass. The effect of the earlier incorporation of St. Louis simply reversed the effects of the tax structure, thereby intensifying the pernicious effects of white flight generally. There’s simply no tax base in the city, affecting the quality of schools and roads and employment.
The inequality Frum is (must be?) referring to is that between the incredibly poor black majority and the few thousand urban professionals, college professors (Wash U, Saint Louis U, UMSL), and hospital employees (Barnes-Jewish) remaining in the city. For 7/8ths of St. Louis City County there is no inequality, since all are equally poor (the egalitarian poor).
Unless I’m missing Frum’s (?) point.
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The thing is, it’s not just that New York is about the same as the rest of the country in terms of equality. It’s much worse—Gini index of close to 50, the highest of any metro area in the country.
So it’s not just that progressive politics on a local level can’t compensate for national trends toward inequality. It’s that progressive politics on a local level are correlated with even stronger trends toward inequality. And that’s something we really need to grapple with.
“No, but if Frum wanted to make that case, then that’s quite a different argument to be having.”
There is a reasonable question here although trying to talk about it while simultaneously heaping scorn on Frum may be a fool’s errand, but what the hell.
So a high GINI is considered bad in a country even when those at the bottom are relatively well off materially by historical and developing worlds standards. In crude form, the argument is that those at the bottom—though they may have plenty of food and heated and air-conditioned living space, and entertainment and gadgets, still suffer because they compare themselves to others, see that all this stuff they have is really ‘junk’ in comparison to beautiful Lexuses and granite counter-tops of the rich and are unhappy.
It’s also a meme that once absolute income reaches around $10,000/year, that further increases in absolute living standards provide little benefit and that, above that level, we’re all wasting our money on ‘positional goods’ in a harmful, zero-sum status competition.
So assume you believe something like the above—that a high GINI in a wealthy country is mainly bad because of relative status. If you believe that, do you also think it is a good thing for people to sort themselves into low-GINI, economically homogeneous communities? If not, why not?
On the other hand, if you believe class diversity is good for a community, doesn’t that tend to undermine the status-based argument for redistribution?
Or—if you think a high GINI is bad for a the U.S. as a whole, is it also bad for a state? For a county? For a city? For a neighborhood? And if you say yes in all cases, aren’t you expressing a preference for economically homogeneous cities and neighborhoods?
Peasants will pay their fealty and taxes to the king, or to Generalissimo Giuliani, if they’re left to their own devices the rest of the time, or cared for or lied to well enough.
Gentrification, the overrunning of the servants’ quarters, is owned and operated first by adventurous free-thinking liberals and only after by the banking class, who clean up after the hard work is done.
Frum wants to pretend he’s not an individualist. He’s lying to himself. He’s a fucking joke. But you know you’re an individualist and you think that’s a response?
There are no neighborhoods or communities in big cities any more. They’re been destroyed and replaced by xerox copies. Neo-liberalism is not social democracy. Glass houses and idiocy all around.
” It’s that progressive politics on a local level are correlated with even stronger trends toward inequality.”
You’re god damn right.
Stupid motherfuckers
Look at New York City. Little island of European social democracy somehow stuck to America. Political culture about three standard deviations to the left of the US average. Union density two or three times higher than the US average. And yet income inequality is also higher here than anywhere else in the country.
You can see the same thing across the country. Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all. This, to me, looks like a genuine problem.
Perhaps the genuine problem is that in the US, people actually have to see the effects of extreme income inequality on a daily basis before they can begin to understand the benefits of the social welfare state? Just a guess. The need for a strong public sector was palpably obvious to me when I lived in New York; out here in the rural college towns it’s a much more abstract concern.
So, organizing your life so that you only live near other white people, and far away from those darn immigrants, means that you “care most deeply about equality.” Does he even think for five minutes about what he writes?
“I think we’re dismissing Frum too quickly.”
Well, if he didn’t spell out the “egalitarian communities” he’s describing as being so white, maybe. As it stands, it really does sound as if he’s saying that, if you live in a nice gated community that keeps all the riff-raff out, you vote Republican.
“Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all. This, to me, looks like a genuine problem.”
Yes, because it suggests that the egalitarian politics isn’t working. Why the egalitarian politics isn’t working is another matter – that could just mean, as washerdreyer says, that there’s a limit to how much income equality can be produced by progressive politics at the municipal level, if the state and Federal governments aren’t in sync. But what it doesn’t suggest is what seems to be Frum’s point – that New Yorkers are voting Democratic because they just love inequality and want more of it. More likely, in the areas that have most inequality, the poor vote Democratic, and that’s what’s producing the difference he observes.
You can see the same thing across the country. Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all. This, to me, looks like a genuine problem.
No, they do correlate. Not in some naive sense that people create the communities they set out to, but in the more practical sense that those who actually experience inequality are more likely to want to, you know, actually do something about it. It’s just plain fatuous to assume that the problem they’re addressing was created by the means they’re using to address it, or that it doesn’t exist elsewhere where people aren’t doing something about a problem they don’t have.
Those, on the other hand, who live in isolated, socioeconomically self-selecting pockets of heavily government-subsidized developments, i.e., suburbs, and who therefore experience the rest of the universe through American mass media, are more likely to be, well, ignorant. Hence their voting patterns. Fatuous, non-historicized “arguments” about problems they’ve never encountered actually make a kind of narrative sense to them, in the same way that they understand why Gabrielle is having an affair with Carlos.
Quoth the Frum: These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.
Go frakking figure.
There’s nothing natural about the latter living arrangement, no matter how ubiquitous it’s come to be in our little corner of the world for a few generations. Suburbs are inequality exoduses, the constituting fears of which are the basis for the, now disintegrating, conservative movement, as has already been discussed on this blog elsewhere.
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Slocum-
It’s not just a “meme” that relative income is very important, while absolute income is only important up to $10-15,000. It’s strongly supported by public health data. Things like life expectancy and infant mortality follow this pattern exactly.
if you think a high GINI is bad for a the U.S. as a whole, is it also bad for a state? For a county? For a city? For a neighborhood? And if you say yes in all cases, aren’t you expressing a preference for economically homogeneous cities and neighborhoods?
A high Gini (it’s not an acronym, it’s the inventor’s name) is indeed bad right down to the neighborhood level. And yes, there are real and important benefits to economically homogeneous communities. (This is one reason why Hispanics tend to enjoy better life-chances in the US than other groups with similarly low incomes.) But recognizing these benefits does NOT mean “expressing a preference” for segregation by income, because there are also important costs to segregation of communities by income, especially in the political sphere.
The solution, of course, is greater equality at the national level so that equality at the local level does not require segregation by income.
I do agree with you that Holbo and others are too quick to dismiss the real problems here.
No, they do correlate. Not in some naive sense that people create the communities they set out to, but in the more practical sense that those who actually experience inequality are more likely to want to, you know, actually do something about it.
Maybe. But doesn’t it strike you as troubling at all that the relationship between egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes seems to take opposite forms internationally and within the US? At the least, as Lynn Gazis-Sax says, because it suggests that egalitarian policies in the US aren’t working.
So a high GINI is considered bad in a country even when those at the bottom are relatively well off materially by historical and developing worlds standards.
Probably because a high GINI is characteristic of the developing world, rather than the developed world, and Americans like to think that the have the best of everything, rather than being on the ass-end of the developed world in so many ways of measuring.
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progressive politics on a local level are correlated with even stronger trends toward inequality. And that’s something we really need to grapple with.
Only if we’re going to confuse correlation with causality.
Which we aren’t.
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36 by gmt is an excellent comment. Inequality is the cause, egalitarian politics is the effect; circumstances determine consciousness.
And let’s be clear, in the US context the policy tools available to local governments are not trivial.
If doubling union density, raising the minimum wage by several dollars an hour, enrolling 10-20% of the population in public health insurance, and shifting the main source of government revenue from a sales tax to a progressive income tax still doesn’t make a dent in income inequality, shouldn’t that worry us?
(This isn’t just a New York City puzzle. I could just as easily be talking about California.)
And yes, there are real and important benefits to economically homogeneous communities. (This is one reason why Hispanics tend to enjoy better life-chances in the US than other groups with similarly low incomes.)
Or rather it might be if Hispanic communities were economically homogeneous. They aren’t. What they do share are non-economic arrangements of support, something we will miss if we insist on dumbing everything down to dollars.
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36 by gmt is an excellent comment. Inequality is the cause, egalitarian politics is the effect; circumstances determine consciousness.
Thanks, but it was also redundant. As usual, Bérubé said it first and better, despite what must be an annoying combination of keyboard shortcuts just to spell his name.
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Race. Race explains everything. Here’s the question. What does it say about our country that none of those equality centers is racially integrated?
Note that the centers are on the fringes of areas that are integrated or are heavily African-American in population and that they are Republican. Why might that be? Why do Republicans move out of urban centers into homogeneously white enclaves? Why?
The ugly truth. The faux “egalitarianism” of Republican whites is rally just __ (you fill in the blank).
If doubling union density, raising the minimum wage by several dollars an hour, enrolling 10-20% of the population in public health insurance, and shifting the main source of government revenue from a sales tax to a progressive income tax still doesn’t make a dent in income inequality, shouldn’t that worry us?
It didn’t make a dent? Really?
New York still looks like a Gilded Age sewer?
Really?
This is what I meant by ‘fatuous, non-historicized “arguments”.’
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Or rather it might be if Hispanic communities were economically homogeneous. They aren’t. What they do share are non-economic arrangements of support
You are right that income (in)equality is just one dimension of solidarity, altho quite an important one. But I wonder why you think income inequality is as high in Hispanic communities as elsewhere in the US. because I’m pretty sure that Hispanic communities in general are more economically homogeneous than most low-income communities. More to the point, the social universe of Hispanic immigrants is—for language and other reasons—largely composed of other immigrants, so they effectively live in more income-egalitarian communities than others even in the same physical neighborhoods.
Income isn’t everything, but under capitalism it’s a pretty big thing.
I’ll try to put up some cites on this but I’m curious why you think I’m wrong.
And Marx said it even earlier and even better!
Though it’s true that correlation is often correlated with causality.
I’m from Kansas City, so I’m familiar with the “equality centers” Frum is writing about. These are largely lower middle to middle working class areas, largely white, and largely composed of people who moved closer to the city from small towns (or whose parents made that move. .. ). They haven’t “organized their lives to live in egalitarian communities.” They’ve organized their lives in order to: 1) be near the jobs in the urban area (and many would rather be in the small towns, but not so many jobs there. . .); but also to 2) be far from the urban center and its horrors, real or imagined. And in the midwestern white pastoral imagination the city is a place of unrelenting horror; part of that, alas, is really nothing more than zenophobia. They stay away from the urban parts of the metropolitan area partly out of fear, partly out of a desire to be around people like themselves. Nothing egalitarian about it; if there is homogeneity in income levels that is because folks with much higher incomes tend to live in areas with more expensive housing stock and, often, better schools. If we feel we must paste a political label on people in these “centers” I would say it is more libertarian than anything else, though of a particularly jingoistic flavor. They like to be left alone, they don’t want their tax dollars going to “welfare queens,” and when the first Gulf War started they were all quite keen on killing “towel heads.”
But if your car is broken down on the side of the road they will be the first to pull over and ask if you need a hand.
Sorry, I have no data to back any of this up, but when I worked new housing construction in KC, I spent many days with these very people, and had many frustrating conversations with them.
New York still looks like a Gilded Age sewer?
New York still has extreme levels of inequality, most obviously of income but along pretty much any other axis of well-being you can name, yes.
Grand Moff, what are you actually trying to argue?
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Yes, I think race is a very big piece of it.
But I wonder why you think income inequality is as high in Hispanic communities as elsewhere in the US.
I didn’t say that, I disagreed with the opposite assertion. I am also intimately acquainted with Hispanic communities and I don’t recognize their realities in your attempts to salvage Frum’s stupidity.
Grand Moff, what are you actually trying to argue?
You said that it hadn’t made a dent.
That’s dumb.
I’m sorry, but I can’t make it any simpler than that.
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Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all.
If you surgically remove the excess stupid from Frum’s original statement, you get ‘people living in homogeneous communities tend to be less worried about inequality as a political issue’.
Dunno if it is true or not, but it does make a certain amount of sense, at least to the extent you can split up ‘relative inequality’ and ‘absolute poverty’ as distinct and independant issues.
lemuel pitkin, Lynn Gazis-Sax nailed it on the head: “So, organizing your life so that you only live near other white people, and far away from those darn immigrants, means that you care most deeply about equality..Does he even think for five minutes about what he writes?”
Obviously, if you live in a place with very high homogeneity of race, then racial inequality isn’t really an issue.
Or to put it more simply, black poverty won’t be a problem… if there are no blacks.
Then again, the same holds for white poverty.
When I hear the word “diversity”, I reach for my shotgun.
That’s dumb.
Right. I think you can do better than that.
Look: New York City has the highest Gini index of any major metro area, despite also having the highest union density and a relatively high minimum wage. That doesn’t seem like a problem to you?
Here’s where I’m coming from.
(1) Income inequality is very important—one of the most fundamental social variables there is.
(2) Historically, social democracy has offered powerful tools to reduce inequality—strong unions, universal public services, labor market regulation, redistribution through the tax system, etc.
(3) In the US, many of these policies vary substantially between states and localities. But the states with the most extensive social democratic policies also tend to be the ones with most inegalitarian outcomes.
To me, as someone who is committed to social democracy, this is a serious problem. To you, evidently, it’s not.
But I can’t tell if you disagree with my first premise, that income inequality matters; or with my second, that things like unions and minimum wages are important; or with my third, that inequality continues to be worse in places like New York or California than in the rest of the country; or if you just think I’m dumb.
“organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities” as a euphemism for “move to a neighborhood where no poor people live” is just beyond my limited powers of comprehension—I can’t believe that someone would be so shameless as to frame it that way. So I’m trying to figure out what Frun could be saying that would not require him to be a fictional villain, and coming up with bupkes.
During my online debates about LF, I’ve been told that a tax increase is as bad as fascism, and that public education is an example of fascism.
The point perhaps being that Jonah’s book is most successful among people who had no concept of fascism at all before they read the book by their friend Jonah, who told them all they needed to know: fascism is transfer payments and government interference in the economy.
And Jonah is a hyper-inflated version of the bright, glib, lazy frat boy college student who successfully bullshits his way through most of his undergrad years and then hits a wall during his senior year when a teacher actually requires him to perform, and who for the rest of his life whines about the biased teacher who ruined his career.
He’s the avatar of lazy undergrads, and he has has hundreds of thousands of disciples.
Also, the U.S. is doomed. Goldberg is going to successfully pull this off. The big Movement Conservatives will support him, or at least not blow his cover. The big media people will continue to pay him lots of money. And with his help, the American people will become just a smidgen stupider.
30: I think that all “world cities” are very unequal, because these are the places where the world’s wealthiest and best-paid people congregate. Lemuel compared a city to a nation.
the U.S. is doomed. Goldberg is going to successfully pull this off.
You know, Emerson, the fate of the US might not actually depend on Jonah Goldberg one way or the other.
After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity?
For anyone confused about what “fascism” means: this is it.
The Missouri study cited (as we see it here) seems to compare the suburban or exurban parts of metropolitan areas (conservative) to the urban parts of the same metropolitan areas (liberal). It’s just a form of segregation, where the middle class leaves the poor behind. The resultant urban area will be liberal but cash-strapped.
A lot of political pontification requires geographical correction.
Right. I think you can do better than that.
I already did. The inequalities you refer to:
1) may correlate with the politics you oppose, but that doesn’t mean the latter caused the former, nor is there any evidence that they have. There is, however, an entire political movement committed to undermining them, and it has been very successful until very recently.
2) The inequalities you refer to predate progressive politics. Do liberal fascists have access to time machines?
3) The inequalities you refer to have historically been ameliorated by progressive politics. If that’s news to you, go read.
To me, as someone who is committed to social democracy, this is a serious problem. To you, evidently, it’s not.
No, it is important to me. I just don’t happen to be an idiot who can’t tell correlation from causality, or who doesn’t know the first thing about the last 150 years of American social history. Then again, I was fortunate enough to study American history with a social historian (of Chicago), so even though I’m a medievalist, I’m not approaching this topic from a perspective of woeful ignorance.
The fact that shoddy reasoning and factual ignorance make Frum seem reasonable will be news to no one.
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New York City. Little island of European social democracy…
Have you ever lived in NYC? City income taxes are slight compared to, say, Copenhagen. And a middle-income NYC resident has nowhere near the range of services available to him that a similar Copenhagen resident would.
Edwards is more concerned with poverty and wage stagnation than with income inequality in and of itself. Indeed, he rarely uses the words equality or inequality. Even his Cooper Union address did not do so. Inequality matters for Edwards to the degree that it results in policies that create greater burdens for the middle-income on down.
Well, obviously I’m not getting through here, so I’m going to stop.
But, Grand Moff, I’ll match you book for book and class for class on American history and economics. Dollars to donuts I know the Chicago social historian of whom you speak.
Of course I don’t “oppose” social democracy. I’ve spent my whole life working for stronger unions and a more generous welfare state! If you haven’t picked this up from my comments, you haven’t been reading.
My point is that in many parts of the US fairly aggressive social democratic policies have failed to substantially reduce inequality. Not that they cause it. To me, understanding why this is is more important than scoring debating points.
Lemuel compared a city to a nation.
I’ll add it to my list.
In the meantime, I read your first sentence as ‘I think that all “world cities” are very unequal, because these are the places where the world’s wealthiest and best-laid people congregate.’
More coffee, please.
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60: Hyperbole, Lemuel! A literary form! I didn’t mean it literally. Honest.
all “world cities” are very unequal, because these are the places where the world’s wealthiest and best-laid people congregate.’
If only it were so….
Look: New York City has the highest Gini index of any major metro area, despite also having the highest union density and a relatively high minimum wage. That doesn’t seem like a problem to you?
I would say that New York has the most progressive politics precisely because it has the highest Gini index. New York city has a monopoly on being New York—or, more particularly, being the financial center of the U.S. So there are lots of very rich people whose high incomes depend on being there. But the absolute numbers of rich people are not huge, so everyone else is free to vote themselves politicians who will milk the rich. And the rich really aren’t free to leave.
It’s analogous to the way the U.S. auto industry used to have the strongest unions with the highest pay—this was possible because the companies they were milking had an effective monopoly. When the monopoly was broken, well, we know what happened.
Other cities have tried the same progressive, high-tax approach, but in most cases, the rich were not really stuck in the city itself and moved themselves and their enterprises to the lower-tax periphery (see Detroit especially, but also any number of comparably shrunken cities—St Louis, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cleveland, etc). Other than New York, Chicago is one of the few exceptions that comes to mind.
So right now, New York has the most progressive politics because it can—because the rich really can’t move out.
Yet.
I think that Slocum is talking about the difference between “world cities” and cities which are just big—the rich have to be somewhere, and a lot of them want it to be a first-class city. (Not all—the Koch brothers are happy with Wichita). And some big business has to be done face-to-face.
Lists of world cities vary, but all would include NYC, London, Paris, Tokyo, and LA. I’m not sure about the rest—Shanghai? Chicago? Amsterdam? Rio?
These world cities drawn both wealth and poverty, and while they don’t all “soak the rich”, up to a certain point they can.
A few comments: egalitarian life-styles do not always mean egalitarianism. What about the “socially liberal, economically conservative” mindset.
What’s more the situation in New York is of relatively recent development. After all, America once had 90% top federal income tax rates.
New York City’s social democracy is disintigrating, but then so is the State of Wisconsin”s. But that’s another story.
So right now, New York has the most progressive politics because it can—because the rich really can’t move out.
New York has no suburbs? Learn something new every day.
I gotta repeat myself here:
Keeping up with the Joneses in the burbs doesn’t have anything to do with egalitarianism .
As a born Amsterdammer, I can assure you, it should not be on the list.
But, Grand Moff, I’ll match you book for book and class for class on American history and economics.
Pace, LP. If I’ve been unfair to you, I apologize. But is this greater familiarity with the historiography going to make an appearance in your posts any time soon? Or have I been reading too much into your use of the word “troubling”?
Maybe pulling the lowest classes in American cities up out of the shocking and abject poverty of the turn of the 20th century and controlling diseases, etc., isn’t what you meant by reducing inequality? All that seems significant to me, but I’m not just looking at dollars. Likewise the emergence of a broad middle class in the mid-20th century wasn’t exactly the product of market forces.
As we’ve gotten away from the things you say that you support, these gains have been reversed. So, why blame increasing inequality on the policies opposed to it which have historically reduced it? Or, if it is just a matter of judging efficiencies, why in the hell would we choose the here and now, after twenty years of voodoo economics and social policy regression, why on earth would we choose this political and economic outlier of a period to assess their efficacy?
Dollars to donuts I know the Chicago social historian of whom you speak.
I didn’t say he was a major figure. Thomas Philpott. Reagan was still in the White House, but I still recall enough that I cannot understand what underlies your statement:
My point is that in many parts of the US fairly aggressive social democratic policies have failed to substantially reduce inequality.
Gains in reducing income inequality have been reversed nationally, regardless of what local government may be doing to cushion the blow. If we could lift the boot of corporate socialism off of the neck of the paycheck classes, I think we’d get more reliable data on what works and what doesn’t.
But I admit: that’s just my opinion.
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New York has no suburbs?
This is sort of true, actually. A much higher percent of the NYC metro area population is in the city itself than in any other major urban center. In large part because the 1898 merger resulted in what would have been the inner-ring suburbs becoming part of the city itself. This is certainly a major reason why NYC has done so much better than other east coast and midwest cities.
Also, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—but are clearly very strong—there are powerful incentives for businesses and some individual rich folks to be located in Manhattan.
Wow, there sure is a lot of bullshit being spouted on this thread.
the rich were not really stuck in the city itself and moved themselves and their enterprises to the lower-tax periphery (see Detroit especially, but also any number of comparably shrunken cities—St Louis, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cleveland, etc).
Two observations:
1) the rich don’t have to be where the work is being done (one of the advantages of being rich, I guess). I suspect that’s why huge development of biotech and telecom outside the US doesn’t trouble our political class: they’ll be buying those products regardless of where they’re made.
2) industries have been moving to the largely non-unionized south for some time, a move not limited to industries associated with rural areas (like the wood products industry), but also those usually associated with urban areas, like Hyundai and Honda making cars.
As communities develop in those areas, however, I’m pretty sure they’ll turn blue. At least, that’s been the pattern so far in VA and TX. That is, the problems that the rich have with The Help will follow them, or at least their economic activity.
.
“You can see the same thing across the country. Egalitarian politics and egalitarian outcomes don’t correlate at all.”
If that’s the case, perhaps you should reexamine your definition of an egalitarian politics. You’re telling yourselves the same lies GA Cohen lives by. It’s a joke.
NYC is not dominated by progressive politics but by neoliberal politics. Our mayor is liberal billionaire not a socialist.
American politics like all politics, like all culture, is a modality, it’s principles and a prioris function only within its self-assigned boundaries. And if you think NYC is an egalitarian community I’ll be glad to introduce you the men and women who scrub your office floors at night. Manhattan has all the deep egalitarianism of the famously informal Salons of Catherine the Great Small beer in a democracy kids.
It’s not the ignorance that’s offensive its the pretense that what you don’t know must not be relevant.
The rationalized self-absorption is pathetic.
“Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.”
After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity?”
But this is just….Conservative Communism!
(Show-Me State Communism?)
My point is that in many parts of the US fairly aggressive social democratic policies have failed to substantially reduce inequality.
You say that, but is it true? The relevant issue for your point is not whether urban areas have higher inequality that non-urban areas, but whether they have higher or lower inequality than they would have if they didn’t have social-democratic policies. You seem to be moving from an absolute claim (cities have high levels of inequality) to a comparative one (social democratic policies have failed to reduce inequality) on the basis of no evidence.
Also, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—but are clearly very strong—there are powerful incentives for businesses and some individual rich folks to be located in Manhattan.
Yes. None of which suggests that, pace slocum, the rich “can’t” leave New York for lower-tax suburbs. There are any number of very affluent suburbs in the NYC metro area where Manhattan-employed high level professionals and executives live. The notion that wealthy city-dwellers “can’t” move to the ‘burbs the way they do in other US cities is nothing short of laughable.
In other words, what engels said. Can we at least get the most basic facts straight here, or is that too much to ask?
I’ll just say again that no unit smaller than the SMA should be used in this argument.
Since my comment apologizing to lemuel pitkin is still under moderation, let me just say that I apologize to lemuel pitkin.
.
Yes. None of which suggests that, pace slocum, the rich “can’t” leave New York for lower-tax suburbs. There are any number of very affluent suburbs in the NYC metro area where Manhattan-employed high level professionals and executives live.
But the key word there is ‘Manhattan-employed’—if the rich work in New York, they still pay. The commuter tax was repealed a few years ago (though there are periodic calls to restore it). But even without a commuter tax, those who work in New York still contribute a lot to the city’s coffers. There’s an enormous difference between some stock traders commuting in from CT or NJ and the NYSE moving out. The latter is what happened in some many of the cities that are half their former size.
I think that Slocum’s point is that the rich can’t, or don’t want to, move from NYC to some other big city, because NYC (along with a few others) is the best. The other high-tax cities didn’t just lose people to suburbia, they lost people to the south and southwest.
all “world cities” are very unequal, because these are the places where the world’s wealthiest and best-laid people congregate.’
If only it were so….
I believe it is so for many New Yorkers…
Joking aside, I don’t want to see you and GMT fight too much, Lemuel. I am honestly confused as to why the GINI index in NYC has you so concerned. To me, it is pretty clear that NYC has a high Gini index for reasons other than its social wellfare policies. The most important factor is that NYC has a whole lot of rich people. But even if the Gini index results from progressive policies, I don’t think it is in the way you think.
Perhaps NYC’s existence in its current form depends on its social wellfare policies. If they didn’t provide a lot of services (funded by progressive taxation) and a very good minimum wage, how could the service industry possibly function in NY? You could make the argument that progressive politics are necessary in order for the poor to live near the rich. Maybe these policies encourage the poor to move to NYC? Maybe the fact that the poor live in decent enough conditions is why so many rich people like to live in NYC?
I don’t know if this argument is true or not, but I really feel that focusing on Gini indexes in small localities is a big mistake. There are tons of external factors driving people’s living decisions and financial circumstances such that I would not conclude that progressive politics have failed. You have some pretty tremendous examples in the social democracies over in Europe as to how progressive policies at the national level effect national Gini indexes. So I don’t understand why a clearly complicated casual relationship in American localities would leave you so concerned.
I suspect that most of the very rich who don’t have to work don’t live anywhere in particular; they have a penthouse in Manhattan, apartment in South Beach, villa in LA, condo in Paris, ranch in Texas and so on.
Rich people who do work live in Manhattan because they work in Manhattan. But some commute; Letterman, for example.
The northern half of NJ is a suburb of New York. What the fuck are you talking about?
But isn’t the root question why some people like uniformity of neighbors on some measures(race, religion, ethnicity etc.) yet don’t support measures to promote a wide-ranging equality of income?
It seems to cut both ways, that suburbanites are narrow-minded in wanting uniformity by segregation, and that urbanites are inconsistent to if they don’t add income to the diversity list.
I don’t think egalitarianism is reality-based. Last month Harry B. said he would address moral diversity and why its reasonable to morally prefer things to be other than they currently are and I’m looking forward to that post.
Please, Goldberg is being very clear:
People of the Right are, you know, the people who, you know, defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
… oh shite, I am at 52. minutes of the Bloggingheads discussion. I REALLY should be doing something else.
“But isn’t the root question why some people like uniformity of neighbors on some measures(race, religion, ethnicity etc.) yet don’t support measures to promote a wide-ranging equality of income?”
“But isn’t the root question why some people like uniformity of neighbors on some measures(race, religion, ethnicity etc.) yet don’t support measures to promote a wide-ranging equality of income?”
No.
I have one in moderation already. Let’s try for two:
Sitting at a local bar last year and talking to the hot eastern european bartender (Bulgarian) the subject of manhattanites came up, and whether or not they’d succeed in taking over the neighborhood.
“I hope not” she said, “I like the diversity”
Queens is 46% foreign born and the population has a better understanding of [feeling for] social democracy than native born americans, or of course, the majority of readers here.
It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.
Is it that this kind of Republicanism is one which prioritises social conservatism? I suspect there are similarly conservative communities in Denmark.
But Seth, what does Ivanka, the bartender, think of Edwards?
New York City’s social democracy is disintigrating, but then so is the State of Wisconsin”s. But that’s another story.
Yup. Almost all gone.
those who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican
Damn it. I’ve got to say it again—what they care about is not living near black people. They don’t “care most deeply about equality” at all.
I think that Slocum’s point is that the rich can’t, or don’t want to, move from NYC to some other big city, because NYC (along with a few others) is the best.
My point is that many of the NY City rich can’t move and make the same money or have the same jobs somewhere else. It’s unclear how many would like to live and work somewhere else if it was possible to enjoy a similar job and income.
The other high-tax cities didn’t just lose people to suburbia, they lost people to the south and southwest.
No, with respect to Detroit at least, that’s not the case. Even as the city of Detroit shrunk, the overall metro area grew substantially. Since 1960, Detroit has lost almost a million and the surrounding suburbs and exurbs have gained all that plus another million and a half. Or, more simply, it used to be about two million in Detroit and two in the ‘burbs—now the metro area is less than one million in the city itself and 4.5 million outside:
“Since 1950, when the total reached 1,849,568, Detroit has lost population, dropping to 1,514,063 in 1970, 1,203,369 in 1980 and to 1,028,000 in 1990, when it held 7th place among US cities. The 2002 population was estimated at 925,051, putting Detroit in 10th place. As Detroit lost population, however, many of its suburban areas grew at an even greater rate. The Detroit metropolitan area totaled an estimated 5,469,312 in 1999, up from 4,320,203 in 1995 and 3,950,000 in 1960.”
http://www.city-data.com/states/Michigan-Population.html
Nope, still not getting Slocum’s point. The argument appears to be that the rich abandoned Detroit for the suburbs, but rich New Yorkers “can’t” move to the suburbs—and even if they do, and even in the absence of a commuter tax, they still “fill the city’s coffers.”
I live in NYC, Slocum, and I work for some people who are quite wealthy indeed. Some of them live in the city, and pay income property taxes to the city. Some of them live in comfy bedroom communities in Connecticut or Westchester or Long Island or exurban New Jersey, and pay whatever state and local taxes apply there. Your assertion that those in the former group live in the city because they “can’t” live elsewhere is simply untrue.
In that case, I don’t see Slocum’s point. There’s no particular reason why the heavily-taxed NYC rich couldn’t move to New Jersey or Long Island and commute in. They don’t seem to have done it.
The fact that NYC is the center of the world in a lot of ways, whereas Detroit and Pittsburgh were only the centers of particular industries, has a lot to do with it.
Nope, still not getting Slocum’s point. The argument appears to be that the rich abandoned Detroit for the suburbs, but rich New Yorkers “can’t” move to the suburbs—and even if they do, and even in the absence of a commuter tax, they still “fill the city’s coffers.”
Yes—even without a commuter tax, NYC commuters work for companies that pay taxes and in downtown office building that pay taxes. And they also spend money dining and shopping in the city.
But the businesses also left Detroit, which meant not just some of the rich people left the city, but they virtually all did. And they didn’t just leave to sleep and commute back in to work (still spending most of their waking hours in the city), they stopped going into the city (and spending money there) almost entirely.
You can’t usefully generalise under the one word ‘rich’ the merely ludicrously-high-salaried and the actual owners of capital.
“My point is that many of the NY City rich can’t move and make the same money or have the same jobs somewhere else”
There are a lot of things to enjoy in NY that only the rich can afford to enjoy. The culture of New York is based among other things but very much on the public theater of disposable income. The history of the city is as the most international and most [if not only] truly cosmopolitan city in the country, and cosmopolitanism isn’t progressivism it’s noblesse oblige. It’s less cosmopolitan than it used to be due to the influx of post MTV-generation children from the heartland who no longer come here to escape hell but to bring it with them. Call it The Great Leveling: Ohio is more sophisticated than it used to be, and Europe more American.
“But Seth, what does Ivanka, the bartender, think of Edwards?”
Her name wasn’t Ivanka it was Lily, Liliana to you. She’s been to more countries than you ever have and speaks more languages. My neighborhood goes 95% democrat, though on the whole I hear nothing but contempt for the party.
The idea that NY, or academia is “progressive” is absurd. I know a professor who tells his grad students: “You’re time is too important to do laundry. Get a housekeeper!”
And he votes democratic too of course.
And I’m still waiting for a comment to get out of moderation. I don’t even think there were any four letter words in it.
After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”?
And after all, what is a punch in the face but another form of “affection”?
Slocum maybe the rich don’t leave NY because the social democratic policies we’re hearing about actually suit them? They don’t have to pay for The Help’s health insurance, they don’t have to use their car every day, and there are enough police to protect their property… If all this social democracy stuff is so bad, why did the rich go there in the first place? Couldn’t they have used their capital to set up their businesses somewhere more deregulated?
I think your argument follows the same confusion of cause and correlation as Frum’s.
#108 “They don’t have to pay for The Help’s health insurance,”
What planet are you on?
“People of the Right are, you know, the people who, you know, defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
Trane found it! The worst argument in the Goldberg podcast!
Seth, I’m arguing against Slocum using the first principles (“NY is social democratic”) established by someone else (lemuel?) If NY is so terribly social democratic as to make Slocum think the rich want to leave, it must surely have a socialised health care system, right? So companies don’t have to pay health insurance. I don’t actually believe this, I’m just working from the definitions.
Seth,
Ok, I now know its Liliana, she’s been around and speaks in tongues, but I don’t how she relates to the argument that Frum is making, that Holbo is saying is silly, that White Bread Republicans care about equality and also think the John Edwards does not.
martin james,
“she’s been around and speaks in tongues.”
“I don’t how she relates to the argument that Frum is making,”
Don’t piss me off. She’s a nice kid, bright eyed at 22. There are countries where between school and the neighborhood you pick up two or three languages. If you said what you wrote to my face you’d be on your back with my foot on your throat.
Frum is an idiot not a con man. So the question becomes what would make an idiot believe what he does? I gave the beginnings of an answer. Don’t waste time arguing with idiots, study them.
sg, I apologize for the misreading. But still, it’s simpler to say that the sort or rich people who live in Manhattan need not only money an audience, and an international one at that. Detroit is in the provinces, There’s not way around it.
That’s all you need to shut slocum down.
Isn’t there some kind of Godwin-type principle about Seth Edenbaum threatening to kick someone in the face?
Anyway, I think this thread is done.
…. oh, right, it’s:
The probability of a belligerent and/or incomprehensible Seth Edenbaum comment approaches one as the total number of Seth Edenbaum comments approaches one.
“The probability of a belligerent and/or incomprehensible [sic]
On this site I’d have to agree.
Seth’s a redneck?
I didn’t get the memo.
Uh, isn’t one obvious cause of high inequality in NYC that the city’s relatively generous welfare state keeps poor people from leaving? In other cities, the poor would move out, but NYC has way more public housing than anyplace else in the country.
Can’t we all get along? Maybe there’s something in what Lemuel is saying, but not much. City/state level politics can’t create soc-democracy – the communitarian aspect is missing, you need borders. Witness the EU, western European backlash against eastern Europeans, the dreaded Polish Plumber. Proletarians of the World do not want to unite; they’re busy competing against each other.
By the way, I’ll see Lemuel’s NYC, and raise Minneapolis, Honolulu, Seattle, and Portland—all relatively social-democratic places at the bottom of inequality list.
surely though ragout, if it keeps poor people from leaving it should be good enough to ease their poverty and thus reduce the gini index?
If it was good enough to keep them from leaving, wouldn’t it also be good enough to attract more poor people? This could explain the phenomenon.
Your explanation only works if you assume that the poor people think the social welfare system is good enough to make them stay, but in fact it is not good enough to help them, so they stay poor. i.e. they don’t know what’s good for them. Seems an easy cop-out.
But an easier cop-out is that lemuel is confusing correlation and causation.
if it keeps poor people from leaving it should be good enough to ease their poverty and thus reduce the gini index?
Actually, no. Lemuel linked to an index of income inequality. Income here means cash income. Public housing presumably provides benefits to its residents, but not cash income. Similarly, much of the US (& NYC) welfare state provides in-kind benefits, not cash income: food stamps (food), WIC (more food), medicaid (medical care), etc.
Well, as the say in Missouri… you can’t spell homogeneity without homo.
Sorry ragout, I don’t know much about either the gini index or NYC’s supposed social democracy, I am passing time between debugging simulation runs.
Certainly if the index describes only income inequality it seems plausible to me that an effective social democratic system, delivering its poverty-alleviation measures through non-income transfers, would have a high income inequality if it was an otherwise thriving economy. People who are structurally incapable of earning more money would have no interest in leaving to less supportive areas, but since NYC is a city and not a nation-state it’s not in a position to make the larger changes required to reduce income inequality.
Alternatively, being pressed into a dense urban area with a lot of poor people makes New York voters want to reduce social inequality, but they don’t do it as well as nations with a better history of that sort of thing.
“After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”?
And after all, what is a punch in the face but another form of “affection”?”
Even if the thesis is nonsense, (And I think it is.) surely inequality (of income) is a lot more like diversity, than a punch in the face is like affection.
It would be interesting to overlay a map of ‘sunset’ towns (whites-only enclaves) on a map of Frum’s ‘equality zones’.
Also w/regard to cities, a city has been described as an economic boom in geography rather than time. It’s no surprise that you get the high end of the income curve. Given the relative rate of pay for low-end service and the social safety net, the high GINI is not surprising.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
Diversity, baby.
The very point about the exurban frontier having the least inequality is a function of development in these areas being the most recent. Developers may pitch these areas to people who will sacrifice a long commute for cheap housing. These people can be expected to have similar incomes.
Also rural Missouri tends to vote Republican anyway. Much of St. Charles, Franklin, and Lincoln counties are still rural.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
The book goes into some detail on the NYC after the fiscal collapse in the 70’s. I haven’t read it yet but there’s a discussion of both the book and the history in the rough draft of an unpublished paper by a friend at mine at UC London. You might want to read it or something similar before pontificating on the “social democratic” character of the city.
Lemuel said: “And yes, there are real and important benefits to economically homogeneous communities. (This is one reason why Hispanics tend to enjoy better life-chances in the US than other groups with similarly low incomes.)”
This seems pretty presumptuous; both are caused by a much higher percentage of Hispanics being recent immigrants, and I haven’t seen any evidence that those Hispanic immigrants who live in diverse communities have worse life chances than those who live in homogenous communities (perhaps such evidence exists, but the claim here seems far from proven).
Why’re you taking their irritable mental gestures so seriously?
Seth-
The Harvey book is sitting on my shelf. (I picked it up after seeing Doug Henwood’s review.) And you’re right, reading it would be a better use of my time than posting on this blog….
Homogeneity is not community, networks of reciprocal obligation are community. I live in an ethnically and economically heterogeneous neighborhood. I was out drinking last night with a south asian neighbor: a muslim married to an Irish catholic who and who has property on 3 continents. [He just walked away from one of his properties in Florida] He owns 3 buildings in NY, a house north of Dublin, and has 30 families of tenant farmers on his family’s land bac