Quote of the day - how bad science and unquestioning journalism might just kill people

From an excellent review of the awful, ignorant moral panic over vaping in the USA:

Journalists' failure to do so during debates over secondhand smoke got smokers banished to the fringes of social spaces. By repeating this failure in the debate over lower-risk competitors to the cigarette, journalists may get those smokers killed.

Absolutely. The UK is unusual, if not unique, in having adopted a largely evidence-based approach to vaping (it's much less harmful than smoking so smokers switching is a big health plus). In the USA we have a profoundly ignorant panic that is destroying what a month or so ago were legitimate businesses employing thousands and, as the quote above reminds us, probably killing tens of thousands of smokers who might otherwise have switched.

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British and American suburbs are very different - we should remember this when doing housing policy.

 I am, as you know, a fan of suburbs. The best suburbs combine the attributes of the city - walkability, access to public transport (but not to the exclusion of cars), a variety of house styles and tenures build reasonably densely all combined with a sense of openness and access to clean, fresh air and even the countryside.

So it worries me when people write about housing development and, in doing so, repeat this sort of line:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Firstly this isn't true. Or rather it is in some places because that's all we're building. This quotation comes from Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher B. Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz - pretty much champions of dense, high-rise city development. My problem is that it's quoted in a piece about British housing issues. Plus is completely ignores what Americans say when they're asked about the place they want to live and the houses they prefer - and what they actually do when able to choose.

But first let's remember that British suburbs look and feel very different from American suburbs. You'll all be familiar with what American suburbs look like from just about every second thriller or romantic comedy - low rise, often single-storey, family homes built on large plots that feature huge garages, lawns and not much else. Often there's no pavement (as we Brits call it correctly) and the road space is wide.

You'll also know that, while there are some similarities, British suburbia doesn't look much like this. I was brought up in Beckenham which is pretty much an archetypal suburb and while there were some larger houses (and a few very large houses) most of it consists of three-bed semis or, in the older Edwardian parts, solid three-bed terraces.

Even in today's new build suburban housing, the style, size and spacing is completely different from just about anything you'll see built in US suburbia (and not just because we use more brick or stone and less wood). Yet the writings of US anti-suburb urbanists are taken as applicable to this completely different environment.

The development of Britain's suburbs did not sprawl out in an uncontrolled manner, nibbling away willy-nilly at the edge of the countryside. They were, from late Victorian times onwards set out in planned environments - visit the Cator Estates is South London to see how this worked before the first world war and any number of places from Shirley near Croydon to Pudsey in Leeds to see the product of the 1930s housing development boom. These suburban developments were connected to existing communities - helps sustain and expand the services those places provided and allowing for immediate access to public transport networks - and laid out to encompass open space, schools and those rows of local shops we all grew up knowing. The idea that these places weren't 'walkable' is manifest nonsense yet again and again we're peddled this myth that only crowed, dense "mixed-use family housing" can provide for this perfection of urban pedestrianism.

Finally can we just say 'no, not true' to this nonsense:

...because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents

Whenever people are surveyed about their preferences, most plump for that familiar family home with a garden - ideally near good schools and not so far from a good link to the city. Perhaps with a good park nearby, a decent pub and some local facilities (post office, chemist, doctors). It remains the case that suburbia - the English sort of suburbia - represent best compromise between urban living and some sort of bucolic countryside idyll.

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The real population timebomb - and why we need a more family-friendly society

Depopulating trends are global, across the developed world. After decades of worrying when Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” would go off, we are seeing a rapid decline in child-rearing, so much so that, for the first time, there are more grandparents than grandchildren on the planet. The lower birthrates are leading some demographers to suggest that global populations, instead of growing into the next century, will start to decline as early as 2070.

There is a profound and growing population crisis in the developed, urban world and it isn't what most of you think it is - we are no longer, indeed haven't been for a long while, replacing ourselves. It's not just headlines like the one about there being more grandparents than grandchildren but an accelerating decline in communities outside big cities and, without immigration, the growing inability to provide the care and support those grandparents will require.

Here's what it means:

According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

From the 1850s through to 2004 the population of the village always hovered around the 80 to 100 mark, but since 2004 the population has dropped to 50 and only 20 of those are under the age of 60.

Those living in the village are losing hope that the village – and indeed all of rural Ireland – can be saved.

In Hara-izumi, there's no worry about an influx of foreigners. There are no immigrants here, nor the prospect of any. A bigger issue now is wildlife: The village's population has become so sparse that wild bears, boars and deer are roaming the streets with increasing frequency.

The Alpine hamlet of Albinen is so desperate for new residents that it has voted to offer $70,000 for a family of four to settle in the southern Swiss community.

In the first referendum of its kind, 100 of Albinen's 248 residents showed up to vote Thursday, and 71 approved a proposal to pay $25,000 to each adult and $10,000 per child to live in their picturesque village.

"Only the elderly stayed behind, the parents of those who left, and over time they grew older and died," he said as he stumbled across rubble to reach his dilapidated former office. He said Kalna's population had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,000.

Just take the figures: 85 out of the town's 820 houses are empty. The town had 3,000 inhabitants not too long ago, but now there are only 1,900. When elderly citizens have passed away, there has been no one there to replace them.

"Nobody lives there anymore either," Daum says, pointing to a mint-green single-family house. The industrial bakery moved to the east, he explains, and the area in front of the former garden furniture factory is full of dandelions. The Edeka grocery store closed its doors for good last year, and no trains have passed through the town since 1994.

I could continue - these examples from Italy, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Serbia and Germany could be joined by others from Poland, from Canada and from the USA. Our cities are, where they've sustained their economies, thriving but the people making that thriving possible are the ones who've left these small towns and rural villages. All this sits against a background of concern about immigration and integration for the people who - because there's far fewer young people in these rich nations - are filling the gaps left by those empty villages.

Eighty percent of US counties, notes a study by Economic Innovation Group, with roughly 150 million people, have seen their labor force decline in the past decade. The demography of the United States will become more difficult in the next quarter century, with an increase in the working population (15-64) of 18 million projected to be swamped by 28 million new senior citizens, according to the United Nations.

For Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, whose article the quote above comes from, the problem isn't how you square the need for labour with local resentment of immigration but rather how we create a society and economy that allows population replacement. Not the explosive population growth of the past 200 years but a recognition that, if we're to continue the betterment of humanity, we need to achieve a steady state. Kotkin & Cox point to housing policies as a key component but we should also ask questions about policy and attitudes towards families, to childcare and to a more dynamic work environment allowing people to move in and out of paid employment. Above all we need to recognise the value of family and that it cannot really be measured in purely economic terms.

We need to place community and family policy right there alongside climate change, the impact of technology and long term healthcare as one of the 21st century's biggest challenges. If we don't we will see more and more of these shattered, even abandoned, communities, places filled with old people trying their best to look after very old people.

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Targeting works (which is why ASBOs and PSPOs are ineffective, lazy, divisive policing)

"Broken window" theory (or, to use its pompous operational name, "order maintenance policing") is the idea that lies behind a lot of modern policing including, in the UK anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) and public space protection orders (PSPOs):

In essence, Kelling and Wilson argued that latent danger loomed everywhere, and everywhere people’s disorderly impulses needed to be repressed, or else. Their “broken windows theory” didn’t stay theoretical: Also known as order maintenance policing, this tactic propelled an entire generation of policing practice that sought to crack down on minor “quality-of-life” infractions as a way to stem violence.

The problem is that, as research now shows, all this sounds good but doesn't work - a great deal of time and money is invested in the idea that anti-social behaviour (essentially annoying but non-criminal acts) and petty crime are gateway drugs to more serious crime and that we should target deprived areas using aggressive approaches like stop-and-search, arrests for petty misdemeanours and large scale area campaigns. This, in most developed countries, inevitably means targeting areas with concentrations of minority residents (black or Hispanic in the USA, black or South Asian in the UK) leading to understandable allegations of racism and high degrees of mistrust in police and criminal justice.

What Stephen Lurie, Alexis Acevedo, & Kyle Ott have shown is that serious crime (they focus on violent crime) is much more concentrated socially than 'broken window theory" allows:

...in over 20 cities, we found that less than 1 percent of a city’s population—the share involved in what we call “street groups” (gangs, sets, and crews)—is generally connected to over 50 percent of the city’s shootings and homicides. We use “group” as a term inclusive of any social network involved in violence, whether they are hierarchical, formal gangs, or loose neighborhood crews. In city after city, the very small number of people involved in these groups consistently perpetrated and were victimized by the most serious violence.

We are talking about really small numbers of people - Lurie describes how:

This held true even in areas considered chronically “dangerous,” like parts of East Baltimore. There, the group member population totaled only three quarters of a percentage point, even as they were connected to 58.43 percent of homicides. Shootings tend to be even more concentrated than homicides. In Minneapolis, we found that 0.15 percent of the population was determined to be involved in groups, but this population was connected to 53.96 percent of shootings—a proportion over 350 times higher than their population representation.

The conclusion here is that we need to do two things: target resources (policing and other interventions) towards the very small numbers responsible for most of the mayhem, and spend some time explaining to the wider public that 99% of young people living in deprived areas with high crime levels are not criminals or even likely to become criminals. Right now with ASBOs, PSPOs and extensions of stop-and-search we are doing the opposite. These strategies act to give the impression to people in these areas that the police and public authorities do not trust them and consider them likely criminals. It is no surprise, then, that these communities - often minority communities - don't co-operate with the police or other public authorities.

We should scrap ASBOs, PSPOs and the whole structure of anti-social behaviour measures and direct resources towards targeting the small number of (mostly) young men who are responsible for most of the violence, burglary, robbery and assaults in our cities.

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Quote of the day...the "Green New Deal"

From Tim Newman:

Yesterday Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Green New Deal, her plan to transform America by combining technologies not yet invented with those of Iron Age man, leaving out everything in the middle. If implemented it will make the USA look like the Soviet Union, only run by the sort of people who shop in organic food stores and collect their own stools to spread on the rhubarb.

 AOC is a force to be reckoned with - attractive, articulate, enthusiastic - but the policies she urges direct the USA down a path of chaos, the sort of zero-carbon world that only the loopiest of carbon-based lifeforms would advocate.

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A comment on the US Midterm elections (and why the media and the Democrats risk getting it wrong)

I'm guessing most of you aren't geeky or obsessed enough to have stayed up most of last night watching the US midterm election results roll in. I did and mighty good fun it was too. I chose to watch CNN for the simple reason that their presentation of the data (and the chap who talks to it) is really good. I'm not going to comment on the outcome and what it means because, like most of us over here my knowledge of US politics is paper thin. We know now that the result was the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives while the Republicans consolidated their hold on the Senate. It seems obvious to me that this reflects the same pattern as for Trump's election in 2016 with the Democrats piling up votes in places the already won while Republicans sneak back in or win by narrow margins in places - Florida, Ohio, Texas - where they target.

In the short term* the results seem good for Republicans and suggest that the Democrats will have an uphill struggle to unseat Trump in 2020 especially if they make the mistake of this campaign (and 2016) of targeting the wrong places (all that money and attention on a skateboarding chap in a Texas senate race and a couple of rock solid blue seats in the North East because they had strong female candidates). I also wonder whether the Democrats will revisit the mistake the Republicans made in 1994 and spend all their time trying to bring down the President.

The reason I feel the Democrats will again get both strategy and tactics wrong was illustrated by the conversation, once the change in the House was clear, between the CNN presenters. I don't recall the precise details of the interaction between the main anchor and two presenters but, in summary, it asked what the new Democratic House majority should (could? would?) do and concluded that the focus would be on Trump - "maybe they'll get Trump's tax returns" said one, "the i-word - impeachment" said another, "the Mueller business" - you get the gist. The entire focus, or so these pundits suggested, is going to be the continued programme of trying to prove that Trump (or the Russians or a secret cabal under the direction of Steve Bannon) stole the 2016 election, a sort of post hoc vindication of Hilary Clinton.

Maybe this stuff matters but I can't help but think that the people who just elected Democrats to congress did so to get better healthcare, funding for schools, childcare and welfare support. And if their shiny new representatives, having promised all this, then spend all their time shovelling through the arcana of the previous presidential election, this simply plays into Trumps hands. And with the great hopes for Democratic ambitions - bouncy, dynamic modern folk like Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum - falling at the first hurdle it's hard to see where the person to challenge Trump will come from. What Trump wants, because it's what he's best at, is a long, vulgar shouting match over things that really don't matter a jot to the ordinary American.

The problem, however, is that the media - as those pundits on CNN last night showed - wants that long, loud scrap with Trump. Not because it's important but because, in these days of politics as entertainment, it's box office in a way that boring stuff about medicare or housing policy simply isn't. Those latter things really are the things that matter to Americans but the media, just as is the case in Britain, would rather focus on gossip and the shallow and snide world of Twitter than on the big issues facing real people.

*In the long term Republicans have a problem with cities and especially the growing sun belt suburbs that tells me, without some changes in focus and strategy, places like Texas and Tennessee will start electing statewide democrats again.
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Planning makes houses expensive...

...or so it seems - here's Randal O'Tolle in The Antiplanner:

With few exceptions, prices rise above three times incomes only when government policies make it difficult for homebuilders to meet demand.

For example, in 1969 the only places in America where housing cost more than three times incomes were Hawaii and Stamford, Connecticut. I don’t know why Stamford was on the list, but Hawaii had passed legislation strictly regulating where people could build homes in 1961. Other states and urban areas didn’t do so until the 1970s, and as they did so their housing prices rose faster than incomes as well.

Thanks to the urban planning prescriptions, housing is prohibitively expensive in too many areas. While median home prices are more than three times median family incomes in 45 percent of housing, it is more than four times in 24 percent of housing and more than five times in 14 percent of housing.

O'Toole points out that US millennials have low ownership rates (below 30%) in California and New York where there are strict controls on rural housing whereas a swathe of Southern and Mid-west states have millennial ownership above 45% because there aren't significant controls on rural housing development. It's true some millennials want to live all hugger-mugger in pokey city flats but most of them want what their mom and dad had - a family home.

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Come work in Vermont - they'll pay you $10,000 to move

Vermont is a beautiful place. We bought some maple syrup there and, according to my son, you can't go far wrong with maple syrup. The thing is, and I don't want to upset all those fans of Vermont's socialist senator, that the Green Mountain State is the back of beyond. And this means:

Vermont, like many states, is suffering from demographic challenges. It has the fourth slowest population growth of any state since 2000. It has the lowest share of its population who are children under 18 (if you exclude the District of Columbia, a “city-state” from the figures). Vermont is also impeccably progressive, has many quaint cities and towns, and is known for natural beauty. None of these factors has driven population growth there. Population growth is not the only metric, but the situation in much of New England is not looking healthy to me, especially northern New England.

So reports Urbanophile, Aaron Renn as he explains that (in an echo of other beautiful places likes Sardinia, Switzerland and Calabria) the state is offering a bung to people who move there:

A new bill signed into law Wednesday will pay remote workers $5,000 a year for two years to make the Green Mountain State their home, as long as their employer is based somewhere else.

So you've got mountains, forest, quaint historic towns, lots of bears and that maple syrup but folk don't move there because, well, it's a long way from Boston, New York or Chicago where the jobs are. Will a little gentle incentive (ten grand's worth of incentive) work by pulling in people who write software, edit textbooks or so or other job not requiring either physical interaction with co-workers or the facilities of a city? Remains to be seen - perhaps some kind researcher might like to look at how well these sorts of schemes work - but it might answer an important question as to whether the people are in the city because the jobs are there or whether they're there for the culture, social life, drugs and sex meaning that's where the jobs go?

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Is democracy dying? If it is, there's blood on the left's hands

It sometimes seems that way as we move from a pluralist world where ideas are discussed and debated to one where debate is contained and constrained - a short step to that one-party state:

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

This may seem fine until (and maybe the 'ever-so-right-on' chap writing this doesn't care) you consider this excludes not just millions of Californians but, more to the point, a huge swathe of opinion about taxes, markets, intervention, housing and the classical liberal enlightenment. Worse still, our wealthy progressive doesn't just want a one-party state in California but wants to impose its ideas on other places like some ghastly authoritarian hegemon - conservatism must be destroyed:

The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards.

As I said, it seems not just that democracy is dying but that it's 'liberal progressives' - The Left as we call them in Europe - with blood on their hands.

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Employment quotas and state monopolies don't improve female empowerment

From a study (Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway) by Marianne Bertrand, Sandra E. Black, Sissel Jensen and Adriana Lleras-Muney:

We document that the women appointed to these boards post-reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. On the other hand, we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota. Moreover, the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. Finally, we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women: while the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, we do see some improvements in labor market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages; however, we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees, suggesting this may not be due to the reform. Overall, seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect, we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms.

The case for quotas (other than the 'it's fair' argument) is that they provide for positive female role models and, therefore, act over time to improve the lot of women in the workforce. This would appear to be a questionable assertion - indeed when Nima Sanandaji looked at The Economist's 'Glass Ceiling Index' he found:

...that the rise of the welfare state created jobs for women as well as aided their labor market participation by offering various family-related services. Yet this same system contains disincentives for female ascension in business. One example is high taxes that make it costly to purchase household services (a strategy otherwise used by parents to “buy” time so that they can take care of children as well as focus on their careers); generous benefit systems combined with high taxes that reduce economic incentives for both parents to work full-time and public sector monopolies/oligopolies in female-dominated sectors and parental policies that give women incentive to take long breaks from the working life.

The Nordic welfare state is very good for female participation in the workforce but seems less good at improving female power in that workforce - here's Nima Sanandaji again:

Based on the Economist index, the United States has unusually women-unfriendly work policies while the Nordics have the most women-friendly work policies in the world. However, it is the United States which has the highest rate of women managers amongst all countries included in the Index, while the Nordic countries have a lower share.

Again the findings suggest that open market economies with fewer state monopolies are better for female power even when they are less good for participation. Sanandaji confirms this in showing how within the Nordic countries the levels of female empowerment (indicated by numbers of women managers) vary depending on the extent to which services operate in a competitive market.

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Buses aren't saving the planet...

One of the usual arguments against suburbs is essentially "cars are bad for the environment". This statisitc - from the USA so data may differ for other places - tells a different story:

The average car on the road consumed 4,700 British thermal units (BTUs) per vehicle mile in 2015, which is almost a 50 percent reduction from 1973, when Americans drove some of the gas-guzzliest cars in history. The average light truck (meaning pick ups, full-sized vans, and SUVs) used about 6,250 BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015, which is also about half what it was in the early 1970s.

By comparison, the average transit bus used 15 percent more BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015 than transit buses did in 1970. Since bus occupancies have declined, BTUs per passenger mile have risen by 63 percent since 1970. While buses once used only about half as much energy per passenger mile as cars, they now use about a third more.

Hmmmm.

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Quote of the day: Urban containment doesn't work

From a profile by Aaron Renn of demographer, Wendell Cox:

Wendell also denies that he’s anti-urban, but does believe development should be allowed on the fringes. “I love cities. I’ve lived in three of the four European and American megacities. Only London have I not lived in. I’ve lived in Paris, LA, and New York…I am not a proponent of low density or high density. I am a proponent of those arrangements that get us great affluence and less poverty. And that means low land prices. The big problem with urban planning in the United States…[is that] the competitive market for land has been absolutely destroyed on the urban fringe and we have seen unbelievable two and three times increases in the price of housing relative to incomes in some cities. I couldn’t care less quite frankly about sprawl or densification, though at the same time I do believe that in the United States we’ve made some major errors in failing to put some limits on the extent of sprawl, but that doesn’t mean we should be doing things like green belts or urban growth boundaries because those inherently destroy the market and destroy housing affordability.”

Absolutely - great profile piece too.

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On safari with the poverty tourists

Since the Brexit vote in Britain and Trump's election in the USA, there has developed a genre of journalism that involves the writer departing from their comfortable, elite environs (London, New York, San Francisco) and venturing out into the badlands where people voted either the leave the EU or else for Donald Trump. On safari with their patronising pencils:

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

Or by the seaside smugly observing poor people struggling:

The elephants that lumbered up and down Blackpool’s beach have long gone. Britain’s political parties have stopped decamping to the town for their annual jamborees. Even the deckchairs have left: the local government sold all 6,000 of them three years ago to a company in the affluent county of Cheshire. The one thing that hasn’t disappeared is the people.

This sort of poverty tourism feeds a set of consumers eager for the latest instalment of voyeurism, the next explanation as to why these stupid people voted for Brexit or plumped for Trump. We get depressing descriptions of people's lives interspersed by showing how they're all bigoted, racist, misogynist, overweight and unhealthy. What there isn't is any attempt at all to understand why, at least not beyond glib, smug quips about "shit life syndrome" or lurid reporting on illiberal attitudes towards druggies, welfare queens and high school drop-outs.

The whole approach - whether it's a Financial Times journalist going to Blackpool, a Guardian writer venturing to Stoke, or some San Francisco researchers driving through rural Wisconsin - reeks of 19th century anthropology where intrepid researchers ventured into the dark jungle in search of lost tribes to write up in their next book - published to great acclaim and talk of how brave, how brilliant. What we don't get is any real sense of understanding as journalists turn for insight to the public sector elites that dominate many of these places - to the very people who are failing to turn them round.

It's no surprise then, that the descriptions focus on the dysfunctional lives of people who live in these places, on the drugs and alcohol, the depression and the sense of hopelessness. What's lacking from this poverty tourism is any sense of empathy, any appreciation of what having a shit life is really like. And why so many people with those shit lives are in Blackpool, Stoke and rural Wisconsin. It struck me as telling that the UK edition of J D Vance's gripping 'Hillbilly Elegy' describes it as "a great insight into Trump and Brexit" - it may be that but more importantly it's a revealing story of the struggles faced by the white working class in the deindustrialised Mid West. That Trump and Brexit were stuck on the book's front cover tells you everything you need to know about the interests and priorities of bien pensant bookshop browsers in London or New York.

What's missing is any suggestion as to what - other than familiar cries for more government cash - should be done to change shit lives into lives that are all right. We get little criticisms of government like this:

For Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the DWP between 2002 and 2008, the lack of a plan was, in retrospect, part of the problem. “There’s an argument for saying you can’t do [welfare reform] separately from having some sort of place-based economic strategy as well — and we never really had that,” he says. “Just telling them, ‘Well there’s 5,000 new jobs in London every week, and people seem to find it perfectly easy to move 600 miles from rural Romania to take one of these jobs, so why can’t you move 200 miles from Blackpool?’ — it’s true but it sort of ignores the social context.”

The truth, of course, is that we had decades of place-based economic strategies some funded through ERDF Objective One and Two, others by UK government funding (City Challenge, SRB, Estate Action - a potpourri of place-based regeneration) but, in the main, the places that were poorest in 1968 are more likely to be poor in 2018. And, while all this money helped, the economic fundamentals for places like Blackpool, Barnsley or Stoke haven't changed all that much.

When you read Vance's book, you get a little sense of the irritation many like him (hillbillies, rednecks, chavs, pikies - the white working classes of Britain and America) feel at the way they're portrayed in these poverty tourism pieces. We're given the idea that such folk are dull, listless, ignorant and essentially helpless, that only the intervention of bright, engaged, educated and empowered people from outside can resolve the problem. We're to say "there, there" and provide a big middle-class hug to all these sad, incapable poor people out there in the sticks.

Perhaps instead of that hug, we should try a little bit of understanding? Get underneath why their lives are shit? Maybe we can stop hassling them about lifestyle too and focus instead on the things that could help? But then, I've a suspicion, the journalists, academics and think-tankers believe they're done their job by pointing at Blackpool as saying "ewww, isn't it horrid" (albeit taking 5000 words to do so). After all their readers will now be armed with all they need to hold forth about the evils of capitalism, the failures of Tory welfare policies and the noble work being done by the public sector elites in these towns, people who are sacrificing the comforts of civilisation to do good work in these sad, broken places.

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The appeal of autocracy to intellectuals

Joel Kotkin is bang on the money here:

China’s ascendency appeals to many in America’s intellectual classes, and not only them, who historically have a soft spot for “enlightened” autocrats and overweening bureaucracies. In the progressive era, the lodestone was imperial Germany, in the 1930s for many the “future” was to be seen in the Soviet Union and even fascist Italy. In the 1980s, Japan emerged as the role model, followed in the late 1990s by a united Europe that seemed to many more humane and successful than the U.S.

The reality is that, for all its many flaws and failings, the US system based on liberal capitalism is more robust, responsive and successful than the Utopian "Man in Whitehall Knows Better" systems beloved of the centrist and progressive left - especially the acedemic and intellectual bits of it.

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Quote of the day: Vietnam

This is spot on:

The Vietnam War was the greatest U.S. military catastrophe of the 20th century. A conflict begun under false pretenses, based on ignorance and hubris, it killed 58,000 Americans and as many as 3 million Vietnamese. It ended in utter failure. Never in our history have so many lives been wasted on such monumental futility.

My generation (and those a year or so older who sang peace and love) associate the disaster of Vietnam with Richard Nixon - it sort of suits the more lefty-minded for it to be a shockingly corrupt Republican President who shoulders the blame for this awful war. Truth is that the origins of the problem* - at least as far as US involvement is concerned - rests rather with the sainted John F Kennedy.

I've always taken the view that, far from being some blessed individual, Kennedy was as committed to projecting US power as any Republican. Kennedy's knack was to wrap it up in the promotion of democracy rather than the less appealing and blunted cold war rhetoric of Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon.

*Interestingly the "strategic hamlet" approach developed by the French and US advisors whereby radicalised communities were relocated into controllable locations was a straight lift from the policy used by the British in Malaya. The main difference was that the Malay insurgency was by ethnic Chinese making it far easier to isolate the community hiding guerrillas and terrorists.

Hows about we try some of that there local democracy? It used to work quite well.

A while ago I wrote about the move to ban local councils from charging for Park Runs following the decision of a town council to do just that:

And, of course, you all think it absolutely right that politicians in London ban Councils from deciding on things like what they can and cannot charge people or organisations for doing. Don't get me wrong here, I don't particularly think Councils should charge for park runs (although please note that crown green bowlers, cricketers and football players are charged to use facilities in public parks) but I do think that if we are to go to the trouble of electing local councillors to make decisions we should actually let them make those decisions. And, yes, that might include charging for a park run. If you don't like the decision you get the chance to vote out the people who made that decision. This is how the representative democracy lark works.

This process - whereby decisions made by local authorities are over-turned because national politicians see some votes to grab or are badgered by national media and other national politicians into stopping the local council from doing what its democratically elected councillors have decided they will do.

This isn't just a British problem (although we are, among larger countries, one of the very worst offenders) - here's Joel Kotkin in New Geography about the USA:

This follows a historical trend over the past century. Ever since the Great Depression, and even before, governmental power has been shifting inexorably from the local governments to regional, state and, of course, federal jurisdictions. In 1910, the federal level accounted for 30.8 percent of all government spending, with state governments comprising 7.7 percent and the local level more than 61 percent. More than 100 years later, not only had the federal share exploded to nearly 60 percent, but, far less recognized, the state share had nearly doubled, while that of local governments has fallen to barely 25 percent, a nearly 60 percent drop. Much of what is done at the local level today is at the behest, and often with funding derived from, the statehouse or Washington.

Anyone taking a reasonably long view of English local government will recognise this trend with local councils increasingly mere agents of central government enacting programmes and projects deriving from the legislative and fiscal decisions of national government. The drive to standardisation through inspection regimes and the tendency to go on about 'postcode lotteries' provides the justification for this change. Very little that Bradford Council does is not directed, regulated and funded by central government meaning that, when that central government changes its spending priorities or reduces spending the thick end of the impact is felt by the council.

I believe this is, for all of standardisation's superficial appeal, bad government. Not only does is assume that circumstances are the same everywhere but it kills administrative innovation by constraining the freedom of action for local councils. It may be true that we'd all like everybody everywhere to receive the same incredibly high quality of service but the reality of modern government is that quite the reverse is true - the lack of flexibility and independence at the local level results in sclerotic, unresponsive public services that become inward-looking and producer-oriented. Faced with radical alternative approaches the producer-dominated local government (and agencies with related vested interests) appeal to national government and national bureaucracy to prevent any threat to the current system.

This problem has got mixed up with the arguments about regional devolution (an excellent idea being very badly delivered because of national government's control of investment finance and insistence on city-regions rather than existing political geography). The thrust of localism is that government is better when politicians focus on making what they see out their front door better rather than on designing grand schemes and systems to run everything, everywhere according to rules laid down by clever folk in a London office.

And let's remember that the check on this system - we call it democracy where I come from - is that folk get a regular chance to replace the politicians if they mess up. I happen to think this a rather better approach to government than the current system where those local councillors can simply blame central government for everything that has gone wrong.

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On taking voters for granted...

Out in Ohio, in what was once Democrat heartland but ain't no more:

"Every 2 years, every 4 years, locally they'd come around and say, ‘oh, we'll fight for you and take care of you,’ and then they'd disappear. It was like an abusive relationship."

Eventually voters get fed up. And then something like Trump turns up and you lose them.

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Expensive cities will eat themselves...

Here's a chunk from a review of the US cities creating the most high-wage jobs - looking at at "which metropolitan areas are gaining the most professional and business services jobs and the trends that are driving some to pull ahead while others fade":

Looking at the 70 largest labor markets in the country, the clear winners are affordable, business-friendly locales – and their momentum is growing. These span an array of regions, from the Midwest heartland to the Deep South, Texas and the Intermountain West.

Our number one metro area for professional and business service jobs, Nashville, Tenn., epitomizes many of the characteristics that drive high-end employment today. Since 2011, Nashville’s job count in professional and business services has expanded a remarkable 42.6% to 160,300, easily the highest growth rate of any major metropolitan area. Management and technical consulting, architecture and related services have led this growth.

The flip side of this is that the big coastal economies of the US are growing more slowly, people are 'cycling out' by returning to their roots from adventures in the big city economies. And the driver of this is living costs and primarily housing. Just watch this happen to London (and get blamed on Brexit).

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Why nationalising the water industry is a bad idea....

It will surprise people to learn that most the the USA's water infrastructure is publicly-owned and managed. And it's not just high profile disasters (poisonings if you prefer) that are the issue, it's that keeping consumers - who vote - happy leads to under-investment in that infrastructure:

Yet there clearly are major infrastructure repair needs in America. We have not been properly maintaining the assets we have built. Levee failures notoriously caused much of the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but America has yet to address the neglect of its dam and levee systems. For example, the recent possibility of an overflow or collapse at the Oroville Dam in California forced 180,000 people to be evacuated. Many dams, levees, and locks on our inland waterway system are in need of repair, often at significant cost. Examples include Locks 52 and 53 on the Ohio River. Built in 1929, their replacement cost is $2.9 billion. As the New York Times reported, this replacement has been botched, and it was originally supposed to cost only $775 million—still a lot of money.

As is reported recently, the UK is not without these water management challenges but they are largely in parts of the system outside the control of the industry. All this means we pay more for our water than the average American but it also means we have a water supply and sewage system that works.

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Why existing infrastructure is more important than new infrastructure

I like John Sanphillippo's perambulations around suburban USA. We spend too much time looking at big cities with their skyscrapers, trams or tube systems and air pollution. Suburbia is really important and undervalued by planners - it's true to say we probably need more of it.

Anyway Sanphillippo makes this telling observation about US land use:

After several years of traveling around the country in the presence of city planners, economic development officials, elected representatives, engineers, production home builders, professional consultants, and groups of concerned citizens I’ve come to my own personal unified theory of America’s land use future. The short version is that we’ve got the built environment that we have and the overwhelming majority of it isn’t ever going to change much. If you want to know what things will look like in thirty or forty years… look around. That’s pretty much it.

Sanphillippo then goes on to observe that, for much of America, the big challenge will be looking after this infrastructure - roads, sewers, water supply - as much as it will be about new infrastructure. For Europe, with largely privatised utility suppliers there's less of a problem (if you want to see the case for a privatised water supply system look at the tragedy of Flint, Michigan) but we can see glimpses of the issue with the underinvestment in our road system. Indeed the contrast between the investment in maintaining rail systems and road systems is striking especially given the dominance of roads in transportation and their poor safety record compared to rail.

The public policy mistake is to focus on the excitement of new infrastructure like HS2 rather than on looking after the existing networks. Sanphillippo's point tells us this is the wrong approach and that we should be seeking to make more efficient use of exisitng systems for the very straightforward reason that those existing systems will make up 95% or more of any future system.

A final observation is that the coming transportation revolution - digital, driverless, drones and so forth - has to fit into the existing network as there isn't the time, capacity or cash to make the changes to public infrastructure. This is a challenge for those developing these new transport technologies and also a reason why places with less of those legacy systems such as Africa start the revolution with an advantage.

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