neat photo sites
I discovered a bunch of interesting websites with lots of photos of various cities (kind of like what I'm doing but 10 times as good), including sites for:

Detroit (including the famous "Classic Ruins of Detroit" on one of the internal links at the top of the web page)
Washington, DC
St. Louis
andEast St. Louis.

Have fun!

my career plans
I'm not sure I've mentioned this before, but I'm moving in August, from Southern Illinois University's law school in Carbondale, Illinois to George Washington University's law school in our nation's capital. This position will be yet another one-year visitorship.

shul or industrial park? You be the judge

O'Toole takes me on
I used to fantasize that one of these days, someone more well-known than I would take enough notice of my work to criticize it. That day has come.

Randall O'Toole, a prominent defender of the sprawl status quo, whacked away at one of my old articles (on why conservatives should criticize sprawl) on his website.

To be fair, O'Toole actually does a reasonably good job of characterizing my basic argument at the start. He states:

"Lewyn's basic argument is that urban sprawl resulted from government policies. Without those government actions, most people would still be living in relatively high-density cities they did a century ago. Those government policies are:

Federal housing policy
Federal highway policy
Federal education policy
Local zoning policy."

But then, he gets into trouble, as follows (O'Toole's comments are always in quotes):

1. The all-or-nothing fallacy

"In each case, Lewyn's claim can be checked with a simple test: If a particular policy caused sprawl, then places that didn't have that policy should not be suburbanizing. Of course, the reality is that suburbanization is happening everywhere . . . " (For example, O'Toole writes that suburbanization "was rapidly taking place long before 1934" when the Federal Housing Administration began its pro-suburban mortgage insurance policy).

Wrong, for two reasons. First, if suburbanization is the result of a wide variety of policies, some suburbanization would be happening even if one policy was subtracted from the mix.

Second, suburbanization is not an "all or nothing" matter (thus my reference above to the "all or nothing" fallacy). New York City in 1936 and Detroit in 2005 both experienced some suburbanization- but I don't think anyone would argue that these two communities were identical or equally suburbanized.

I am willing to admit that if none of these policies happened, we would have some movement of population outward, if only to accommodate increased population. But I doubt suburbanization would have gone so far as to turn any American city into the kind of basket case that Detroit or St. Louis is today. Perhaps those older cities would be where newer cities like Denver are today: that is, a growing, reasonably healthy city surrounded by faster-growing suburbs.

2. Ignoring state and local policy (as well as early federal policy)

O'Toole: "Lewyn's transportation policy is, of course, the Interstate Highway System, which supposedly drained cities of their people. But this program did not begin until 1956, and most cities did not actually have interstate highways until the 1960s. Yet suburbanization was rapidly taking place long before that time."

But the federal government (as well as state and local governments) were spending money on roads long before 1956. The federal government starting aiding road construction as early as the 1920s. (see my article at 26 Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 259 (2001) - and state and local governments were involved by then, if not earlier. Given my assumption that road construction aids suburbanization, it makes sense that some suburbanization would have occurred between the 1920s and 1956.

3. Misunderstanding government stupidity

"Like other sprawl opponents, Lewyn paints the cities as victims of federal transportation policy. But it is important to realize that the only reason interstate highways entered the cites, instead of going around them as was initially planned, is because the cities themselves demanded it. Harvard transportation professor Alan Altshuler notes that big-city mayors realized that downtowns were "strangled and congested. And one way to bring them back was to deal with the congestion problem." If the highways had not been built as the mayors wanted, says Altshuler, "the decentralizing consequences might well have been even greater than they were."

I agree that most mayors wanted the highways. But I think by now it is pretty obvious that that was a stupid decision.

As far as Mr. Altshuler's opinion (or at least O'Toole's interpretation of same), I think it makes no sense whatsoever.

If congestion downtown caused people and businesses to leave downtown, we would see a pretty strong negative correlation between vibrant downtowns and traffic congestion - that is, less congested downtowns (like Buffalo's) would prosper, and as downtowns grew more congested they would shed people.

But in fact, as traffic congestion exploded during the 1990s, downtowns through the U.S. gained population. According to a Brookings report on America's downtowns, some of the downtowns that gained population were in atrociously congested regions such as Houston, Atlanta and Boston, while the downtowns of low-congestion cities such as St. Louis continued to wither.


4. The not-so-slight exaggeration

"The education policy that Lewyn says drained the cities was the federal integration effort, especially forced busing. Here we have counterexamples in both time and place. These policies did not begin until the 1960s, long after suburbanization was well underway. Moreover, race was virtually a non-issue in many American cities that had tiny minority populations, yet those cities suburbanized just as much as more racially diverse cities."

Just as much? Well, let's look at the big cities that lost the most population over the past few decades.

St. Louis lost 60% of its population, more than any other large city- and St. Louis certainly falls into the category of "racially diverse" cities, since it is now majority black.

Other big cities hovering around the 50% mark (Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh) are all cities with pretty substantial black populations- Cleveland and Detroit are now majority black, Buffalo about 40%, Pittsburgh a little less. I an not sure what lily-white city O'Toole is thinking of that "suburbanized as much as more racially diverse cities."

Maybe O'Toole is thinking about Seattle- a city with a not-very-large black population relative to big cities, but with ample sprawl. But I don't think Seattle is in any way analogous to Detroit. The city of Seattle's population has actually grown in recent decades - not as fast as its suburbs, to be sure, but growth it is.

5. What about Houston?

"Finally, Lewyn argues that zoning forced people to live at lower densities than they would prefer. If so, then Houston, which has no zoning, should be much denser than Los Angeles, which has long had zoning. Of course, the exact opposite is true: the Los Angeles urban area has about 7,000 people per square mile while Houston has less than 3,000 per square mile."

But as I have written elsewhere,Houston has most of the same types of anti-pedestrian, anti-transit land use regulation as Los Angeles. Houston has minimum lot sizes, setbacks, minimum parking requirements, and extremely wide streets. The only difference between Houston and Los Angeles is that Houston's municipal code doesn't tell you whether to put housing or shops on a given block. But if you do put housing or commerce on the block, you'd better be sure its sprawl-inducing housing or commerce.

(P.S. I realize that Houston has begun to liberalize its municipal code in recent years- but most of Houston was built before the code changed).

6. What about Europe? Or, the all-or-nothing fallacy part 2

"Counterexamples to all of Lewyn's claims can also be found by looking at cities in Canada, Australia, and Europe. Many of these countries have long had strong anti-suburban policies, yet they are all rapidly suburbanizing. Any differences in the timing of such suburbanization can be traced to differences in income rather than urban policy."

No doubt there is some suburbanization in cities outside America. But is it really true that there's no difference between Berlin and Detroit? Of course not. No doubt that, for a variety of reasons, cities outside America have experienced some suburbanization. But not as much. Patrick Condon writes that Canadian cities:

twice as dense as their American counterparts, with 14.2 persons per hectare in the U.S. compared to 28.5 in Canada. Canadians own nearly as many cars as Americans, but drive them about half as much per year.

Now, I know that Canada isn't exactly Hong Kong when it comes to suburbanization. Most people drive to work, just like in America. But I think Condon's point is that even countries similar to America have not taken suburbanization quite as far.

Again, O'Toole's reasoning exemplifies the all-or-nothing fallacy: he suggests that if there was some suburbanization outside the United States, other countries must not be any different from Detroit.

7. The self-fulfilling prophecy

O'Toole makes some other points that strike me as self-fulfilling prophecies, in the sense that policies he favors cause them to be true.

a) efficiency

"The reality is that autos are the lowest cost form of transportation we have for most urban-length trips. On average, Americans spend about 18 cents a passenger mile driving, and subsidies and social costs of autos add maybe 5 more cents. Yet the cost of mass transit averages about 75 cents a passenger mile and rail transit is even more expensive."

I am not going to get into a numbers argument on this issue; other people on both side of the question (John Holtzclaw and Todd Litman on the pro-transit side, Wendell Cox on the other side of the argument) are far more knowledgeable than I.

But it does seem to me that an argument based on monetary efficiency is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the United States organizes its metropolitan areas in a sprawling, auto-oriented matter, then of course transit will be more expensive per passenger mile than it would otherwise be. If we could somehow grow more compactly (concededly a big if), transit will be less expensive per passenger mile because there will be more passengers and fewer miles.

b) Preference

"Because cars are more flexible, more convenient, and less expensive than public transit, the vast majority of people prefer to drive. Since they prefer to drive, most also prefer to live in areas that have been designed for cars, which mainly means the suburbs and other areas built since World War II."

But the reason they prefer to drive is because they live in areas designed for cars. People who live and work in places that are not designed for cars (New York City) prefer to use public transit.

c) Taxes

"The fact that taxes tend to be significantly lower in the suburbs than the cities is only an added bonus."

Which might have something to do with 50 years of middle-class flight and suburbanization. A city that loses half its tax base will of course have higher taxes. (And there are instances of cities that have lower taxes than their suburbs and still lose population- Buffalo, for example).

8. Confusing libertarianism and obeying the road lobby

Each sentence or two in O'Toole's piece is instructive.

a. Defending the highways

"For example, Lewyn's first prescription is "no new roads." A truly conservative position would be that the federal government should get out of the business of taxing and funding transportation. But Lewyn's idea that we should have a "paving moratorium" is absurd."

I'm not really sure I see the difference (leaving aside privately funded toll roads, which I haven't thought that much about).

"Ironically, the federal road program was at one time one of the few federal programs that worked from a conservative viewpoint. It was funded out of user fees and transportation engineers designed the roads to best meet the needs of those users. Those engineers enjoyed a market-like feedback relationship: if they built roads where they were needed, people would use them and generate more user fees."

I'm not quite sure what O'Toole likes about the road program, other than that it promoted suburbanization.

Is O'Toole's point that roads were funded out of user fees, and that roads are therefore virtuous because they pay for themselves? I don't think that's quite right. Assuming arguendo that the program as a whole paid for itself (which is certainly highly controversial, given the debate over the social costs of driving - see 7-a above), it doesn't necessarily follow that each road paid for itself.

Often, a new road has not been funded out by the users of that particular road. Rather, it has been funded out either out of general tax revenue, or taxes and user fees affecting all drivers (i.e. gas taxes, license fees). Gas taxes tax users of EXISTING roads to benefit users for NEW roads. The two groups are not identical, and may have sharply varying interests.

Users of existing roads live in existing neighborhoods, and when a new road makes a new suburb more accessible, the people who move to the new suburb might benefit- but the people who stay in their current neighborhood might not. The latter group may actually be worse off- for example, if they stayed in the city, they may suffer, as the new suburbanites flee and cause the "stayers'" neighborhood to deteriorated, causing property values to decline, crime to rise, the tax base to decline, etc. Eventually, the "stayers" feel like they have to leave too in order to be physically safe.

(And if it did pay for itself, why was government involvement even necessary?)


Or is O'Toole think roads are a good program because people actually used the roads? By that logic, welfare pre-1996 should have been the perfect federal program: the government paid young women to have babies, and the young women actually used welfare to bring up those babies. Does that mean government was satisfying a need?

b. Tax and tax, spend and spend

"This system broke down for two reasons. First, the user fees, being mainly a cents-per-gallon tax, failed to keep up with inflation."

Randall O'Toole complaining that taxes aren't high enough? Oh, my!

c) Empty slogans

"Second, urban planners are now using those fees more for social engineering than for transportation."

Last time I checked, the federal government alone spent $35 billion on highways. Is that social engineering or transportation?

Actually, both. If "social engineering" is the use of government to achieve a social objective, transportation spending is "social engineering".
(For example, he explains in the next paragraph that he likes road spending because it achieves the wholesome social goal of more travel).

But I don't think that is O'Toole's point. O'Toole is trying to use "social engineering" as a synoym for "government spending I don't like." But "social engineering" is an emotionally loaded term, so O'Toole uses it.


d. Induced travel

"Lewyn's big objection to roads is that, if you build them, they will be used. In other words, he buys into the "induced travel" argument. If there is any truth at all behind the induced travel claim, it is that new roads make travel less expensive so more people will travel."

O'Toole's point misses the point of the induced travel argument. New roads are sold to the public, rightly or wrongly, as a cure for traffic congestion. The induced traffic argument isn't that travel is bad in the abstract, but that new roads don't do the job- that the extra travel means that Jane Commuter spends just as much time stuck in traffic as she would have otherwise. (And supporters of the induced traffic theory tend to believe that the traffic has all sorts of unwelcome unintended consequences).

e. The transit distraction

"In other words, does Lewyn think that it makes more sense to build things (such as light-rail lines) that won't be used than things that will be used? If so, such muddleheaded thinking betrays conservative principles."

That's really a separate argument. It seems to me that a principled libertarian should agree with my arguments about roads, even if we agree to disagree about whether the money saved should be devoted to light rail or to tax cuts. (And I'm not sure we would in every concievable circumstance; obviously I wouldn't support light rail in the middle of the desert).

Though for what its worth, I think some highway programs (e.g. tearing up urban neighborhoods with expressways in the 1950s) were so harmful that throwing the money in a sewer would have been more socially useful.

8. Education

"Lewyn suggests that school vouchers will take care of the education problem. While that is certainly a conservative policy, I suspect that vouchers are not going to lead a lot of families to move back to the cities. Many cities today still have excellent school systems that were never disrupted by forced busing. Yet their school-age populations are typically declining even as their overall populations grow because -- as the New York Times -- families prefer low-density suburbs."

Having lived in Buffalo and Cleveland, I can state with some certainty that if I had a dollar for every person I met who said "I would live in the city but for the schools" I would have enough money to . . . well, at least enough to fly him to Buffalo and Cleveland to meet those people.

As far as "cities with excellent schools", I am not sure what O'Toole is talking about.

9. Confusing local control and small government

"Lewyn's approach to zoning is almost as bad as his no-new-roads prescription. He considers the idea of abolishing zoning, but says that this "would eliminate sprawl-limiting ordinances (such as those limiting development in newer suburbs) as well as sprawl-creating ordinances." His apparent desire to keep "sprawl-limiting" zoning doesn't sound like limited government to me.

Instead, he wants the states to pass laws dictating how local government do their zoning. Such laws should prohibit low-density zoning, require that apartments and duplexes be allowed in all residential areas, and require that residential zones also allow retail shops. This is exactly the sort of government intrusion that conservatives should oppose."

So O'Toole is saying that if states prevent local government from regulating you to death, that's "government intrusion." Wrong. That's preventing government intrusion.

Now to be fair, that sort of regulation does impinge on another good conservative principle, local control - just like Oregon's Measure 37 (which O'Toole supports).

But I believe that in this case, less government should trump local control, because of the importance of the broader value of increasing consumer choice. And since O'Toole apparently purports to be a libertarian, he should come down even more strongly on the "less government" side of the issue than a wishy-washy pragmatist like me.

10. Confusing tyranny of the majority and small government

"The fact is that, until recently, most zoning codes reflected what people wanted: low densities, separation of multi-family from single-family homes, and separation of residential from commercial areas. Again, we can see this by looking at places that have no zoning and see that the covenants written by developers and maintained by homeowner associations follow similar patterns."

If suburban homeowners want to follow a contract, fine. (Though I'm not sure whether that covenant should survive the original contracting parties, as courts have generally allowed). But just because the majority wants X doesn't mean the majority should always be allowed to enforce X on people who haven't signed a contract.

11. Parking

"Finally, Lewyn would forbid cities to require developers to include "more free parking than the market would dictate." Apparently he doesn't realize that such requirements arise because developers often build less parking than needed in the expectation that people will park on public property."

So let me get this straight. On the one hand, government should tax and spend and regulate us to ensure that more people drive more miles on the roads (which are public property). On the other hand, if people actually park their cars on public property, that's bad? I'm not sure I see the point here.

"While zoning might not be the best way to solve this problem, the real problem today is that planners are trying to limit the amount of parking developers are allowed to build."

On what planet? Even Andres Duany's New Urbanist Smart Code sets out minimum parking requirements.

Yom Hashoah thoughts
Today is Yom Hashoah, the day for remembering the Shoah (aka Holocaust). So I thought I would write a kind of op-ed on some of the ways the Shoah (Hebrew for "slaughter", I think) has affected my thoughts.

First a bit of background: my father was born in Berlin in 1923. He spent World War II hiding out in Berlin, narrowly avoiding deportation to concentration camps. His parents and most of his extended family were less fortunate. (To buy my father's book about his experiences, go here or just type "lewyn" into the amazon.com search engine.

So how has the Shoah affected me?

Religiously, in at least two ways:

1. My father's Shoah experience made me more immersed in Judaism than I would have been had my parents both been non-Shoah survivors (i.e. if their ancestors had moved to America before the war). Although I grew up in a very secular, nonobservant home, not one of the five Lewyn children, not one married a non-Jew (though some have drifted away from Judaism in other respects). I suspect this fact has something to do with the fact that from the time we were very young, we were reminded of my father's struggles not to be murdered because of his heritage.

More narrowly, it made me more aware of, and perhaps more desensitized, to the Shoah than I would have been otherwise. I was more educated than shocked by the Holocaust Museum, and one friend used to complain that I mentioned "Hitler" in some context at least once a week. Hitler and his deeds are a part of the mental furniture of my life.

2. My awareness of the Shoah implanted in me a distaste for what I call vending-machine theology: the idea that just as putting coins in a vending machine automatically gives you food, putting sins (or alleged sins) into your life automatically gives you divine punishment. So when clerics argue that disaster X is caused by sin Y, I get a bit outraged - because obviously it is hard to imagine a sin that could justify the Shoah. I'm not sure this distaste has any practical consequences - it keeps me alienated from the most right-wing 1 or 2% of my own (and other) religions (which I suppose means the most right-wing 10 or 20% of Orthodox Judaism), but I probably am not predisposed in that direction anyhow.

Politically, I think my awareness of the Shoah gives me an instinctive understanding of the fact that many (if not most) people are capable of doing very evil things at least occasionally. In turn, this reality affects how I view politics, making me more hawkish and culturally conservative- that is, willing to use or threaten force against the enemies of American society(i.e. foreign enemies abroad, criminals and terrorists at home).

By contrast, people who think of the Shoah as an abstraction that happened to other people long ago (i.e. most people) are more likely to believe that there are few truly evil people, and that if someone is trying to hurt us ("us" meaning either Americans generally or relatively law-abiding, noncriminal Americans), it must be because we have mistreated them.

For example, during the last decades of the Cold War, some liberals didn't believe that the Soviets were interested in world domination, because after all, using force to achieve world domination was bad and how could people be this bad? Obviously (they thought) America must have provoked the poor dears.

My view, by contrast, was that human beings are capable of mass murder (the Shoah being Exhibit A), and that the occasional murder in pursuit of world domination was perfectly normal for any red-blooded head of state. So I took it for granted that the Soviets wanted to run the world, and that the only difficult issue was what we should do to stop them.

Similarly, after 9/11 a common question on the loony Left was: "What have we done to provoke the poor dears to hate us so much?" (Obviously, I am not sure anyone phrased the question quite that way, but I think some people shared this underlying sentiment). By contrast, I take it for granted that the world is full of fanatical, nasty people, and that even if we hadn't provoked them to want to kill us they would probably want to kill someone else.

(Though I am more dovish vis-a-vis the Mideast, Iraq, etc. than towards the Soviets, since I believe that perhaps if the U.S. minded its own business a little more, that region's residents might be more interested in harassing each other and a little less interested in killing Americans).

More website news
Now that I have a scanner, I am trying to put a bunch of my photos online so I won't have to drag several photo albums everywhere to look at my memories of places I've lived and visited.

My first installment is a selection of photos from Atlanta (where I grew up, and where I lived again from 1991-2 and 2000-03).

I have also updated the Car-Free in Atlanta site by uploading a bunch of the photos at the start of the site.

Both sites are in the "Links" page to the left.

fun quiz
which intentional tort are you?

Car-Free in Atlanta website: back from the dead!
at lewyn.tripod.com


For those of you unfamiliar with the site, it is a guide to Atlanta and to getting around Atlanta without a car.

are we better off now than we were 400 years ago?
interesting discussion (from very traditional Jewish perspective) at

http://vbm-torah.org/archive/bereishit/25bereishit.htm

Bottom line: maybe.

Something else I wish I'd written
Each morning we begin our prayers with a remarkable expression of gratitude.
In the graceful translation of Sim Shalom, it reads as follows:
Praised are You, Lord our God, King of the universe who with wisdom
fashioned the human body, creating openings, arteries, glands and organs,
marvelous in structure, intricate in design. Should but one of them, by
being blocked or opened, fail to function, it would be impossible to exist.
Praised are You, Lord, healer of all flesh who sustains our bodies in
wondrous ways. (p. 7)


I love the unvarnished specificity of these words that celebrate the reality of our bodies. Having just awakened, we are stirred by the discovery that
our body continues to function smoothly without pain or disorder, and we pause in thankfulness, mindful of how delicate is our endowment. We praise
God for one more day of well-being.

R. Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

From the department of "I wish I'd written this"
Andrew Sullivan writes:

"What we have lost today is the prudence and moderation of old moral teaching. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Catholic natural law theology, argued that a human being did not exist as such immediately after conception. He believed that the soul entered at about the time of “quickening” — roughly the first trimester.

Even today we accept that a fertile procreating woman spontaneously aborts countless fertilised eggs after conception. That does not make her guilty of involuntary manslaughter on a massive scale. So the abortion of a foetus the morning after conception is intuitively different from an abortion in the third trimester. But that insight was dropped by the church in its fierce opposition to every aspect of modernity in the last part of the 19th century.

Relative judgments get turned into absolute ones when religion feels threatened by new technology or new ways of life. We live in an era of two great trends. One is the miracle of modern science and its awesome capacity to prolong and better life. The other is the rise of religious fundamentalism in which bewilderment at technology, global change and cultural and moral diversity understandably leads some to cling to the most absolute of moral claims."

I think by "we" he means Catholics.

the case against bashing (Jewish) Germans
In some circles, it has become fashionable to hold out pre-Hitler German Jews as an example of assimilation gone amok (presumably as opposed to pure-as-the-driven-snow East European Jews).

I recently skimmed bits and pieces of a book about German Jews (The Pity of It All, by Amos Elon). Elon points out that

"intermarriage was more prevalent in 1933 than ever before, reaching the astonishing figure of 44 percent" (p. 399).

Note the use of the term "astonishing" in reference to his 44% figure. Before then, intermarriage apparently hovered around 30% (p. 225, using 29.86% figure for 1915).

By contrast, American Jewish rates of intermarriage may be over 50%, depending on whose survey you take seriously. (NOTE: If you want to read about all these conflicting surveys, just google something like "+ Jews + intermarriage + percent")

So maybe we should stop throwing mud at our ancestors.

NO BAD SCHOOLS, JUST BAD STUDENTS

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article by Joel Kotkin and he repeated a common claim: that if cities would only “fix their schools”, they would be more appealing. Kotkin’s implicit assumption is that cities suffer from bad (but fixable) schools: that is, that urban schools would be just as prestigious as their suburban counterparts if their bureaucrats were a little more competent.
If the “bad schools” theory was true, urban schools would be unable to educate high-achieving children ile prestigous suburban schools would be able to educate disadvantaged students who urban school districts cannot adequately educate. But in fact, neither of these propositions is completely correct.
When urban schools in otherwise “bad” school districts can limit their student body to high achievers, they perform just as well as suburban schools for example, Buffalo’s City Honors high school (which uses entrance examinations to screen out weak students) is as prestigious as any suburban school.
Similarly, the “bad schools” theory requires one to believe that suburban schools, due
to their superior teachers and administrators, could turn children from disadvantaged urban households into well-scrubbed geniuses if they were only given the chance. But even suburbanites do not believe this myth. Instead of admitting urban children in order to turn them into productive citizens, suburban school districts have done their best to lock out those children. For example, Cleveland’s suburban public schools have excluded urban children by refusing to participate in Cleveland’s small school voucher program, and some states have even created the crime of enrollment fraud in order to imprison and fine urban parents who seek to sneak their children into suburban schools.
Why? In the words of Cynthia Tucker, the liberal editorial page editor of the
Atlanta Constitution, “Very few upscale parents - black, white or Hispanic warm to the idea of
sending their children to school with poor underachievers.” She was writing about an Atlanta exurb’s attempt to merge a predominantly middle-class school with a school dominated by low-income students- an attempt which met with the following response from a school board member: “Do we want to spread all the low-income children around the schools so we can achieve mediocrity?”
Thus, it appears that most suburbanites know that a school’s mediocrity arises from the presence of low-achieving children from disadvantaged households, not from the school’s inherent “badness”.
Indeed, low-income children achieve less than their more affluent peers even
within the same school or school system. For example, P.S. 24 in Riverdale (an affluent outer
borough New York City neighborhood) has a regular program for relatively gifted students and a
special program for slower students. The special programs are dominated by children who are
poor enough to qualify for government free-lunch programs, while the regular program is
dominated by students from middle-class households.
The disproportionate presence of poor children among low achievers does not mean poor children are completely uneducable - but does mean that, in the absence of truly exceptional measures, the educational gap between rich and poor will not be completely eliminated. Thus, schools dominated by low-income children with low test scores will generally be low-achieving schools, and schools that can screen out such children will generally be high-achieving schools- whether they are in an urban school district or a suburban school district.
In other words, if a typical urban school district and a typical suburban school district retained their current school boards, teachers, and administrators, but switched students, parents would be fleeing the suburban district for the urban school district, because the suburban school’s low-income clientele would mean low levels of achievement- just as urban schools are handicapped today by their students’ problems.
This proposition also is supported by the strong correlation between schools’ reputation and their student bodies: socially diverse communities nearly always have schools with poor reputations, while homogenously upper-class communities nearly always have schools with good reputations.
So why do politicians and pundits continue to believe that urban areas’ schools, rather than their poverty and diversity, is what ails them?
Pro-sprawl commentators like the “bad schools” theory because it enables them to blame the victim: that is, to argue that regional solutions to sprawl are unnecessary because cities can fix the problem on their own by fixing the schools. This claim is simply rubbish, because as long as regions do nothing about sprawl, cities will have more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, which means they will have poorer schools.
Liberals like the “bad schools” theory because it leads to a simple, easy-to-understand solution that comes naturally to liberals: spending more money to fix the allegedly “bad” urban schools. The liberal version of the “bad schools” theory is based on the assumption that urban schools do in fact spend less than suburban schools - an assumption that is false as often as not. For example, in the early 1990s, a federal courts desegregation degree mandated that the Kansas City, Mo. school district be given state subsidies in order to compete with the suburbs for white students. As a result, the Kansas City school district spent at least 30% more than the most well funded suburban districts, and over twice as much as less well funded suburban districts. Yet the city/suburb gap (as measured by performance on statewide tests) did not narrow very much, and the Kansas City school district remained unable to attract white suburbanites. (I am not arguing that the extra spending was completely useless- just that it made far less difference than the socio-economic background of the students).
Even New Urbanists like the “bad schools” theory because they tend to believe that social diversity is a good thing. But if a school’s reputation depends on its students’ test scores and discipline problems (or lack of same), and if students’ test scores and discipline problems depend on their socio-economic background, a diverse school will nearly always have worse test scores and a worse reputation than a homogenously upper-class school.
So lots of commentators want to believe that “bad schools” are the cause rather than the result of cities’ social problems. But it’s just not true.
Given that a school’s academic reputation is nearly always dependent on its student’s background, what are the policy consequences of this fact? Two points come to mind:
1. To attract middle-class families back to cities, urban school districts will probably have
to cater to suburbanites’ desire for schools which, like City Honors, are dominated by high
achievers. This means some sort of school choice system that groups the high achievers together- probably through schools which, like City Honors, require an exam for admission. Urban school systems that lack exam schools should create a few, and school systems that have exam schools should create a lot more of them. A voucher system can lead to similar results (as long as it includes middle-class pupils as well as low-income students).
2. Suburban politicians should stop blaming cities’ decline on their bad schools, because the
major reason cities have schools with bad reputations is that they have a disproportionate share
of the region’s poor - a fact which, in turn, is caused by the sprawl-producing policies that suburban politicians usually support.
In other words, there are no truly good or bad public schools: only good and bad
students. And sprawl is more the cause of “bad” schools than the result of “bad” schools.

oddly enough, a religious play
I recently saw the new movie Merchant of Venice (based on Shakespeare's play of that name), which I highly recommend. When I read the play in junior highI wasn't as Jewishly literate as I am today- so I missed a lot of insights that I notice now. A few thoughts:

1. The role of lashon hara (literally, "evil tongue" or gossip): I'd always thought Shylock's resentment was against Christian anti-Semitism generally. But my sense of the movie is that his resentment is directed at Antonio individually; apparently, Antonio had been calling Shylock a dog, etc. Obvious lesson: lashon hara can be dangerous.

2. One reason why the play is not quite realistic (other than the obvious point that merchants don't run around demanding actual flesh in contracts): if Shylock had in fact sought to mutilate a well-connected gentile, the organized Jewish community would have used the threat of excommunication to prevent him from bringing suit. Why? Because it had a strong interest in preventing Jews from doing anything that would provoke Christian retaliation - and bringing a lawsuit calling for the mutilation of a Christian merchant would certainly fill the bill.

great thoughts from DC
Since I am moving to Washington in the summer (to teach at George Washington's law school for a year) I have been looking at the web pages of various synagogues in Washington, and in particular at various sermons.

I have been especially impressed by some of the thoughts of the rabbi at Tifereth Israel, a Conservative shul on upper 16th St. near the DC/Md. border.

A couple of great lines:

focusing on the downside of having too many choices)"If this community had
> only one Jewish day school, somehow, we'd make do- we'd deal with it, and
> we'd probably even be thankful. But since there are a number of choices out
> there, we focus on the weaknesses of each, and are bitterly dissatisfied
> with all of them."
>
> (encouraging more Shabbat observance) "Don't let Madonna get more out of
> Shabbat than you!"

And check out this d'var torah on risk-phobia.

Words of Torah from Abraham Lincoln
"The Almighty has His own purposes."

From his second inaugural address (speculating about Divine involvement in the Civil War).

My interpretation: trying to speculate too much about Divine desires, or what the Divine intent is in allowing bad things X, Y and Z to happen, is nareshkeit (foolishness).

Comic relief in the Bible
This week's Haftorah (I Kings, starting at 18:1) brings back a memory.

First a little background: Elijah seeks to prove that there is only one God through a kind of contest: he will offer a sacrifice to the one true God, while a group of "prophets of Baal [a Caananite idol]" are offering a sacrifice to Baal. Elijah apparently believes (correctly as it turned out) that his sacrifice will be accepted by God through a fiery consumption of his offering, while the nonexistent Baal will of course ignore the sacrifice of the Baal-worshippers.

While trying to get their god to respond, the Baal-worshippers began by praying. Elijah makes fun of them, stating: "Shout louder! After all he is a god. But he may be in conversation, he may be detained, or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up." (18:27).

Then the Baal-worshippers "gashed themselves with knives and spears, according to their practice, until the blood streamed over them." (18:28).

I was following the reading of this Haftorah in shul a couple of years ago, and started laughing out loud, thinking of the Baal-worshippers.

These poor schmucks- stabbing themselves and each other to get the attention of a nonexistent deity! So pathetic! So sad. And yet (at least to me)amusing at the same time.

It just goes to show: sometimes comedy is tragedy plus distance- in this case, about 2800 years' distance.

My letter to the Washington Post
on transit issues got published today

Brief summary: the Post ran one of those "Gee, it's too bad nobody wants to use public transit" stories. I point out that the poll upon which the story is based shows that

(1) the most common reason given for not using Metro (the D.C. region's major provider of public transit) was that jobs or residences were not Metro-accessible -- a fact which implies that more respondents WOULD use Metro if their jobs or homes WERE Metro-accessible

and

(2) even Washingtonians who don't use Metro to get to work use it for other purposes.

Torah talk on capital punishment
While I was rummaging through some bank statements, I found something that didn't belong there: some notes on a talk at the Association of American Law Schools conference in January on capital punishment and Jewish law, given by Prof. Stone of Cardozo Law School.

As far as I knew, conventional wisdom had always been that Jewish tradition was skeptical of capital punishment; even though the Bible prescribes capital punishment for all manner of offenses, the Bible also requires that capital punishment only be used if a crime has witnesses, and the Mishnah says that a court "that passes the death penalty once in seven years is called a violent court." (Mishnah, Makkot 7a). Prof. Stone explained the justifications for this view (doubts about infallibility of witness testimony, distrust on courts' ability to judge cases properly where lots of murders have occurred, etc).

But there are also much more tough-minded views in the Talmud and in later rabbinic commentary. For example:

"I have heard that a court may decree capital punishment without the warrant of the Torah . . . Such was the case with a man who rode a horse on the Sabbath in the days of the Hellenists, for which he was brought to court and stoned to death." (Talmud, Sanhedrin 46a).

"If there are murderers who are not subject to the death penalty, then an Israelite king may execute them by his royal prerogative and by reason of societal need, if he so wishes. Likewise, if a court wishes to execute such a person as a temporary measure, they may do so if such are the needs of the hour." (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Rozeaih 2:4).

"A murderer against whom the evidence is not [totally] conclusive, or who was not warned [before he slew his victim] or even [one] who [was observed by only] one witness, and similarly an enemy who inadvertently killed [someone] - the king is granted license to execute them and to improve society according to the needs of the time." (Maimonides, Laws of Kings 3:10).

Prof. Stone suggested that Jewish law created a kind of two tier system. The Torah mandates capital punishment under some circumstances- but only under very narrow circumstances, and subject to evidentiary rules that make capital punishment very difficult. But in addition, rulers (whether they be kings or rabbis) can impose capital or other punishment whenever social needs demand it, and the latter system is not subject to such strenuous safeguards.

Prof. Stone also pointed out that there was anti-death penalty commentary that she was omitting, and that she personally was opposed to capital punishment in 21st century America.

why I'm discontented with what passes for conservatism today
When I was younger, I always thought of conservatives as fundamentally pragmatic and liberals as ideological wackos. But a recent New Republic article suggests that the positions have been reversed

(I can't seem to link to it but here's the URL

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050228&s=chait022805 )

A few key quotes:

"Conservatives don't always dwell on their first principles because those principles have little use in converting unbelievers. But they pop up from time to time, especially when conservative factual claims come under stress.

Take, for instance, the current debate over privatizing Social Security. Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Michael Kinsley has argued that privatization cannot increase national wealth--an argument that, if true, would undermine the idea's central rationale. A recent National Review editorial implicitly accepted the thrust of Kinsley's argument and proceeded to gamely offer up some possible second- and third-order benefits that privatization could produce. (People might be induced to save a bit more, and maybe higher debt would discourage spending.) Seemingly unpersuaded by its own reasoning, the editorial righted itself by declaring that "reducing dependence on Washington is a worthy goal in its own right."

Likewise, conservative columnist George F. Will conceded not long ago that, contrary to the claims of privatization advocates, Social Security does not face a financing crisis. But Will declared his support for privatization anyway. "[T]he best reasons rise from the philosophy of freedom: Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money."

This preference for removing power from Washington is simply something that either you accept or you don't. It's neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. It does, however, make empirical reasoning pointless. Viewed pragmatically, Social Security raises questions about which economics has a lot to say: balancing the tradeoffs between retiree incomes and costs to workers, allocating risk, and so on. Liberal thinking, unlike conservative thinking, actually hinges on the outcome of those questions.

This doesn't mean that conservatives don't believe their own empirical arguments. Nor does it mean that ideologically driven thinking can't lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases--conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies--it does. But empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.

Consider the conservative view of health care. Conservatives repeat the mantra that the United States has "the best health care system in the world"--a formulation used endlessly by President Bush. That isn't true by almost any objective measure. The United States devotes a far higher share of its economy to health care than any other country. Yet, according to the most recent World Health Organization study, the United States ranks just 37th in overall health care performance. These massive inefficiencies derive in part from our huge numbers of uninsured. The uninsured end up forgoing treatment until they arrive at the emergency room. Basic preventive care, of the sort universally available in every other advanced country, would avert such disasters--at less cost to the economy and with less suffering and fatality for patients.

The only way to deem the U.S. system the "best" is if you substitute ideological criteria for pragmatic criteria. Our health care system is indeed the best at minimizing the role of government. France, on the other hand, produces better measurable health outcomes at a vastly lower cost. Yet conservatives would consider the notion that France has a better health care system than the United States to be self-evidently false.

The conundrum is that the remedy of smaller government is particularly ill-suited for the problem of health care. The market for medical services does not resemble the market for blue jeans. Among other problems, health insurance firms have every incentive to deny coverage to those most likely to get sick, which makes the individual health insurance market inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Economists call this phenomenon "adverse selection," and it is inherent in the private health care market. It cannot be solved without some kind of government intervention.

For this reason, conservatives have almost nothing to say about adverse selection. When they do write about the topic, they tend to call for bromides like (to take an example from a David Brooks New York Times Magazine essay last year) "reforming the health care system so competition works as it does in every other sphere--to improve value, spur innovation and reduce costs." This is classic backward reasoning: Start with a solution (competition) and then proceed to make it fit the problem. In this case, the author doesn't even explain how to make the solution fit the problem. He simply assumes that it can be done because market forces work everywhere and always."



"If liberalism is not the mirror image of conservatism, what is? The more apt parallel is probably socialism. True socialists believe that allowing capitalists to keep some of the fruits of workers' labor is inherently immoral. They also tend to believe that free enterprise does not work very well. But, like the conservative belief that big government doesn't work well, this empirical belief merely sits atop a deeper normative belief. For committed socialists, doing away with "exploitation" is an end in itself.

.... It's not a coincidence that the two most economically liberal Republican presidents--Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford--also displayed the most serious interest in empiricism. Both required their assistants to produce detailed "Brandeis briefs" outlining the essential arguments on both sides of any policy debate. Ford invited Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith into the Oval Office for a free-ranging debate on economic policy.

Since the mid-'70s, the GOP has grown steadily more conservative, and therefore less pragmatic. Genuine ideological conservatives, banished to minority status since Eisenhower, briefly resurfaced under Barry Goldwater, and, after falling back again, began to take control of the Republican Party. Conservatives correctly see George W. Bush as one of their own. Bush does frequently depart from conservative orthodoxy, as with his tariffs, farm subsidies, and Medicare drug benefit. Yet conservatives understand that Bush sees these compromises as politically expedient, not a genuinely felt embrace of expansive government. His signature proposals--massive tax cuts and Social Security privatization--both reflect a belief that reducing government is an end in itself. Outside events exert not even the slightest influence on his policy goals. Bush steadfastly embraced his tax cuts as the economy veered from boom and surplus to slowdown to wartime to recovery and deficit.

Meanwhile, Democrats have continuously reexamined their policies in light of changing conditions. Bill Clinton came to office planning to spur the economy with a Keynesian stimulus, but abandoned those plans after fierce debate among his staff economists. Instead he embraced the novel goal of sparking recovery by slashing the deficit in the hopes that lower interest rates would enable sustainable growth. As that policy seemed to work, moderate liberals continued to embrace the credo of fiscal restraint. But, after the economy slid toward a recession in 2001, liberal economists abandoned short-term restraint in favor of temporary tax cuts to encourage spending.

Clinton also recognized the failure of welfare, previously a cherished liberal goal, to accomplish its stated purpose, and he enacted a sweeping overhaul. Many liberals complained, but the main objections centered around the details--certain punitive provisions and the lack of adequate job-creation measures--not the concept of welfare reform.

That Clinton's economic policymakers had great use for empirical inquiry, and Bush's do not, is hardly a secret. One way to see the contrast is to compare the economic summits each president has held. Clinton's 1992 Little Rock economic summit featured a vigorous and open-ended debate between diverse participants, and it helped persuade the Clinton team to alter the economic blueprint developed during the campaign. Bush's summits have been tightly scripted affairs in which supporters testify to the virtues of his policies.

Or compare two memoirs: Robert Reich's Locked in the Cabinet and Paul O'Neill's The Price of Loyalty. Both books chronicle the disillusionment of a former Cabinet member. Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, bemoans the triumph of cautious deficit-cutting over public investment, but his tale is larded with academic policy debates he simply happened to lose. O'Neill, the former Bush Treasury secretary, mourns that administration's hostility to expertise and fact-driven debate. "You don't have to know anything or search for anything," he says of the ideologues in the administration. "You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts. It's absolutism."