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."

CNU response to O'Toole attack on NU
The Congress for New Urbanism responds to the article I referenced in my 2-13 post:


Reason Mag's Bad Crime Tip
February 15, 2005
Reason Magazine has given its readers some bad crime advice, publishing a piece with a shaky grasp of the relationship between safety and urban design. Just as bad, the article misses the point on a subject its editors should know a thing or two about - the regulatory environment governing what gets built and where in the United States.

The article in question - Crime Friendly Neighborhoods - hit the magazine's web site this past week. It's written by Stephen Town, a British police officer who specializes in fortifying communities against crime, and Randal O'Toole, an economist known for attention-getting critiques that caricaturize the principles of traditional neighborhood design and New Urbanism.

The piece is a sharply worded attack on New Urbanism and its efforts to promote communities built around compact traditional neighborhoods, places with residences, schools, shops located within walking distance of each other. Near the top of the piece, Town and O'Toole make the sweeping claim that the neighborhood designs of New Urbanists "almost invariably increase crime."

But as Rob Steuteville, editor of New Urban News, notes in a rebuttal to the article, O'Toole and Town have a strange way of going about proving this hypothesis. "The 3,000-word article fails to mention a single New Urbanist community in the US that has increased crime," writes Steuteville. "Since nearly 500 sizable New Urbanist communities are under construction or built in the US ... why couldn't the authors come up with a single example...? The New Urbanism, after all, began the US more than 20 years ago."

Steuteville ticks off a list of well-known and well-received new communities where the authors could have tested their theories, including Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Celebration near Orlando, Florida, and Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon. "The idea that crime is a problem in these New Urbanist towns is laughable," says Steuteville.

And then there are the hundreds of infill projects that incorporate major elements of traditional urban design - projects such as Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, CA, and CityPlace in Long Beach, CA, which have replaced failed enclosed shopping malls with neighborhoods mixing residences and shops. They are associated with upturns in formerly struggling parts of their downtowns.

By far the strangest omission in the Reason piece, however, are the hundreds of public housing developments redeveloped according to New Urbanist design principles under the federal Hope VI program. Hope VI replaced towering and isolated housing "projects" with mixed-income neighborhoods incorporating townhouses, small apartment buildings and often schools or businesses, all on smaller blocks that connect with the surrounding street grid.

"The HOPE VI projects have been the subject of numerous studies, and they have come through with flying colors," reports Steuteville. "The gaping chasm between crime rates in public housing census tracts and their cities as a whole had narrowed from 141 percent in 1990 to only 26 percent in 2000 in places where HOPE VI plans had been put in place. And this change took place while citywide rates fell dramatically," says Steuteville, summarizing the results of a study by Sean Zielenbach for the Housing Research Foundation. At Diggs Town in Norfolk, VA, where a New Urbanist plan was put into place without displacing residents, police calls dropped from 25-30 calls a day to about three a week, according to one study.

The research that Town and O'Toole do cite at length is from the 1970s and pre-dates the New Urbanism movement by almost 20 years.
Ironically, this seminal research by Oscar Newman was based on his early observations that design flaws in St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects - which towered in isolation on desolate superblocks - made them more prone to crime. New Urbanists agreed with him and made fixing such design flaws a hallmark of the Hope VI program.

For Town and O'Toole, the lessons of Newman's research are extremely narrow. The problems of Pruitt-Igoe and other unsafe neighborhoods is too much public accessibility and unclaimed public space. So anything that restricts public access - cul-de-sacs, gates, the replacement of public parks with large, fenced back yards - is good, while anything that aids public accessibility is dangerous.

Newman himself didn't see things this way at all, as Laurence Aurbach has noted at City Comforts Blog. In his book Creating Defensible Spaces, Newman recognized a multitude of ways to promote safety through design. While it's obvious that building gated communities full of cul-de-sacs is one way of creating defensible space, Newman noted that safety improvements can also be gained from traditionally urban techniques that allow people to observe and claim responsibility for a space, even as it's shared with the public.

Where places have adequate "natural surveillance," Newman did not generally advise closing off streets and paths. Some of his own plans improved circulation. In the case of an Indianapolis public housing development, he proposed "a system of streets to penetrate the entire site" and said increased circulation would "greatly facilitate" the work of police.

In urban neighborhoods, Newman promoted "the close juxtaposition of the building with the street so that as many apartment interiors and building entries as possible face the street." Residents more easily extend their zones of influence over narrower streets, rather than wider ones, he said.

New Urbanists know these strategies well. Their goal is not adding accessibility and public space, willy-nilly, as Town and O'Toole allege. It's to create harmonious urban places that combine private spaces with active and well-observed, well-connected streets and other public spaces. Streets, squares and plazas are compact and lined with buildings whose many doors and windows help occupants provide ongoing natural surveillance. In places ranging from Brunswick, Maine to Savannah, Georgia to New York's Greenwich Village, these strategies create a satisfying level of safety. The logic of well-observed places is well-understood publicly - it's why today's parking structures are built with glassy stair towers facing streets and why they're now viewed as far more friendly and inviting.

With few real facts on their side, Town and O'Toole keep distorting the image of New Urbanism. In their opening anecdote, they cite the simple act of adding a bike path to the end of a British cul-de-sac as a New Urbanist act. Note to authors: Bike paths aren't a particularly urban form and inserting them into an area of cul-de-sacs hardly makes them urban. No New Urbanist would expect it to lead to a reduction in crime. So why blame us when the new path gave vandals from a nearby school easier access to the neighborhood?

The authors also portray cul-de-sac subdivisions as a sort of natural state of suburbia and New Urbanist reforms as attempts to regulate conventional suburbia out of existence. In truth, suburbia is already highly regulated. New Urbanism is a reaction against the arsenal of regulations and standards governing community design and real estate development in the United States. These mandates force the separation of businesses, residences, and civic facilities onto widely dispersed parcels reachable only by automobile. If you love the way the court house, church, school, shops and residences frame the public green in a place such as Woodstock, IL (better known as the setting for Bill Murray's Groundhog Day), you can almost forget about building another community like it without having to change a lot of regulations, which is no easy task.

Don't just take it from us. Here's Catesby Leigh, writing in the National Review: "The idea that suburbia is a spontaneous, market-driven phenomenon is completely false... Modernist planning is deeply entrenched. In most of the country, getting traditional, mixed-use neighborhood projects approved is a Herculean task, for the simple reason that they are illegal under postwar zoning ordinances. Under the modernist regime, builders specialize in plopping down substantial quantities of homogeneous 'product' in self-contained precincts. One builder does apartment houses, another single-family homes, another hotels, another office towers, another warehouses, and so on."

Strangely, Reason joins O'Toole as defenders of this heavy-handed regulatory culture - and opponents of reform efforts that seek better options for community leaders in shaping their communities, as well as more options for citizens in choosing a community. Adds Leigh, "Officials at all levels of government should do what they can to level the playing field for competition between two very distinct approaches to shaping the human environment by making sure the [New Urbanist] SmartCode approach is an option for local communities - which, of course, should have the final say on land-use issues." Here, here.

CNU President and CEO John Norquist invites the editors of Reason and other libertarians to have a true dialogue on community design. He notes that the Congress for the New Urbanism invited O'Toole to a debate at its annual Congress in Chicago last year and even paid his air fare. That makes the poorly substantiated attack puzzling. "There's a bitterness emanating from this man towards New Urbanism that's hard to understand," said Norquist. "We welcome a true exchange with the libertarians. When you get past stereotypes, it's clear that New Urbanism seeks to broaden consumer choice. We strongly advocate for the benefits of traditional neighborhood design, but it's not about forcing that choice on anybody. The desirability and safety of well-designed urban places speak for themselves."

a bit more pointless New Urbanism bashing
On Reason online, Randall O' Toole bashes grid streets, asserting that cul-de-sacs and separation of land uses control crime.

O'Toole asserts that the safest neighborhoods are dominated by cul-de-sacs that are as isolated as possible from stores and from other streets, implying that any neighborhood in which residents can walk anywhere at all is "custom made for easy crime" because of the possible influx of strangers. In other words, the way to stay safe is to imprison yourself.

But the experiment of imprisoning residents in order to protect them has been tried in the American Sun Belt, with dismal results. In my former home town of Atlanta, the traditional street grid disappears about two or three miles from downtown, to be replaced by a maze of cul-de-sacs. Yet in 2002, Atlanta had 1964 burglaries per 100,000 people - more than five times as many as New York City, and more than twice as many as San Francisco. (I think burglaries are the most relevant crime to this argument because that crime is most likely to occur inside a house, and thus most likely to be connected to street design and land use - and also because O'Toole has, in another article, used the term burglar-friendly to describe pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods).


The rest of metropolitan Atlanta has tried similar techniques with equally dismal results. According to a Smart Growth America survey, Atlanta has the third lowest "street connectivity" score in America - that is, its streets do not connect with each other, just as O'Toole would like.

Yet the region boasted 924 burglaries per 100,000 people in 2003 - more than twice as many as in metro New York City (356 burglaries/100,000), the region with the highest level of street connectivity for which 2003 regional crime statistics are available. Rochester and Syracuse, the two regions with the lowest level of street connectivity, also have burglary rates higher than metropolitan New York City.

Segregating housing from commerce is no panacea either. The three regions with the lowest mix use levels are Raleigh (854 burglaries/100,000), Greensboro (1198/100,000) and Riverside (853/100,000)- all more burglary-prone than the national average of 757 burglaries per 100,000 people. By contrast, the three most mixed-use areas for which crime statistics were available (Providence, Allentown and Oxnard) all had fewer than 600 burglaries per 100,000 people.

To be sure, regional crime statistics are of limited value, because regions include a wide variety of neighborhoods.

But plenty of small suburbs have a gridded, mixed-use core and extremely low crime rates. For example, East Aurora, New York is dominated by a gridded 19th-century downtown - yet it had fewer than 150 burglaries per 100,000 people (20 in a town with just under 14,000 residents). Ditto for Haddonfield, New Jersey, which sits on a subway line running from Philadelphia and crime-infested Camden, and had just over 11,000 residents and only 10 burglaries.

Concededly, these neighborhoods are high-income enclaves. But how do they stay that way? If East Aurora-style urbanism was so inherently undesirable, high-income people would stop living there.

More importantly, if high-income suburbs have low crime rates no matter what their geographic form, it logically follows that the main reason one town is more dangerous than another isn't urban form: its demography. Places with lots of poor people have a lot more crime, whether they look like East Aurora or like a typical Atlanta suburb. Places that don't have a lot of poor people don't have a lot of crime.

cute parody of Bush bashing (I think)
I found this in the "Fray" (the readers' feedback section of Slate:

"The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable -- yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom."

Truth: The road of Providence is I-95, which depending on traffic conditions and maintenance, can be quite uneven and unpredictable.

http://www.dot.state.ri.us/WebTraf/index.html.

But mislead: I-95 does not lead to freedom, or at least not directly. Directly, it leads along the Providence River past Rhode Island Hospital and Providence Place. It does lead to Pawtucket to the North and Cranston to the South (which does have a Freedom Seafood), and technically, goes all the way up and down the Eastern Seaboard. But freedom is not found anywhere near I-95 in Providence itself.

There is a Freedom Square a few miles off I-95 in Reston, Virginia.

http://www.mortons.com/website/htmldocs/locations/restonP.html

There is also the Freedom Florence Recreational Center off I-95 in South Carolina.

http://www.cityofflorence.com/freedom/vision.html.

And a Freedom Commerce Drive off I-95 in Jacksonville, Florida (go Eagles!)

http://www.motel6.com/reservations/motel_detail.asp?MotelId=1232&state=FL&full=Florida&city=Jacksonville

And the Freedom Salon and Spa about ? mile off I-95 in York Maine, whose website, in classic Republican fashion, tells us "Freedom will be on your right in the rotunda." I'm am not making this up.

http://www.freedomsalonandspa.com/contactus.htm

That Bush has to continuously resort to such verbal trickery is a disservice to our nation and to freedom itself. And no, I am not referring to the Freedom Federal Credit Union ATM in I-95's Maryland House rest stop."

Bush budget out
The Bush budget is out, and right now I don't have anything exciting to say about the details. But I do recommend the Historical Tables,which show how the government has grown (and occasionally shrunk) over time. A couple of things that grabbed me from Table 1.2:

1. Even if you believe the Bush projections, government will be bigger in 2010 that it was when Bush took office. In FY 2001, government took up 18.5% of GNP. Today its at 20.3%. Bush claims it will be at 19% in FY 2010. (Of course, these sorts of projections tend to be highly optimistic).

2. The good news: either way, government far smaller than under Reagan. In the 80s, federal outlays took up 21-23% of GNP.