New Deal

The New Deal at 75: An Inspiration, Not a Blueprint

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:57:40 -0400

Whatever your political perspective, Americans need to admire the New Deal for, if nothing else, its ambitious agenda. In a way unparalleled in the 20th Century, the New Deal left us a legacy of achievement – one that we can still see in big cities like San Francisco and small towns like Wishek, North Dakota.

The great genius of the New Deal lay not in ideology but in its pragmatism and practicality. People were out of work so it created jobs. The country’s infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas, was primitive, so it took on the task of modernization.

In some ways, this paralleled what was also being done under the Communists in the Soviet Union as well as under Fascists in Italy and under the National Socialists in Germany. This has led some conservatives, such as “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg, to conflate the New Deal legacy with fascism. But this assertion is belied by the fact that we still live under a democratic and liberal political structure, one that by the 1980s had turned to oppose much of that legacy.

Yet I believe that even Ronald Reagan – himself once an avid New Dealer – would admit that the New Deal did much to expand America’s middle class. It did so not by promoting redistribution and welfarism or by moral cajoling – characteristics Mike Lind identifies with the more elite Progressives – but by practical actions that gave people the tools with which to build their own individual prosperity.

Economically speaking, it is also true that the New Deal failed to recreate prosperity (at least until the onset of the Second World War). But it cannot be denied that it literally brought light to large parts of the country – particularly the Southeast and the rural Great Plains – into the 20th Century. Among the New Deal’s great accomplishments, as Andy Sywak discusses, are its public works.A partial list of these accomplishments include:

• 22,428 road projects
• 7488 educational buildings
• Over 7000 sewer, water and other public buildings
• Employed over 3,000,000 workers earning who helped support 10,000,000 dependents
• Employed 125,000 engineers, social workers, accountants, superintendents, foremen and timekeepers scattered in every state and community

Ultimately, notes scholar Jason Scott Smith, the New Deal touched intimately the lives of more than fifty million out of a total U.S. population in 1933 of 125 million. Yet its legacy went well beyond the Roosevelt years, extending from Roosevelt and Truman all the way to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and, even to some extent, Richard Nixon.

As Sherle Schwenninger points out, The New Deal created the basis for the great, and widely shared, national prosperity of the post-war period. Through infrastructure spending, housing programs, the GI Bill and government-funded scientific research, the New Deal directly and indirectly helped make the United States the premier power on the world scene and by far its strongest economy.

America remains the preeminent country in the world, but there is a great, widely held belief that this status is slipping as other countries – China, Russia, Brazil, India – enact what amounts to their own New Deals. Our once vibrant middle class is under siege, our infrastructure is aging and even “progressives” seem more interested in promoting avant garde cultural values than in economic growth, upward mobility or maintaining technological excellence. Even in the field of conservation, a core value of the New Deal and progressive traditions, the focus is increasing less about preserving resources and open space for people, and more about how to preserve and insulate nature from the ill-effects of human carbon-based life forms.

Yet if we can be inspired by the New Deal, we can not simply repeat it. For one thing, our crisis today is less palpable and immediate, making it all but impossible to mobilize resources in the same way. At the same time, the public sector, small at the onset of New Deal, has already swollen to gargantuan size. The power of organized public employees, largely a non-factor in the 1930s and 1940s, threatens any government initiative by siphoning off too many local and federal resources due to their often extravagant demands in everything from salaries and work rules to pensions.

This can be seen in the morphing of the New Deal legacy in large cities including the greatest of all, New York. Under Mayor Fiorella La Guardia, a maverick Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt stripe, the city built new parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, roads, and sanitation systems with an almost messianic fervor. At one time, New York City was receiving one-seventh of all funds dispersed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Yet La Guardia’s expanded city government, notes Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel, still operated under an efficiency-oriented progressive administration. La Guardia and his parks commissioner, Robert Moses fired political appointees and dismissed incumbents, leading some public employees to identify him with the Italian dictator Mussolini. Rejecting narrow ideology, La Guardia famously claimed: “There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets.”

La Guardia’s successors, in New York and elsewhere, did not stick to this moral and administrative rigor. The share government workers in New York’s workforce expanded from 10 percent in 1950 to over 17 percent in 1970s but with increasingly little accountability. If a new New Deal means a large expansion of the unionized public workforce, in New York or elsewhere, it will be largely doomed.

So as we admire the achievements of the New Deal, we also need to keep in mind the shortcomings that grew out of its success. That we need a new powerful commitment to infrastructure and economic growth is undoubted, but in pursuing this we need to make sure it does not serve primarily the public employee lobbies and the well-organized rent-seeking private interests.

New solutions, such as tapping abundant capital resources from both here and abroad, need to be tried out. And given the overconcentration of power already in Washington, and the spread of technical expertise to states and regions, a greater emphasis on locally based initiatives may work better this time around.

Yet in the end, American still requires some form of broad initiative to overcome its current doldrums. This requires the same kind of bold, innovative and pragmatic spirit characteristic of the New Deal that three quarters of a century later remains its most useful legacy.

Joel Kotkin is the Executive Editor of www.newgeography.com.

Other New Geography New Deal articles:

The New Deal & the Legacy of Public Works
New Deal Investments Created Enduring, Livable Communities
Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape
Public Investment, Decentralization and Other Economic Lessons from the New Deal
Emerald City Emergence: Seattle and the New Deal
Excavating The Buried Civilization of Roosevelt’s New Deall

Other New Deal sites:

New Deal Network (sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute)
New Deal Cultural Programs
California’s Living New Deal Project

Why Sen. Josh Hawley Telling Young Men to Man Up Won't Work

Aaron M. Renn — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:28:58 -0500

One of the reasons I started writing my newsletter was that I saw so many young men turning to online gurus for life advice rather than seeking direction from traditional institutions and authority figures, particularly the church. Why are young men avoiding church but tuning in by the millions to people ranging from the relatively anodyne Jordan Peterson to the dubious Andrew Tate?

I came to the conclusion that the church was getting it wrong on some important points, and the online gurus, despite being morally questionable in many cases, were often more factually accurate and gave better insights about the real world we live in.

I want to highlight an example of how traditional conservative figures miss the mark on men in the form of a recent appearance by Sen. Josh Hawley on Tucker Carlson’s show. I believe Hawley is serious and well-intentioned. I completely share his goals that more people would get married and have kids, and that men would kick the porn habit. Unlike many, he’s also getting some things right. Unfortunately, he is also off in some ways that will undermine his effectiveness. I will review these in some detail so that he, and others who are genuinely concerned about the problems facing young men today, can re-calibrate to become even more effective.

But first let’s watch these. Here’s the Tucker Carlson segment:

Here’s a transcript of a portion of Hawley’s remarks:

Somebody’s got to be honest and tell the truth to these young men. And the truth is that what the porn industry is selling them is a total lie. And the truth is, American society needs them. We need them to step up. We need them to go get married, have families, and be responsible husbands and fathers. This society is impoverished because too many young men are too despairing, are too checked out on social media or porn to be doing what we need them to be doing as a country. It’s time to call people, to call young people in particular, young men, to be something more. And Tucker, they want to be called to it. They don’t want to be sold a bill of goods anymore. Somebody needs to tell them the truth.

…

The message to young people is the most you can aspire to in life is to be a consumer who sits in a cubicle in front of a computer all day - and doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t do anything meaningful with your life. And what we need to say to young men - and young women, too - is just the opposite. Aspire to be something more than a consumer. For young men, aspire to be something more than a consumer of pornography. Aspire to actually create something in your life - like create a family, for instance. That is the single greatest act of rebellion, if you like, against the liberal culture that is suppressing people’s desires, that is suppressing their potential, is to go out and actually engage in real relationships, get married, have a family, have kids, have your own ideas and be a responsible member of society. This is what people are built to do. It’s what young people want to do. They want to be challenged.

Tucker’s segment is a follow-up to a speech by Hawley at a recent Turning Points USA event. TPUSA is a youth oriented conservative group similar to the old Young Americans for Freedom or College Republicans. I was unable to find a full video of Hawley’s talk (send it to me at if you have one). But here are what appear to be a few clips.

Read the rest of this piece on Aaron M. Renn on Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: screenshot from video.

Meeting Labor's Moment

Lane Windham — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

In my thirty years in the labor movement, I’ve never seen a moment quite like this one. We’re living through a pivotal moment for America’s working class and for the future of U.S. labor, but it’s more than that. This is a major shift in the social and economic order.

In order to see the path forward, we have to consider what’s different from the system we’ve operated in for the last 40 years. The last time we saw such a shift began in the 1970s, when markets-are-always-right thinking eclipsed New Deal ideas that prioritized checks and balances on capital.

Now market-centric neoliberal thinking is weakening. The pandemic is key. There’s far more public awareness about how poorly workers have been treated, and this has driven up public support for unionism. A full 71 percent approve of unions, according to recent Gallup polling, which is the highest level since 1965. Gen Z is the most pro-union generation alive, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress. Gen Zers are more supportive of unions than were Boomers, GenXers or Millennials at the same age.

Yet the shift we’re living through together actually started before the pandemic with the Great Recession of 2008-09 when new, diverse movements began to challenge the status quo. The Occupy Movement of 2011 united people under the banner of “We are the 99%.” The Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, the #metoo movement in 2017, and the Day Without an Immigrant in 2017 all laid bare the hollow promise of a neoliberal system in which “equity” merely meant equal access to the market, not fundamental reform.

Even before the pandemic, labor activity increased to new levels. There were more people on strike in 2018 and 2019—half a million a year—than in any year in the previous thirty. The #RedforEd strikes brought out teachers in a host of conservative-leaning states, and unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, they enjoyed enormous public support for their walkouts. Fight for $15 effectively raised minimum wages in many cities and states.

People no longer believe the “Washington consensus” that prioritized unfettered corporate access to global markets, no matter the cost to workers and communities. Our lived reality has revealed the false promises of neoliberalism. Wildfires, floods and heat waves all make us see the climate crisis and the need for structural reform. Workers are pushing back against the kinds of bad jobs that have become the norm over the last 40 years.

Yet the erosion of the neoliberal order isn’t a guaranteed win for workers. Rather, the shift has helped spark a global political backlash, including the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the UK’s Brexit, and other right-wing, populist fronts that threaten the advance of democratic ideals. Though Democrats squeaked out the Senate in this most recent election, ultra right-wing voices remained a potent force.

The post-neoliberal world could move in a direction that is neo-authoritarian and that is fundamentally elitist and anti-democratic. Or it could be a turn to a communitarian, multiracial democracy that is based in the common good. In order for labor to help ensure that the second option prevails, we must help forge a new order that lifts all working people.

Read the rest of this piece at Working-Class Perspectives.

Lane Windham, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. She is also co-director of WILL Empower.

Building Back Better?

Joseph A. McCartin — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

As we await U.S. Senate action on President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, it is worth reflecting on what the past few tumultuous months have meant for U.S. workers. Much has happened in the short time since the summer drew to a close. Collective and individual actions have worked together to create new leverage for both organized and unorganized workers that didn’t exist six months ago. Workers are expressing higher levels of discontent than we have seen in years. And the federal government has taken a more pro-worker and even pro-union stance than most living Americans have ever seen before.

To begin with, an unprecedented number of workers have quit their jobs in what we have taken to calling the “Great Resignation.” A record 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August, according to the aptly named JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary) survey. Many economists predicted that number would decline in September as children returned to in-person school, relieving working parents from the difficult balancing act they had maintained during the pandemic, when managing online schooling forced many, especially women, to leave their jobs. Instead, workers broke the record again in September as 4.4 million quit. The unprecedented willingness of workers to say “Take This Job and Shove It,” as the old David Alan Coe song put it, has produced something rare in U.S. history: a worker-created labor shortage that has hit sectors that offer low wages (like fast food) and terrible working conditions (as in trucking) especially hard. Plenty of people who could flip burgers or who hold trucking licenses are choosing not to.

Workers’ increasing willingness to quit bad jobs has in turn strengthened the hands of unionized workers, who have decided to take advantage of this moment to stage walkouts. A spate of strikes at John Deere, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, and Alabama’s Warrior Met coal company, among others, led observers to coin a new portmanteau — “Striketober.” The last U.S. strike surge happened in 2018, when more workers went on strike than in any year since the mid-1980s. But that surge was driven almost entirely by public sector workers. Almost 80% of strikers in 2018 were teachers, #RedforEd strikers in West Virginia, Arizona, and other states, or the “Bargaining for the Common Good” strikes led by the big teachers’ unions in LA and Chicago. Private sector workers sat out the 2018 strike wave. Since Ronald Reagan famously broke the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, the strike rate among private sector workers has continuously declined. In 2020, there were only eight major work stoppages in the US (down from a postwar high of 470 in 1952)—and only two of those involved the private sector.

While the recent “strike wave” is tiny in comparison to past instances of worker militancy, it reveals a growing discontent among workers that may just begin to rouse unions out of the defensive crouch they have been in recent years. John Deere strikers twice rejected tentative agreements between their union, the United Auto Workers, and management before finally agreeing to a contract that included an immediate 10% wage hike. After rejecting a tentative agreement with their university after a monthlong strike in the spring, members of the Columbia University graduate workers union walked out again on November 3. Perhaps most significantly of all, the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union recently chose new leadership. By an overwhelming 2-1 margin, Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman defeated Steve Vairma and Ron Herrera for the Teamster’s top offices after running a campaign that criticized the leadership of outgoing president James Hoffa as too business-friendly.

But the change isn’t just happening among workers. The federal government has taken some remarkably pro-worker actions lately compared to those of administrations of either party over the past half-century. In successive weeks in October, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited a John Deere picket line in Iowa, and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh joined Kellogg’s strikers in Pennsylvania. For decades before this, even putatively pro-union cabinet members embraced neutrality during strikes, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman, did during the 1997 UPS strike, when she demanded that “everyone involved must show greater flexibility and willingness to compromise.”

Read the rest of this piece at Working Class Perspectives.

Joseph A. McCartin is Professor of History and Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

Photo: USDA via Flickr in Public Domain.

The GND Has No Plan to Replace Crude Oil Products

Ronald Stein — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Two of the fossil fuels, coal, and natural gas, are used to generate continuous uninterruptible electricity, but crude oil, the third fossil fuel, is seldom ever used for electricity, but primarily used to manufacture oil derivatives that thousands of products are based upon, and the fuels for the various transportation infrastructures.

The primary usage of crude oil is NOT for the generation of electricity, but to manufacture transportation fuels needed by the world’s aviation, merchant ships, cruise ships, militaries, and vehicles, and to manufacture oil derivatives that make 6,000 products used in our daily lives, and the economy.

After crude oil was introduced around 1900, we created various modes of transportation, a medical industry, and electronics and communications systems. Oil reduced infant mortality, extended longevity from 40+ to more than 80+, and gave the public the ability to move anywhere in the world via planes, trains, ships, and vehicles, and virtually eliminated deaths from most diseases and from all forms of weather. The consequences of abandoning crude oil and all the progress after its introduction into society could be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change.

While just 2 of the products manufactured from crude oil are gasoline and diesel fuels for the shorter-range vehicles of cars and trucks, EV technology is making progress to replace those two products from oil. EV owners have demonstrated that their usage of EV’s for approximately 5,000 miles per year represents a real opportunity to meet that short range need with EV’s.

Governor Newsom’s call on the global community to end reliance on crude oil, represents total blindness of the fact that crude oil is the feedstock to refineries for the manufacturing of products that have led to developed countries being healthy and wealthy.

The GND that Newsom and President Biden have bought into, seeks to replace ALL fossil fuels, including the innocent bystander of crude oil that is seldom used for electricity, but necessary for products and fuels. The “green” movement is all-in for breezes and sunshine to replace coal and natural gas for electricity, but the movement has absolutely no concept that the third fossil fuel of crude oil is the feedstock to refineries to manufacture products. Any grade school educated kid can understand that breezes and sunshine, can only generate weather-dependent intermittent electricity, but cannot manufacture anything.

Read the rest of this piece at CFACT.org.

Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.

Photo credit: courtesy CFACT.org

Dirty Jobs, Essential Workers, and the Infrastructure Bills

James V. Catano — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Current negotiations over the second infrastructure bill may remind a lot of people of Mike Rowe’s oddly popular series Dirty Jobs. Which makes sense. Watching a man stumble around inside a sewage tank as he gags loudly and directs us toward closeups of turds, rancid grease balls, and darkly bubbling sewage can clarify a lot about infrastructure negotiations.

That isn’t a sarcastic comparison. Rowe actually talks directly about infrastructure in Dirty Jobs, and the kinds of jobs he highlights and what he ignores can help explain recent disagreements over what qualifies as ‘real’ infrastructure. For some, infrastructure means material structures: bridges that allow traffic and goods to flow smoothly. For others, infrastructure includes workers who support society at its base, such as meatpackers who provide goods moving over those bridges, or day-care workers who help parents find time to actually have a job.

Clearly, how we define infrastructure and essential workers reflects our attitudes toward jobs that society needs in order to function but all too often considers dirty work: labor tinged with social and/moral taint. Everett Hughes’s “Good People and Dirty Work” and Eyal Press’s recent Dirty Work both discuss such morally tainted work: debt collectors, prison and concentration camp personnel, sex workers.

But when we think of infrastructure, we’re more likely to think about the kind of jobs that Ruth Simpson, Jason Hughes, and Natasha Slutskaya consider in Gender, Class, and Occupation: Working Class Men Doing Dirty Work. These jobs are physically dirty: refuse collection and street cleaning, butchery, coal mining. This sort of dirty work is the central core of Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.

Running for nearly 10 seasons, Dirty Jobs offers viewers both specific examples of dirty work and a broader understanding of infrastructure. Both the show’s content and Rowe as its narrator gained wide-spread popularity, particularly among blue-collar workers eager to see their labor displayed up close and personal.

Yet that popularity contains an inherent social paradox. While we know that dirty jobs have to be done, we usually try not to notice work that offends us, especially jobs that are morally tainted. But Dirty Jobs argues that we should see this work, especially that involving physical labor. It actually revels in displaying dirty jobs, visualizing such work fully and in detail, even as the series is properly “cleaned” to exclude morally compromised topics.

In short, Dirty Jobs features jobs high in “ick” factor but relatively low in ethical complexities. As in gory horror films, scenes are intended to shock and disturb by laying bare the permeability and deeply fluid nature of the human body and its related activities.

Equally important is Rowe’s attention to boyish, even grade-school humor material: things that are inside of or come out of bodies in various ways, some natural some decidedly not. Fecal matter — human crap, worm poop, bat guano; bodily corruption—roadkill, animal slaughter; and jobs connected to sex—artificial insemination; all loom large in early episodes of Dirty Jobs, setting its tone from the start. As Rowe himself notes, episodes are regularly “repulsive, repellant, raunchy, and rank.”

Such forms of physical dirt and bodily leakage are usually taboo, so they are either hidden or publicly visualized only in ritualized form. The standard pattern of episodes of Dirty Jobs makes it both a formalized practice and a delightful form of rule-breaking, further enhancing its boyish good humor.

To no small degree, that humor is key to defusing disgust. Rowe stands in for the audience, with his amateur performances and ongoing commentary working on many levels: pulling back the curtain, allowing both direct participation and physical distance, visually enacting horror, disgust, and enough humor to smooth the dangerous edges on all those reactions.

Read the rest of this piece at Working-Class Perspectives.

James V. Catano is producer/director of Enduring Legacy: Louisiana’s Croatian Americans and author of Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man. He is Professor Emeritus of English and Screen Arts at Louisiana State University.

Joe Biden's Class War

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Joe Biden may present himself as a ‘working-class hero’, a claim reiterated recently in the leftist American Prospect, but increasingly America’s workers are showing signs not of common cause but disquiet. Hollywood workers just announced a large-scale strike, some of whom blame their hard times on the ‘disruption’ to their industry wrought by tech firms, which are distinctly hostile to unions. There’s also increased tensions at Disneyland, as well as numerous organising efforts targeting Biden’s oligarch allies like Amazon and Starbucks.

One possible cause for the unrest lies with inflationary pressures that have cancelled out any income gains for most people outside the oligarchic elites. The sad economic reality of today – real wages are in decline – contrasts uncomfortably with the far better performance for working people under the pre-pandemic Trump administration.

High inflation – notably for food, rent and housing – cutting against working- and middle-class budgets seems likely to spread more labour unrest across the country. Today only 22 per cent of Americans express optimism about the economy, and confidence in Biden’s economic leadership has fallen to nearly 40 per cent.

This grassroots unease poses a major challenge to a man who some see as the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, Biden’s programme, shaped by Senator Bernie Sanders, is far more aggressively socialist than many expected. This is quite a transition for a man once widely castigated on the left as a predictable ‘corporate hack’, particularly subservient to credit-card companies based in his home state. In 2019, the Guardian accused Biden of ‘dressing up his candidacy in a blue-collar costume’ – adding that ‘he’s never taken a political risk for workers’.

Biden clearly lacks FDR’s charm, easy-speaking manner and vision, which were critical to the New Deal’s political legacy. Unlike FDR, who enjoyed huge congressional majorities and widespread public support, Biden faces a divided congress, backing a programme that polls poorly outside his own party. Roosevelt dealt with a global economic catastrophe where deflation and mass unemployment were the key challenges. Biden’s spending programme comes amid a labour shortage and high inflation now rising faster than at any time in 30 years (as also seems to be the case in Europe).

Biden’s programme of massive new spending and tax increases has been criticised not just by conservative economists, but also by veterans of the Clinton and Obama eras. Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers has criticised Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar spending programme as inherently inflationary. This is not the medicine an economy choked by supply issues, rising commodity shortages and low labour participation needs, he argues.

Since 2016 the seeming unity of the Democratic coalition lay in common detestation for Donald Trump, which motivated a wide array of people. Yet as soon as Biden was in power, his coalition began to fracture, as Big Tech companies, Wall Street and well-to-do taxpayers rallied to make sure that progressive reform does not morph into a democratic socialism.

Biden’s dual identities – ally of oligarchy and friend of the working class – are in fundamental conflict. On green, gender and other gentry-liberal issues, the progressive left and the oligarchy are in fundamental agreement. But when it comes to class issues, like taxes and labour organising, the new oligarchs, however sartorially modest they are these days, still think like corporate aristocrats. They are desperate to preserve their quasi-monopolies and unorganised workforce, and often use groups like the Business Roundtable as convenient fronts.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz via Flickr under U.S. Government work, in Public Domain.

Grandpa's Basement House

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 20:28:58 -0400

My mother-in-law was born in a small town in rural Nebraska in 1941. Her father was oversees fighting World War II for the first few years of her life, so she and her mother lived on her grandparents’ farm in a society absent of young men. When her father returned home after the war he took a job at the post office and set about building a home for the family which quickly included three more children. In those early days the lawn was actually a highly productive vegetable garden that generated enough surplus in summer and fall to be put by for winter and spring. People raised on farms had all the required construction and preservation skills to provide for their own essentials. Critically, our institutions generally didn’t offer much resistance.

The late 1940s were a transitional period when the old iterative ad hoc era was coming to an end, but the mass produced Levittown version of suburbia hadn’t yet emerged. People were still operating largely under the previous development model of incremental modest self built homes that grew and evolved over time. The “minimum viable product” concept was alive and well. Land was purchased with cash. The basement was constructed first, also on a cash basis, and fit with a bare bones kitchen and bath. That space was occupied for a few years until more cash could be pulled together to build the ground floor. In time there might be a second above ground story as well as horizontal additions. To the extent that there was any debt associated with any of this work it was short term and typically borrowed from family or friends. Most of the work was done by the home owners themselves.

Next door the neighbors had clearly taken the same path with their property. Today just about every part of this plan is illegal, culturally unacceptable, and economically unwieldy in most locations. These basement homes are too small to be approved by local authorities. Minimum square footage requirements have been put in place to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes. Most municipal codes insist on two off street covered parking spaces which, in this case, would be the same size and likely the same cost as the homes themselves. Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws. And building anything in stages is frowned upon since the present custom is to create a finished product all at once and never change any part of it without interacting with a host of special committees and review boards. I have no doubt that the four children, now in their 70s and 80s, who spent their early years in the basement house would never tolerate such activity in their own neighborhoods today. It’s just too trashy and sets the wrong tone.

But here we are seventy odd years later and neither of these homes have ever received their upper floor additions. I asked why and was told that by the 1950s it was clear that the national economy had re-centered away from agriculture and small farm towns to a handful of big cities. The basement house was sold for about what it cost to build, the family packed up their belongings, and they moved to the coast - first to Seattle, then to Los Angeles. The old town never grew beyond that 1950 peak, and was actually lucky to avoid complete depopulation and abandonment as was the case for many other rural settlements. No doubt, permanently half finished homes like these were one of the reasons incrementalism was eventually outlawed.

Read the rest of this piece at Granola Shotgun.

Johnny Sanphillippo is an amateur architecture buff with a passionate interest in where and how we all live and occupy the landscape, from small rural towns to skyscrapers and everything in between. He travels often, conducts interviews with people of interest, and gathers photos and video of places worth talking about (which he often shares on Strong Towns). Johnny writes for Strong Towns, and his blog, Granola Shotgun.

The Green New Deal will Impoverish America

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 20:28:58 -0400

‘The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all… Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.’ So said Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and generally acknowledged author of the Green New Deal.

Sometimes it is wise to find out what ideas’ originators actually think. That is true for documents that have lit up our lives, such as the US Constitution, as well as for those that have darkened them, such as Mein Kampf.

This is true as well for the nascent Green New Deal, which President Joe Biden has essentially adopted as his own. Even if Congress fails to pass it entirely, Biden will seek to impose many of its goals through administrative diktats on gas-powered cars, land use, airplanes, any form of fossil fuel and nuclear power. Green New Dealers will also extend the welfare state, including to those who choose not to work.

As Chakrabarti indicated, the Green New Deal is not another environmental ameliorative, but something far more fundamentally transformative. The Biden administration’s embrace of it is somewhat surprising given that the likely economic fallout of this plan – particularly for the working class – made both Biden and House speaker Nancy Pelosi distance themselves from it during the fall campaign. But now the Green New Deal has resurfaced, having made the metamorphosis from a leftist fantasy into a serious political initiative.

Environmental puritanism and its consequences

The deep-seated sense of pending apocalypse that grips Western elites is driving the shift to draconian and radical policies. Some politicians, like Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer, have called on Biden to declare ‘a climate emergency’, which would essentially give the White House a blank cheque and unlimited power to impose its vision.

For environmental puritans like Blumenauer, climate sin is equivalent to sex and gluttony in the original Massachusetts version. For a generation, environmentalist advocates have prophesied an imminent climate disaster that would, if not met with extreme action, threaten the very future of humanity. Such catastrophism, as a 2021 paper by two Carnegie Mellon professors demonstrates, undermines the climate-change movement’s credibility. This assertion is also made in environmentalist Michael Shellenberger’s devastating Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Remarkably, despite this record of distortion, climate hysteria has become the abiding faith of the dominant media, universities and a large swath of the corporate establishment, particularly on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Some have even embraced the hardly capitalist notion of degrowth, an ideology which suggests, in essence, the Western working and middle classes must sacrifice comfort and aspiration to save the planet. (Often at the urging of the world’s wealthiest people, with their grand estates and private jets!)

Although most industrial unions backed Biden, the first clear victims of his embrace of the Green New Deal are obvious: people working in energy and fields that depend on reliable and affordable energy, such as oil workers, truck drivers, factory and logistics workers. For example, a move to ban fracking – which vice-president Kamala Harris has supported – would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, cost several million jobs. This will be made much worse by the green turn against nuclear power and natural gas, notes long-time environmentalist Ted Nordhaus.

Under the Green New Deal, displaced workers will be placed on the dole, or encouraged to take a job in the ‘green economy’. Yet these jobs, notes a recent Building Trades Union study, pay far worse, and are less likely to last long or be unionised, than those in the conventional energy industry. ‘It’s pie-in-the-sky bullshit about these green jobs being good middle-class jobs, because they’re not’, said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, in conversation with Politico. ‘I’m concerned about union members and union families being left behind… and I think they’ve already been left behind.’

Climate activists today often mouth slogans about how climate change is also ‘racist’, but historically disadvantaged minorities are most likely to be negatively affected by a Green New Deal. In California, a test case for Green New Deal-style policies, extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices. The biggest losers have been African Americans and Latinos. Overall, minorities in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco do far worse economically than in historically less regulated and taxed places like Kansas City, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Dallas or Nashville.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked Online.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Senate Democrats via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

What Happened to Social Democracy?

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 20:28:58 -0400

In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.

In its place, we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change. Abandoned by traditional Left parties, some voters have drifted into nativist—and sometimes openly racist—opposition while more have simply become alienated from major institutions and pessimistic about the future.

The revolution in class relations

Social democracy was a product of the inequities of the industrial era and the consequent solidarity that flourished among working people. This often resulted in greater justice for racial minorities. The German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein developed an “evolutionary” ideology based on gradualism, practical results, and a commitment to democratic norms. Observing late-19th century Britain, where unions were accepted even in business circles, Bernstein noticed that working conditions, contrary to Marxist dogma, were steadily improving. He believed that the proletariat was evolving from an oppressed underclass into a more upwardly mobile group, whose goal was to find “an appropriate status in industrial society.” For their efforts, Social Democrats were denounced as “social fascists” by Stalin, and Antifa’s predecessors—the German Antifaschistische Aktion—spent at least as much time fighting them as fighting the Nazis. A fatal error.

After the Second World War, however, social democrats enjoyed considerable success while the remarkable productivity of the private sector helped transform the once-forlorn proletariat into something more bourgeois in aspiration. A study covering the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States shows that all three saw a rapid decline in the concentration of wealth until the 1970s. Their program focused on physical needs such as boosting access to electricity and improving public health and education.

Never before had so much prosperity and relative economic security been so widely enjoyed. By the 1960s, the American labor movement could boast of “developing a whole new middle class,” said Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. Industrial laborers could afford to buy homes, send their kids to college, and live the kind of life only the affluent had previously enjoyed. Western Europe benefited from the same process—economic growth helped finance a welfare state that provided greater security and improved the prospects of most families; the rapid growth of export industries, in particular, was an integral part of the original Swedish social model of increasing wages without inflation.

Starting in the 1970s, such things as foreign competition, mass immigration from developing countries, automation, and the growing financialization of economic power undermined this progress. In the United States, data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low since the 1970s. Wealth gains in recent decades have gone overwhelmingly to the top one percent of households, and especially to the top 0.5 percent. Social mobility has declined in over two-thirds of European Union countries, including Sweden. Across the 36 wealthier countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP while the middle class has shrunk. Much of the global middle class is heavily in debt—mainly because of high housing costs—and “looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters,” suggests the OECD.

Parties repositioning

One might assume that this concentration of wealth would energize traditional working class parties—Labour in Britain and Australia, the Liberals in Canada, the Democrats in the US—but they shifted their focus away from blue-collar and lower-middle-class workers. Instead, leftwing parties are increasingly peopled by, and cultivated support from, the well-educated professional class—now an estimated 15 percent of the US work force—along with the corporate elites and academic clerisy. These classes have done well over the past few decades, while the traditional lower-middle and working classes have languished.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.

Photo credit: Nicolas Nieves-Quiroz via Unsplash under