The Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"
tomdispatch.com
tomdispatch.com
All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs, mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive chain stores.
I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram line."
The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.
The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions.
It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification.
You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.
You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.
Hoping to evoke a Keystone Cops-on-a-map style mental image.
Didn't mean the phrasing literally, as much as in parody. That said, there is an element of upwardly mobile African Americans seeking opportunities for their children. While they are not explicitly "chasing white people", this search frequently lands them in the same suburban locales.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_cat...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_law...
Then that Wikipedia article needs to be amended.
Look at an example from the real world. This is happening right now, in Portland Oregon. http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-c...
The problem is that glass factories are "adjacent to a 100-child daycare facility, two public schools (Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8), and a city park."
These factories have been emitting metals such as cadmium and arsenic into the air. As you can imagine, this being Portland, everyone is quite upset. And rightly so.
You can argue about the quantities of emission that any given plant should be allowed. But you can't argue that, for any given emission level, society as a whole is much better off if these factories aren't adjacent to daycare facilities and schools.
Keeping schools and factories separated is a very legitimate "safety" goal of zoning.
Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure.
http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...
That's what Americans do with the free market.
You don't know the half of it.
Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do.
They did it on purpose.
This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.
In my neighborhood (which wasn't nice) the public parks offered much more than a single yard ever could.
As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.
Where I grew up (northwestern PA), there are suburbs where you can get a few acres and city water hookup. We don't consider it truly rural until you have double digit acreage and a water well.
West Berekely has (last time I checked) a 45 ft limit on building heights. They also have deliberate dead ends to discourage driving on side streets. Piedmont forbids multi tenant buildings and has a time limit of two or three days before a citation can be issued for a resident's parked car staying in the same spot. My buddy was openly criticized by his neighbor in Piedmont for the way he managed his lawn, which was not neglected. These are absolutely issues of politics and discouraging undesirables to live elsewhere.
This is in East Bay, where we tend to consider ourselves progressive, and it's called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The Berkeley tactics are a blatant example of, "It's ok when we do it because we're special."
There absolutely are hordes of NIMBY tactics used in Berkeley politics, with nearly zero coherency, attempting to stop dense development especially downtown.
otherwise, what is happening is traffic is being discouraged/encouraged overall which has economic consequences.
TANSTAAFL
Because redlining was often an explicitly racist choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.
> During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.
I wonder what the reasons might be? Some ideas:
* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in
* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable
* Larger, louder cars and trucks
* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets
No. With proper insulation and good windows, wood-frame houses are extremely quiet inside. And they don't collapse in earthquakes.
>* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable >* Larger, louder cars and trucks >* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The cars are probably the biggest factor, plus the fact that "cars" here are frequently giant noisy pickup trucks and SUVs.
Another factor is dogs. I've lived in several places where people have big noisy dogs they leave outside to bark for hours on end. I imagine that's not a big problem in Britain. Everyone in America just loves huge, smelly, noisy dogs that bark all the time.
Note that most experiments here with forced high-density living (the high-rise public housing most big cities built in the "urban renewal" era), were unmitigated disasters.
https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2014/03/26/22/21/va...
So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.
I want to live in this magical under-employed paradise
A Chilean from a subpar city like Valparaiso could make maybe like 4$/hr, with similar hollidays as in the US. Would never be able to pay 500$ a month for rent.
Also Valparaiso is a "touristic" city, or more accurately used to be one, so not many lucrative carreers to be had -I imagine that the second something pops out there all prices would go up, too. The reason it's medium denisty it's more likely because of the sismic activity in the area.
That's about 1.4 times the median household income in Chile. You can have a pretty good middle class life in the US at 1.4 times the median household income too.
In the U.S. it seems there's a slow decrease in density from a city core out dozens of miles; from tall density out to suburbs, then individual developments and maybe around then you'll get the kind of farm environment you'd find in Europe.
It's not to say that all of Europe/Asia, or all of the U.S. is the same in this way. But it seems to be a pattern. In the U.S. people try to move away from cities once they can, in Europe people seem to gravitate towards historic centers.
I think lots of it has to do with livability. In France it might be convenient to take a daily trip to the local market to get some groceries for dinner -- not much more work than going through the pantry. Density might not be too high, and the environments are pleasant, relaxing and convenient.
In the U.S. cities built before the car are better, but can still be a grind. Big swaths of NYC are hard to do daily shopping in for example. Cities built after the car are a mess wholesale and people live far from each other and spread very far out, and the things they need to live are similarly spread everywhere.
In Korea, my parents-in-law live in a proper house (not an apartment flat), but a grocery store is a 2 minute walk, and a large commercial center with pretty much every other service you might want is about 5 more. I easily triple my walking-time in Korea even on lazy do-nothing days compared to life in the U.S.
Seoul is a perfect example. If you take a train going out of the city you feel like you jump back in time 100 years in a matter of a few minutes.
It continues today in my hometown of Philadelphia, where I still live. My friends and co-workers who are older all consistently move outside of the city, like my parents and their parents did before them, when they have children. This movement to the suburbs today is no longer caused by political intervention, but rather by the terrible school system that continues to be underfunded, which is primarily the effect of the richest Philadelphians moving outside of the city to raise their families (and pay taxes to the surrounding communities). It's no wonder there's such a major divide between people who "have" and people who "have not", or why the schools are so terrible and the transportation infrastructure is outdated by over 50 years. Perhaps if my generation chooses to stay in the city limits when we settle down and raise families, our kids won't have to deal with such dangerous and depressing environments.
On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy getting away from people and being out in the wilderness. Being off-grid sounds really interesting, and something I've always wanted to try in my life, just to see if it was feasible and comfortable. I'm not coming down on you for living your life the way you want to live it in any way. I think you would agree with me that if land around you suddenly became very valuable and apartment towers started going up, you'd feel a little unnerved right? Living off-grid, in my opinion, is not the problem. The problem is people who want to take a beautiful place and build it into a haven for human environmental destruction.
It's hard to express in the space of a HN comment, but American society is built to encourage suburban sprawl and car dependence in almost every way imaginable.
* The mortgage interest tax deduction taxes renters to give that money to buyers
* Roads, once supposedly funded by fuel taxes, are now mostly funded by general revenue, meaning that they're an all you can buffet (so why not use all you can? Somebody else is going to, after all)
* Drivers who kill cyclists and pedestrians virtually never face any serious consequences for their actions
* Cities force amenities, jobs, and homes to be ridiculously - comically - far apart from each other through zoning. How the hell does central Dublin have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of pubs, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of jobs all within a couple miles of each other, while people in Mountain View are pissed off their neighbors might want to put a duplex on land that they own because hey, that's too many people!
* We make it ILLEGAL to build homes and businesses without ridiculous excesses of parking, meaning you have to pay for parking whether you like it or not
* The cost of parking is rolled in to the cost of goods and services. A grocery store's land is easily 70% parking. That land costs a lot of money. Why do I have to pay for everyone else's parking when I walk to the store?
* Auto companies normalized the idea that streets are only for cars with campaigns to popularize terms like Jaywalking. I mean, think about it - for all of human civilization streets were where kids played, vendors sold, people chatted, and horses, carts, and people moved. Then the car showed up, quite literally started killing everyone in its way, and we decided everyone else can just deal with it
* Safety standards in the US tend to worry about the safety of the vehicle's occupants without regard to those struck by the vehicles. That's almost as dumb as imposing safety standards on guns based on the threat to the firearm operator.
Edit:I should have said "based solely on the threat". Obviously it's important that guns don't blow up in their user's face. And I conflate safety standards with licensing, though the comparison to cars there is fairly apt.
* Carbon emissions are likely to cause trillions of dollars in economic damage and kill millions of people through increased disease, decreased food security, and increased drought, among numerous other things. The people who will bear most of this cost are not the ones who are causing it. Gasoline should be taxed at the rate necessary to remove its carbon from the air via proven means. This would probably make it around $15 a gallon, which much to the surprise of most in the US, isn't THAT much. Very healthy societies function fine with $10/gallon fuel. In those places it is not wasted so profligately.
* There's more, but I need to get back to other stuff.
tl;dr - if you live in the US, you're going to pay the huge, tragic cost of auto dependency whether you like it or not, so you better get with it and just buy one already.
That said, I would much rather drive 45 min than spend 45 min on public transportation. I grew up in Kiev, a place with by all accounts very good public transport system, at least during the Soviet days when they still took care of the system. And guess what, it was awful! I also visited Boston, lived in Lake View in Chicago for 6 years without a car, and traveled through Europe and lived for 4 years in the center of downtown San Diego. And I can honestly tell you, based on my experiences, I would NEVER want to go back to using public transport. Maybe I am selfish, or maybe I just hate people, who knows, but being in the mass of humanity, at the whim of some government agency running the system, just doesn't sit with me. I know the freedom the car provides is in some ways an illusion. We still rely on public roads (most of the time) and gas stations are still a prerequisite, but I can't help breathing easier knowing that my car can take me any place I want to go and I can fix everything about it my self. It's a freedom thing, even if it's an illusion, a feeling that perhaps is hard to understand for someone from Europe (I am assuming).
I am not saying it is right or wrong, but it's inline with the mythology of America, and I like it. I do understand that diversity is important though, and there is no clear reason why there couldn't be more mixed use places like you describe. Perhaps if there were more places like Dublin (as you described, I'v never been) in US, more people could move there and be happy. All I am saying is I am happy with my car in South California, a place that's in general in love with their cars, and I am quite happy here. What can I say, different strokes for different folks.
I think it's great that you have the ability to choose your lifestyle, but the whole point is that your lifestyle is being very heavily subsidized by taxpayers. I consider this unfair, and I'm sick to death of paying for it all while being told cyclists like me are the ones freeloading.
I'm aiming to return to Dublin now after a year spent very much disliking San Diego. I hated the hostility and threats I got as a cyclist. I hated how over 100 of us spoke to the two-faced Todd Gloria and the rest of SANDAG to fight for one. damn. bike lane on University ave, and he shot it down because the Hillcrest Business Association insists on taxpayer-provided parking welfare, dead cyclists be damned. I hate how people just took it for granted that they should put alcohol-heavy events in places with no access to transit (though admittedly Lyft/Uber are options, albeit expensive). I routinely witnessed drunk, or at least not sober, people hopping in their cars and driving off. I hated that I went to the Greater Golden Hill planning meetings where homeowners baldly stated that the reason NO new housing should EVER be constructed ANYWHERE in their neighborhood is because it could mean that their already $800k+ homes might not rise in value quite as fast. I hated conversations that consisted of people bitching about how horrible cyclists are because you know that some of them run lights? Nevermind the drivers who blast down 30th St. at 40+, ignore stop signs, and often are likely drunk. I hated the fact that the only halfway-livable neighborhoods in SD (South Park, Little Italy, etc.) would be ILLEGAL to build now because of parking minimums - San Diego's distinctive residential design where several cottages are clustered around a man courtyard doesn't work when every damn home is forced to have two parking spots by law. I hated the fact that if you ever suggested SD was anything less than sheer fucking heaven people took HUGE offence, as though you'd insulted them personally.
Also, I like SD beer (especially Lost Abbey), but c'mon people just saying "omg let's make a 16% ABV quintuple IPA which is basically just hop tea" isn't actually that innovative.
1. It's not nice to shit on the city you live in, unless it's constructive, of course. I hate it when people come to whatever place I happen to live in and proceed to tell me that it's crap. My reaction is always: "Why the fuck are you here than?" On the other hand if someone says, hey, I have this idea that worked in other places, maybe it could work here, I usually tend to listen. Not sure how you pitched your critique.
2. Bicycle riders are hated in San Diego for a good reason. For full disclosure, for the years I live in Downtown San Diego, I used a bicycle to get around a most of the time, though I also had a car and a motorcycle. Yes, I used to run lights, split lanes, and ride on side walks. But I can honestly say that in all that time I have never been beeped at, cussed at, or hated, and I went out of my way to not inconvenience people.
Many bicycle riders in San Diego are just like me. However, there is also a group in San Diego called Critical Mass. I am sorry if you belong to that group, I hope not, but I literally want to punch every member of that group in the face, and I have at least one of them on one occasion. They organize these rides where they get 500+ people and they ride on University or down Market street for 10 min straight, running every light and blocking traffic. And I am not even talking about car traffic. This one time I was WALKING home from Hillcrest, and I was trying to cross University. These fuckers decided to stage their protest and were riding through the red light on University and 4th. I needed to cross the damn street, the pedestrian crossing light was on, and I had the audacity to try to cross while they were having their little protest. This guy ran up to me and tried to stop me. It didn't work out well for him.
On another occasion I was driving my car and I noticed a guy on a bicycle (fixy, of course) riding behind me, weaving side to side, with both hands in the air, flipping off people behind him, screaming at the top of his lungs "bikes rule, fuck you all." I stopped of a red light. The guy was too busy flipping off people behind him to notice such trivial things as red lights, and crashed straight into me. Cause me no damage, but it was hilarious :)
So, in short, I love bicycles, I ride bicycles all the time, I used to defend people who ride bicycles and get in trouble for stupid shit with the police in court, and yet I also consider the San Diego Critical Mass to be a bunch of entitled douchebags who hurt the reputation of San Diego bicycle community.
3. As for the tax payers subsidizing my love for cars, they are also subsidizing other peoples choice to procreate, and I am not bitching about that. And before you say that there is value in education, I am strong believer that school is nothing more than 12 year long obedience training for kids. It's a place where smart and intelligent little kids become obedient little consumer whores with no ability to think for them selves. Oh, hold on, I am bitching about that ;) Ok, in that case most people in SD have cars, most pay taxes, so if it is an injustice, it's a small one by comparison to the above mentioned public school situation. To be honest, I am not against public schools as a concept, just against the fact that out public schools are little factories for cogs.
In any case, I love San Diego because it's close to Mexico (where one can still by antibiotics for your dog without a fucking prescription), it has amazing weather, generally nice people, amazing beach especially the one by UCSD :), and a good mix of people. Yeah, you have to have a car or a motorcycle to enjoy the city fully, but that's SoCal for you. Different strokes for different folks, like I said. I promise not to come to Dublin and demand that they have more parking, as long as you stop trying to take my precious parking away :) After all, isn't the best kind of voting is voting with your feet? It's too bad it's so difficult legally to do that.
PS: Currently I am living off the grid (relatively speaking, still have satellite internet, obviously) near JT, and love it here too. So I am not defending SD just because I live there, it's a good city. My favorite parts are OB, MB, and Bay Park. By least favorite, PB.
Again, never been to Philadelphia, so I am picturing it to be similar to Chicago. And if that's the case, perhaps it makes a bit of sense to move out when you are ready to raise your kids. Is it so wrong to start out in the city, have your fun, and move out to the suburbs in your middle years. Of course, I do agree that the problem is the School systems being paid for by the property taxes instead of by the state. The state should collect property taxes uniformly and then combine it with other taxes and distribute it to schools based on child population in each school district.
I am also not a really huge fan of the Suburbs in general to be honest. I like the idea of small towns rather then suburbs. The difference is, a small town would, and should, have it's own economic engine, local services, and everything else to cater to your life. That way you can actually live and work in the same place, and raise your kids. The problem is consolidation of industry. So many companies, especially tech companies, concentrate around one location, forcing high density living to be the ONLY answer. What about medium density living? What about spreading the employment centers a little more evenly, allowing for lower density, but without the need necessarily to always drive to work, and if you have to drive for some (medical perhaps) reasons, it could be 5 min commute at most. That would be the type of society I would strive to build, but I am not in in the business of building societies, and I am guessing plenty of people would disagree with me.
That's because the US has the most habitable land of any country. Russia, Canada and China are all technically larger but most of their population lives in their small habitable areas. The other European countries are not much larger than most US states.
The size of the country isn't playing in to people's commute distances. The scale of infrastructure within cities and towns does, though. If your zoning laws mean that the nearest place to buy a box of cereal is 2 miles from your house, and for that matter if density restrictions, height maximums, and parking minimums mean you have relatively few houses per acre, your city (to use the term generously) is not going to achieve anything resembling medium density.
There were other factors as well like car culture and white flight. Until the last decade living in cities was something anyone wealthy enough avoided because of the high crime rates.
I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious.
It's impossible to have a moment's peace in even a suburban environment. Between cars driving around with absurdly powerful subwoofers making their presence literally felt for a quarter-mile everywhere they go, loud truck engines and mufflers made purposefully loud, incessant backup beepers even in the middle of the night, neighbors with no respect for other people, cheaply built apartments, dogs barking...the list goes on and on. Surely ancient Rome was noisy, but they didn't have machines, and they didn't have people roaming around operating devices whose sole purpose is to make enough noise to be heard inside people's homes for hundreds of meters in every direction.
It only takes a small percentage of the population doing things like this to make everyone else miserable. And good luck legislating against it when powerful lobbies operate on behalf of companies whose existence depends on the legality of operating said equipment without restriction.
People weren't meant to be crammed together and stacked on top of each other. People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?
People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?
but consider this: america was built by people trying to leave europe and to a lesser extent asia, not rebuild it elsewhere. and it worked great, until it stopped working (recently). i think we'll figure it out eventually, it just won't be for a while.
see the resurgence of city centers and farmer's markets, for example. also, for what it's worth, american cities that are forced into small areas because of water or economics (sf, ny, isolated parts of LA and chicago) result in a euro-like end result.
Suburban life isn't a "major problem" for the US, it's how we want to live.
And yet the parent comment's experience holds, typically, for somebody living in a house with a yard in a majority of the UK.
Also, which of these has the better yard?
Houses in Nevada: http://www.newhomeselko.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Homes...
Apartments in France: http://cdn-1.aparisguide.com/montmartre/Paris-montmarte12.jp...
* Density doesnt have to be expensive
* Density doesnt mean it cant be green and beautiful
* Conversely, a lot of suburban yards are ugly and people dont spend much time in them, they just stay in the big box in the middle and enter and leave thru the garage.
Also those look like cheaply made houses for people who want maximum square footage per dollar. It's easy to find smaller houses with larger yards.
Try moving to the northeast; you'll find things a bit more similar to France. I used to live in New Jersey and I lived just down the street from a convenience store with a pretty decent selection of stuff, and about a half-mile from a real full-size grocery store (though it closed while I lived there; not enough business). Northern NJ is full of small "townships" that have a downtown section not far away from housing. But remember, these places were mostly built almost a century ago; the house I lived in there was built in 1930. They did things really differently back then.
The "innovation district" is full of big pharma and etc companies that would have had an easy time finding offices anywhere; most of the time when the i-word is trotted out, its because someone is either offering tax breaks to some giant corporation to entice them to grace us with their presence, or launching some gaudy public cheerleading event that no one really cares about.
But substantial issues relating to the "creative class"? Such as, for instance, effective public transit? Suddenly the state and city can't spare a dime; its not a "priority"; students and post-car intellectuals (and, incidentally, the working class) are stuck paying through the nose to get on a subway that's broken again. Or, taking an Uber because its past midnight. (Late night service was great for the six months it lasted!)
There are other issues of a similar bent; there's a fight going on in Somerville (the neighborhood of MIT, Harvard, and Tufts students, now that Cambridge property deeds come platinum-plated) to allow more than four unrelated individuals to share a house. And they're facing fierce resistance.
Most of us who can head to the west coast at the first opportunity; Boston would be SF if it wasn't for its outright hostility to the bright minds pouring out of its universities. The scale of the wasted opportunity is staggering.
I couldn't agree more. The area just absolutely does not give a shit about infrastructure. It took Google coming into Kendall square to get the jacked up sidewalks and roads fixed outside of MIT, and the Longfellow bridge restoration project has been consistently extended. Meanwhile, up the block in Central square we have major Novartis, Takeda, J&J, and Pfizer research centers going in with no apparent consideration for how these workers will commute in and out. Cambridge seems more concerned with forcing people to use reusable bags for shopping than they are with actually instituting useful change.
> [T]here's a fight going on
> in Somerville...to allow more
> than four unrelated individuals
> to share a house. And they're
> facing fierce resistance.
[1] http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/1601...
And its also true, this kind of rule exists for a reason- in my experience, the sardine-student-housing lifestyle stops being fun at about 8 or 9 people to half as many bedrooms. But I guarantee you that Somerville is already full of such situations, and they're all much worse off because they're illegal- these people's landlords can get away with anything, because if their tenant's complain to the town everyone living in the building will get evicted.
Not sure that's a good thing. SF has its own share of big problems right now. I certainly wouldn't want Boston to emulate those!
Speak for yourself, I'd rather be dead in Somerville than alive in SF.
As for public transit, the city and state certain can spare many dimes. What they can't spare is the ten billion dollars it would take to actually deal with the MBTA's debt and deferred maintenance. It absolutely has to be addressed, for the sake of the entire regional economy, but investments on that scale, when they are not immediately relevant to the lives of 4/5ths of voters, are... challenging. If killing off an expensive but lightly used late night service that accounted for 0.4% of trips makes it marginally easier to deal with the root issues, then it should be cut. The T had four years (not six months) to make late night service viable, they failed.
I'm pretty sure that debt was seven billion smaller before they dumped the Big Dig's debt onto the MBTA's books.
>investments on that scale, when they are not immediately relevant to the lives of 4/5ths of voters, are... challenging.
It's immediately relevant to all of us whether a few inches of snow shuts down or delays the Red Line and Orange Line.
Wait... there is!? Because my roommate just got a girlfriend, and when she stays over, that makes four of us. I should probably start attending public meetings about this.
Today it is extremely common for someone in the "blue tribe" to know no one who is in the "red tribe" - people who (to use a few stereotypes) are Christian, enjoy NASCAR, and unabashedly eat at chain restaurants. People in either tribe don't encounter each other daily and as a result both tribes have little understanding of each other's worlds or the number of people who are not in their tribe.
Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism recognizes this. The problem is that the tribal line now runs along an economic fault line. Red tribe hasn't been doing well - red states are full of disadvantaged people. Worse, because of identity politics they have been made "the other" and rendered relatively voiceless.
Liberalism can champion the disadvantaged but it has to approach them with solutions. As technological displacement of workers continues it is hard to see what they will be.
I am blue tribe but I flinch when I see my colleagues in the tech industry complain about things like the injustice of having to go to a whiteboard in an interview to get a job in a Crèche-like work environment with play-balls while people outside the industry are lucky to get jobs driving cars, cleaning tables, or lifting boxes without health insurance. We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.
No, it doesn't. The article points this out very eloquently. Bernie Sanders recognizes it, but he doesn't speak for most liberals, who are all excited to vote for Hillary and Goldman Sachs.
(And before anyone downvotes me for directly bashing a political candidate, go read the article; I'm just repeating what the article says. Don't like it, downvote the whole article.)
>We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.
This is absolutely right. As the article says, this is exactly why Trump is so popular right now: he's playing directly to the working class that's lucky to get a job lifting boxes without health insurance. The mainline Democrats are not: they're telling everyone how wonderful the economy is, how unemployment is at record-low levels, how wonderful Obamacare is, etc. All those platitudes aren't helping actual working-class people at all, and they're not seeing any of these benefits.
Trump could be seen as these red-tribe members realising they'd been duped, but it could also be seen as the Republicans losing control of the racism they cultivated to win those votes in the past.
The whole thing was a stupid idea by a right-wing thinktank. It tries to help by establishing a cap on profits and spreading the costs around by requiring everyone to be insured, but it depended on states increasing their Medicaid eligibility, which red states did not. It did nothing to actually decrease the cost of care.
I consider it a mess, not a complete failure. The problem is that we only have one candidate who's serious about fixing the situation, and it's unlikely he's going to get his party's nomination. His competitor thinks this system is wonderful and defends it. On the other side, one guy wants to repeal it altogether and just screw over anyone who can't afford insurance, and with the other guy no one really knows what he's going to do because he keeps changing his position, though he did say something in favor of universal healthcare a while back, but his current website has switched to some standard lame Republican ideas about letting insurance companies compete over state lines, so they'll all just move to the least-regulated state like Wyoming.
Nope. The deciding vote against a public health-care option was Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and well-graduated meritocrat from Yale Law.
This rings true, and explains a couple of the key failings of modern American society. Liberals' wholesale embrace of meritocracy combined with their traditional alignment with public unions has manifested in this bizarre fixation with education. Education has become the sole means for achieving traditional liberal goals within the framework of meritocracy. That trend has directly resulted in the college bubble: a society where everybody spends inordinate amounts of money getting an education that for most of them is a waste if time.
More fundamentally, the leadership of the liberal establishment doesn't seem to really believe in the idea of a flat, egalitarian society. Among the liberal elite in San Francisco, D.C., Boston, etc, there is an intense disdain for the folks who form the backbone of the middle class in other industrialized countries: non-college educated blue and white collar workers. In places like Germany, you can get a white collar job and live a middle class life with just 16 years of formal education. In the U.S., even the liberals don't seem to think that is a desirable state of affairs.
"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."
"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."
- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites
There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.
16 years is a timeframe that requires tertiary eduction. The longest non-tertiary education I've heard of is 13: K-12. How are you breaking down 16 years into 'non-college' education for white-collar workers?
From what I've seen they are it's primary critics. It was hardly liberals pushing Github to end meritocracy and adopt whatever it's adopting now (there isn't really a name for it). In various recent court cases (Fisher vs Texas, Ricci v DeStefano) it was usually liberals opposed to meritocracy. When high merit people get rewarded it's usually liberals criticizing this outcome.
I can't think of a single modern case where liberals push people to adopt purely merit based systems, in fact. They seem to want some sort of spoils system - the closest word I can think of is corporatism in the old Italian sense (I'm being very careful not to use an alternate term, see this reddit comment for a good explanation of why https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...).
(Lets also distinguish credentialism from meritocracy. The tech industry has something approaching the latter - we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.)
It's a little hard to discuss this in this context because the article talks about different kinds of liberalism and different kinds of meritocracy, that without specifics the question is a bit meaningless.
In particular, the word meritocracy itself is hard to describe because it was originally coined as a joke, and specifically defined to mean something that is satirical, ill-defined, and even oxymoronic[1]. Then the question becomes exactly how much of a joke is meritocracy in each circumstance. Many would say that in the GitHub case, meritocracy was a very extreme kind of a joke as it wasn't even self-aware. It was like describing a king's court as meritocratic. The liberals of the kind Frank talks about would be appalled at calling that meritocracy, and would want a "true" meritocracy. Frank would say (as would Michael Young, the sociologist who coined the term in a satirical essay), that even "true" meritocracy is a joke (and is also just a spoils system).
In any case, meritocracy is (intentionally) too ill-defined for comparing different kinds, but I think it is clear from Frank's article that the new kind of professional-class liberals he's talking about is definitely in favor of some sort of meritocracy (which, for Frank, is a bad thing).
> we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.
That is a very ridiculous thing to say, as the vast majority of "our culture" is generally liberal. While libertarianism and other right-wing ideologies are more common in tech than in other professional occupations, it is still a small minority. In any case, the criticism from the left of the culture you describe is that there's nothing wrong with idolizing a self-taught ubergeek as long as you don't marginalize other groups with no less "merit".
[1]: After all, every system is some sort of meritocracy -- most people actually believed that noble-born people have more merit than commoners -- and so calling it that shows a lack of self-awareness more than anything else (especially as in all such systems, merit is something that is 90% due to luck of being born to the right family; this is almost as true for ubergeeks as it is for aristocrats).
There's a really silly rhetorical trick Eric Raymond likes to play, where the definition of a "hacker" devolves pretty much to that of someone who shares Raymond's politics. Seeing him try to deploy it over and over again has made me allergic to attempts to assumptively foreclose arguments with appeals to ill-defined group identity.
The point you are taking issue with is completely tangential to the main point. You could delete that sentence and the rest of the post wouldn't be affected.
Now I don't read ESR except when you or someone links to him on twitter and it sounds like it might be interesting (it rarely is). So maybe I'm missing something here. But do you actually assert that any of my claims are false? Or are you merely attempting to raise your status and lower mine by criticizing ESR and associating me with him?
Nobody's reading this thread at this point, so the "status" stakes seem pretty low.
This is something that is inevitable, and it's coming up fast. To the extent that we subsidize and protect dying industries to maintain the jobs of their workers, we hinder their retrainment in new professions and further entrench the inefficiencies of the past. In even the medium term, this is nothing but harmful.
Now, I think there are things that probably can and should be done to help these people get into new jobs. Subsidizing retraining and education, providing interim assistance to help them get through these periods, and maybe eventually even a universal basic income (fundamentally the economics of this probably don't make sense quite yet, but I think they will in the future). But what is fundamentally not ok, what is never ok, is shielding dying industries under the aegis of employment.
On a more philosophical level, I am not at all certain that efficiency should be society's goal[1], but I think that at least for the foreseeable future, fighting such unquestioned axioms is an uphill battle...
[1]: It's fascinating how long it took in the early modern period to convince society that efficiency is a desirable goal at all; see Max Weber's classic 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
And, at the risk of misinterpreting you or putting words in your mouth, I think you may be interpreting 'efficiency' as necessarily squeezing more and more out of workers. And this is, in general, true. However, efficiency can also ultimately mean a society where people no longer have to work at all - where only a comparatively small number of people need to be engaged in intense knowledge work, and the rest of civilization can live entirely from the fruits of those people's labors, and the automated production processes they operate and advance.
Indeed, that is an interesting concept, but at this point in time that goal is still far off and somewhat utopic, and so the question is whether there is only one path towards that goal (assuming it is achievable, desirable, or even if it is inevitable), and what and who we choose to sacrifice in the meantime.
I suppose the way I see it efficiency is an absolute goal - the debate should be about what we do with the product of that efficiency.
If you want that as a goal, social change may be more important than technological change. Who controls the automation? A small set of people.
The issue is not the job loss, but that the benefits of the disruption accrue not only accrue mainly with the employer, but are less valuable to the employer and the economy then the loss of taxable income and stable jobs. The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony isn't a bad read.
And I agree, I think we should think very carefully about how these companies are taxed and regulated, because ultimately it does make sense for them to consolidate to a single provider. Especially so once they start using self-driving cars and stop employing drivers at all.
I think what we need to think very carefully about is how we distribute and deal with the gains of this massive step-change in efficiency we are about to experience / are experiencing. What we must not do though is allow fears about those gains to prevent us from attaining them.
In other words, if you're worried about the plight of laborers or drivers, tax Uber and just give them the money. Don't enact protectionist policies for the taxi industry.
Now, you can disagree with that philosophy of personal charity. I'm not even sure I agree with it - but it's really of no relevance to the point under discussion.
If I had 10-20% extra income and there was a well-run Kiva style system for local poor people in my neighbourhood, I would definitely donate. Probably beyond that percentage.
Some would say that 40% is itself a poor use of resources. When examples of government inefficiency and outright incompetence surround us, I don't understand why people have such faith in it doing anything else well.
> Primarily because there isn't a well developed charity industry for helping the poor as government has taken over this role. If I had 20% extra income and there was a well-run Kiva style system for local poor people in my neighbourhood, I would definitely donate.
I don't know what your criteria are, but it seems to me that you're overlooking the innumerable local charities that quietly go about their work helping people every day, with minimal overhead compared to government-run programs. Are there any churches where you live? Do any of them have programs to feed or clothe the needy in the area? Any homeless shelters?
Imagine if half of the money you pay in taxes that goes to government-run aid programs were given to these local charities instead.
Are you familiar with the tragedy of the commons[1]? It does a good job of capturing the strategic dynamics at play here. One very effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is for everyone to get together agree to submit to a common set of rules. Do you see the analogy here?
Basic income. It would cause some inflation, but it would mean everyone could at least afford the basics.
It would remove an entire class of complexity from the government by reducing paperwork associated with all other assistance programs.
Personally I'm in favor of funding it with pollution taxes, but there are other ways as well. If done properly it could be a net-zero program - money in = money out, by law.
$1k/month for every US citizen over the age of 18. That's roughly 235 million people, each getting $12k/year. That's 2.8 trillion dollars. Just for the basic income, not funding any other part of government (for scale, the entire federal budget is currently 3.8 trillion).
I am optimistic about the UBI, and I think we would recover an enormous amount of those dollars in increased economic activity, but I think it's not quite ready for prime time yet. It needs to be tested on a small scale to see whether or not the purported economic benefits will materialize and in sufficient quantity to counter the enormous cost of such a program (though i'm optimistic that they may).
It's not an easy life. Here's a recruiting video.[1] They open by showing workers in a railroad yard in Chicago at 5:47 AM in a snowstorm. Management training starts with jobs like that. They show a management training session on how to deal with conflict. There's a lot of travel. One of the trainees says "UP operates in 23 states, and I went to 21 of them in my first year."
It's the total opposite of the "brogrammer" culture. Not only does UP hire many women, the women go out in the field, wearing all the heavy protective gear and doing hard work. UP is insistent about this.[2] It helps that they're a union shop, where employee discipline is formal. And this is in a culture much more macho than programming.
It's the politics of fear. Democrats yell "Vote for me, I will keep those evil republicans from making abortion and being gay illegal." And the Republicans yell "Vote for me, I will keep those sodomites and baby killers in check." They paint the other side as evil, split the poor people in half, and stay in power. The truth is, they desperately need each other, because, if people stopped hating their neighbor for a second, and turned around, they might realize that they are being fucked by their elected officials on both sides.
This is a political story that has a chance of clearing the 'unusually interesting' bar so let's give it a try. Frank's model of the 'professional class' (a.k.a. top 10%) as the key socioeconomic faultline is an interesting one that deserves a good discussion. If the thread turns into partisan or ideological bickering, we'll demote it. Let's stay substantive.
(It's also possible that that's not really Frank's central premise, given that this is a excerpt from a book on a larger topic.)
Let me get this straight. The elite are bad for taking away working class jobs in industrial sectors (jobs which could be so brutal to workers that they basically spurred the invention of the labor unions). But they are also bad when they create new working class jobs.
There is definitely a problem for working class people today. Maybe it feels better for people to believe that it's because today's politicians and business leaders are uniquely malfeasant. But it's not really accurate. Technology changes the picture and we have to figure out how to respond to that. Read about the Ludlow Massacre and try and tell me that industrial America was "the good old days."
I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I totally agree with Eric Schmidt here. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the growing incubator/accelerator industry, of which YC is at the vanguard, is one of the most hopeful, encouraging things happening in the world today. I think it's ridiculous that Paul Graham has to defend himself against charges of exacerbating inequality, when he's done as much as anyone to start the economy down a new path. (Disclosure: I have not applied to YC or any other accelerator, but I might in the future.)
So -- is this too much of a contradiction, to be what this author calls an "innovation liberal" while supporting a populist/socialist candidate?
Economic change, of the kind the US is now going through, is always wrenching and painful; there are always people on the back side of the curve who suffer. I think the challenge for government is to craft policies that support the changes, and those driving them, while not excessively punishing those left behind.
I think that broadly, the pendulum in the US has swung too far in the direction of minimizing the safety net in support of individual responsibility, and the surprising success the Sanders campaign is having -- Bernie himself did not think, a year ago, that he could get as far as he has -- shows that the public mood is starting to swing back the other way. I think that's healthy, to a point, and that's why I'm supporting him.
Let's not make this a discussion about Bernie, though. I recognize he is not perfect, and I'm not even 100% certain he would make a good President. I just think the issues he is raising deserve a larger hearing.
By any measure, social safety net spending is significantly higher than it has ever been. News comes out every day of some new government mandate like paid parental leave, paid personal days, etc.
The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.
Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.
We just passed a massive, expensive, entitlement known as Obamacare, which provides (or was supposed to) health insurance to everyone in America.
Obama, during his first term, passed a massive expansion of government-subsidized student loans.
We are in the process of a significant expansion of home loans for low income and people with dodgy credit.
Except for the very limited, bipartisan, welfare reform under President Clinton (which has since basically been reversed), I'm not aware of any shrinking of the welfare state that has happened in the last 20 years.
Not in constant dollars [0]. It peaked in 1968. It's a bit lower than that now -- if you accept the official inflation estimates, which some argue are understated.
> Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.
True, though as a percentage of GDP, Social Security hasn't increased that much since 1975 -- it reached 4% then, and is around 5% now. [1] I'll let you look up the numbers on Medicare and Medicaid.
The situation with the ACA is complicated -- it is costing some money in the short run, but (a) it's less than originally projected, and (b) more importantly, it does seem to be curbing healthcare inflation (something is, anyway).
All that said, your point that the welfare state hasn't been shrinking, either, is a fair one. Perhaps it's fairer to say -- as I think the OP is arguing -- that economic conditions, particularly since the Great Recession, and especially the fact that the middle class has been shrinking in recent years, put us in a situation where the need for the safety net is arguably greater than it had been until recently.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-abou...
[1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending...
I'm a Bernie supporter too, but I recognize this too, but the thing is, thanks to our crappy political system, he doesn't need to be a "good President", he just needs to be the least bad one. I don't worry about just how great a President he could be: I just know that with any of the other three in office, it's going to be somewhere between terrible and a complete disaster. With Bernie, I don't think he'll be terrible, and that's good enough for me.
But yeah, I'm hopeful: I think the issues he's raising do deserve a much larger hearing and I think the only way we're going to do that is by electing him. The establishment politicians don't want to raise those issues and at best want to give them a little lip service while dismissing them as "not politically feasible at this time".
- Hollowing out icky manufacturing & extraction-sector jobs, while ensuring maximal support for FIRE & "knowledge sector" jobs via IP protections & lax regulations.
- Importing vast amounts of cheap labor to compete for service-sector jobs.
- Ensuring that "live in an expensive neighborhood" is the only mechanism to ensure your children go to vaunted "good schools" (or even safe schools).
- Devoting recurring two-minutes-hates to attacking their cultural symbols.
Instead, what today's liberal establishment really pines for, the author writes, is a more perfect meritocracy.
Unfortunately, there is no solidarity in a perfect meritocracy, for the ideology of meritocracy negates any esteem society's winners might feel for poorly educated, low-achieving losers.
Rings True.
socially liberal, economically oligarchist, to contrast with the Repbulicans socially conservative economically oligarchist.
OK so assume these top 62 people give all their money to the poor. 1.76 trillion is distributed among 3.5 billion people giving $502 each. the average net worth of these people goes from $500 to about $1000. 1 year later what will have happened? probably not much. These people will increase consumption somewhat, some might invest a bit, but mostly the money will just disappear.
Huge swathes of the population have minimal net worth, like many of my friends, and live happy, comfortable lives. If they had an extra $500 they would spend it quick. This isn't the rule obviously, and there is a lot of poverty, but these statements don't really quite give a true picture of the issue.
I read it has been shown that simply giving money to the poorest people is a very effective way of stimulating the economy.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has $16 billion dollars and hes making significant strides towards colonizing mars and slowing global warming.
It opens with the assumption that everyone shares the author's policy prescriptions.
How can anyone write about politics and think that it's full of issues with only one obvious answer? Is it through screening all interactions to avoid anyone with different opinions?
And there's no reason to single Frank out on this. Why does almost everyone on both sides of the aisle write and talk about politics in exactly this way?
You don't see this as much in cities that are not as liberally run.
There will continue to be going to be growing levels of income inequality as automation continues to increase. Either we focus on solving that (Minimal Viable Income sounds like a plan) or we face a true million man March on DC.
Something has to change.
Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.
Note that I'm not a Democrat and not defending politicians in any general case. But, I do think it's silly to make the claim that local Democrats caused Detroit's decline, when there are clearly so many other factors in the story.
Not to say that the automakers weren't also badly run -- they were. There's an NPR piece about NUMMI that puts some great color on the situation -- ah, here it is [0]. See especially "Act Two", where GM completely muffs bringing the NUMMI success to the rest of the company.
[0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/t...
That's true, because if mismanagement caused a city to collapse, then San Francisco would be a ghost town by now. There are stinky things in city hall.
As for rural voters... they have no national platform, with both parties disengaged. It's really a battle between the city and the suburbs.
[1] "New York Values" is a pejorative yet "Small Town Values" denotes virtue.
It's actually about values: guns, abortion, God, gays...
Jewishness is but a teeny tiny part of that, and this mostly because of things that aren't directly related to the faith. We don't see too many Jews protesting outside abortion clinics and complaining about gay marriage.
The solution, building more housing, is simple, well-known, and obvious, but the people who live there don't want it because it will hurt their property values. It's a classic case of entrenched power vs newcomers.
And before people rebut this argument with: "this has happened before, and people will just get education and find better jobs" I challenge you, please do, tell me, what job will you get when the robot/AI replaces you? The answer isn't to fear the future though, but to embrace it and figure out how to make it work for everyone. It's a little hard to do that, and to have this conversation, when the overwhelming majority of people refuse to consider this inevitability as even a possibility and dismiss it. Oh well, rent over.
http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15116.pdf
It's global:
https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/
"An alarming result from this year’s estimates in The Conference Board Total Economy Database(TM) is that the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the productivity of labor and capital together, continues to hover around zero for the third year in a row, compared to an average rate of more than 1 percent from 1999-2006 and 0.5 percent from 2007-2012. The challenge on TFP growth is widespread across the globe. Most mature economies including the United States, the Euro Area and Japan show near zero or even negative TFP growth. In China, TFP growth has turned negative, and in India it is just above zero, at 0.2 percent. Both in Brazil and Mexico TFP growth continues to be negative, respectively at -2.3 and -1.7 percent."
Socially liberal is not the same as economically liberal is not the same as politically liberal is not the same as anti-authoritarian is not the same as Democrat. (And so on.)
In fact I think the argument comes down to four positions:
I want as much as possible and I don't see why I should care about anyone or anything else I want as much as possible but I suppose I have to care a little about other people because otherwise the non-winners will kill me and eat me Exploiting other people is morally wrong Exploiting other people creates economically and politically disastrous network effects so it's important to allow people the economic freedom to move beyond exploitation
They should be clearly distinct. But in the US they're all tinged with rhetoric of crusading personal heroism and slightly manic social signalling, so it can be paradoxically hard to tell them apart.
Do you actually think some important distribution is bimodal, or are you just describing your mental categorization?
Of course, there's plenty to quibble about. I've never heard of city-data.com. Maybe this distribution looks more normal if you don't bucket everyone >200k together.
But I'm curious where you were headed with your comment. Is there a more important distribution that I just didn't find?
[1] http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor...
My point is that whenever people start mentally divvying up the population discretely (introverts vs. extroverts, rich vs. poor, etc.), this is almost always a mistake; it's a projection of their mental map onto reality, when in fact the variable under discussion is almost always smoothly distributed.
I guess its a matter of scale... A single WalMart certainly employs less people and provides lower salaries than the 20 small businesses it replaces...
If by elite we are including the typical small business owners then yeah they are job creators...
If by elite we are talking the investor class executive class then not in aggreememt
you realize that businesses don't spring out the ground like plants, right. typically, someone has to invest
At the same time, there are also corrupt thieves wearing corporate clothes, who destroy companies and sell them off in pieces; there are bankers who lie and cheat and buy laws to make them money; there are senators who use insider information on the stock market, or connections in other ways to make money.
So how to keep the good while getting rid of the bad? That is the central question.
> Posted by Thomas Frank
...
> Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? [...]
...
> Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work [...]
...
> [...] Frank does a typically brainy thing.
You usually don't see people review their own books from a third person viewpoint, or point out how brilliant or brainy they are. The few times I have seen that have been in contexts where they were obviously trying to project an image of a giant ego for humorous purposes. I'm not familiar enough with this author to know if that's what he's going for in this review, or if he is seriously praising himself.
The writer who wrote a few introductory paragraphs to the large book excerpt is not Thomas Frank himself. It's not 100% explicit, but the person writing these laudatory words is almost certainly Tom Englehart, the editor of TomDispatch.
I've seen Thomas Frank speak and followed him for many years, since he and others founded the Baffler in Chicago in the late 80s. He's a Midwesterner through and through, grew up in suburban Kansas City, and has the characteristic modesty of the area.
1. Author Foo writes a book.
2. Tom Englehart writes a review, which consists of introductory material and then a long excerpt from the book.
3. Englehart's review appears on the site, but it says "Posted by Foo" at the top. The only mention of Englehart is that it says "Tom" in italics immediately after the last sentence of the introductory material.
4. At the bottom it says "Foo, a TomsDispatch regular, is the author of <name of book>".
5. At the bottom it says "Copyright <year> Foo".
Basically everything on the page except for that lone italicized "Tom" after the introductory material makes it look like Foo wrote the review. In the case where firstname_of(Foo) == "Tom", everything on the page makes it look like Foo wrote the review.
I googled some verbatim sentences from the review, and it seems like various aggregators/wires have picked it up, and at least several are bylining the review to Tom Engelhardt (the "tom" of tomdispatch.com) and not to Thomas Frank himself. So maybe that's it. Here's one:
http://www.unz.com/tengelhardt/thomas-frank-the-inequality-s...