Considering a Gentrifying Something? Read This Essay First

Cold, windy Sunday afternoons are for reading. It seems to me that one of the great tragedies of our times is that few 25-year-old men are willing to say that. Or better yet, not enough parents of any age are willing to explain that to their children and then miss a football game to visit the library (or it's modern, yuppie equivalent - Barnes & Noble).

I spent over 5 awesome hours in Barnes & Noble, I only left because they were closing. I read The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, flipped through National Geographic, some sort of skeptic magazine, followed by (unintentional irony alert) a magazine called The Believer. I forget why I pulled The Believer off the shelf, but I want to draw your attention to a fantastic essay by Eula Biss: No-Man's-Land.

I highly recommend that you read the essay before continuing. But in case it's not cold and windy, I'll summarize quickly: It's a great essay, comparing the displacement of the Native Americans by white settlers as described by Laura Ingalls Wilder with the gentrification of neighborhoods in American cities. It doesn't make gentrification out to be entirely evil, which is nice, because I don't think I'm all that evil. The essay really hits its stride when it comes to being a "pioneer" of gentrification.

I can relate to having mixed feelings about being a pioneer of gentrification. I would estimate that the immediate area around my house is no more than 75% gentrified. There are still drug deals happening in the vicinity. I'm torn between feelings of guilt about pricing some families out of the neighborhood and desire for some sort of harm to befall drug dealers everywhere. I have a very Jermaine Clement (à la Flight of the Conchords) approach to dealing with drug dealers, I exact my revenge by thinking very mean thoughts about them.

Biss also brings up the fear that you are expected to maintain when you live in an urban area. About how your parents and friends and people you don't even know say "Isn't that kind of a dangerous?" when you talk about walking outside at night or going for bike ride.

For example, take this quote from the essay:

Gangs are real, but they are also conceptual. The word gang is frequently used to avoid using the word black in a way that might be offensive. For instance, by pairing it with a suggestion of fear.

It took me some time living in Baltimore (growing up and growing used to the city) before, as a senior at JHU, I finally started to notice the casual racism that surrounded the campus. That everyone casually used the word "ghetto" until it lost the significance of that word should car (the utter shame we should all feel for allowing such a thing to exist in America). Sure, for most upper-middle-class kids, ALL of Baltimore is a ghetto. It certainly doesn't look like where they grew up. It's all so poor, so crime-ridden, so... black.

Not that these students shouldn't be wary. There are muggings near campus, students can get hurt by crime, and if you have no idea how to tell a questionable neighborhood from a bad neighborhood it's no surprise that you're scared whenever you're out of sight of campus. That does not, however, excuse the remarks and actions that stereotype the vast majority of Baltimore's residents as being untrustworthy, drug-dealing or -using, and dangerous.

There is another passage in the essay that I found particularly striking.

We are afraid, my husband suggests, because we have guilty consciences. We secretly suspect that we might have more than we deserve.

That sentiment is hauntingly familiar to me. I've lived in this city long enough to feel like a real resident, but I still don't feel accepted by the city. Lately I've taken up distance running and as I've started to increase the length of my runs, I've started to push back the boundaries of my intimate exposure to Baltimore. Once I ran back towards south Baltimore from Patterson Park on Gough. Gough is legitimately crosses through what most people consider to be bad neighborhoods. There's even a four- or five-block stretch that passes through a housing project.

I didn't detour around the housing project, I just kept on trucking. For one thing, I was running, I had nothing on me but a key to my front door. I'm a tall man and although I don't think anyone considers me imposing, the world is a much more frightening place for a petite woman. So I ran right through the housing project.

As I ran through, I was struck with the familiar question: "Do you think these people hate me? Do they resent not only that I have so much more in material terms, but is it particularly offensive that I am even bringing my bourgeois hobby of running into their neighborhood?"

I'd like my running through their neighborhood to be interpreted in a positive way. Interpreted that I treat this housing project as just another city street and don't shun it just because it's residents are poor and predominantly (completely?) African-American. I'd like there to be some way to telegraph "I got a lot of what I have through hard work," but instead I'm sure just look like another rich, young asshole who can't wait to make them move further from my expensive coffee shops.

I feel this tremendous desire to help them by giving them good financial or educational advice or even personal advice. Heck, I'd love to explain to the kids why I'm running (Because it feels fucking great! Because it gets you in shape! Because it's about hard work and the sense of achievement that comes from completing something difficult! Because I don't want to end up with type II diabetes!).

There's no way for me to actually achieve any of this. The chasm that divides us socially is too much for me to bridge. I have to face that this sort of interaction is too far outside my comfort zone and if a conversation did happen, I would not be able to effectively communicate.

I run on, and the next thought is, of course, why do I feel I need to try to spread happiness by forcing my middle-class values on poor people? I think this, of course, because I am running and when you are running you have a lot time to try to think about things that aren't how tired you feel or how far you have left to go.

The answer to this question definitely points back to Biss's (the essayist) point about the feeling of "having more than I deserve." I feel guilty for having more than I deserve, but more subtly, I probably feel the desire to pass these values on to people poorer than myself in hopes of justifying my beliefs. If they adopt my values and also find success, then perhaps I am not party to some terrible crime. I'm just a person who has played by the rules, and here's living proof that anyone can succeed with these rules, so clearly the game wasn't necessarily rigged in my favor.

But I can't escape the fact that the game is partly rigged in my favor, even if I don't actively try to take advantage of it, I'm still a white, middle-class man. So I run on. I cross Central Avenue, reach Little Italy. Back on familiar turf, back to a neighborhood where you can take a date and purchase over-priced Italian food, wine, and dessert. Probably not much more than 2 miles to go on this run, I'm almost done!

I guess that's the other reason to run; because you can make visible, evident progress and you're always moving forward.

Biofuels: Still NOT a Good Idea!

I was always kind of vaguely suspicious of biofuels - the argument has essentially been over which politician can lavish more subsidies on their constituents in the name of "green fuels" - and finally we have some better proof that FlexFuel vehicles = bullshit.

From the journal Science:

• Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change

• Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt

New York Times summary of the reports:
Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

So basically, when you take into account the carbon dioxide emitted when land is cleared for use in biofuel growth (and eventually, because of substitution effects, some land somewhere is going to get cleared), you put yourself in a deep carbon debt that will take a few generations of using biofuels to escape.

Not to mention the fact that the entire life-cycle carbon cost of biofuels is kind of suspicious as it is. I'm supposed to believe that all of the energy it takes to grow the crops, harvest them, transport them to refineries, and refine them into fuel is less than the amount of energy you get out of the fuel? It's not like I'm breaking new ground in this analysis, check out this article from 2005.

So how much longer do you suppose we'll be hearing from politicians about how important it is to expand federal subsidies for biofuels? I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, if it's one thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it's that we need to transfer massive amounts of wealth to farmers and agri-business ($618 billion dollars, 2008-2017).

NYTimes Sees a Number, Decides Sky Has Fallen

The magical thing about a recession is that you can't tell if one is happening or not until months later. This puts the news media in a delicate situation. There's no way to report on the thing that everyone is curious about. Reporting about recessions also seems to be a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, if you close your eyes, click your heals, and repeat "the economy may be slipping into recession," it just might happen.

Take, for example, an article today in the New York Times: Productivity Slowed in the 4th Quarter

I have several problems with this article.

1. Productivity did not slow. Productivity is not a thing that can slow, it is a measure of goods produced per unit labor input, so it can only increase or decrease. Productivity growth, on the other hand, can accelerate or slow down.
2. You look at that headline and your first reaction is to think "The US economy was less productive in the 4th quarter, the economy's really in the crapper!" Wrong. Productivity stilled increased, just at a slower rate than before.

Ok, so fine, maybe the headline is a little to pessimistic for me. Perhaps the article is objectively written in a thoughtful manner. But you're no fool, you can tell that I'm just setting you up with that statement.

In the body of the article you find nothing but doom and gloom. Productivity growth slowed to a mere 1.8% annualized growth rate in the 4th quarter, from a blazing 6% annualized rate in the 3rd quarter. Sounds disastrous, right? 1.8 is not a big number! It's certainly not as big as 6!

How about some perspective then? From Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms," page 200, there's a table of long-term productivity growth rates. For the United States, from 1960-2000, the average growth rate of output per worker-hour was 1.75%.

To quote the article itself:

For the year, productivity rose by 1.6 percent, a slight rebound from a 1 percent gain in 2006 but both years were well below the average annual increases of 3.2 percent turned in from 2000 through 2004.

Because 4 years constitutes a reasonable amount of time to use to set your expectations. Seems more likely that we're just looking at productivity growth reverting to the long-term mean.

The whole tone of the article is ridiculous. It's basically written from the tone of "Batten down the hatches, it's going to get rough out here!" when all the data in the article says "We're not in a boom, but we may not be in a recession either." The article admits that productivity growth was twice what economists expected and that the cost of labor was lower than expectations, but then quotes an analysts that says everything is going to hell.

So my point is the New York Times has taken something that really means nothing or could mean anything, and decided to interpret it in the gloomiest possible fashion. What's worse, it's not even an individual reporter that we can blame. Apparently this is just a story from the Associated Press. Every news outlet is going to pick this up and people everywhere are going to clamor for an "economic stimulus" (which is synonymous with "increased deficit spending").

So I guess my point is, maybe there's a recession coming, but there's no way to really tell. Also, for most people, a recession is an entirely abstract thing that you can blame unfortunate economic events on. When you're using a home equity loan to finance your consumption, you have to know it's going to catch up with you eventually. When the entire nation is gripped by this mania, why are we surprised that the economy is slow for a bit? I guess that I just wish the news media had enough economic sense to parse the news a little better by themselves, rather than just weighting their stories to whichever camp has more analysts. Or, failing that, be a little more objective about things.