Category Archives: Business and Economy

Questioning the value of an outsider’s perspective in MoMA’s “Foreclosed”

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MoMA’s exhibit Foreclosed certainly seems to be provoking a lot of strong reactions (see Brian’s previous commentary here).  Diana Lind, editor in chief of Next American City, questions both the motives and the practicality underlying MoMA’s re-imagining of the American suburbs:

Foreclosed seethes with disdain for the suburbs, and the lack of an empathetic understanding of how the suburbs function and are changing, ultimately makes the exhibit look less visionary than ignorant. As an urban dweller who is deeply frustrated by the social, economic and environmental consequences of sprawl and car-centered communities, I too want to see clever ways of retrofitting these parts of the country. But saying that, I wish the exhibit had improved upon the suburbs rather than suggest transforming them beyond recognition.

It was critically apparent that none of the architects participating in the exhibit actually live in the suburbs (a fact confirmed by the exhibit’s curator). To Bergdoll, the last great American architect to live and work in the burbs was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park at the turn of the 20th century. This outsider perspective on the suburbs is the exhibit’s crucial flaw and inevitably influenced the architects to propose interventions in suburbia that have all the grace of a superblock in the middle of the city grid. Despite their good intentions, their efforts at sustainability and their smart alternatives to homeownership, the architects’ wrath for the suburbs has caused them to create projects that annihilate the suburbs rather than improve them. [emphasis added]

For all their problems, suburbs clearly “work” on some levels.  (If they didn’t, suburbs would hold little attraction for to the millions happily residing in them.)  Lind’s specific examples of cultural clueless-ness on the part of the MoMA-commissioned architects are well worth pondering.  She suggests that failing to consider what aspects of suburbs work (and how) results the same sort of ham-fisted, bureaucratic approach that destroyed thriving urban neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century:

[MoMA’s] radical visions that are so insensitive to the suburbs remind me of the Modernist public housing projects that were once foisted on inner cities. Created by well-intentioned but essentially ignorant architects and planners, those buildings made sense in theory but not in practice. They didn’t respond to the rhythms and needs of the people who would be housed there, because the architects didn’t really respect or understand the lives of poor people. MoMA should have found some architects who could love and live in the suburbs, showing us the way to make the most of suburban housing instead of wishing it didn’t exist.

Mass transit in an age of self-driving cars

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Wired’s article about the nearing technical feasibility of self-driving cars makes several intriguing observations about the (possible) future of personal transportation:

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Shopping malls as glamorous places in India

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After fifty plus years of living with the shopping mall, perhaps they have simply become second nature to Americans. But, when they are built in places like India, it is fascinating to see how the mall fits into a different context:

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Fuel efficiency = bankrupt highways?

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Brian hit the issue almost a year ago, but Jordan Weissmann at the Atlantic recently re-focused attention on the problem of funding U.S. highways with fuel taxes:

Since back in the Eisenhower era, the federal government has maintained a Highway Trust Fund, paid for mostly by taxes on fuel, that helps cover the repair and construction of our country’s roads, bridges, and mass transit. The idea was that drivers themselves should bear some of the cost the roads they used. Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1993. Since then, inflation has eaten away at least a third of its value…[and] two new challenges [have] emerged. First, Americans started caring about the fuel efficiency again, as skyrocketing oil prices ended the era of gas-guzzling SUVs. Then the recession struck, and penny-pinching drivers logged fewer miles to save on gas.

The upshot, of course, is that

less money is flowing into the Highway Trust Fund, which is now facing potential insolvency in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

I guess it’s good that fuel efficiency gains are having an impact?  (Ah, unintended consequences.)  Looks like we’re headed into a world where cars will have to start paying by the mile–or the highways are going to get a lot worse.

Is “Hollywood” hypocritical?

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Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing comments on

the hypocrisy of the way that [the entertainment industry has] painted Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload

by pointing to a blog post by Alan Parker over at the Toronto Sun.  Parker’s argument for hypocrisy is historical, based on the founding of Hollywood in the face of Thomas Edison’s assertions of monopoly control (via patents) over motion picture technology.  He concludes:

The film corporations that were spawned by the very pirates and outlaws who created a hole-in-the-wall getaway hideout in Hollywood are now leading the charge to eradicate uncontrolled Internet access to works and technology they say they hold copyright and patent title to.

And they even use much of the same hypocritical, moralistic language that the Edison Trust used to claim the high ground over the shabby, nasty little rats, weasels, thieves and cheats stealing from them.

If Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldfish/Goldwyn, Jesse Lansky, Adolph Zuker, Marcus Loew, or “the Warner boys”–all cited by Alan as independent producers who resisted Edison’s monopoly–had personally tried to assert their own monopolies and cut off subsequent producers, that would undoubtedly be hypocrisy.  But that is not what Alan is arguing:  he is accusing corporations of hypocrisy because their contemporary trade organization (the MPAA) is taking a position (roughly, that “pirates” should be “shut down”) that is contrary to the position (roughly, that the “market should flourish”) taken by natural persons (particular independent producers whose associated corporations continue in some form to this day) about a hundred years ago.

Can corporations be hypocritical in this fashion?  At its core, hypocrisy is falseness, saying one thing yet doing another.  When the “saying” and the “doing” are separated by 100 years–and involve none of the same actual people–it’s hard for “hypocrisy” to have any real meaning.

Exploited workers: why Apple and other companies will not move manufacturing jobs back to the US

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The New York Times has a long piece examining why Apple, even with the pleas of President Obama, will not likely move manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It sounds like it has a lot to do with what Apple can ask of workers in China. Here are a few examples:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day…

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said…

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

This sounds ripe for a Marxist explanation: Apple has its products overseas because it can ask things of workers (possibly interpreted as “exploiting” these workers) that would be very difficult to ask of workers in the United States. American workers would not be happy about multiple things: non-predictable work hours, living in company dormitories, relatively low pay compared to wages in the first-world, consistent twelve hour days.

When I first read these descriptions, it immediately reminded of manufacturing in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was a period marked by labor unrest, the rise of unions, and a change in a lot of laws about what companies could ask of employees. We’ve had company towns; think of Pullman on the south side of Chicago. We’ve had bad working conditions; think the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. We’ve had low wages; now we have a minimum wage (that some would argue is still not enough and should be replaced by a living wage). With the protests of workers plus a growing prosperity, work conditions changed. Is China close to a similar period or does a different governmental approach and different culture make is less feasible? As Marx suggested, will the basics of capitalism help turn these workers against the system, pushing companies to look for workers in other countries?

The article hints at this but I think it could be put more clearly: there are not easy answers to this issue. If manufacturing jobs will not return to the US except in certain circumstances (see the recent battle over Boeing plants being located in right-to-work states), we need a clear discussion of this rather than politicians saying nice things.

Sociologist argues shorter work weeks would reduce unemployment

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Alongside a report last week suggesting the 40 hour work week was simply a cultural norm we could change, a sociologist argues that shorter work weeks would reduce unemployment levels:

[Juliet Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston College] claimed that working hour reductions have “a long history” of successfully leading to lower rates of unemployment.

“What progressive reductions in working hours financed by productivity do is allow a society to take some or all, depending on its choices, of its economic dividend of the productivity growth that it generates, and use it to give people more leisure time rather than more income,” Prof Schor added…

She cited the example of the Netherlands, where such a policy was implemented in 1980.

The Dutch began a 15-year project to alter the look of the working week, long enough to have a limited, if any, impact on real wages.

I wonder if Americans would like this trade off: fewer hours on the job and less pay for a lower unemployment rate. Would any politician have the guts or political capital to even make this a talking point? Everyone does want to reduce unemployment, don’t they…

At the same time, this could also lead to larger discussions in the United States about the emphasis on productivity and income growth over other desirable outcomes. Could you imagine lots of companies talking about wanting their employees to flourish rather than simply be more productive? Even discussions of living wages seem to focus on properly paying workers so they can survive rather than allowing them to pursue relationships and leisure time.

Breaking the social norm of the 40 hour work week

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The New Economics Foundation suggests we work 40 hour weeks because that is the prevailing social norm, not because it is necessary:

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) says there is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered a “normal” 40-hour work week today. In its wake, many people are caught in a vicious cycle of work and consumption. They live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume things. Missing from that equation is an important fact that researchers have discovered about most material consumption in wealthy societies: so much of the pleasure and satisfaction we gain from buying is temporary, ephemeral, and mostly just relative to those around us (who strive to consume still more, in a self-perpetuating spiral).

The NEF argues we need to achieve truly happy lives, we need to challenge social norms and reset the industrial clock ticking in our heads. It sees the 21-hour week as integral to this for two reasons: it will redistribute paid work, offering the hope of a more equal society (right now too many are overworked, or underemployed). At the same time, it would give us all time for the things we value but rarely have time to do well such as care for our family, travel, read or continue learning (as opposed to feeding consumerism).

This reminds me of past visions where modern conveniences, like new appliances or flying cars or a a perpetually robust economy, would reduce the number of hours people would have to spend on “menial” tasks like housework and working. Alas, many of these things have not happened.

This group does raise an interesting issue: there are ideological reasons for sticking to 40 hours. This foundation suggests that working less would lead to more fulfilling lives full of relationships and time to pursue our true interests. I wonder how many Americans would really be willing to work less in exchange for less money or discretionary income.

I wonder if a movement toward this direction would require a respected company to make this change.

Three years of poll data from during the Great Recession

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Here is a lot of interesting poll data collected during three years, April 2009 to early 2011, of the Great Recession. From a quick glance at the data, there is quite a bit of uncertainty and the country could go in a number of directions.

A declining response to customer surveys?

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Perhaps you, like me, has received an endless stream of invitations to take customer surveys on your receipts, in your email box, or while browsing a website. Experts note that the proliferation of these surveys may lead to a lower response rate and lower-quality data:

Surely, it’s nice to be courted for input, at least sometimes. But some consumers say they’re fed up with giving time-consuming feedback for free, don’t like being drawn into a data web used to evaluate employees or feel companies don’t act on the advice they get. Others say they simply don’t have anything revelatory to impart about, say, ordering a shirt or buying a package of pens…

“Survey fatigue” has long been a concern among pollsters. Some social scientists fear a pushback on feedback could hamper important government data-gathering, as for the census or unemployment statistics.

If more people say no to those, “the data, possibly, become less trustworthy,” said Judith Tanur, a retired Stony Brook University sociology professor specializing in survey methodology.

Response rates have been sinking fast in traditional public-opinion phone polls, including political ones, said Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center’s survey director and the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Pew’s response rates have fallen from about 36 percent in 1997 to 11 percent last year, he said. The rate includes households that weren’t reachable, as well as those that said no.

This is an issue that is bigger than customer surveys: it can be harder to reach people today with surveys because of call screening, the inability to contact people on cell phones, and the problems with doing web surveys. All of this means that people who conduct surveys will have to work even harder to get people to respond.

I wonder if the solution is to give customers better incentives for filling out surveys. A lot of these surveys include the chance for winning a prize but perhaps these could be increased or customers could earn points (and be able to redeem them) for giving consistent feedback.

I can honestly say that I very rarely fill out such surveys, even knowing how difficult it is for companies and research organizations to obtain such information. I recently started filling out a survey for Marriott after staying a few nights but the survey was ridiculously long and detailed so I quit 30% in.