Rahm Emanuel: Chicago the model for pro-growth policies

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday where he explained how his city could show America the way toward growth:

While infrastructure improvements have been neglected on a federal level for decades, Chicago is making one of the nation’s largest coordinated investments, putting 30,000 residents to work over the next three years improving our roads, rails and runways; repairing our aged water system; and increasing access to gigabit-speed broadband. We are paying for these critical improvements through a combination of reforms, efficiencies and direct user fees, as well as creating the nation’s first city-level public-private infrastructure bank. Democrats should champion these kinds of innovative financing tools at a national level.

If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed, we must continue the push for reform that the president began with Race to the Top, bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals.

Chicago has adopted its own Race to the Top for early childhood education, allowing public schools, Head Start, charters and parochial schools to compete for dollars by improving the quality of their pre-kindergarten programs. In addition, this year Chicago Public Schools put into effect a 30 percent increase in class time, which means that when today’s kindergartners graduate high school, they will have benefited from 2½ more years’ worth of education.

In partnership with leading private-sector companies, we reengineered our six community colleges to focus each on skills training for jobs in one of Chicago’s six key growth fields. Democrats can be the party that closes the nation’s skills gap by making our community colleges a vital link between people looking for jobs and companies looking for skilled workers.

The strength of these investments is proven in the number of people we’re putting back to work: Chicago is first in the nation in terms of increase in employed residents, and for several months we have led the nation in year-over-year employment increases. We added 42,500 residents to the workforce in the past year alone — 8,000 more than the next highest U.S. city…

If Democrats develop innovative policies that help Americans compete in a global economy, we will outperform Republicans on Election Day. It’s that simple.

I’ve made this argument before (see here): Rahm Emanuel is more of a pro-business Democrat. As he notes in this article, he is in the mold of Bill Clinton who was willing to do what it takes to add jobs and fuel growth (illustrated by his recent push for digital billboards on city property alongside busy highways). And thus far, Emanuel has been able to push through his agenda in Chicago.

However, two things might hold back his arguments on the national level:

1. How much do Democrats and other Americans want government  to work closely private firms and corporations? Emanuel is a fan of public-private partnerships but people on both sides may not like this idea much.

2. Critics will charge that Chicago is hardly a model for others to emulate. Crime? Residential segregation? Massive budget issues? Battles with local unions? Underperforming schools?

I imagine some other big-city mayors might argue their cities could provide better models for the whole country. It would be fascinating to see a number of them respond with different visions.

(One last question: how much of this argument is simply boosterism from the mayor of the city’s third largest city?)

An argument for Amazon’s one-star reviews reveals the role of cultural critics

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A professional critic praises Amazon’s one-star reviews:

About a year ago, while shopping online for holiday gifts, I became an unabashed connoisseur of the one-star amateur Amazon review. Here I found the barbed, unvarnished, angry and uncomfortably personal hatchet job very much alive. Indeed, I became so enamored of Amazon’s user-generated reviews of books, films and music that my interest expanded to the one-star notices on Goodreads, Yelp and Netflix, where, for instance, a “Moneyball” review notes the movie “did not make you feel warm and fuzzy at the end as a good sports film should.” How true! A rare opinion on a critical darling!…

But there is a visceral thrill to reading amateur reviewers on Amazon who, unlike professional critics, do not claim to be informed or even knowledgeable, who do not consider context or history or ambition, who do not claim any pretense at all. Their reviews, particularly of classics, often read as though these works had dropped out of space into their laps, and they were first to experience it. About “Moby-Dick,” one critic writes: “Essentially, they rip off the plot to ‘Jaws.'” About “Ulysses,” another critic writes: “I honestly cannot figure out the point, other than cleverness for cleverness’ sake.”

Likewise, to seriously dismiss “The Great Gatsby” as “‘Twilight’ without the vampires,” as an Amazon reviewer did, may be glib and reductive, but it’s also brilliantly spot on, the kind of comparison a more mannered critic might not dare. “Whoever made that ‘Twilight’ comparison, whether they know it, is showing their education, that they can connect new media with old works and draw fresh conclusions,” said David Raskin, chair of the art history, theory and criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago…

Speaking of honesty: It should be pointed out here that, in general, online amateur reviews are not mean but usually as forgiving as the professional sort. Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied online reviews — “partly because I was curious if they were real or just someone gaming the system” — told me that 60 percent of Amazon reviews are five-star reviews and another 20 percent are four-star. The information research firm Gartner released a study in September predicting that, within a couple of years, between 10 and 15 percent of online reviews will be paid for by companies — rigged.

It sounds like the argument is this: you can find the average American in the one-star Amazon reviews. Instead of getting the filtered, sophisticated review typically found in media sources, these reviewers give the unvarnished pop culture take. Discussed in this argument is the idea of social class and education. An approved reviewer or critic, the typical gatekeeper, is able to put a work in its context. The educated critic is trying to make the work understandable for others. The educated critic often has experience and education backing their opinions. In contrast, the Internet opens up spaces for individuals to post their own reactions and through aggregation, such as the Amazon five-star review system, have some say about how products and cultural works are perceived.

This new reality doesn’t render cultural gatekeepers completely irrelevant but it does do several things. One, it dilutes their influence or at least makes it possible for more critics to get involved. Second, it also makes more visible the opinions of average citizens. Instead of just theorizing about mass culture or pop culture, we can all see what the masses are thinking at the moment they are thinking it. (Think of the possibilities on Twitter!) Third, it provides space like in this article for reviewers to admit they don’t always want to write erudite pieces but want to have a “normal person reaction.”

Just one problem with this piece: the critic says he doesn’t really read the one-star Amazon reviews for information. Instead, he appreciates the “visceral thrill.” He quotes an academic who says such reviews reveal cultural gaps. Thus, celebrating the one-star reviews may be just another way to assert the traditional reviewer’s cultural capital. Read the one-star reviews for entertainment but continue to go back to the educated reviewer for the context and more valued perspective.

American housing reacts to changes in family and household structures

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After looking at some data about how much American families and households have changed in recent decades, Kaid Benfield asks an interesting question about how American housing might change to meet these realities:

So, as many of us connect with families in one way or another on Thanksgiving, I can’t help but observe that there really is no “typical” American family living under the same roof these days, if there ever was.  Rather, we have a diverse and changing array of household types and circumstances that smart planners and businesses will seek to accommodate.  The census data show that the growing parts of the housing market are nonfamily households, smaller households including people living alone, unmarried couples, single-parent households with kids, and older households.  The declining parts of the market are larger families, married couples, two-parent households, and couples with only one breadwinner, though each of these categories clings to a significant share of the total.

Interesting stuff, and mostly good for those of us who would like to see less sprawl and more walkable neighborhoods.  But also a bit complex.

The typical answer I’ve seen online to this question is to point to indicators that suggest younger (see here and here) and older adults (see here) will be seeking out denser housing. This may be true. I think we could also argue that American housing has already shifted to these realities in recent decades through several new options.

1. The rise of townhouses, particularly in the suburbs. These have the advantages of allowing for single-family home ownership, the ability to pay an association to maintain the housing as well as help protect property values, and denser housing which frees up more open space.

2. The rise of condos in both suburbs in cities. In suburbs, this has similar benefits to townhouses. In cities, this has been a boon for redevelopment and the movement of people with money into urban cores.

3. New housing products for older Americans beyond group homes including developments like the Del Webb communities and retirement complexes that include owned units (whether more like condos or detached single-family units).

4. More interest in tiny houses and tiny apartments (see this latest example from San Francisco).

5. Some New Urbanist communities and neighborhoods that allow for denser housing.

Perhaps the argument here about housing is about a matter of degrees; there have been changes in American housing in recent decades but it hasn’t necessarily been mostly anti-sprawl.

Note: I’ve been following some of these trends about changing family and household composition. For example, check out these posts (here and here) about more Americans living in single-person households.

Shopping the real favorite sport of Americans?

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At the bottom of yet another article about Black Friday, I found this interesting quote from a Sears executive about how Americans view shopping:

Sears, like many retailers, will make many Black Friday deals available online. At Sears, they’re available to the store’s Shop Your Way members (there’s no fee to join, and it can be done online).

“Shopping is a sport to many people, and this is the Super Bowl,” Hanover added.

Americans tend to like their sports so could shopping really supplant football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and other activities? Here are some reasons this could happen:

1. The average American probably gets a lot more opportunities to shop than to play sports. It is different to observe a sport versus participating in shopping.

2. Shopping can now take place in many different places. As brick and mortar retailers have noticed, online shopping makes it possible to look at, think through, and make purchases from virtually anywhere.

3. Shopping is a fairly frequent activity. Even if someone spends very little disposable income, that person still has to shop for groceries and essentials.

4. Shopping incorporates some of the same features as watching sports or cheering for sports teams. Shoppers are fans of particular brands. Shopping can be done with other people, building and cementing group bonds. Shopping can be ritualistic. In other words, the same sort of social benefits of group activity suggested by Durkheim that could apply to sports could also apply to shopping.

5. Shopping is a critical part of our economy. While people do need to purchase certain goods regularly, new products like the latest smartphones, cars, video games, and other things are important for corporations, the stock market, and thus, stockholders which includes a wide range of Americans.

6. Shopping in America is often tied to holidays like Christmas, Thankgiving, and Halloween. Spending can be easier to justify because it is for the holidays plus it is related to social interactions that take place those days.

7. Compared to most of human history, more people now have the time and income to devote to shopping beyond subsistence.

Shopping itself deserves more attention from sociologists. While plenty of sociologists in recent decades have looked at consumption patterns (often focused on the products or objects acquired through consumption), this isn’t quite the same as looking at the process of shopping. I have enjoyed reading Sharon Zukin’s work on shopping; for example, see Chapter 6 “While the City Shops” in The Cultures of Cities.

Argument: individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities since they require contributing to the “public good”

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After looking at the Democratic vote advantage in cities for the 2012 election, here is an argument about why individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities:

If Republicans are ever going to earn real votes in cities in the future, though, they’ll have to do more than just talk about them differently. The real problem seeps much deeper. As the Republican Party has moved further to the right, it has increasingly become the party of fierce individualism, of “I built that” and you take care of yourself. Cities, on the other hand, are fundamentally about the shared commons. If you live in a city and you think government – and other people – should stay out of your life, how will you get to work in the morning? Who will police your neighborhood? Where will you find a public park when your building has no back yard?

In a good piece on the GOP’s problem with geography earlier this week, The New Republic’s Lydia DePillis interviewed Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse, who made this point succinctly: “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

The real urban challenge for conservatives going forward will be to pull back from an ideology that leaves little room for the concept of “public good,” and that treats all public spending as if it were equally wasteful. Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).

Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics. There’s no reason why the Democratic Party should have an exclusive lock on this idea. Investing government money efficiently – as Republicans want to do – is also about focusing on how it’s spent in cities. While Republicans are mulling this over in the next four years, it may help to look at Howard’s map. What is going on in those dark blue dots? What does it mean to live in those places – and to live there and hear from politicians that “government should get out of the way?”

This reminds me of some of the observations of early sociologists about the transition from more rural village and farm life to urban life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Cities aren’t just different because there are more people who are living and working closer together; this changes the social interactions (think of Simmel’s talk of the blase attitude in cities) as well as the social interdependence (think of Durkheim’s discussion of the division of labor).

One way Republicans could positively argue about cities: along with their surrounding metropolitan regions, cities are economic engines. A thriving economy needs thriving firms in these regions that encourage innovation, provide jobs, and interact with and operate in nearby communities.

Are there cities that are more individualistic than others? Can you have a global city that has a more individualistic ethos?

Trial of 220 square foot apartments moves forward in San Francisco

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A trial run of “micro-apartments” has been approved in San Francisco:

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors tentatively approved Tuesday a trial run of 220-square-foot “micro-apartments” — carefully designed compact living spaces that have become all the rage in urban development. Pending ratification and mayoral approval next month, the plan beats, in smallness, Vancouver’s 226-square-foot “micro-lofts,” and make the 275-square-foot units under trial in New York look like airplane hangars…

Depending on your perspective, the tiny living spaces are either a much-needed option for single people crushed by climbing rents, or community-destroying crash pads for young techie weekenders. Either way, the competition is fierce for creative floor-plan designs that do more with much, much less. The San Francisco measure requires of a minimum of 150 square feet of living space, plus a bathroom and kitchen, though the kitchen can be integrated into the living area. The trial approves 375 units total.

For a clue to what the micro-apartments will look like, Wired toured San Francisco’s new “SmartSpace” micro-apartment complex, which was unveiled last week by developer Patrick Kennedy — an advocate for the new, smaller limits. SmartSpace crams 23 units into its footprint, each 285 to 310 square feet. The floor plan is similar to the even smaller units Kennedy plans to build now that the new measure has passed, he says.

SmartSpace contains narrow rooms with a bathroom at the front, a wall-mounted TV over a computer workstation, and a window seat with a hydraulic pop-up table. (They call it “SmartBench.”) In some units, a fold-up bed reveals an integrated dining table. A closet near the bathroom was designed to hold a washer and dryer and some appliances, including a small convection oven. There’s a dishwasher, but no oven under the small, two-burner electric stove. High ceilings, says Kennedy, were key, noting that they had a grad student live in a 160-square-foot prototype in Berkeley, and made some significant design changes based on her input.

It is interesting to note the opposition these apartments have faced in San Francisco. It sounds like there are a few issues: do the units meet some basic requirements for living space, how will they affect the affordable housing market (and who will end up living in the micro-apartments), and where these units will be located and how the residents will interact with the surrounding community. But, if this size of apartment has worked in other cities, why couldn’t San Francisco look at the best examples and set tough regulations?

Also, I was struck in looking at these plans that more space could be created by transforming the unit more. For example, the small spaces in the IKEA showrooms tend to have a loft bed so it frees up more space. Or other small apartments utilize moving walls or space at a slight step-up. These particular plans look more like traditional apartments that have simply been shrunk to the bare essentials although this may be a function of cost.

The real question after the 2012 presidential election: who gets Obama’s database?

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President Obama has plenty to deal with in his second term but plenty of people want an answer to this question: who will be given access to the campaign’s database?

Democrats are now pressing to expand and redeploy the most sophisticated voter list in American political history, beginning with next year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and extending to campaigns for years to come. The prospect already has some Republicans worried…

The database consists of voting records and political donation histories bolstered by vast amounts of personal but publicly available consumer data, say campaign officials and others familiar with the operation, which was capable of recording hundreds of fields for each voter.

Campaign workers added far more detail through a broad range of voter contacts — in person, on the phone, over e-mail or through visits to the campaign’s Web site. Those who used its Facebook app, for example, had their files updated with lists of their Facebook friends along with scores measuring the intensity of those relationships and whether they lived in swing states. If their last names seemed Hispanic, a key target group for the campaign, the database recorded that, too…

To maintain their advantage, Democrats say they must guard against the propensity of political data to deteriorate in off years, when funding and attention dwindles, while navigating the inevitable intra-party squabbles over who gets access now that the unifying forces of a billion-dollar presidential campaign are gone.

The Obama campaign spent countless hours developing this database and will not let it go lightly. I imagine this could become a more common legacy for winning politicians than getting things done while in office: passing on valuable data about voters and supporters to other candidates. If a winning candidate had good information, others will want to build on the same information. I don’t see much mention of one way to solve this issue: let political candidates or campaigns pay for the information!

What about the flip side: will anyone use or want the information collected by the Romney campaign? Would new candidates prefer to start over or are there important pieces of data that can be salvaged from a losing campaign?

Report calls for more study of how “kids navigate social networks”

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A new report suggests we don’t know much about how kids use social networks and thus, we need more research:

A recent report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Kids Online: A new research agenda for understanding social networking forums, has identified that we don’t actually know enough about how pre-teens use online social networking. The researchers, Dr. Sarah Grime and Dr. Deborah Fields, have done a good job in helping us recognize that younger children are engaged in a range of different ways with online social networks, but that our knowledge and understanding of what that means and how it impacts on their lives is pretty much underdone. GeekDads, of course, will have thoughts about how and why our children are playing and engaging with technology and networks in the ways they do, but this doesn’t give the people who make the rules and set the policy agendas the big picture that they need.

Essentially, Kids Online is a research report that calls for more research into children’s use of social networks. But the report does demonstrate very clearly why this is required. And at the rate that technology is changing and advancing, we need to work cleverly if we are to have the type of data and analysis that we need as parents to guide our decision making around technology and our children. We are all out there trying our best to facilitate healthy, dynamic, educational and exciting experiences for our children when it comes to tech, but there are not enough people exploring what that looks like. As the report says:

“Research on Internet use in the home has consistently demonstrated that family dynamics play a crucial role in children’s and parents’ activities and experiences online. We need further research on the role of parental limits, rules, and restrictions on children’s social networking as well as how families, siblings, peers, and schools influence children’s online social networking.”

I would go further: we need more research of how people of all ages navigate social networks. This doesn’t mean just looking at what activities users participate in online, how often they update information, or how many or what kinds of friends they have. These pieces of information give an outline of social network site usage. However, we need more comprehensive views how exactly social interaction online works, develops, and interacts in feedback loops with the offline and online worlds.

Let me give an example. Suppose an eleven year old joins Facebook. What happens then? Sure, they gain friends and develop a profile but how does this change and develop over the first days, weeks, and months? How does the eleven year old describe the process of social interaction? How do their friends, online and offline, describe this interaction? Where do they learn how to act and not act on Facebook? Do the social networks online overlap completely with offline networks and if so or if not, how does this affect the offline network? How does the eleven year old start seeing all social interaction differently? Does it change their interaction patterns for years to come or can they somewhat compartmentalize the Facebook experience?

This sort of research would take a lot of time and would be difficult to do with large groups. To do it well, a researcher would have two options: an ethnographic approach or to gain access to the keys to someone’s Facebook account to be able to observe everything that happens. Of course, Facebook itself could provide this information…

The four cultural camps of American parenting

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A sociologist argues there are four cultural parenting camps in the United States:

The Faithful, who make up 20 percent of American parents and are largely white and middle class, believe strongly that “God’s timeless truths” about sex, marriage, and life remain as true today as they have always been. They seek to defend these truths in the broader culture and, failing that, aim to “buffer themselves from progressive currents enough that their families will remain faithful to their traditions.” Their most important parenting goal is “raising children to reflect God’s will and purpose.”…

The Engaged Progressives, who make up 21 percent of American parents and are whiter, better educated, and more affluent than the population as a whole, march to a very different beat than the Faithful, at least ideologically. They steer clear of organized religion, believe strongly in the virtues of personal freedom, choice, and tolerance, and seek to form their children into independent-minded adults. But these individualistic values are also tempered by a commitment among progressive parents to the “golden rule” and the values that go along with this rule: honesty, openness, empathy, and compassion for the vulnerable. Their cultural commitments point them in a Blue direction (82 percent reported they would not vote for the Republican presidential nominee).

Ironically, whatever their ideological differences with the Faithful, Engaged Progressives live lives that look surprisingly like their ideological opposites. Although they have fewer children (2.46) than the Faithful, they are almost as married (80 percent are married), about as likely to have stay-at-home-mothers when preschool children are in the home as are the Faithful (58 percent compared to 65 percent), and they also highly engaged parents, enjoying—for instance—more meals with their children than the average parent. So, in pursuit of progressive ideals, Engaged Progressives rely on largely neotraditional strategies: namely, marriage and an intensive parenting style.

The same cannot be said about the other two cultural camps of American parents detailed in the report: “the Detached” and “the American Dreamers”, who make up, respectively, 19 and 27 percent of American parents. Although a slight majority of the Detached are married (67 percent), this largely white, largely downscale group of parents feel incapable or unable to exert much of an influence on their children’s lives. They spend comparatively little time interacting with their children, do not eat daily with their parents, are disconnected from the religious and civic fabric of their communities, and instead allow the television and other outside influences to set the cultural agenda for their children. Indeed, Bowman contends that the Detached parents “lack the vision, vitality, certainty, and self-confidence required to embrace any agenda” for their children. Not surprisingly, this camp has little interest in or involvement with politics.

By contrast, the American Dreamers—who are disproportionately working class and minority—have high hopes for their children. Politically, they are divided, with black and Hispanic Dreamers tilting Democratic, and white Dreamers titling Republican. They believe strongly in education, their children are optimistic about their educational prospects, and they want their children to make good on the American Dream. But given that marriage is fragile in this camp (only 64 percent are married), they have less income and education than most parents, and they are more likely to hail from communities with anemic religious and civic institutions, it’s not clear that American Dreamers can make good on the big dreams they have for their children.

A few thoughts about this:

1. Read the PDF report here and see more about the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia here.

2. Sociologist Annette Lareau suggested in Unequal Childhoods that social class led to two parenting styles: concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth. Are Lareau’s two styles spread across these four new categories or was Lareau missing something big?

3. There are some interesting implications here for the culture wars. The suggestion in this article is that both The Faithful and The Engaged Progressives follow similar patterns even if they hold to different ideologies and tend to fight among themselves. Is this because of social class? Education? Race? Current or lingering effects of religion? Living in suburbs and/or wealthier areas?

4. When I see typologies like this, I always wonder about how many categories can and should be created. Is four cultural family types enough or too many? A lower number seems better for having more coherent categories and it is easier to discuss the findings. However, if there are actually smaller clusters of families, then more types may be needed to be more precise and better describe reality.

Was the US at a point where “every good American deserved a McMansion”?

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I’ve seen claims like this before but here is a great example of a broad description of how McMansions contributed to the American economic crisis:

A worrying and much commented on aspect of America’s Great Recession was that very few people saw it coming.

The autopsy revealed many obvious causes — the artful bundling and trading of bad debt, the notion that every good American deserved a McMansion in the suburbs whether or not he could pay for it, instituting big tax cuts and massive spending increases, pervasive debt, everywhere.

These were mostly ignored until it was too late.

What intrigues me here is not the argument that the construction of and mortgages provided for McMansions and other large houses contributed to the economic crisis. They did. However, the argument here is that Americans thought they deserved McMansions and other goods. Is this true? It is one thing to have the credit available to make such big purchases but another thing to have a pervasive ideology that everyone deserves such an opportunity. The real problem then was not McMansions but materialism and excessive consumption. This is why McMansions are often mentioned in the same sentence with SUVs: both have become symbols of unnecessary but wanted consumer goods.

This is the reason I have wondered repeatedly on this blog whether American consumer patterns will change once (if?) the economy turns around. Because of the downturn, it is more difficult to purchase and build things like McMansions. But, if the economy turns around, will people again turn to unnecessary consumer goods? A number of commentators have suggested spending patterns will change, particularly for younger adults who will have or want to delay purchases like cars or houses. Yet, we will have to wait and see and see whether the economic status of today sticks around for a long time or not and then how people respond.