Small Cities Are Becoming a New Engine Of Economic Growth

The conventional wisdom is that the world’s largest cities are going to be the primary drivers of economic growth and innovation. Even slums, according to a fawning article in National Geographic, represent “examples of urban vitality, not blight.” In America, it is commonly maintained by pundits that “megaregions” anchored by dense urban cores will dominate the future.

Such conceits are, not surprisingly, popular among big city developers and the media in places like New York, which command the national debate by blaring the biggest horn. However, a less fevered analysis of recent trends suggests a very different reality: When it comes to growth, economic and demographic, opportunity increasingly is to be found in smaller, and often remote, places. (...)

[What] we see is a very different reality than that often promoted by big city boosters. Large, dense urban regions clearly possess some great advantages: hub airports, big labor markets, concentrations of hospitals, schools, cultural amenities and specific industrial expertise. Yet despite these advantages, they still lag in the job creation race to unheralded, smaller communities.

Why are the stronger smaller cities growing faster than most larger ones? The keys may lie in many mundane factors that are often too prosaic for urban theorists. They include things such as strong community institutions like churches and shorter commutes than can be had in New York, L.A., Boston or the Bay Area (except for those willing to pay sky-high prices to live in a box near downtown). Young families might be attracted to better schools in some areas — notably the Great Plains — and the access to natural amenities common in many of these smaller communities.

Perhaps another underappreciated factor is Americans’ overwhelming preference for a single-family home, particularly young families. A recent survey from the National Association of Realtors found that 80 percent preferred a detached, single-family home; only a small sliver, roughly 7 percent, wanted to live in a dense urban area “close to it all.” Some 87 percent expressed a strong desire for greater privacy, something that generally comes with lower-density housing.

This trend towards smaller communities — unthinkable among big city planners and urban land speculators — is likely to continue for several reasons. For one thing, new telecommunications technology serves to even the playing field for companies in smaller cities. You can now operate a sophisticated global business from Fargo, N.D., or Shreveport, La., in ways inconceivable a decade or two ago.

Another key element is the predilections of two key expanding demographic groups: boomers and their offspring, the millennials. Aging boomers are not, in large part, hankering for dense city life, as is often asserted. If anything, if they choose to move, they tend toward less dense and even rural areas. Young families and many better-educated workers also seem to be moving generally to less dense and affordable places.

by Joel Kotkin, New Geography |  Read more:
Photo: Glens Falls, NY

Europe’s Achilles heel

The respite in the euro crisis lasted a few short months. Now, despite a €130 billion ($169 billion) second bail-out for Greece, a fiscal compact agreed on by the euro-zone leaders in December, and €1 trillion of cheap long-term loans from the European Central Bank, the night terrors are back. How dispiriting that Europe is still so ill-prepared for the ordeal to come.

Time is short. In France voters have given their new president, François Hollande, a mandate to alter the “austere” course set by his ousted predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and to focus on growth. Mrs Merkel says she will not change the fiscal compact, but Mr Hollande needs something to show voters in legislative polls next month. More threatening is the second election looming in Greece, where parties are struggling to form a government. If a majority of Greeks again vote to reject the spending cuts and reforms that go with their country’s bail-out, then euro-zone governments—in particular, Germany’s—will face a drastic choice. Mrs Merkel will either accommodate Greece and swallow the moral hazard of rewarding defiance or, more likely, stand firm and cut the Greeks adrift (see article).

The idea of a chaotic Greek departure from the euro at a time of Franco-German disunion should terrify everyone it touches (the damage it would do the world economy may well be the biggest risk to Barack Obama’s chances of re-election, for instance). With so much at stake, the rest of the euro zone urgently needs to lower the risk that contagion from a Greek exit would infect Portugal, Ireland and even Spain and Italy. The worry is that, just at the moment when hardheaded realpolitik is needed, politics has fallen prey to self-delusion, with leaders in all the main countries peddling seductive half-truths that promise Europe’s citizens an easier way out.

Stories that people tell… 

The euro zone needs to do a lot of hard things. Our list would include at the very least: in the short term, slower fiscal adjustment, more investment, looser monetary policy to promote growth and a thicker financial firewall to protect the weaklings on the periphery from contagion (all of which the Germans dislike); in the medium term, structural reforms to Europe’s rigid markets and outsize welfare states (not popular in southern Europe), coupled with a plan to mutualise at least some of the outstanding debt and to set up a Europe-wide bank-resolution mechanism (a tricky idea for everyone). It is an ambitious agenda, but earlier this year, with the Italians, Spanish and Greeks all making some hard choices and ECB money flushing through, the politics seemed possible.

Now they have lurched into dreamland.

by The Economist |  Read more:
Illustration: Jon Berkeley

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Technology in America

Why are Americans addicted to technology? The question has a distinctly contemporary ring, and we might be tempted to think it could only have been articulated within the last decade or two. Could we, after all, have known anything about technology addiction before the advent of the Blackberry? Well, as it turns out, Americans have a longstanding fascination and facility with technology, and the question of technology addiction was one of the many Alexis de Tocqueville thought to answer in his classic study of antebellum American society, Democracy in America.

To be precise, Tocqueville titled the tenth chapter of volume two, “Why The Americans Are More Addicted To Practical Than To Theoretical Science.” In Tocqueville’s day, the word technology did not yet carry the expansive and inclusive sense it does today. Instead, quaint sounding phrases like “the mechanical arts,” “the useful arts,” or sometimes merely “invention” did together the semantic work that we assign to the single word technology.¹ “Practical science” was one more such phrase available to writers, and, as in Tocqueville’s case, “practical science” was often opposed to “theoretical science.” The two phrases captured the distinction we have in mind when we speak separately of science and technology.

To answer his question on technology addiction, Tocqueville looked at the political and economic characteristics of American society and what he took to be the attitude toward technology they encouraged. As we’ll see, much of what Tocqueville had to say over 150 years ago resonates still, and it is the compelling nature of his diagnosis that invites us to reverse the direction of the inquiry—to ask what effect the enduring American fascination with technology might have on American political and economic culture. But first, why were Americans, as early as the 1830s, addicted to technology?

We buy our books to give shape to our thinking, but it never occurs to us that the manner in which we make our purchases may have a more lasting influence on our character than the contents of the book.  (...)

Tocqueville understood what impressed Americans and it was not intellectually demanding and gratifying grand theory. It was rather “every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them.”⁴ This was how democratic societies measured the value of science and America was no exception. Science was prized only insofar as it was immediately applicable to some practical and economic aim. Americans were in this sense good Baconians, they believed knowledge was power and science was valuable to the degree that it could be usefully applied.

“It is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits,” Tocqueville concluded. “You may be sure,” he added, “that the more a nation is democratic, enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer gain, fame, and even power on their authors.”⁵

Technologies not only allow us to act in certain ways that may or may not be ethical, their use also shapes the user and this too may have ethical consequences.

We could summarize Tocqueville’s observations by saying that American society was more likely to produce and admire a Thomas Edison than an Albert Einstein. As a generalization, this seems about right still. The inventor-entrepreneur remains the preferred American icon; Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the objects of our veneration. This was already evident in the 1830s and Tocqueville eloquently described the distinct blend of technology and economics that we might label America’s techno-start-up culture. But if Tocqueville was right in attributing American attitudes about technology to political and economic circumstances, we should go one step further to ask what might be the political and economic consequences of this enthusiastic embrace of technology.

by  Michael Sacasas, The American |  Read more:
Image by Rob Green/Bergman Group

Should You Purchase Long-Term-Care Insurance?

Long-term-care insurance. It's a subject most people don't want to think about—but many people know they need to.

At first blush, policies that help pay the costs of extended nursing care make perfect sense. Bills add up quickly when you can no longer take care of yourself and your needs exceed what family and friends can provide. Nursing homes, assisted-living centers and home care all are expensive, and there is no telling for how long you may need the service. Buying a long-term-care insurance policy can be a way of making sure your future physical needs will be met. Policies designed in partnership with state governments also give individuals and their families a way to protect savings in the event of burdensome care costs that stretch on for years.

Critics, however, say insurers are using scare tactics to sell their products, which come with a hefty price. For most people, these critics say, long-term-care policies are either unnecessary or cost more than their benefits are worth. They believe that a great many people would be better off essentially self-insuring or relying on government-funded programs.

Mark Meiners, a professor of health administration and policy at George Mason University, argues in favor of long-term-care insurance. Prescott Cole, a senior staff attorney at California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, argues against.

by Mark Meiners and Prescott Cole, WSJ |  Read more:

Hawaii’s Beaches Are in Retreat

Little by little, Hawaii’s iconic beaches are disappearing.

Most beaches on the state’s three largest islands are eroding, and the erosion is likely to accelerate as sea levels rise, the United States Geological Survey is reporting.

Though average erosion rates are relatively low — perhaps a few inches per year — they range up to several feet per year and are highly variable from island to island and within each island, agency scientists say. The report says that over the last century, about 9 percent of the sandy coast on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Maui has vanished. That’s almost 14 miles of beach.

The findings have important implications for public safety, the state’s multibillion-dollar tourism economy and the way of life Hawaiians treasure, said Charles H. Fletcher, who led the work for the agency.

“This is a serious problem,” said Dr. Fletcher, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. (...)

The new analysis, “National Assessment of Shoreline Change: Historical Shoreline Change in the Hawaiian Islands,” is the latest in a series of reports the geological survey has produced for the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, California and some of Alaska. Over all, their findings are similar: “They all show net erosion to varying degrees,” said Asbury H. Sallenger Jr., a coastal scientist for the agency who leads the work. (...)

But that is not ordinarily the case in Hawaii, where the typical response to erosion has been to protect buildings with sea walls and other coastal armor. “It’s the default management tool,” Dr. Fletcher said. But in Hawaii, as nearly everywhere else this kind of armor has been tried, it results in the degradation or even loss of the beach, as rising water eventually meets the wall, drowning the beach.

He suggested planners in Hawaii look to American Samoa, where, he said, “it’s hard to find a single beach. It has been one sea wall after another.” 

by Cornelia Dean, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cucumber Feta Rolls

2 cucumbers
6 ounces crumbled feta
3 tablespoons Greek yogurt
2 1/2 - 3 1/2 tablespoons finely diced sundried tomatoes or red bell pepper
8 - 12 pitted kalamata olives, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon roughly chopped dill or oregano
2 teaspoons lemon juice
pinch of pepper, or to taste

Directions:

Thinly slice the cucumbers longways on a mandoline at a 2mm thick setting. Alternatively, you can use a vegetable peeler if you do not have a mandoline. Lay the cucumbers on top of a paper towel lined cutting board while you prepare the filling.

Add the feta and yogurt to a medium bowl. Mash to combine using a fork. Add the bell pepper or sun dried tomatoes, olives, dill, lemon, and pepper to the bowl. Stir well to combine. In a bowl, mash the feta using a fork.

Place 1 - 2 teaspoons of mixture at one end of a cucumber strip and roll up. Secure with a toothpick. Repeat with remaining strips. If not serving immediately, chill until ready to serve.

by Katie Goodman, GoodLife Eats |  Read more:

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Building a Better Vibrator

The offices of Jimmyjane are above a boarded-up dive bar in San Francisco's Mission district. There used to be a sign on a now-unmarked side door, until employees grew weary of men showing up in a panic on Valentine's Day thinking they could buy last-minute gifts there. (They can't.) The only legacy that remains of the space's original occupant, an underground lesbian club, is a large fireplace set into the back wall. Porcelain massage candles and ceramic stones, neatly displayed on sleek white shelves alongside the brightly colored vibrators that the company designs, give the space the serene air of a day spa.

Ethan Imboden, the company's founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master's in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited, one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out -- an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. "I think if you asked my mother she'd probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles," he told me. (...)

Ten years ago, walking into the annual sex toy industry show for the first time, Imboden was startled by the objects he encountered. He had developed DNA sequencers for government scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and more recently he had left a job designing consumer products -- cell phones and electric toothbrushes -- for companies like Motorola and Colgate, work he found dispiriting. "It was imminently clear to me that I was creating a huge amount of landfill," Imboden told me. "I wanted no part of it." He struck out on his own, and found himself approached by a potential client about designing a sex product. (...)

Imboden was inspired. "As soon as I saw past the fact that in front of me happened to be two penises fused together at the base, I realized that I was looking at the only category of consumer product that had yet to be touched by design," Imboden said. "It's as if the only food that had been available was in the candy aisle, like Dum Dums and Twizzlers, where it's really just about a marketing concept and a quick rush and very little emphasis on nourishment and real enjoyment. The category had been isolated by the taboo that surrounded it. I figured, I can transcend that."

At dinner parties in San Francisco, where he lives, Imboden found that mentioning sex toys unleashed conversations that appeared to have been only awaiting permission. "Suddenly I was at the nexus of everybody's thoughts and aspirations of sexuality," he said. "Suddenly it was OK for anyone to talk to me about it." It occurred to Imboden that the people who buy sex toys are not some other group of people. They are among the half of all Americans who, according to a recent Indiana University study, report having used a vibrator. They are people, like those waiting outside Apple stores for the newest iPhone model, who typically surround themselves with brands that reinforce a self-concept. They spend money on quality products, and care about the safety of those products. Yet, for the very products they use most intimately--arguably the ones whose quality and safety people should care most about--they were buying gimmicky items of questionable integrity. It's just that people had never come to expect or demand anything different--silenced by society's "shame tax on sexuality," as one sex toy retailer put it to me. And few alternatives existed.

Jean-Michel Valette, the chairman of Peet's Coffee, who would later join Jimmyjane's Board of Directors, told me: "I had thought the opportunities for really transforming significant consumer categories had all been done. Starbucks had done it in coffee. Select Comfort had done it in beds. Boston Beers" -- the makers of Samuel Adams -- "had done it in beer. And here was one that was right under everyone's nose." 

by Andy Isaacson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Remnev, Andrey (1962- ) - 2005 Birthday (Private Collection) by RasMarley on Flickr.
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Photographie de Oleg Lopatkin
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Jumping Through Hoops

On July 5, 2005, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, took up his pen to make official his city’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee. The 2012 Olympics had not yet been awarded to London—it would be, the following day—but the I.O.C. insists that candidate cities sign an official Olympic contract before the vote is taken, while all the leverage remains on the committee’s side. The contract is an epic masterpiece of micro-management. Its supporting materials, a set of 33 “Technical Manuals,” take up more than four feet of bookshelf space.

As Livingstone prepared to sign, he paused for a moment. Then he looked up at the I.O.C.’s executive director, Gilbert Felli, who was standing by his side, and said, “My lawyers advised me not to sign this contract. But I don’t suppose I’ve got any choice, have I?”

“No,” Felli answered, “you haven’t, really.”

Livingstone told me later that he had just been joking, but second thoughts would have been understandable. The full stipulations of the Olympic contract, which were made public in December 2010 by an East London activist and researcher named Paul Charman, following two years of Freedom of Information requests, contain tens of thousands of binding commitments. To comply with its terms, London must designate 250 miles of dedicated traffic lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and “the Olympic Family,” including I.O.C. members, honorary members, and “such other persons as may be designated by the IOC.” (These traffic lanes are sometimes called “Zil lanes,” alluding to the Soviet-era express lanes in Moscow reserved for the politburo’s favorite limousines.) Members of the Olympic Family must also have at their disposal at least 500 air-conditioned limousines with chauffeurs wearing uniforms and caps. London must set aside, and pay for, 40,000 hotel rooms, including 1,800 four- and five-star rooms for the I.O.C. and its associates, for the entire period of the Games. London must cede to the I.O.C. the rights to all intellectual property relating to the Games, including the international trademark on the phrase “London 2012.” Although mail service and the issuance of currency are among any nation’s sovereign rights, the contract requires the British government to obtain the I.O.C.’s “prior written approval” for virtually any symbolic commemoration of the Games, including Olympic-themed postage stamps, coins, and banknotes.

by Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Photo: Gerry Penny/EPA/Landov; by Jeff Gross/Getty Images

Where Food Comes From

[ed. Click on the graphic for a larger version. Per Mark Bittman: It seems like nearly all of the products we consume are produced by 10 companies.]

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David Shrigley
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Edward Hopper - People in the Sun, 1960. Oil on canvas
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Their Last Winter: Remembering Two Old-Timers from Eagle

Every spring, I think of the old-timers who didn’t make it through yet another Alaska winter. This year, I lost two such friends. They lived in Eagle, a town of 135 people on the Yukon River. These are their stories.

Some would call Dave a hermit. Others might call him a gentleman. His home was an eight- by 10-foot cabin made of plywood five miles up the Yukon River from Eagle. His previous dwelling—a drafty log cabin not much larger—had been too big, “Like living in a ballroom without a dancing partner,” he said.

In the winter, Bill, my boyfriend, and I would check on Dave every few days, walking the mile and a half from our cabin to make sure he had enough wood and food as the temperatures fell to negative 30, 40, 50 or below. Our visits always followed the same pattern as we fit into the simple rhythm of his day.

We hailed his cabin as we approached on the narrow trail through the woods. Dave, a gaunt figure in his 70s with an erect bearing came to the narrow doorway dressed in heavy wool pants and sweater. “Greetings,” he called out in a gentle voice, giving us a slight, but welcoming, nod. Dave rarely received visitors—most people were deterred by the Keep Out sign at the entrance to the trail. His unwashed hair stood up stiffly and around his mouth his tangled gray beard had yellowed from decades of pipe-smoking. Dirt thick enough to have been laid on with a palette knife covered his face, already discolored and scarred by frostbite. Soot ground into his pores stippled his face with black dots. It was commonly known that Dave didn’t take a bath all winter, but that was not considered particularly odd behavior in Eagle, where many people lacked running water. The road to Eagle closed every winter, and the effect was always a delicious feeling of isolation from the outside world, which suited Dave, and us, just fine.

Our neighbor invited us into his cabin for tea. With a courtly gesture, Dave offered me the best seat in the house: the end of his army cot closest to his tiny woodstove. He sat on an overturned bucket and Bill sat next to me. Dave always apologized for having only one cup, but we came prepared. Bill pulled a tin cup from the pocket of his parka, along with half a loaf of homemade bread or, Dave’s favorite, a hunk of cheddar cheese.

Throwing a handful of loose tea leaves into a pan, Dave would let the tea steep while he filled his pipe from a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco. He took his time, as he did in all things—what did time matter in a place like Eagle, where life moved according to the seasons? Dave was also slowed by his right hand, which had been impaired by a stroke some years earlier. And yet, somehow he still managed to cut all his firewood with a bow saw, haul water from town, and do not-always-easy tasks, like refilling the kerosene lamp.

I never tired of looking at the simple setting. A dented wash basin. A cast iron skillet. A single shelf held his meager larder: oatmeal, corned beef hash, canned peaches, and not much more. Wool socks dried on a line above the stove. A trapper’s hat made of marten fur hung on a peg on the door. The few people Dave accepted as friends often passed things on to him, but he refused to accumulate more “scatter,” as he called it; new things didn’t stay long before he gave them away. We never left his cabin without a used sharpening stone, a handful of .22 shells, a can of evaporated milk.

by Louise Freeman, Anchorage Press |  Read more:

Château Sucker

Even at Rudy Kurniawan's coming-out party in September 2003, there were questionable bottles of wine.

A score of Southern California’s biggest grape nuts had gathered at the restaurant Melisse in Santa Monica that Friday for a $4,800-a-head vertical tasting of irresistible rarities provided by Kurniawan: Pétrus in a dozen vintages, reaching as far back as 1921, in magnums.

Although Pétrus is now among the most famous wines in the world, it gained its exalted status relatively recently; before World War II, it was virtually unheard of, and finding large-format bottles that had survived from the twenties bordered on miraculous. Paul Wasserman, the son of prominent Burgundy importer Becky Wasserman, is something like wine royalty, but before this event, the oldest Pétrus he had tasted was from 1975.

Nonetheless, two bottles left him scratching his head. The 1947 lacked the unctuousness of right-bank Bordeaux from that legendary vintage, and the 1961 struck him as “very young.” He briefly entertained the idea of “possible fakes”—’61 Pétrus in magnum has fetched up to $28,440 at auction—and jotted, in his notes on the ’47, “If there’s one bottle I have serious doubts about tonight, this is it.”

But in the rare-wine world, doubts are endemic; murkiness is built into a product that is concealed by tinted glass and banded wooden cases and opaque provenance and the fog of history. At the same time, the whole apparatus of the rare-wine market is about converting doubt into mystique. Most wealthy collectors want to spend big and drink famous labels, not necessarily ask questions or hear the answers. Guests at tastings don’t want to bite the hand that quenches them. Auctioneers may not want to risk losing consignments by nitpicking ambiguous bottles. Winemakers don’t like to talk about counterfeiting, for fear of the taint. Also, one thing not high on the FBI’s list of investigative priorities: billionaires getting snowed by wine forgers. It’s clear to everyone on this rarefied circuit that wine fraud is rampant. It’s also clear not many insiders feel an urgency to do anything about it.

Wasserman ended up convincing himself that the wines must be legitimate. Another guest who had tasted the ’61 many times said this one was “absolutely consistent” with his experience. And there was nothing suspect about the wines’ appearance. The colors were appropriate; the corks, even those that looked young, were plausible (it was standard historical practice for wines to be recorked). As for the hodgepodge of inks and paper types used for the labels, Wasserman wasn’t qualified to judge. But Kurniawan, usually soft-spoken and reserved, held forth with great assurance, in his lightly accented English, about the variable labeling of old Pétrus. As Wasser­man told a popular online wine board a few days later, “Rudy has become quite an expert on the subject.”

by Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine |  Read more:
Photo: Jeffery Salter/Redux

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Currently terrorizing Lake Washington.
Photos: natek

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