WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

The Post editors concede that one — and only one — of the programs that Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed — namely, the domestic metadata program, because it “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.” Regarding the “corrective legislation” that followed its exposure, the Post acknowledges: “We owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.” But that metadata program wasn’t revealed by the Post, but rather by The Guardian.

Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM, about which the Post says this:

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.)

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Pantelis Saitis via Washington Post

The Quiet Power of Maya Lin

Older artists who struggle futilely for recognition often envy those who achieve great success at an early age. But never being able to surpass or even equal a youthful triumph can be a cruel fate for those who believe you are only as good as your latest work. This is the potentially daunting reality that Maya Lin has lived with for three and a half decades, since she skyrocketed to fame at the age of twenty-one, when during her senior year as a Yale undergraduate architecture major she won the open design competition that resulted in the most influential public monument created since World War II: the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1981–1982 in Washington, D.C.

Although Lin’s rigorously abstract scheme—devoid of the representational elements and allegorical imagery typical of war monuments since ancient times—provoked great controversy in some quarters when it was chosen from among the 1,421 contest entries, her powerful melding of the period’s two main avant-garde sculptural developments, Minimalism and Earth Art, fundamentally recast popular notions of commemorative architecture. This symmetrical composition of two wedge-shaped, vertically paneled, polished black granite walls set at a 125-degree angle to each other and sunk ten feet below grade at their deepest is inscribed with the names of 58,307 American military personnel who died as a result of the Vietnam War between 1957 and 1975.

The sloping walkway parallel to this 493-foot-long expanse of stone begins at street level and then reaches its nadir at the monument’s midpoint. The transit along the declivity gives one the palpable impression of being swamped by a tide of mortality as the rows of names rise higher and higher above one’s head. Then, as the pedestrian path begins to ascend at the structure’s midpoint, the opposite occurs, the sensation ebbing and abating as one reaches the flat expanse of the Mall once again, filled with relief that the flood of names has finally ended. It is not uncommon to see visitors in tears or even sobbing after they have negotiated this symbolic abyss, a journey made all the more unnerving because of the unconsoling directness of the experience.

The adage that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan certainly pertains to those involved with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial commission, although the person most responsible for its triumphant outcome—the artist herself—has never tried to arrogate sole credit for what became a hugely complicated and highly politicized process. Robert Doubek, who served as executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund—the nonprofit organization created in 1979 to raise money for the monument’s construction—has written a heartfelt memoir of the struggle to bring this patriotic dream to fruition, and he is not at all reticent in aggrandizing the part he played.

As the definite article in his subtitle suggests, Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: The Inside Story is not only a first-person but also a one-sided account of this frequently contentious saga. Nonetheless, for all its flaws and self-serving paybacks, this is a valuable contribution to the memorial’s historiography, above all in Doubek’s portrayal of conflicting forces vying for supremacy. We get a vivid sense of the emotions Lin’s design aroused among those who felt her scheme was disrespectful to the memory of the fallen because of its uncompromising abstraction and the way it is dug into the earth—a grave, a pit, a latrine, detractors charged—rather than elevated to a position of high honor.

Doubek admits that he was no fan of Lin’s design as it emerged from the crowd of other submissions during the selection process. “[Her] sketches and drawings were very amateurish,” he writes, “and the black shapes said nothing to me. ‘What the hell is that?’ I had thought.” A very different reaction came from the West Point–trained Jack Wheeler, cofounder (with another former soldier, Jan Scruggs) and chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, who instantly declared, “It’s a work of genius.” Doubek still didn’t get it. “I had anticipated a messiah emerging from the mists of competitionland,” he recalls of his first meeting with Lin. “But she didn’t have a lot to say and didn’t seem to know or care much about us. I felt like I had let a genie out of the bottle only to have the genie chill out.”

Things between them never improved greatly, and in the book’s postscript the author sourly notes that it was only in 2007 that “Lin for the first time expressed thanks to me and the others with VVMF,” oblivious to why it may have taken her so long. But Doubek’s obtuseness was far from the worst adversity Lin faced, as she endured vicious sexist and racist attacks from those outraged that an Asian woman—a “gook,” many openly said—should determine how the Vietnam War was memorialized for the ages.

Concerted objections to Lin’s design among veterans’ groups led to the addition of a naturalistic bronze statue, Frederick Hart’s The Three Soldiers, which depicts a trio of zombielike combatants who exhibit the so-called thousand-yard stare of battle-hardened warriors. Unveiled a year after the main memorial’s completion, this kitschy tableau was at least placed far enough away from the great earthwork to inflict minimum damage. Not surprisingly, Hart’s hypermasculine lineup spurred feminists in turn to demand yet another sculptural supplement to the site, which resulted in the Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1993), a bronze figural group by Glenna Goodacre that shows three servicewomen tending to a wounded GI in the attitudes of an overcrowded but still male-centered Pietà.

As the art historian Harriet F. Senie reports of her study visit to the Mall in 2005, Lin’s and Hart’s works impel very different responses from visitors. In contrast to the main memorial, The Three Soldiers, she writes,

attracted a respectful crowd but not an awed or silenced one…. One young man wearing fatigues and smoking a cigarette was…draped over the figures: respect was not evident. The sculpture, composed of so much posturing, seemed to prompt some more in its visitors.

In her new book, Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11, Senie examines the changing nature of commemorative design during the three decades that separated those two watersheds in American history. She seems to side with early opponents of Lin’s scheme who somehow interpreted it as critical of the Vietnam conflict. As she writes:

The guidelines for the competition…insisted that the memorial make no political statement about the war. It might be argued that refusing to discuss the war was tantamount to a negative statement about it and that silence itself could be considered a distinct form of rhetoric. Although responsibility for the creation of meaning at a memorial (or any work of art) ultimately rests with the viewer, the rhetorical effect of silence is heightened at the VVM by its reflective surface. As one confronts the names, essentially staring both separation and mortality in the face, interpretation inevitably becomes personal and—given the nature of this war—political….

Visitors behave reverentially, as if they were at a cemetery, largely because the presence of bodies is implied by the list of names on the Wall…. Even though most of the Vietnam dead are buried in local cemeteries around the country, interment is implied by the way the memorial is placed into the ground.

There are many good things in Memorials to Shattered Myths—especially Senie’s insightful interpretation of the modern phenomenon of spontaneous vernacular memorials, which arise on the site of tragic incidents ranging from fatal traffic crashes to random shootings and are quickly festooned with flowers, balloons, candles, stuffed animals, and handwritten tributes. However, her reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial strikes me as mistaken, most of all her assertion that the design is somehow evasive about the true nature of the war and inevitably mistaken for an actual burial ground. I find the opposite to be the case.

The pervasive influence of Lin’s masterwork has been repeatedly demonstrated in a period when traditional forms of architecture and sculpture seem wholly inadequate in memorializing events once deemed unimaginable, most clearly the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s National September 11 Memorial of 2003–2011 on the site of that catastrophe reinterprets several of Lin’s concepts in highly original ways.

So as not to become architecture’s Lady of Perpetual Mourning, Lin has turned down all but three subsequent offers to design memorials, including that at Ground Zero. She is now working on what she promises will be her final effort in that vein, the Memorial to the Sixth Extinction, intended to raise awareness of species protection and funded through her What is Missing? Foundation. (The other two commemorative commissions she did accept were the Civil Rights Memorial of 1989 in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Women’s Table of 1993 at Yale, which was commissioned in 1989 to mark twenty years of coeducation at her alma mater.)

She turned instead to environmental sculptures, as well as to a smaller number of modestly scaled buildings that have led some to underestimate her degree of professional ambition. Yet in contrast to architecture as many males in the profession still would define it—the bigger, costlier, and showier the better—her meditative view of the building art provides a means for expressing poetic impulses about humanity’s place in the natural, rather than man-made, environment. Indeed, Lin’s steadfast determination to ignore the corruptions of modern publicity—that fatal addiction of postmillennial culture, signified in her profession by the hideous neologism “starchitect”—is among her most important qualities.

It could be said that such indifference is easy for someone whose place in architectural history is already secure. But the blatant degree to which some of Lin’s colleagues in the profession, female as well as male, have fallen in with the contemporary celebrity industry offers a cautionary contrast. When Jerry Seinfeld was asked last year on CBS News Sunday Morning how he could ever possibly exceed the phenomenal success of his eponymous TV sitcom, which ended in 1998, he replied in words that echo Lin’s attitude: “There’s only one way to top it. And that’s to remain an artist and not a ‘star.’”

by Martin Filler, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Tim Hursley

Daisuke Kumakiri
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Saya 2016

Just when you thought the uncanny valley couldn’t get much uncannier, Saya’s parents released a new photo of our favorite not-so-typical Japanese schoolgirl.

We first met Saya 1 year ago when husband-and-wife digital artists Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa released a photo of their beautiful daughter. Indeed, Saya is only as real as the pixels on your screen and was gently brought to life by the tokyo-based freelance 3D CG artists. Over the last year Saya has matured, meaning that Telyuka, as the duo are called, made slight improvements to her based on feedback from the public, working in their spare time as they attempted to balance commercial work and personal projects. Saya is now so human-like it leads to an important question: have we safely made it across the uncanny valley?

by Johnny, Spoon & Tamago |  Read more:

Image: Telyuka.com

A Persnickety Spy For Luxury Hotels

On a recent Wednesday evening, Ann, a fifty-three-year-old securities lawyer who lives in Manhattan, checked into Room 310 at a swanky hotel in midtown. (Average nightly rate: four hundred and twenty-eight dollars.) She dropped her purse in the corner and headed straight for the bathroom, where she gripped the sides of the toilet and peered inside. “It checks out,” she said. Back in the room, she sat down on the bed and ran her hands across the dark-gray velvet headboard, which complemented the light-gray velvet comforter. She leaned back slowly on four large, white pillows and bounced up and down a few times. “Firm, but not crazy-firm.” This seemed to satisfy her. Getting up, she stood by the side of the bed, then dropped to her hands and knees. She lifted the sheets and looked under the mattress. “Is that a hair?” she asked, extracting one from the underside of the mattress. She whipped out a notepad and started scribbling.

Ann is a hotel inspector. (She asked that her full name not be used, so that she could protect her identity as an undercover operator, so to speak.) Like a detective analyzing a crime scene for potential clues, Ann travels the world at the behest of Small Luxury Hotels of the World (S.L.H.), poking and prodding her way around hotel rooms, spas, restaurants, and lobbies, and reporting back on everything from how many times a staff member smiles and makes eye contact during an interaction to optimum bed bounciness. She is required to test every aspect of a hotel, from on-site facilities (spa, gym, yoga studio) to food and beverage options (which means breakfast, lunch, dinner, and room service, usually all in one day). “I’m kind of a pain in the ass,” she said. “I’m the one who rings up for new coat hangers.”

S.L.H. is an association of five hundred and twenty luxury boutique hotels in eighty countries. The majority of these hotels are independently owned, and getting the S.L.H. seal of approval is hard: about a thousand hotels look to join the brand every year, but only about five per cent are successful. The vetting procedure can take anywhere from one to three months, and successful entry into the group allows the hotel owner to post a plaque bearing the S.L.H. logo near the entrance—useful marketing for hotels charging upward of three hundred dollars for a single night’s stay.

S.L.H. has around a hundred hotel inspectors, and Ann has been one of them for seven years. Although she travels a lot for work, she performs inspections only during personal vacation time, and inspects between three and five S.L.H. properties a year. She is always reimbursed for her expenses at the hotel.

As a seasoned traveller, Ann has become accustomed to subtle differences among hotels according to what part of the world they’re in. European hotels, for example, excel at “funky bathroom hardware.” American hotels have “smushier” pillows. A hotel in Asia had a nightstand drawer devoted to charging devices, with every kind of international adapter. “I see something like that, there could be rats on the floor and I wouldn’t care,” she said. She’s bagged enough hotel slippers that she keeps a basketful by the door in her apartment for guests. Pens, too: “I could furnish a small school with the amount of hotel pens I have.”

Back in the room in New York, Ann took a peek inside the closet. The robes were soft, and monogrammed with the hotel’s name. The extra blanket and pillowcase warranted a closer look. Ann stood on her tiptoes. Another hair—long and black. She made a face. “Is it the end of the world? No. But at some point, it starts to matter.”

The furniture in the room checked out. A few slight scuffs, but someone had obviously taken pains to paint over them. “It’s a high-traffic room, I get it.” Next to the bed, a large tablet displayed touch-screen controls for the television, blinds, and thermostat. A sleeping app had options for sounds like “rocky beach” and “crickets.” Ann pressed “crickets”—and the noise of a thousand angry insects filled the room. “God, no,” she yelled, trying to turn it off.

The perception of an untouched, unscuffed room is a powerful marketing tool. We may be in control of our environment when we’re at home, but we’re at the mercy of someone else when we stay in a hotel. This is why we crave the illusion of a space that looks and smells brand-new, unsoiled by the hands—and hairs—of other humans. “The best hotels try to create an impression of what perfect, effortless living would be like,” Sean Hennessey, an assistant professor at N.Y.U.’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, said. “Hotel managers try very hard to have rooms look pristine, including having the housekeeper vacuum while walking out backwards, so there are no footprints in the carpet. Seeing someone else’s hair in your sink shatters that illusion.” (Though the idea of “hospitality” may be changing: compare this to the Airbnb experience, which encourages travellers not just to acknowledge that someone else lives in that space but to embrace it.)

Every now and then, Ann snapped a picture on her smartphone and tapped some notes into an app, which has replaced the forty-one-page document that inspectors used to be required to fill out. After an inspection is finished, S.L.H. sends the hotel an official report, and if there are problems the hotel has thirty days to clean up its act. Other luxury hotels also use inspectors, too, both for in-person inspections as well as for online and voice reservations. According to Hennessey, one of the benefits of hotel mystery shoppers, as they’re known in the industry, is that they help insure employees don’t lose their edge. “Mystery shoppers check for specific acts, like employees saying ‘Good morning’ as well as ‘Would you like another drink or would you like to upgrade to suite for only fifty dollars?’ ” Hennessey told me. His daughter once worked in reservations at a boutique New York hotel, where she became proficient in sniffing out undercover inspectors. “The caller says they’ll be in New York next week and asks if the Yankees will be in town,” Hennessey said. “Then the caller will ask if the hotel can arrange a massage. Who goes to a Yankees game and then gets a massage?”

by Laura Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum 

DEA Bans Kratom as Alternative Opioid Treatment

[ed. We're all supposedly going through a collective opioid withdrawal and the DEA springs into action and bans kratom, an alternative treatment... guess they felt they had to do something to make the situation worse. See also: Drugmakers Fought State Opioid Limits Amid Crisis.]

Binh Nguyen started using opiate pain medications after his doctor wrote him a prescription to mute the piercing pain of an acute liver condition. The pills did help with the pain, and they also changed the way the world looked a bit—how it felt to be on opiates became how it felt to exist.

“It escalated from there,” says Nguyen of his addiction. Soon he was swallowing upward of five 30-mg Oxycodone pills a day and scrambling to keep up with his maintenance painkiller habit.

Nguyen’s life changed after a friend told him about a legal herb that the friend was using to kick his heroin addiction. The botanical-derived psychoactive substance, kratom, was legal and available for purchase around Seattle. It wasn’t so much that the effects were similar to those of opiates, but the herb kept withdrawal symptoms at bay and was a good, natural way to ease anxiety and feel a little energized, Nguyen says. More than a year later his mental state and quality of life have improved substantially, he says. He still takes kratom most mornings, but he doesn’t need it to get out of bed or make it to work.

Nguyen’s story isn’t unusual. Since kratom started appearing on the shelves of head shops in the U.S. around 2007, many have come to rely on the East Asian tree leaf to stay clean, curb chronic pain, or get through the day. But unfortunately for its adherents, and despite the lack of adverse effects, the botanical’s days as an accessible legal remedy in the United States will come to an end October 1.

On August 30, the DEA announced its intent to make the active components found in kratom leaves—mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine—illegal “in order to avoid an imminent hazard to public safety.” The temporary move to Schedule I—the category of the Controlled Substances Act occupied by drugs believed to have high abuse potential and no medical value—is intended to allow time for an unregulated substance to be scheduled through formal rule-making procedures.

That, though, is of little comfort to people like Nguyen, who are already sold on kratom’s lifesaving effects.

Mitragyna speciosa, a deciduous tropical tree in the coffee family that is indigenous to Thailand, has been used to manage pain, enhance concentration, and replace opiates since the 1800s in Southeast Asia. In the U.S. its therapeutic benefits have yet to be formally established, though early research shows promise.

A paper published by Columbia University’s Dalibor Sames and Andrew Kruegel this summer in the Journal of the American Chemical Society demonstrated that kratom’s active ingredients activate the same receptors as does morphine. Research led by Susruta Majumdar at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has been showing a kratom derivative’s potential as a building block for a safe and effective pain medication. (...)

Joe Salender just returned from this year’s Burning Man, where he shared kratom with many people who had never heard of the plant. “It was an amazing thing, but my overall vibe is kind of bummed,” he says. He’s stocked kratom at his Olive Way glassware shop, Holy Smoke, for seven years, and for much of that time he’s been watching with concern as some state governments rushed to regulate the plant. Kratom arrived from Southeast Asia hot on the heels of the notorious designer drug bath salts, and, in the wake of the wave of negative media coverage that followed, lawmakers in many states began to work to make the botanically derived psychoactive substance illegal. Its novel ability to help wean users from heroin didn’t help kratom’s reputation, either, Salender says; many people assumed that if kratom kept opiate withdrawals at bay, it also must be highly addictive.

User Aaron Farmer, who replaced coffee with kratom, says that’s not the case. He’s been drinking kratom tea daily for over a year, and says that when he’s taken a break, the withdrawals have been slightly less severe than those he experienced when he quit drinking coffee.

The DEA doesn’t necessarily disagree with that assessment. In a press release, the agency said 660 calls “related to kratom exposure” were made to poison-control centers between 2010 and 2015. Fifteen “kratom-related” deaths occurred between 2014 and 2016, the agency said. However, DEA public information officer Jodie Underwood clarified that the scheduling decision “is not to say or suggest that these active materials in the kratom plant are as dangerous as heroin or LSD or even other scheduled controlled substances—it simply means that the substances meet the statutory criteria as a Schedule I controlled substance.”

by Lael Henterly, Seattle Weekly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

As Amazon Arrives, the Campus Bookstore Is a Books Store No More

[ed. They're everywhere. I wonder why Amazon doesn't start branding everything with their logo like Nike does.]

As school started at Stony Brook University this month, two freshmen, Juan Adames and John Taveras, set out to buy textbooks.

They had not heard yet that the bookstore was a books store no more.

This summer, Stony Brook, part of the State University of New York, announced a partnership with the online retailer Amazon, now the university’s official book retailer. Students can purchase texts through a Stony Brook-specific Amazon page and have them delivered to campus.

In the campus store where the textbooks used to be, there are now adult coloring books, racks of university-branded polos and windbreakers and three narrow bookshelves displaying assorted novels. The rest of the store is a vibrant collage of spirit wear and school supplies: backpacks and baseball caps; pompom hats and striped scarves; notebooks and correction fluid. There will soon be a Starbucks.

“I was a bit thrown off by the appearance,” Mr. Adames said.

It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore? (...)

According to Mr. Walton, textbooks are generally not the focus of college bookstores, anyway. A school on a two-semester system has an approximately eight-week period of textbook activity per year, he estimated.

“The function of the store has been oversimplified to textbooks,” he said. “The store really functions on a variety of levels.”

Admissions tour groups pass through; visiting alumni stop by; faculty and staff members go there for the convenience, Mr. Walton said.

“If anything’s in danger, I would say the thing that’s probably the danger is that textbooks are going to go away,” he said. “The store continues to serve a number of functions that people just don’t recognize.”

At Stony Brook, the former bookstore has become “a branding piece,” Mr. Baigent said, which helps to provide more of a “campus university identity.”

by Arielle Dollinger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dave Sanders

Tile Gains Footing All Over
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Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right

Pragmatic Centrism Is Crony Capitalism

Neoliberal crony capitalism is driven by a grand coalition between the pragmatic centre-left and the pragmatic centre-right. Crony capitalist policies are always justified as the pragmatic solution. The range of policy options is narrowed down to a pragmatic compromise that maximises the rent that can be extracted by special interests. Instead of the government providing essential services such as healthcare and law and order, we get oligopolistic private healthcare and privatised prisons. Instead of a vibrant and competitive private sector with free entry and exit of firms we get heavily regulated and licensed industries, too-big-to-fail banks and corporate bailouts.

There’s no better example of this dynamic than the replacement of the public option in Obamacare by a‘private option’. As Glenn Greenwald argues, “whatever one’s views on Obamacare were and are: the bill’s mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry.” Public support is garnered by presenting the private option as the pragmatic choice, the compromise option, the only option. To middle class families who fear losing their healthcare protection due to unemployment, the choice is framed as either the private option or nothing.

In a recent paper (h/t Chris Dillow), Pablo Torija asks the question ‘Do Politicians Serve the One Percent?’ and concludes that they do. This is not a surprising result but what is more interesting is his research on the difference between leftwing and rightwing governments which he summarises as follows: “In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter”.

Nothing illustrates the irrelevance of democratic politics in the neo-liberal era more than the sight of a supposedly free-market right-wing government attempting to reinvent Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac in Britain. On the other side of the pond, we have a supposedly left-wing government which funnels increasing amounts of taxpayer money to crony capitalists in the name of public-private partnerships. Politics today is just internecine warfare between the various segments of the rentier class. As Pete Townshend once said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

The Core Strategy of Pragmatic Crony Capitalism: Increase The Scope and Reduce the Scale of Government

Most critics of neoliberalism on the left point to the dramatic reduction in the scale of government activities since the 80s – the privatisation of state-run enterprises, the increased dependence upon private contractors for delivering public services etc. Most right-wing critics lament the increasing regulatory burden faced by businesses and individuals and the preferential treatment and bailouts doled out to the politically well-connected. Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention. Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes. In other words, expand the scope of government to permeate as many economic activities as possible and contract the scale of government within its core activities.

Some of the worst manifestations of crony capitalism can be traced to this perverse pragmatism. The increased scope and reduced scale are the main reasons for the cosy revolving door between incumbent crony capitalists and the government. The left predictably blames it all on the market, the right blames government corruption, while the revolving door of “pragmatic” politicians and crony capitalists rob us blind.

Radical Centrism: Increase The Scale and Reduce The Scope of Government

The essence of a radical centrist approach is government provision of essential goods and services and a minimal-intervention, free enterprise environment for everything else. In most countries, this requires both a dramatic increase in the scale of government activities within its core domain as well as a dramatic reduction in the scope of government activities outside it. In criticising the shambolic privatisation of National Rail in the United Kingdom, Christian Wolmar argued that: “once you have government involvement, you might as well have government ownership”. This is an understatement. The essence of radical centrism is: ‘once you have government involvement, you must have government ownership’. Moving from publicly run systems “towards” free-enterprise systems or vice versa is never a good idea. The road between the public sector and the private sector is the zone of crony capitalist public-private partnerships. We need a narrowly defined ‘pure public option’ rather than the pragmatic crony capitalist ‘private option’.

The idea of radical centrism is not just driven by vague ideas of social justice or increased competition. It is driven by ideas and concepts that lie at the heart of complex system resilience. All complex adaptive systems that successfully balance the need to maintain robustness while at the same time generating novelty and innovation utilise a similar approach.

by Ashwin Parameswaran, macroresistance | Read more:

Boondoggles

A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.

Etymology

The term arose from a 1935 New York Times report that more than $3 million had been spent on recreational activities for the jobless as part of the New Deal. Among these activities were crafts classes, where the production of "boon doggles," described in the article as various utilitarian "gadgets" made with cloth or leather, were taught.

Dynamics

The term "boondoggle" may also be used to refer to protracted government or corporate projects involving large numbers of people and usually heavy expenditure, where at some point, the key operators, having realized that the project will never work, are still reluctant to bring this to the attention of their superiors. Generally there is an aspect of "going through the motions"—for example, continuing research and development—as long as funds are available to keep paying the researchers' and executives' salaries.

The situation can be allowed to continue for what seems like unreasonably long periods, as senior management are often reluctant to admit that they allowed a failed project to go on for so long. In many cases, the actual device itself may eventually work, but not well enough to ever recoup its development costs.

While cost overruns are a common factor in declaring a project a boondoggle, that does not necessarily mean the project has no benefit.

The project may have unseen benefits that overshadow its initial problems. For example, the cost of construction of the Sydney Opera House ballooned over 1,400 percent, but the building has since become an icon for the city and for Australia. The cost of the Space Shuttle vastly overran its initial estimates, but it was still able to carry out tasks unachievable by any other technology.

Another example is the RCA "SelectaVision" video disk system project, begun in the early 1960s and continuing for nearly 20 years, long after cheaper and better alternatives had come to market. RCA was estimated to have spent about $750 million (1985 dollars) (equivalent to $1.65 billion in 2014 dollars) on this commercially nonviable system, which was one of the factors leading to its sale to GE and later breakup in 1986.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program has suffered massive cost and schedule overruns and the fighter's military utility is the subject of heated controversy, yet the program continues to be the highest priority procurement activity for the United States Department of Defense.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

To Find Hillary Clinton Likable, We Must Learn to View Women as Complex Beings

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from the lack of stories about everyone else.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.

We tend to talk about likability as a black or white issue. But like the old adage, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” there’s no universal component of likability. After all, erudite Barack Obama, folksy Joe Biden, and angry Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more different, yet all three are beloved by their bases. Even Donald Trump—as divisive as he is—clearly has a magnetic pull among his loyal supporters.

But Clinton is different. Even many of those who plan to vote for her admit they don’t find her particularly likable. According to The Washington Post, just 33 percent of Clinton supporters are “very enthusiastic” about supporting her while 46 percent of Trump supporters say the same about their candidate. (For the record, Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.) Pundits usually blame Clinton’s favorability issues on her perceived caginess, her tone, and her general awkwardness when it comes to public speaking. Essentially: Clinton’s flaws make her unlikable.

But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws that makethem likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure. And while one might assume Joe Biden’s frequent gaffes and penchant for using words like “malarkey” would make him seem hopelessly old-fashioned, those are precisely the qualities that have transformed him into a beloved darling of the social media age. And Clinton’s own running mate, Tim Kaine, provides a particularly interesting contrast because he shares so much of her awkwardness. Yet far from being condemned for it, he was lovingly hailed as “America’s nerdy stepdad” after his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

So why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn't she seen as America's awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?

I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women. We can recognize Sanders as a fiery activist, Biden as a truth teller, and Kaine as an earnest goof, but we just don’t have an archetype—fictional or otherwise—through which to understand Clinton.

by Caroline Siede, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: YouTube and uncredited.

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That Time I Published a Personal Essay on the Internet

Bleary-eyed at three in the morning, I submitted the personal essay I’d spent months crafting. When I woke up, an email was awaiting me with the subject THIS ESSAY IS EVERYTHING!

“Ur writing is srsly #OnFleek!” wrote the editor. “I need 2 tweak a little and then we can publish it on the site. Nothing cray-cray — just some bling 4 more eyeballs/shares/RTs.”

Publish? I shakily set down my cup of coffee, my body buzzing with adrenaline and caffeine.

The essay was titled “The November of Her Years: My Mother’s Final Thanksgiving at Her Brother’s House.”

“Love the stuff about ur mom… it gives me ~ all ~ of the feels,” my editor later wrote via Instant Messenger (“my editor” — just thinking about her like that gave me goosebumps). “Quick fact-check: what does ur uncle do 4 CA$$$H?”

“Tim’s a retired nurse, but he’s gotten into computers and now does volunteer work with hospitals up in Maine to improve their databases and keep down costs — the state has hit a rough financial patch.”

“BROGRAMMER ahahahahaha… ur next-level HILARIOUS… u do u,” she wrote. “You mentioned ur mom and uncle were ✝.”

“Yes, they were lapsed Catholics, but they found some comfort in religion at the end of my mother’s life.”

“So Tim didn’t invite any1 Jewish to the dinner smh?”

“Anyone Jewish? Technically speaking, no — we were keeping it to just our immediate family, because Mom was so sick. But he wasn’t intentionally trying to—”

“Lolwut!” she wrote. “It’ll be up super-1st thing tomorrow.”

“Wait — don’t you want to give me a chance to look over your edits?”

“Kthxbai!” came on-screen before she logged off.

The next morning the essay was the lead feature on the site. The headline was “I Can’t, I Just Can’t: My Coder Uncle, Who’s THE WORST, Had an Epic Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Thanksgiving.” Here was the beginning:

“I’m chowing down on stuffing gravy turkey (om nom nom) while trying to tune out my Silicon Valley creeptastic uncle as he victim-blames the economy on the Jews.”

“That moment when you’re at my family’s literally insane Thanksgiving. HOLIDAY FAIL.”

“Thanks for running the piece,” I emailed my editor. “However, I notice you attributed various remarks to my uncle that weren’t in the original essay and removed all the references to my mother and her passing away the next week.”

“U mad?” she wrote. “Tbh, those parts of the essay were kinda ¯\(ツ)/¯, because death.”

Then the comments section began filling up.

by Teddy Wayne, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Welcome to the Dark Net

[ed. See also: Someone is learning how to take down the internet.]

His name is not Opsec, but I will call him that to guard his privacy. In webspace he is known as a grand master of the dark art of hacking. He is one of a small elite—maybe a hundred, maybe fewer—all of whom are secretive and obsessed with security. They do not talk about their work with their families. They generally do not talk to the press. Nonetheless, through friends of friends, Opsec agreed to speak and to introduce me to his perspectives. In “meatspace,” as he and others like him call the real world, Opsec lives in a metropolitan area in a little wooden house by a railroad track. He is in his mid-30s, physically imposing, and not a geek. He hangs out in a local bar, where the regulars know vaguely that he works with computers.

He is a fast talker when he’s onto a subject. His mind seems to race most of the time. Currently he is designing an autonomous system for detecting network attacks and taking action in response. The system is based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. In a typical burst of words, he said, “But the automation itself might be hacked. Is the A.I. being gamed? Are you teaching the computer, or is it learning on its own? If it’s learning on its own, it can be gamed. If you are teaching it, then how clean is your data set? Are you pulling it off a network that has already been compromised? Because if I’m an attacker and I’m coming in against an A.I.-defended system, if I can get into the baseline and insert attacker traffic into the learning phase, then the computer begins to think that those things are normal and accepted. I’m teaching a robot that ‘It’s O.K.! I’m not really an attacker, even though I’m carrying an AK-47 and firing on the troops.’ And what happens when a machine becomes so smart it decides to betray you and switch sides?”

Opsec lives in a hall of mirrors. He understands that webspace and meatspace, though connected, remain largely distinct. Given sufficient motivation and time, Opsec can break into almost any secure network without setting off alarms. Breaking in used to thrill him, because once inside he could roam as he liked, but success comes too easily now: with such an attack, he has to find only a single way in. By contrast, defense presents the challenge of out-thinking every aggressor. This appeals to him, and he works now on the defending side. Usually this means protecting company networks from criminal attacks, or reacting to attacks after damage has been done. Opsec does not do the routine stuff. He is the man for the serious cases. He has seen some big ones. But even he was taken aback when, late last year, he stumbled upon a hack—a sliver of alien software on American shores—which suggested that preparations were being made for a cyber-attack of unprecedented scale.

I will call his client the Company. It is an Internet behemoth. It streams entertainment online and makes direct regular connections to more than 70 million personal computers worldwide. The Company does not charge for the connections but rather for the services it provides. It is very profitable. And it is under frequent attack from many parts of the world. Most of the attacks are drive-by shootings—spray-and-prays that succumb harmlessly to the defenses that Opsec has helped design. But some are carefully aimed and have threatened the Company’s existence.

He first intervened six years ago, after a data center had been hacked (as Opsec puts it) in a fucking major way. The intruders had gone after key systems, including the central payment processor and the C.E.O.’s computer, and had stolen credit-card and financial data as well as the Company’s proprietary source code—the secret formula upon which the business is built. Opsec worked for nearly six months to clean up the mess. By backtracking he discovered that the hackers were a group associated with the Chinese army. They operated out of a specific building near Shanghai, which he was able to locate, and specialized in targeting entertainment companies. Eventually he was able to identify some of the individuals involved, and even to obtain pictures of them. Nominally, that was the end of it. Opsec told me that because a government was involved, and legal recourse in China was unrealistic, no further action was taken.

What do you do when there is no law? Counter-hacking is a temptation, but can be dangerous. The Russian mob, for instance, has a poor sense of humor, and Colombian drug cartels are not much fun, either. Also, among independent hackers there is no small number of psychopaths. Over the years the Company has endured death threats, rape threats, and bomb scares. It gets personal. In a world without privacy, home addresses as well as the names of spouses and children are easily found. As the Democratic National Committee recently discovered, it is better not to get hacked in the first place.

After the original breach by the Chinese, Opsec had urged the company’s management to establish a vigorous information-security program, which it did by building three NASA-like control rooms scattered in data centers around the world. Collectively, they are staffed around the clock. The sole purpose is to catch intruders, and to catch them as quickly as possible. The average industry delay in detecting a malicious hack is 188 days. For the Company, Opsec was hoping to reduce the delay to minutes or even seconds. But late last year, when the operations manager called him at home and urgently requested his presence at the Company’s high-tech campus, about 20 miles away, he knew that those defenses had failed. Almost as disturbing, the alarm had been raised not by the security team but by an ordinary technician, a system administrator doing the drudgery of a routine review.

by William Langewiesche, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Matthieu Bourel

Keisuke Maekawa. 2012
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Don’t Panic, But There’s An Asteroid Right Over There

An asteroid no bigger than a school bus whizzed past Earth at 18,000 miles per hour on Sept. 7, harmlessly continuing its cosmic journey after paying our planet an exceptionally close visit. The rock, dubbed 2016 RB1, made its closest approach just 25,000 miles from the Earth’s surface. That’s just a tad farther out than the orbit of weather satellites — an extremely close shave, in space rock terms. Scientists spotted it just two days before it passed.

There’s no chance 2016 RB1 will hit us, and even if it did, Earth would barely notice. It would be statistically most likely to explode over an unpopulated area, and it’s too small to make a dent; the asteroid is 25 to 50 feet wide, a range that’s hard to pin down because 2016 RB1 is so small and moving so fast. It’s probably at least 10 feet narrower than the rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013. Still, this wimpy asteroid is notable for two reasons: its close passage and the fact that scientists saw it at all.

The solar system is full of crumbs left over from the birth of the sun and the planets. Some of them hold clues to the formation of the Earth and, potentially, the beginning of life, which is why NASA just launched a spacecraft to a nearby coal-dark rock called Bennu. Some asteroids hold precious metals, which private companies would like to mine someday for use in electronics and catalytic converters on Earth. And some asteroids occasionally make their way to our planet, where they explode in the atmosphere or excavate giant craters and, sometimes, cause global catastrophes.

NASA and other space agencies are trying to find as many asteroids as they can, but most of them remain unknown to us. Many are too small, too dark, too distant or in the wrong place in the sky for our telescopes to catch them. Yet some of them are big enough to pose a threat to people on Earth, so figuring out where they are is a key part of NASA’s mission.

There is good news: Gigantic space rocks like the one that probably killed the dinosaurs will not arrive anytime soon. Using infrared telescopes in space, as well as sophisticated ground-based telescope networks, scientists are confident they’ve found more than 90 percent of the Earth-killer asteroids out there — the ones about half a mile wide or larger, which would cause global extinctions if they crashed into Earth. None of those threaten our livelihoods in the next few centuries.

But there are plenty of small and mid-size asteroids, and they can do a lot of damage, too. Congress mandated that, by 2020, NASA is supposed to have found 90 percent of asteroids measuring 460 feet across, roughly the size of a football stadium, which would cause regional havoc if not global devastation. Scientists think there are about 25,000 such asteroids, and they have located some 20 percent to 25 percent of them. Asteroid-hunting surveys find about 500 a year, and NASA has said it won’t hit the deadline for that 90 percent mark without more funding. Then there are the house-size and bus-size rocks, like Chelyabinsk and 2016 RB1. More than a million asteroids like those are thought to exist, but scientists have details on maybe 1 percent of them.

by Rebecca Boyle, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The People Walker

[ed. Great ideas are sometimes the simplest.]

Chuck McCarthy recently auditioned as a homicidal biker for a TV show, but the actor is finding glimmers of fame, and possibly a business franchise, with another role: Los Angeles’s first people walker.

He walks humans for $7 a mile around the streets and park near his home, pioneering an alternative to dog walking that requires no leash, just an ability to walk, talk and, above all, listen.

The idea initially struck the underemployed actor several months ago as a joke, an imaginary way to make extra cash, until it became real.

“The more I thought about it, the less crazy it seemed,” said McCarthy, draining a bottle of water – he now takes hydration seriously – and heading out into the sunshine for another walk, this time with the Guardian trotting in step.

A homemade scrawl across his T-shirt declared him The People Walker, low-budget, mobile advertising. “I’ve been doing walks almost every single day for the past week and I’m getting repeat clients, which is what you want.”

A stroll with this soft-spoken, hirsute hulk seems to be what much of LA wants, judging by the response to his Facebook page and homemade flyers.

“Need motivation to walk?” they ask from lamp posts. “Scared to walk alone at night? Don’t like walking alone at all? Don’t want people to see you walking alone and just assume you have no friends? Don’t like listening to music or podcasts but can’t walk alone in silence, forced to face thoughts of the unknown future, or your own insignificance in the ever expanding universe?”

For many, the answer to one or all of the above seems to be “yes”. McCarthy is fielding hundreds of emails from the lonely, the curious and the adventurous, all seeking a stranger’s ambulatory company.

“I try to listen more than talk,” he said this week, striding past handsome houses in Los Feliz, a leafy neighbourhood near Hollywood. (...)

“Awesome concept, plenty of screwed up lonely people out there,” said one of his Facebook commenters, suggesting the job is more people whisperer than walker.

But according to McCarthy, paying to be walked does not mean people are friendless. It just means they cannot always coordinate leisure time with friends, a product of fluid schedules in the gig economy, leaving them isolated. “We’re on phones and computers constantly communicating but we’re not connecting as much. We need that human interaction.”

We also need exercise. McCarthy has slimmed down two notches on his belt since starting the professional walking. “I try not to run because it could ruin my brand,” he deadpanned.

by Rory Carroll, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Noah Smith

If You Build It . . .

Among Bernie Sanders’s many proposals during his presidential run was a plan for Washington to spend $1 trillion on public infrastructure. Progressives love such proposals. Just tax the rich enough, they say, and we can build superfast trains, new roads, revamped airports, and other things that (purportedly) will bring widespread prosperity and greater equality from California to Montana to Maine. President Barack Obama has done his best to further this vision. He began his first term pumping $48.1 billion into infrastructure spending, via the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (otherwise known as the stimulus package), and is ending his second term with a proposal to spend $73 billion more on infrastructure.

The progressive romance with infrastructure spending is based on three beliefs. First is that it supercharges economic growth. As President Obama put it in his 2015 State of the Union address: “Twenty-first century businesses need twenty-first century infrastructure.” Further, by putting people to work building needed things, infrastructure spending is an ideal government tool for fighting unemployment during recessions. Infrastructure should also be a national responsibility, progressives believe, led by Washington and financed by federal tax revenues.

None of this is right. While infrastructure investment is often needed when cities or regions are already expanding, too often it goes to declining areas that don’t require it and winds up having little long-term economic benefit. As for fighting recessions, which require rapid response, it’s dauntingly hard in today’s regulatory environment to get infrastructure projects under way quickly and wisely. Centralized federal tax funding of these projects makes inefficiencies and waste even likelier, as Washington, driven by political calculations, gives the green light to bridges to nowhere, ill-considered high-speed rail projects, and other boondoggles. America needs an infrastructure renaissance, but we won’t get it by the federal government simply writing big checks. A far better model would be for infrastructure to be managed by independent but focused local public and private entities and funded primarily by user fees, not federal tax dollars.

Building infrastructure is no surefire way to stimulate economic growth, as Japan’s example shows. After decades of strong economic expansion, Japan experienced a massive asset bubble in the late 1980s, with the Nikkei 225 reaching 38,500 in December 1989. The next year, the bubble burst and the index began falling precipitously, dipping below 15,000 by August 1992 and never recovering—indeed, by 2001, it had dropped below 10,000. Even today, the index is only slightly above 17,000. Japan’s dismal stock-market performance has been matched by little or no economic growth. Per-capita GDP, in constant U.S. dollars, was no higher in 2009 than in 1991, according to OECD data. The Japanese economy picked up slightly this year, but it’s fair to say that Japan has lost a quarter-century of growth.

To help fight this economic sluggishness, Japan has invested enormously in infrastructure, building scores of bridges, tunnels, highways, and trains, as well as new airports—some barely used. The New York Times reported that, between 1991 and late 2008, the country spent $6.3 trillion on “construction-related public investment”—a staggering sum. This vast outlay has undoubtedly produced engineering marvels: in 1998, for instance, Japan completed the Akashi Kaiky¯o Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world; just this year, the country began providing bullet-train service between Tokyo and the northern island of Hokkaido. The World Competitiveness Report ranks Japan’s infrastructure as seventh-best in the world and its train infrastructure as the best. But while these trillions in spending may have kept some people working, no one can look at the Japanese numbers and conclude that the money has ramped up the growth rate. Moreover, the largesse is part of the reason that the nation now labors under a crushing public debt, worth 230 percent of GDP. Japan is less, not more, dynamic after its infrastructure bonanza.

Infrastructure spending is a form of investment: just as building a new factory can boost productivity, laying down a new highway or opening a new airport runway can, at least in principle, generate future economic returns. But the relevant question is: How do those future returns compare with the costs? Just because infrastructure is a form of capital doesn’t mean that spending a lot on it is always smart. When a firm estimates the rate of return for a new factory, it can calculate the expected net profits and compare those with the expense. The analog for, say, new or improved roads is to estimate the benefits to users from reduced travel times, add the likely modest spillover benefits to nonusers, and then subtract the spending needed to construct and maintain the infrastructure. The results can differ significantly across projects. A well-known 1988 Congressional Budget Office survey found that spending to maintain current highways in good shape produces returns of 30 percent to 40 percent—but that new highway construction in rural areas showed a much lower return. A clever study that used firm inventories estimated that the rate of return to new highways was sizable during the 1970s but sank below 5 percent during the 1980s and 1990s.

Returns can vary substantially for other forms of infrastructure, too. One study found that adding a new runway to New York’s hectic LaGuardia Airport would generate considerable value, but adding one to San Antonio’s less frantic international airport would bring little benefit. Busy airports are likely to be worth improving; others, less busy, may not be. California’s huge investment in high-speed rail was justified by a 2014 cost-benefit analysis that Parsons Brinckerhoff, the firm building the rail system, had prepared. The report predicted that total benefits from the project would range from $66 billion to $80 billion over several decades. That number looked reasonable when the projected price tag for the project was $35 billion, but the budget has already swollen to $68 billion—and is still expanding. In 2009, I calculated a rough cost-benefit calculation for a (fictional) high-speed rail link between Houston and Dallas and found that costs outweighed benefits by an order of magnitude. The returns to high-speed rail tend to be limited because air travel will still be faster and driving a lot cheaper. Outside the East Coast, meantime, train travelers would typically still have to rent a car once they arrived at their destination. President Obama’s grand vision of “walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination” is at odds with reality in car-centered America. Has the president never been to Houston?

The existence of plausible transportation alternatives and the law of diminishing returns have also tended to reduce the benefits of infrastructure investment over the past two centuries. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1821 brought enormous value because the inland transportation options at the time were dismal. In the early nineteenth century, it cost as much to ship goods 30 miles over land as to send them across the entire Atlantic Ocean. Yet the very existence of canals, as much of a breakthrough as they represented, reduced the benefits of the later rail system, as Nobel economist Robert Fogel has shown. The returns for new transportation infrastructure in places with terrible roads, such as much of Africa and India, will be much higher than in the United States, which already enjoys an impressive, if under-maintained, array of mobility options.

What about the economic value of the shorter commuting times that new infrastructure can bring? Between 2009 and 2014, the Texas Transportation Institute estimates that the annual cost to Americans from traffic rose from $147 billion to $160 billion and that hours wasted in traffic increased from 6.3 billion hours to 6.9 billion hours, despite the surge in federal transportation funding. The time wasted has been particularly egregious in America’s more successful metropolitan areas, like San Jose, where delays per auto commuter jumped from 56 hours in 2009 to 67 hours in 2014. Yet it’s hard to see how substantially reducing time lost to traffic congestion will turbocharge the economy. Imagine that America gets its act together and cuts traffic time sufficiently to save $80 billion—a pretty miraculous improvement. That would still represent less than one-half of 1 percent of America’s $18 trillion GDP.

by Edward L. Glaeser, City Journal | Read more:
Image:George Washington Bridge, The Museum of the City of New York /Art Resource, NY