Richard Florida -- The new urban crisis
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This book, like a number of other recent ones, attempts to describe
how cities, especially those with large concentrations of high tech
and knowledge workers, are producing increasing inequality of
economic wealth and to analyze the problems associated with
increasing economic inequality, especially in the U.S.A.

What is this crisis? According to Florida, it's made up of the
following dimensions: (1) the gap between star cities, tech hubs,
knowledge cities that are prosperous and all the other cities and
towns; (2) the increasing high costs of living in the superstar
cities; (3) the economic, educational, and social segregation that
is happening within each individual tech hub and knowledge-based
city, and also the loss of the middle class; (4) the degeneration of
living conditions in our suburbs; and, (5) worsening conditions in
cities in the developing world.

That's the down-side.  Is there a positive aspect and view of this
change?  

There are several questions that I'd like answered, not necessarily
by this book: (1) Are cities, especially large ones that have
sizable economic activity still producers of progress and increasing
prosperity?  Or, are they producing less wealth and concentrating it
in fewer individuals and families?  (2) Do those cities produce
progress and wealth and better lives only for a small percentage
people?  (3) Does everyone *except* the wealthy have worse lives and
living conditions than they did several years ago?  (4) What could
and should be done to enable modern cities to produce better lives
for everyone.  (4) And, possibly most of all, is there a better
alternative?  Can we imagine a way in which we would have
technological and economic progress *and* avoid the problems that
Florida describes in detail.  Or, is it that the best we can hope
for is a few minor tweaks that likely do not make things that much
better, and that if we *did* have the power to make changes with
significant effects, we should worry about making things worse,
possibly much worse?

Perhaps another way of asking this (admittedly depressing) question
is to ask whether there has ever been a society that was *both*
egalitarian *and* produced prosperity and progress.  And, I suppose
that this is like asking whether we can have *both* an equal and
even distribution of wealth and income *and* prosperity and
progress.

Florida's analysis is, in some ways, quite detailed.  For example,
he describes several geographical patterns of the growth of
segregation in cities.  That is part of a description of how the old
pattern that we thought we knew (affluence in the suburbs and
poverty left behind in the inner core of the city) does not hold
true in some of our cities.  The gentrification of inner cities,
with tech workers and knowledge workers moving back in and
deteriorating suburbia left behind, is part of this newer pattern of
segregation.

Perhaps we should temper or filter Florida's message a bit with some
of what's been written by Matt Ridley ("The rational optimist") and
Stephen Pinker ("The better angels of our nature" and "Enlightenment
now").  We don't have to be Panglossian and believe that everything
is for the best, but we still might want to look for ways in which
we are much better off than others living in earlier societies and
look for ways in which some of us are much better off that those
living in other societies in other parts of the world and in some
regions within our own society right now.  If we focused on that,
perhaps we could come up with some ways of making improvements for
all of us.

How would Florida counter the argument that nearly all of us have
been made better off by the progress driven by the growth of tech
hub and creative center cities?  After all, there are those who
claim that those who are better off are a force for pulling up those
who are worse off.

Certainly, one approach would be to attempt to spread some of that
prosperity more broadly.  We have to ask whether there might be some
intelligent and productive ways to do this.  For example,
well-educated and trained citizens and workers make wiser decisions
and are more productive on the job.  That might lead us both to
produce more and to be wiser about what we produce and how we
produce it.  Another example, we might improve living conditions,
roads, and other infrastructure if neglected neighborhoods.  That's
not redistribution or tax and spend; that's making residents in
those neighborhoods better able to participate in the economy.

There are political problems with a project like that.  In a society
as diverse as ours, many in some segments of our society feel very
little kinship with members of other segments, and actually may feel
animosity and resentment.  There are political solutions to that
kind of problem, but those solutions require leadership that we do
not have right now.  Sigh, maybe tomorrow, next year, next election
cycle, ...

But, surely, a case can be made that *all* of us benefit when other
members of our society become more productive, less desperate,
healthier, etc.  In particular, it would benefit us all if sections
of our cities could avoid what Florida calls "a poverty trap": a set
of conditions that cause a spiral downward toward even worse
conditions.  What's more, it would benefit us all if we could study
and avoid those self-reinforcing and negative conditions.  Advanced
societies do that; primitive societies do not.  Or, is it only
advanced societies of the future that do.

Florida has a few somewhat specific suggestions on how to enable
residents of slums, for example, to escape that downward spiral: (1)
give them the opportunity to create businesses; (2) give them the
opportunity to develop experience, skills, and expertise; and (3)
give them access to jobs, to include improving transportation to
possible job sites; and (4) give them access to more basic
necessities so they can spend their time more productively at a job,
for example, rather than having to use up so much time acquiring
more basic things like food and shelter and water, even.

Florida is aware that those who have been raised in disadvantaged
neighborhoods are less able to take advantage of business and job
opportunities.  And, he has things to say about dealing with that,
too.  The last chapter of "The new urban crisis", entitled "Urbanism
for all", has some of Florida's policy suggestions for dealing with
the problems associated with extreme inequalities of the benefits
and abilities that are found in tech hub and creative center cities.
We can argue about whether any specific policy recommendation would
improve things (and for whom, since part of the issue is the uneven
benefits that our cities give) and whether we and our political
leaders have the will to put any of those policies into place.  But,
whether we should be trying seems obviously true.  Advanced
societies do that.

Perhaps Florida's most frightening or depressing ideas center around
his discussion of two books: (1) "Coming apart", by Charles Murray
and (2) "Our kids", by Robert Putman.  That discussion, along with
his analysis in the chapter entitled "The bigger sort" really is a
description and analysis of a poverty trap, a hole that we are
unlikely to be able to dig our way out of, and a societal shift that
condemns large portions of our population to poverty and
geographical areas that produce terrible living conditions.  It's a
very sobering discussion and it explains the reason for the word
"crisis" in his title "The new urban crisis".

And, this separation into regions on the basis of education, income,
and occupational class is self-reinforcing (and thus
self-perpetuating).  In addition, these three aspects reinforce each
other: education differences produce income stratification; income
inequalities produce separation of education levels.

Some of Florida's policy discussions and recommendations are very
complex and contentious.  For example, he discusses and recommends
some amount of regulation of city land use, warning that extreme
deregulation might result in very high urban density and "dead"
zones in cities.  But, how would we ever learn and understand how
much (de-)regulation and which specific kinds was optimum.  That's
an especially hard problem because (1) the results of those policies
take time to produce results and feedback and (2) in a country as
vehemently divided as ours (the U.S.A) is about the amounts and
kinds of government regulation to enact enacting these policies is
nearly impossible.

One of the Florida's suggestions that seems most hopeful and
reasonable to me is his idea that we turn (almost) all service jobs
into middle-class work.  Perhaps one way to justify that is to say
that anyone who is doing work that is of value to our society should
be able to earn a living wage.  Also, that living wage should enable
that person to raise and educate her/his children.  If it does not,
we will never enable our citizens to break out of their own personal
and family poverty traps.  But, even this suggestion, which seems so
reasonable to me, causes strong push-back from free-market
believers, who feel that workers should only be paid as much as the
labor market says they are worth.  So, here is another area where
enacting Florida's suggested policies will be difficult if not
impossible in a country as divided as the U.S.A.

It's not up-beat book, but it's certainly worth reading and thinking
about.

06/08/2018

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