New Geography

Author: Michael Lind

  • Intellectuals Are Freaks

    Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.

    My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of  their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.

    The terms “intellectual” and “intelligentsia” arose around the same time in the 19th century. Before the industrial revolution, the few people in advanced civilizations paid to read, write, and debate were mostly either clerics like medieval Christian priests, monks, or secular scribes like Confucian mandarins who worked for kings or aristocrats, or, as in the city-states of ancient Greece, teachers whose students were mostly young men of the upper classes.

    The replacement of agrarian civilization by industrial capitalism created two new homes for thinkers, both funded directly or indirectly by the newly enriched capitalist elite. One was the nonprofit sector — the university and the nonprofit think tank — founded chiefly by gifts from the tycoons who lent these institutions their names:  Stanford University, the Ford Foundation. Then there was bohemia, populated largely by the downwardly-mobile sons and daughters of the rich, spending down inherited bourgeois family fortunes while dabbling in the arts and philosophy and politics and denouncing the evils of the bourgeoisie.

    Whether they are institutionalized professors and policy wonks or free-spirited bohemians, the intellectuals of the industrial era are as different from the mass of people in contemporary industrial societies as the clerics, scribes, mandarins, and itinerant philosophers of old were from the peasant or slave majorities in their societies.

    To begin with, there is the matter of higher education. Only about 30 percent of American adults have a four-year undergraduate degree. The number of those with advanced graduate or professional degrees is around one in ten. As a BA is a minimal requirement for employment in most intellectual occupations, the pool from which scholars, writers, and policy experts is drawn is already a small one. It is even more exclusive in practice, because the children of the rich and affluent are over-represented among those who go to college.

    Then there is location. There have only been a few world capitals of bohemia, generally in big, expensive cities that appeal to bohemian rich kids, like the Left Bank of the Seine and Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. In the U.S., the geographic options for think tank scholars also tend to be limited to a few expensive cities, like Washington, D.C. and New York. Of the different breeds of the American intellectual, professors have the most diverse habitat, given the number and geographic distribution of universities across the American continent.

    Whether they are professors, journalists, or technocratic experts, contemporary intellectuals are unlikely to live and work in the places where they are born.  In contrast, the average American lives about 18 miles from his or her mother. Like college education, geographic mobility in the service of personal career ambitions is common only within a highly atypical social and economic elite.

    In their lifestyles, too, intellectuals tend to be unusually individualistic, by the standards of the larger society. I am aware of no studies of this sensitive topic, but to judge from my experience the number of single individuals and childless married couples among what might be called the American intelligentsia appears to be much higher than in the population at large. The postponement of marriage in order to accumulate credentials or job experience, the willingness to move to further career goals, and — in the case of bohemians — the willingness to accept incomes too low to support children in order to be an avant-garde writer or artist or revolutionary sets intellectuals and other elite professionals apart from the working-class majority whose education ends with high school and who rely on extended family networks for economic support and child care.

    The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment, when we forget that we belong to a tiny and rather bizarre minority. This is not a problem with the hard sciences.  But in the social sciences, intellectuals — be they professors, pundits, or policy wonks — tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias.

    This can be seen in the cosmopolitanism of the average intellectual. I was the guest of honor at an Ivy League law school dinner some years ago, when, in response to my question, the academics present — U.S. citizens, except for one — unanimously said they did not consider themselves American patriots, but rather “citizens of the world.”  The only patriot present, apart from yours truly, was an Israeli visiting professor.

    Paranoid populists no doubt would see this as confirmation of their fear intellectuals are part of a global conspiracy directed by the UN or the Bilderbergers.  I see it rather as a deformation professionelle.  Scholarship, by its nature, is borderless.  The mere phrases “Aryan science” and “Jewish science” or “socialist scholarship” and “bourgeois scholarship” should send chills down the spine. Furthermore,  many successful academics study, teach, and live in different countries in the course of their careers.

    So it is natural for academics to view a borderless world as the moral and political ideal — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Make-believe cosmopolitanism is particularly stupid and lazy in the case of academics who fancy themselves progressives. In the absence of a global government that could raise taxes to fund a global welfare state, the free movement of people among countries would overburden and destroy existing national welfare states, or else empower right-wing populists to defend welfare states for natives against immigrants, as is happening both in the U.S. and Europe.

    The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be:  More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools. It is only natural for them to generalize from their own highly atypical life experiences and propose that society would be better off if everyone went to college — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Most of the jobs in advanced economies — a majority of them in the service sector — do not require higher education beyond a little vocational training. Notwithstanding automation, for the foreseeable future janitors will vastly outnumber professors, and if the wages of janitors are too low then other methods — unionization, the restriction of low-wage immigration, a higher minimum wage — make much more sense than enabling janitors to acquire BAs, much less MAs and Ph.Ds.

    The social isolation of intellectuals, I think, is worsened by their concentration in a few big metro areas close to individual and institutional donors like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. (where I live) or in equally atypical college towns. It was never possible for Chinese mandarins or medieval Christian monks in Europe to imagine that their lifestyles could be adopted by the highly visible peasantry that surrounded them. But it is possible for people to go from upper middle class suburbs to selective schools to big-city bohemias or campuses with only the vaguest idea of how the 70 percent of their fellow citizens whose education ends with high school actually live.

    Universal national service would be a bad idea; the working class majority is hard-pressed enough without being required to perform unpaid labor. But it might not hurt if every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse. Our out-of-touch intelligentsia might learn some lessons that cannot be obtained from books and seminars alone.

    This piece first appeared at The Smart Set, an online magazine covering culture and ideas.

    Michael Lind is a contributing writer of The Smart Set, a fellow at New America in Washington, D.C., and author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States.

    Image courtesy of  simpleinsomnia via Flickr (Creative Commons).

  • Spreading the Wealth: Decentralization, Infrastructure, and Shared Prosperity

    This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism called “America’s Housing Crisis.” The report contains several essays about the future of housing from various perspectives. Follow this link to download the full report (pdf).

    The public’s preference and the views of the social and intellectual elite has never been greater.

    Journalists, urban and environmental activists and politicians tend to share a vision of a future in which generations-old trends toward the decentralization and dispersal of both production and population are reversed. In this view, densification will replace sprawl, and mass transit will grow in importance relative to personal automobile use, as Americans in growing numbers abandon suburban houses for smaller apartments and condos in mid- density and high-density cities.

    “The New American Dream is Living in a City, Not Owning a House  in the Suburbs,” Time recently declared. The Atlantic agrees: “More Americans Moving to Cities, Reversing the Suburban Exodus.” As for the preferred housing type, the Smithsonian informs us: “Micro Apartments are the Future of Urban Living.” In this world-view, even farming will be brought “back to the city” with the emergence of vertical urban farms. “The Future of Agriculture May be Up” according to The Wall Street Journal. National Geographic predicts that “we may soon be munching on skyscraper scallions and avenue arugula.”

    In this dense city-centric world view, not only will cities feed themselves—in reality a practical and economic impossibility—but also there’s virtually nothing density cannot do, from calming the climate to raising (U.S. national productivity. “Double a city’s population and its productivity goes up 130 percent” asserts MIT News.

    In the depopulated hinterland between downtowns, sleek high-speed trains will whiz past rows of elegant white windmills or gleaming solar panels. Economies of scale and large- scale manufacturing will be replaced  by high-tech localism and the rebirth of walkable dense neighborhoods.

    Each wave of technological innovation since the early industrial revolution has inspired hopes that an economy of small-scale producers and small local markets and walkable, village- like communities can be preserved or recreated, using the most advanced technology available at the time. In 1812, in a letter to General Thaddeus Kosciusko, Thomas Jefferson wrote of his hope that industrial technology could be reconciled with a society of small farmers: “We have reduced the large and expensive machinery for most things to the compass of a private family, and every family of any size is now getting machines on a small scale for their household purposes.” In the early years of the twentieth century, Lewis Mumford hoped that electrification would permit a reversal of the trends toward large- scale corporations and utilities and infrastructure grids and a renaissance of community life and pedestrian cities.

    The third industrial revolution based on information technology has produced its own variants of this utopia, with Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicting “the electronic cottage.” With these earlier utopias, today’s techno-urbanism shares the same social ideal, a society in which production and population are reconcentrated and re-localized in dense communities, which may take the form of the low-rise pedestrian cities of the New Urbanists or Green and “sustainable” skyscraper downtowns. The persistence of this vision, in ever-changing forms, suggests that its appeal must be explained in terms of nostalgia for the less far- flung, less centralized, smaller-scale communities of the agrarian era and the early industrial period.

    Something like this vision of the future American landscape has achieved the status of a near-consensus in the mainstream press about the alleged return to the city and the impending demise of the suburbs. But the story is wrong in every detail. In reality, the American people are not abandoning low-density housing for crowded and expensive urban cores, nor are they likely to do so in the future.

    In fact, the immediate and likely mid-term future will look, in many ways, much like the recent past. Factories, farms and office parks will continue to be dispersed through suburbs, exurbs and the countryside. Information technology will consume ever more electricity, most of which, for the foreseeable future, will come from conventional utilities using fossil fuels, not from renewables like wind and solar power. The aging of the population and the growth of low- paying personal service jobs will increase the importance to the service-sector working class of personal automobile  use in employment. Self-driving cars and trucks, along with telecommuting, may reinforce this trend and produce further decentralization of work, housing, shopping and recreation. The robocar, not the passenger train, should be the icon of the transportation future.

    TECHNOLOGY AND DECENTRALIZATION

    For generations, successive technologies have dispersed production and population even as they have radically reduced transportation, energy and land costs. The increasing speed and flexibility permitted by innovative modes of transportation, from the canal to the railroad to the automobile, truck and airplane, have slashed freight and commuter costs while allowing production facilities and residences to spread out. The decentralization of work, shopping and dwelling has been enabled by the long distance transmission of energy and increasingly cheap, sophisticated and reliable telecommunications grids.

    Since the beginning of the industrial era, each new form of travel—the train, the automobile or truck and the airplane—has permitted higher speeds. From 1800 to the present, personal mobility in the U.S. has grown at an average of 2.7 percent per year with a doubling time of 25 years. Higher speeds allow longer commutes or business trips in the same amount of time. This has resulted in the expansion of urban areas to take advantage of cheaper land for the kind of housing people prefer, largely single family, and the simultaneous decline in their overall density. One study notes that the automobile has allowed cities to grow as much as fifty times larger than the typical pre-modern pedestrian city, which was limited to an area of 20 square kilometers. Today’s advocates of urban “densification” frequently denounce the automobile as the source of so-called “sprawl.” But the trend toward urban deconcentration began with the first industrial revolution, based on steam power. Rather than build urban mass transit around smoke-spewing locomotives, many cities built horse-car lines, something which was not practical until industrial technology made iron or steel rails cheap. In many places these were later replaced by electric trolleys or subways (early horse-drawn railways using wooden tracks had been limited to mines). The growth of suburbs began with horse-drawn omnibuses, trolleys, subways and commuter rail. The “pedestrian cities” of 1900, idealized by many of today’s urban planners, in fact were more dispersed than compact pre-industrial villages and cities.

    Nor has it ever been the case in the industrial era that production facilities have been situated for the convenience of existing city residents, as an alternative to moving workers to production sites. Mills grew up first along the fall lines of streams and rivers, where falling water could be tapped for energy. When coal-powered steam engines replaced waterpower, factory towns tended to be located near coal seams, as in the British Midlands, the Ruhr, and Pittsburgh, or else along rivers or canals with access to barge-borne coal. Mill towns and factory towns alike tended to grow up around the production facilities, which began as “greenfield” sites, to use modern terminology.

    The second industrial revolution, based on the electric motor and the internal combustion engine, accelerated the decentralization of manufacturing in the U.S. and other advanced industrial countries. Electric wiring and motorized power tools allowed large, flat, horizontal factories to replace earlier vertical factories in which waterwheels or steam engines had driven machinery on multiple floors by means of ropes and pulleys. To save money, the new factories were located on cheap land, which only later became dense as residences and
    amenities for workers grew up around them, as in Detroit. Trucks enabled factories to be located far from both waterways and rail lines, and personal car ownership allowed workers to live in less crowded conditions at greater distances from where they worked.

    Paradoxically, passenger air travel, by creating truly national corporations on a continental scale whose facilities could be visited by managers in a single day, allowed the centralization of functions in high-rise office buildings in a few headquarters cities, like New York City, and to a lesser extent, Chicago and, more recently, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. Satellite technology and the worldwide Web have enabled the further centralization of supervision over multinational corporations and global supply chains. The error of all too many modern urbanists is a failure to understand that the managerial and financial functions of such dense urban cores depend for their existence on supply chains and consumer markets in lower- density areas across the United States and the world. Only a small number of cities can specialize in these functions in the national and world economies, and these “global cities” like New York and Tokyo and Frankfurt cannot serve as models for most metro areas.

    THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION

    Will the trend toward the decentralization of production and housing be reversed in the twenty-first century?

    Although their contribution to national employment is dwindling because of automation and offshoring, traded sector industries such as manufacturing, energy, mining and agriculture remain important parts of an advanced economy, because of their multiplier effects and upstream and downstream linkages. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, every dollar in final sales of a manufactured good is responsible for $1.34 in input from other economic sectors, while a dollar of retail trade generates only 55 cents and a dollar of wholesale trade only 58 cents. These industries, by their nature, tend to locate their facilities in low-density areas and need extensive, state-of-the-art infrastructures to connect them with national and global suppliers and businesses and consumer markets with minimum friction and cost.

    The decentralization enabled by trucks and cars and buses has converted the monocentric city of the railroad and canal era into what William Bogart, following Jean Gottmann, has called the polycentric city—a blob-like metro area with multiple smaller retail, office and recreation centers. For a while some older urban cores became specialized downtown business districts, housing the headquarters of firms whose factories, warehouses or back offices were located where land or labor or both were cheaper, in suburbs, small towns, and other states or other countries. But as headquarters have moved to suburban office parks and exurban campuses, many downtowns have reinvented themselves again as “playground cities” based around amenities enjoyed by a residential population of the rich and young professionals before marriage, as well as transient populations of tourists.

    Production has moved back to its historic home, the countryside or the outskirts of town. The migration of production out of the city has been accelerated by municipal policies that penalize productive enterprises because of their side effects of traffic, waste or pollution. The real estate
    interest in gentrification—turning former warehouses into lofts for affluent members of the gentry class or restaurants or offices for fashionable social media startups—has seized on this transformation, and in some places, with favorable economic results.

    The mainstream press frequently publishes breathless articles about the alleged rise of urban agriculture— sometimes accompanied by striking illustrations of skyscrapers full of hydroponic gardens or covered with what appears to be kudzu. Most of these stories quote a single activist, Dickson Despommier, a retired professor of microbiology at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Many articles convey Despommier’s claims about the alleged superiority of indoor, climate- controlled farming in big cities without raising any objections.

    The most obvious objection is the price of land. Even if greenhouses and, in time, synthetic food laboratories were to contribute more to the diet of people in advanced industrial nations like the U.S., and even if consumers insisted on fresh food from nearby, most of these structures would be located on the periphery of expensive cities in low-rise suburbs or exurbs, to minimize the contribution of rent to the price. No matter what technology might be used, food grown in Manhattan will always be an expensive luxury because of land rent alone.

    Nor is most manufacturing ever likely to return to densely-populated, expensive urban areas. The automation of factories is reducing the manufacturing workforce worldwide, even in China. As labor costs decline in importance as a factor in location, more firms may choose to site increasingly-robotic factories near consumer markets and supply chains. And rapid prototyping and other advances that enable customization and short production runs may reduce the benefit that large factories enjoy over smaller operations.

    But high-tech home production of most appliances and high-tech versions of the village blacksmith will probably remain in the realm of science fiction. Economies of scale will probably continue to characterize even advanced manufacturing, to some degree. Most important of all, high rents, combined with municipal regulations, will make cities unattractive as sites for major factories, as distinct from small-scale artisanal shops. Neither agriculture nor large-scale manufacturing are likely to return to cities with high rents and property prices.

    BERMUDA TRIANGLE URBANISM

    What about service sector jobs? As automation leads manufacturing and other productive sectors to shed labor, the greatest growth in absolute employment is found in domestic service sector jobs in health, education, retail, government and other industries that cannot easily be outsourced or automated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that in 2022 “services-providing” jobs will account for 80.9 percent of new U.S. jobs.

    According to one influential view, the “new economy” is a post-material “knowledge economy” or “information economy” in which the production of immaterial goods and services is more important than material goods and traditional services. Adherents of this school often treat the most important activities in a modern economy as tech and financial services. This school of thought holds that U.S. productivity would be increased if more people were
    added to a few U.S. metro areas that specialize in tech and finance, with help from “densification” policies such as transit-oriented development.

    According to Chang Tai-Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, the U.S. could be more productive if more workers could move from less productive cities to more productive cities, which they identify as, among others, San Francisco, San Jose, New York, Boston, and Seattle. They criticize land-use restrictions which prevent more high-rise apartments and high-rise office buildings to house the hordes who allegedly would boost their own productivity, and the nation’s as well, by moving from Bakersfield to San Jose. In short, massive densification would produce huge gains in productivity.

    In all of this there is a grain of truth—but only a very small grain. It is true that, in certain industries, there are genuine agglomeration effects, leading to the dominance of one locale in that field, at least for a while: Silicon Valley for tech, Wall Street for finance, Detroit for automobiles, Hollywood for entertainment. These locations brought together workers, firms, capital, infrastructure and flourishing social networks facilitating the exchange of ideas. If you want to be a country music singer, it was a good idea to move from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Nashville in the old days and to Branson today.

    But even these productivity effects  are limited to particular industries with particular skill sets. You are more likely  to improve your productivity and success as a country music singer if you move from Tulsa to Branson—but not if you move from Tulsa to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. Moretti and Hsieh admit: “The assumption of inter-industry mobility is clearly false in the short run. For example,
    it would be hard to relocate a Detroit car manufacturing worker to a San Francisco high tech firm overnight. On the other hand, the assumption is more plausible in the long run, as workers skills—especially the skills of new workers entering the labor market—can adjust."

    In spite of this concession to reality, Moretti and Hsieh argue for the mass relocation of much of the U.S. workforce to San Francisco, San Jose, New York and a few other big cities. As Timothy B. Lee notes in Vox:

    Hsieh and Moretti envision the New York metropolitan area becoming 9 times its current size, meaning that more than half the country would live there. The Austin metropolitan area would quadruple in size, as would the San Francisco Bay Area. Half the cities in America would lose 80 percent or more of their population. The population of Flint, MI, would shrink from 102,000 people to fewer than 2000.

    This might be called Bermuda Triangle urbanism. Certain metro areas are like the Bermuda Triangle and other legendary zones in which the laws of nature are supposed to operate differently than everywhere else. These metro areas have the unique property of magically raising the productivity of human beings of all skill sets who cross an invisible force field into them.

    Hsieh and Moretti argue that their favored coastal metro areas could rival Southern metro areas in growth by adopting the less restrictive land policies characteristic of growing Southern and Southwestern cities:

    We find that three quarters of aggregate U.S. growth between 1964 and 2009 was due to growth
    in Southern US cites and a group of 19 other cities. Although labor productivity and labor demand grew most rapidly in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose thanks to a concentration of human capital intensive industries like high tech and finance, growth in these three cities had limited benefits for the U.S. as a whole. The reason is that the main effect of the fast productivity growth in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose was an increase in local housing prices and local wages, not in employment. In the presence of strong labor demand, tight housing supply constraints effectively limited employment growth in these cities. In contrast, the housing supply was relatively elastic in Southern cities.Therefore, TFP growth in these  cities had a modest effect on housing prices and wages and a large effect on local employment.

    Advocates of “densification” have seized on Hsieh’s and Moretti’s work to argue for crowding more people into San Francisco and Manhattan by adding skyscrapers, legalizing micro-apartments and squeezing tiny houses into existing suburbs.xxvii But this ignores the fact that the growth of Southern and Southwestern cities has been driven in large part by the desire of middle-class and working-class Americans, as well as affluent Americans, to spend less while enjoying bigger homes and yards. According to demographer Wendell Cox, Census data shows that of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, only three—Boston, Providence, and Oklahoma City—saw their core cities grow faster than their suburbs. (And both Boston and Providence grew slowly; their suburbs just grew more slowly. Oklahoma City, meanwhile, built suburban residences on the plentiful undeveloped land within city limits.)”. Similar preferences manifestly exist among younger generations of Americans. Between 2000–2011, the number of Americans aged 20–29 increased twenty times as much as the increase of their cohort in central business districts. To accommodate this desire for inexpensive space Southern and Southwestern cities have expanded horizontally, not vertically.

    To their credit, Hsieh and Moretti acknowledge that transportation systems, by enabling longer commutes, can allow more people to live in a metro area that remains relatively low in density. But even here they play to the prejudices of the coastal and campus intelligentsia, by endorsing high-speed rail: “An alternative is the development of public transportation that link local labor markets characterized by high productivity and high nominal wages to local labor markets characterized by low nominal wages. For example, a possible benefit of high speed train currently under construction in California is to connect low-wage cities in California’s Central Valley—Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Fresno—to high productivity jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

    Hsieh and Moretti ignore how high-growth Southern cities—their putative models—actually grew. Cities in the South and Southwest in the last half century have expanded thanks to cars and trucks on adequate systems of streets and highways, and near-universal personal automobile ownership, not on the basis of a pre-automobile infrastructure of trains and trolleys and subways. People have moved there—and this appears to be true of educated workers—precisely not to live in high density and expensive areas.

    The link between densification and productivity does not exist even in the so-called “knowledge economy” of the tech sector. Even the intellectual labor of R&D tends to be done in the low-density environments of university and corporate campuses like those of Silicon Valley, Austin and the Research Triangle. The expensive downtowns of skyscraper cities increasingly are home to rentiers with residual financial claims on the products of innovation, including investors and former innovators, rather than individuals and groups engaged in important technological innovation themselves.

    THE NEW LANDSCAPE OF EMPLOYMENT

    Access to cars for personal use will become more, not less, important for  the majority of the American workforce in the decades ahead, thanks to the shifting composition of the workforce and the spatial deconcentration of service sector jobs. While better-paying service sector jobs like those in finance, law and business and professional services may remain downtown in corporate headquarters, an increasing number of lower-wage jobs involving personal care will be found in lower-rent suburbs and exurbs within metro areas. Particularly important among these will be jobs caring for the elderly, either at hospitals and medical centers and nursing homes, or in the homes of the elderly themselves. Between 2002 and 2022, health care and social assistance will have created more jobs than any other sector, growing from 9.5 percent of employment to 13.6 percent.

    Overwhelming numbers of American seniors say they wish to stay in their homes as long as they can. Given the expense of residenial care, elderly Americans will try to remain home with the help not only of technology but also of personal services provided in their homes. These services, many of them paying modestly, will provide employment for nurses, health aides, food delivers, shoppers, drivers, and others providing in-home care or help. Because their clients will be dispersed through metro areas, personal vehicle ownership or access to a car will be a necessity for most of these in-home care-givers. And because few of these jobs are likely to pay well, members of the new service sector working class will economize on expenditures by living in low-cost neighborhoods and shopping at discount stores and dining in affordable restaurants that are located in low- density areas and do not pass on high rents to their customers.

    What we are witnessing is the emergence of something not too dissimilar to European cities with gentrified downtowns becoming centers of high-status spending and employment while poverty is decentralized through the suburbs, particularly those in the inner ring while newer suburbs and exurbs generally do better.xxxiv This reversal of the mid-twentieth century pattern of downtown poverty and suburban affluence poses particular challenges to low-income workers without access to cars in suburbs and exurbs. Researchers at the Brookings Institute, studying data from hundreds of transit providers in numerous metro areas, discovered that, on average, workers reliant on mass transit cannot reach 70 percent of the jobs in their area in less than 90 minutes. Workers in low-income suburbs were even worse off. Only 22 percent of potential metro area jobs for which they were eligible were accessible in less than an hour and a half one way by means of mass transit.

    According to a study of two federal pilot programs operated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing and Welfare to Work vouchers, poor participants with cars lived in better neighborhoods and greater employment opportunities. Low-income workers who received Moving to Opportunity Vouchers were twice as likely to get jobs and four times as likely to stay employed. Even when mass transit is available it tends to consume more time than commuting by car. Another study, showing the superior outcomes available to poor people with access to private vehicles, concluded: “If we were most interested in increasing the mobility of the poor, we would subsidize car ownership.”

    ROBOCARS VS. RAILROADS

    In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared:  “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel  by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying—without the pat-down.” This vision was encouraged by maps showing an imaginary continental network of high-speed passenger rail.

    But the president’s high-speed rail initiative soon collided with reality. In 2011, the Obama administration proposed spending $53 billion on high- speed rail in the next six years. But from 2009-2014 the federal government has spent only $11 billion on high-speed rail. Governors in a number of states have blocked their states from accepting federal high-speed rail grants, for fear of escalating costs. California’s high speed rail project has been plagued by lawsuits and dwindling public support. Amtrak’s Acela, instead of travelling between New York and Washington in only 90 minutes as a true high-speed train might, takes nearly three hours to cover the distance. It would take a quarter century and an estimated expenditure of $150 billion to turn the Washington-to-New York route into a true high-speed rail route.

    The fetishization by many opinion leaders of fixed-rail technology as a futuristic symbol is puzzling. Passenger trains, like passenger blimps, are an anachronistic technology. Most passenger rail in the U.S. was rendered obsolete by the development of automobiles and airlines in the last century. A nonstop cross-country flight in the U.S. usually takes no more than six or seven hours from airport to airport. Even if high- speed rail could compete on some routes, the number of destinations would be far smaller than those accessible by high- speed air. The displacement of passenger rail by air travel and automobile travel in the U.S. has led railroads to return to their original mission from the days of horse-drawn trams and canals—the efficient overland movement of freight.

    The only part of the U.S. where inter-city passenger rail is significant is the Amtrak corridor through the Northeastern megalopolis from Washington, D.C. to Boston. But tickets are expensive, in spite of federal subsidies. In recent years, inter-city bus services have competed with Amtrak along its own route, with much cheaper tickets and only slightly longer travel time. Inter-city bus companies like Bolt have been able to lure away professional- class travelers with amenities superior  to those that Amtrak offers for a  fraction of the price. A 2013 comparison of Amtrak and bus service in a number of routes across the nation concluded that “the cost of providing scheduled motorcoach service is significantly lower than the cost of providing Amtrak train service. The cost difference ranges from a low of $17 per passenger (Washington, DC to Lynchburg, VA) to a high of more than $400 per passenger (San Antonio, TX to El Paso, TX).”

    What about intra-city rail transit? Outside of a few dense urban areas  like New York City, the future of fixed- rail seems bleak, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of urban planners for “light rail” transit projects, which have replaced skyscrapers and Seattle-style space needle towers as icons of progress and prestige  in the imaginations of local boosters. As the technology of self-driving cars advances and regulatory systems adapt, the price of rides in robotaxis compared to subway fare will plummet because taxi fares need no longer support a human worker, only maintenance and energy costs and a modest profit. Single-mode, point-to-point travel will always be more flexible and efficient than fixed- rail transit which requires parts of the journey to be undertaken by foot, bicycle, or automobile, including taxi travel. In most American cities, buses and taxis and personal cars rendered trolley systems obsolete by the mid-twentieth century. By the mid-twenty-first century, except in a few cities or a few routes like airports to convention/hotel centers, robotaxis may put subways and light trail out of business.

    Will robotaxis replace personal cars altogether? Many urbanist opponents of personal automobile ownership hope that fleets of robotaxis will roam the suburbs as well as dense urban centers, permitting suburbanites to dispense with garages and perhaps allowing “densification” of suburban neighborhoods, with houses built right up to the street. Like most fantasies of orthodox urbanism, this is unrealistic. Even if the costs of robotaxis fall radically, it is hard to imagine suburbanites repeatedly calling taxis during the day for different trips—to work and back, to drop off and pick up children and school, to go shopping and  to go out to a restaurant for dinner. In the suburbs, if not in dense urban centers, garages are likely to remain—and they will house the family robocar.

    What is more, the family robocar, like its human-operated predecessors— the station wagon and the minivan and the SUV—will be large enough to accommodate groups of people or large quantities of groceries or other purchases on occasion. And like today’s cars, it will be designed to operate both in cities and on highways. Visions in which individuals on a daily basis now choose tiny one-or-two passenger self-driving cars to commute and now rent spacious robot vans by the hour to go shopping are unlikely to be realized be realized if waiting times make it inconvenient to summon rental vehicles in low-density neighborhoods, as opposed to dense urban cores.

    To the extent that the automation of automobiles and trucks reduces accidents, safety considerations as an incentive to purchase large, heavy vehicles may diminish, and there may be a trend toward somewhat lighter and smaller cars. Still, it is reasonable to predict that fully self-driving cars and trucks will broadly resemble today’s human-operated vehicles, if only because the spatial demands imposed by the dimensions of passengers and freight will remain the same. The street and highway infrastructure of tomorrow is also likely to be more or less the same for self-driving vehicles in the future as for today’s cars and trucks, although fixed signals like painted stripes may give way to virtual signals permitting more flexible road use.

    Reflecting the anti-automobile bias of the gentry intelligentsia, the American press has trumpeted a recent finding that between 2007 and 2012 the number of households without a vehicle increased. But the increase was negligible, from 8.7 percent to 9.2 percent.xli Seventy-five percent of Americans drive to work, while ten percent commute to work by means of carpooling, a number that may have been enlarged by the hardships imposed by the Great Recession.

    Personal care use may well expand, thanks to self-driving cars. The annual cost of upkeep of roads may increase, and it may be necessary to expand road capacity, if the automation of the automobile increases traffic by allowing the elderly and unescorted children to travel without having to drive or be driven by another person.

    Flying as well as driving is on the verge of being transformed by robotics. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may soon adopt regulations that permit the use of drones in the U.S. by civilian business.xliii The potential impact on industries and business models can only be imagined. Restaurant-to-door pizza delivery by drone is probably not in the cards any time soon. The most likely applications of commercial drones are in air freight transportation, warehousing, agriculture and photography, among other industries.

    Meanwhile, increasing automation may make passenger air travel safer. It might also enable the rise of “air taxis”—small aircraft which can pick up passengers on a flexible basis, along the lines of the “free flight” envisioned by a recent NASA study.

    ENERGY IN THE INFORMATION AGE: MYTH VS. REALITY

    Like popular visions of a future American landscape based on urban density and mass transit, perceptions about the information technology and energy infrastructure of the future are equally at odds with reality.

    The ICT (Information and Communications Technology) ecosystem is being transformed by a number of trends: the mobile internet, cloud computing, big data, the “internet of things” and “the industrial internet.” All of these trends together will translate into increased demand for both electricity and reliable wireless communications.

    Because much of the infrastructure supporting ICT is not visible—fiber optic cable, remote data centers, wireless towers—it is easy for the users of modern technology to imagine that it consumes less energy and materials than old- fashioned appliances, and to believe that information-based industries somehow exist in cyberspace rather than the material world. But the alleged virtual reality of cyberspace is grounded in physical infrastructure.

    Unlike windmills and high-speed trains, data centers are not part of the popular iconography of the imagined future. Indeed, for security reasons, many data centers are hidden from public view in nondescript buildings in remote complexes. The result, as a New York  Times report notes, is the illusion that information exists in an immaterial world: “The complexity of a basic transaction is a mystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits
    and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street.”

    In spite of their effective invisibility, data centers are the backbone of the digital economy. As these nodes in national and global communications networks grow in importance, they consume more energy. A modern data center uses 100 to 200 times more electricity per square foot than an office building.xlvi Some data centers consume as much energy as small towns. In 2013 U.S. data centers devoured enough kilowatt-hours of electricity—91 billion—to power twice the number of households in New York City.xlvii Gains in efficiency and productivity may be outstripped by increased demands made possible by falling prices.

    And energy-hungry data centers themselves represent only 20 percent of ICT electric consumption, with the rest dispersed among hand-held devices, PC’s and other technologies. As one study notes, “Cost and availability of electricity for the cloud is dominated by same realities as for society at large—obtaining electricity at the highest availability and lowest possible cost."

    Electricity to power increasingly sophisticated phones and computers and cloud computing centers as well as machine-to-machine communication and communication among self- driving vehicles will have to come from somewhere. Will the source be renewable energy? Many Americans have been persuaded that combating global warming will require a rapid—and relatively painless—transition from fossil fuels to renewables, identified in the popular imagination with wind power and solar energy. This vision is sometimes united with the idea of a “distributed” energy network, in which utilities buy
    much of their electricity from rooftop solar panels or electric cars.

    In reality, the reign of hydrocarbons in the energy mix is far from over. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that in 2040 as much as 80 percent of primary energy consumption by fuel in the U.S. will originate with three fossil fuels—petroleum and other liquids (33 percent), natural gas (29 percent) and coal (18 percent). In their contribution to primary energy production, renewables are predicted to rise only from 8 percent  in 2013 to 10 percent in 2040. As a share of electricity generation by fuel, renewables are predicted to account for only 15–22 percent in 2040, roughly the same as nuclear energy. Most of the renewable category is accounted for by hydropower and wind; only minor contributions will be made even in the best case scenarios for 2040 by solar, geothermal, and biomass.

    FUTURE INFRASTRUCTURE: EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION

    The conventional wisdom of  urban planners posits revolution, not evolution. It is widely assumed that the trend of decentralization of production, housing and shopping—a trend that has been reinforced by each new wave of technology, beginning with steam engines—will somehow be reversed in the near future, leading to the reconcentration not only of housing but also of much manufacturing and even “urban agriculture” in dense cities. And all of this is supposed to be accompanied by mass abandonment of personal automobile use for mass transit and a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

    As I have sought to demonstrate, none of these assumptions is plausible.
    The future American landscape will be characterized by evolution, not revolution. The desire to minimize costs will lead most businesses and households to avoid expensive, dense urban areas for low-density regions with cheaper land. According to Jed Kolko of Trulia, only one of the ten fastest-growing cities with more than 500,000 people, Seattle, is predominantly urban, while five—Austin, Fort Worth, Charlotte, San Antonio and Phoenix—are majority suburban.

    Roads and highways will be important, as increasingly autonomous cars and trucks and buses render fixed-rail passenger transit even more marginal than it is today for passenger transportation (rail will retain its utility for freight transportation in the U.S.).  Air travel will become more complex, with the addition to airliners of civilian drones and perhaps “air taxis” reshaping patterns of production, package delivery and commuting. Telecommuting and the gradual electrification of transport will make reliable electric grids all the more indispensable. And the displacement of coal by natural gas, and the evolution of a global market in natural gas, will necessitate more pipelines. Growing Internet usage will have to be matched by reliable high-speed connectivity via national and international grids and increasingly colossal data servers which, even if they are more efficient, will require immense quantities of energy for operation and cooling.

    Far from reducing the quality of life of the working class/middle class majority in an aging America, “sprawl” or decentralization, if properly carried out, can benefit both the providers and consumers of personal services. Personal service providers with access to cars have a much greater market for their services— particularly if highways or expressways enlarge the number of sites or homes that they can visit. At the same time, low-cost, low-density housing in suburbs, exurbs and small-towns makes it easier for the elderly to age in place. Emergent technologies such as telemedicine and autonomous vehicles may make suburban life much less challenging for the elderly who can no longer drive. The greatest beneficiaries of an automobile-based service economy may be the low-income elderly and their modestly-paid caregivers.

    This picture is at odds with the kind of urban futurism which envisions passenger trains whizzing past windmills and solar power panels on their way from one skyscraper metropolis to another. Certainly robocars, power lines, natural gas pipelines, and data centers are less striking and glamorous than fashionable icons of pop futurism like high-speed rail and imaginary farms inside skyscrapers. But a decentralized America built on the bones of high-capacity roads, power lines, pipelines, and airstrips can enjoy a growing economy while minimizing the de facto taxes imposed by congestion, high land prices, and other detritus of excessive density. The historic nexus among technology, decentralization and the quality of life, far from being rendered obsolete, is on the verge of being reinforced and renewed in the United States.

    This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism called “America’s Housing Crisis.” The report contains several essays about the future of housing from various perspectives. Follow this link to download the full report (pdf).

    Michael Lind is the Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., editor of New American Contract and its blog Value Added, and a columnist forSalon magazine. He is also the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. Lind was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech. He has been an editor or staff writer at the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New Republic and the National Interest.

  • The Green Urbanization Myth

    Once a fringe idea, the notion of using technology to allow humanity to “decouple” from nature is winning new attention, as a central element of what the Breakthrough Institute calls “ecomodernism.” The origins of the decoupling idea can be found in 20th century science fiction visions of domed or underground, climate-controlled, recycling-based cities separated by forests or deserts. A version of decoupling was promoted in the 1960s and 1970s by the British science writer Nigel Calder in The Environment Game (1967) and the radical ecologist Paul Shepard in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973). More recent champions of decoupling include Martin Lewis, Jesse Ausubel, Stewart Brand, and Linus Blomqvist.  

    Proponents of decoupling point out correctly that the greatest threat to wilderness is not urban sprawl, but agricultural sprawl. The amount of the earth’s surface devoted to the unnatural, simplified ecosystems of agriculture—that is, farms and ranches—dwarfs the small amount consumed by cities, including low-density suburbs. Industrial, energy- and fertilizer-intensive agriculture has permitted us to grow far more food on far less land—with costs, to be sure, including water pollution from fertilizer runoff. Genetically modified crops will make it possible to shrink the footprint of global agriculture altogether, and if human beings ever derive most of their diet from laboratory-synthesized foods like in vitro meat and vegetables created from stem cells, most of today’s farmland can be freed for other uses.

    The decouplers are right to predict that technology will free up vast amounts of land for purposes other than farming. But many of them go wrong, I believe, when they assume that the decline of agricultural sprawl will be accompanied by the decline of urban sprawl, for two reasons. First, as societies become richer, more and more people choose low-density housing and can afford it. Second, whatever may be the case in other countries, in the United States, the private market for land—including retired farmland—ensures that little if any of the land freed by technology from agriculture will be turned into public wilderness preserves.

    One of the great urban legends of our time is the claim, endlessly repeated by urban gentry journalists, that Americans are tired of the suburbs and are moving back into the city in the search of walkable neighborhoods. The data disprove the claim. As Wendell Cox points out at Newgeography:

    But the core municipalities now contain such a small share of major metropolitan area population that the suburbs have continued to add population at about three times the numbers of the core municipalities…Indeed, if the respective 2010-2013 annual growth rates were to prevail for the next century,  the core municipalities would house only 28.0 percent of the major metropolitan area population in 2113 (up from 26.4 percent in 2013).           

    Thanks to decoupling, the low-density metro areas will probably become even bigger and even less dense. As farmland on the periphery of metro areas is retired from agriculture, much of it will be converted into cheap housing, low-rent office parks and inexpensive production facilities.

    The rise of robocars may accelerate metro area decentralization. Congestion will be reduced, and the greater safety of driverless cars may permit higher speeds on metro area beltways and cross-town freeways. Once taxi drivers are replaced by robot taxis, the cost of taxis will plummet and the greater convenience of point-to-point personal travel anywhere in a sprawling metro area will make rail-based mass transit obsolete except in places like airports and tourist-haven downtowns.  As in the past, most working-class families with children will probably prefer a combination of a longer commute with a bigger single-family house and yard to a shorter commute and life in a cramped apartment or condo. 

    Nor will most working-class and middle-class retirees move to walkable downtowns. They won’t be able to afford to. And robocars plus in-home medical technology will make it much easier for the elderly to age in place in car-based suburbs. 

    As great numbers of middle- and low-income Americans move to bigger, cheaper homes on the former farmland that rings expanding metro areas, they will be leap-frogged by the rich. Absent a reversal of today’s top-heavy income concentration, much of America’s wealth will continue to be concentrated in the hands of a few people. And when farmland is retired, thanks to GM crops, in vitro food, or other new land-sparing technologies, a lot of the former farm acreage will be bought by One Percenters and turned into rural retreats.

    The decouplers hope that retired farmland will be “rewilded” and transformed into nature parks that everyone can enjoy. But how realistic is this hope? At least in the United States, it is impossible to imagine federal or state governments buying more than a negligible portion of retired farmland and turning it into public parks. What is more likely, that most retired Midwestern farmland will be turned into rewilded public prairie preserves—or that it will be divided into the vast baronial estates of super-rich bankers, tech oligarchs, and trust-fund heirs and heiresses, who commute from their downtown skyscraper penthouses to their high-tech Downtown Abbeys?

    A certain amount of the former farm acreage owned by the plutocracy may be rewilded, with the encouragement of tax incentives like conservation easement laws. But rewilding on the scale imagined by some environmentalists is unlikely. For one thing, the former farmland will still be chopped up by fences, roads, power lines, and other structures. And all but the greatest recreational ranches will be too small to support self-sustaining populations of bison and other megafauna. Nor are voters likely to smile on the restoration of predators like wolves, coyotes, bears, and mountain lions, even if a few of eccentric rich landowners fancied the idea.

    And then there is the aesthetic factor. The biologist E.O. Wilson has suggested that, because we are descended from hominids who evolved on African savannahs, we naturally prefer vistas with grassy expanses to forests, deserts, and other biomes. Some evidence for this comes from the work of the Russian artists Komar and Melamid, who polled members of different nationalities and then painted the “Most Wanted Paintings” based on the results. In most countries, if they are to be believed, the favorite sofa painting shows a grassy landscape with a river and some woods in the background. 

    As Paul Shepard pointed out, the country-house landscape of 18th century Britain was anything but natural. The natural landscape of most of Britain, as of most of Western Europe, is dense forest. But the British rural upper class cleared the forests to create grassy vistas—the ancestors of the modern British and American suburban lawn. Shepard blamed this on the influence of Renaissance Italian landscape painting, which showed once-forested Mediterranean coast land that had been denuded by goats and sheep. But the Wilson theory may provide another explanation.

    Whether for cultural or instinctive reasons, the rich who buy up most of the land spared by technology may wish to keep open spaces, even if the area would naturally be forest. The late architect Philip Johnson waged a constant war on the New England forest in order to maintain grassy lawns over which to view his Glass House and other iconic buildings on his 47-acre New Canaan, Connecticut, estate. In prairie biomes, conversely, the rural rich are likely to plant some trees, to make the land conform to conventional notions of the scenic.   

    If the American rich are given a free hand to shape the former farm acreage they have bought, the most likely result will be a park-like landscape, with open vistas and clumps of trees—regardless of what the natural environment of the area would look like. The rewilding would be limited chiefly to small animals and birds, like raccoons and turkeys. No bison herds and no wolf packs. And as acreage was converted from farmland to One Percenter parkland, the already excessive deer population, freed from natural predators and rural American hunters alike, would swell even more. 

    The decouplers are right, I believe, to predict that advances in food production technology will free enormous amounts of former farmland for other uses. But very little of that land will be converted into the public wilderness preserves envisioned by Calder and Shepard and others. A minority of the former farmland will be converted into single-family housing on the edges of major metro areas. Most of the land retired from farming, instead of being spared for nature, will become rural estates for the plutocracy, surrounded by signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY: KEEP OUT and overrun by starving deer.

    Michael Lind is the Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., editor of New American Contract and its blogValue Added, and a columnist forSalon magazine. He is also the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. Lind was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech. He has been an editor or staff writer at the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New Republic and the National Interest.

    Image from BigStockPhoto.com

  • Against Cosmopolitanism

    All science fiction agrees. History is leading to the unification of earth. The united world may be governed by benign world federalism or by a dystopian global tyranny. But the modern literature of prophecy is clear: the age of competing nation-states is coming to an end. There are no visions of the future in popular culture in which advanced technology is combined with the continued sovereignty and competition of nation-states like China, India, and the United States or blocs like the European Union. The only near-equivalent is George Orwell’s nightmare vision, in 1984, of endless rivalry among the three totalitarian blocs of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

    Most educated people today are similarly in accord, associating historical progress with the increasing scale of our moral and political loyalties. Individuals are liberated from the communities into which they happened to be born. The tribe gives way to the nation and the nation gives way to humanity. History will soon culminate in a secular millennium in which emancipated individuals will be citizens of a postnational, global community.

    Since the late 19th century, hopeful visions of the future have almost always been identified with the transcendence of nation-states. In the early 1900s, many in the West looked forward to the fulfillment of Alfred Tennyson’s vision in "Locksley Hall" (1842) of "the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." Wendell Willkie predicted in 1943 that World War II would be followed by a new age of unity given its title by his book: One World. The fall of the Berlin Wall triggered yet another wave of claims that a postnational epoch was dawning. These forecasts took crude forms, like Thomas L. Friedman’s inaccurate depiction of a global market compelling the convergence of national policies, or sophisticated ones, like the British diplomat Robert Cooper’s claim that premodern and modern societies would give way gradually to postmodern societies.1

    Although philosophical cosmopolitanism today is generally associated with secular elites, its roots are religious. The idea that all human beings belong to a single moral community was part of ancient Stoicism. But the Stoics did not believe in progress. Instead, they envisioned a cyclic universe, like that of Hinduism, in which the world was periodically incinerated and re-created. The combination of progress and cosmopolitanism comes from the apocalyptic tradition in Zoroastrianism, which influenced apocalyptic Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to this school of thought, at some point probably in the near future, history would be brought to an end by God whose direct rule would replace the division of humanity among languages and nationalities that the Biblical tradition explained with the myth of Babel.

    The combination of moral cosmopolitanism with unidirectional progress constitutes Christianity’s greatest legacy to the secular intelligentsia. The idea that a moral person must not be a selfish localist or nationalist, but must take a personal interest in the well-being of poor, suffering, far-away people was a Christian notion long before it informed the view of secular intellectuals of themselves as world citizens who have transcended petty local loyalties and interests. In its secularized version, Providence takes the form of social forces like the economy and culture, but the result is the same: the formation of a single planetary community free from ethnocentrism, wars, and trade conflicts. This kind of secular providentialism informs the philosophies of numerous thinkers including Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and more recently Martha Nussbaum, Ulrich Beck, Peter Singer, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

    The underlying providential structure of cosmopolitanism explains the combination of certitude and moral fervor found among liberal and socialist one-worlders. In Christianity, to deny God’s providential plan for the world is a sin, as it is to obstruct the unfolding of that plan. The same is the case in secular providentialism. Globalist liberals and socialists predict that a single cosmopolitan society will inevitably be brought about by irresistible social forces and then condemn anyone­ — nationalist or capitalist — who resists those forces. Postnational liberals tell us that the nation-state is withering away and then condemn those who defend national sovereignty for delaying the allegedly inevitable postnational future. The sun will rise tomorrow precisely at 7:00 a.m., therefore we must help it rise and fight those who would prevent its rising.

    1.
    Contemporary cosmopolitanism, in defiance of Hume, combines an "ought" with an "is." The "ought" is the view that the nation-state is a parochial form of organization and should be replaced by broader, more inclusive loyalties. The "is" takes the form of the claim that the nation-state is destined to wither away because of irresistible technological or economic forces, whether we like it or not.

    But the trends proffered as evidence of a historic shift toward postnational cosmopolitanism are in fact consistent with the persistence of the nation-state as the main actor in world politics. Changes in the global economy, most significantly, are not signs of cosmopolitanism. The popular conception of globalization is overly simple and misleading. As Alan M. Rugman has pointed out, instead of a single global market there is today a somewhat Balkanized world economy organized around the "triad" of Europe, North America, and East Asia.2

    The emerging world economy is highly regionalized and remains connected to the nation-state. While some industries, like computer electronics manufacturing, are truly global, others, like the automobile industry, are dominated by corporations with most of their production and sales based in one of the three major blocs. New blocs might join the existing triad — India-centered South Asia, for example — but it is naïve to think that all barriers to the free flow of capital, goods, and labor among countries and regions will disappear.

    Even multinational corporations turn out to be not quite so multinational. The 100 largest multinationals in 2008 held 57 percent of their total assets and 58 percent of their total employment abroad, with foreign sales making up 61 percent of their total.3 But this merely means that most multinationals are half-global, at best. The typical multinational still has a distinct national identity, with around half of its assets, employment, and sales within its home market. In fact, very few multinational corporations conduct an overwhelming majority of their business outside of their home countries.

    The domination of global commerce by corporations based in the United States, Japan, and Germany — the three most populous industrial democracies — shows the importance of a large domestic market as a base for multinational sales and operations. Despite the celebration of global corporations by libertarians and their denunciation by leftists and populists, global companies possess national identities after all. Even financial globalization proved more superficial than advertised: major global banks turned to their national governments for bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis.

    The temporary influence of the Washington Consensus notwithstanding, the epoch of economic nationalism never ended. Outside of the Anglophone countries, this is the age of mercantilism. Instead of tariffs, post-1945 mercantilist nations have used subsidies (Europe and the United States); non-tariff barriers (Japan); and currency "tariffs," subsidies, and state-directed credit (China) to protect domestic markets and support export-oriented sectors of their economies. Mercantilism cannot work without a "patsy," and the United States agreed during the Cold War and post-Cold War period to play the role of consumer of first resort for mercantilist nations. This decision was based, partly on libertarian ideology, but mainly on national strategy, to encourage first Japan and West Germany and then China to become one-dimensional civilian manufacturing powers instead of rival military powers. In the long run, it is more likely that the United States — the world’s most protectionist nation before 1945 — will move back toward mercantilism than it is that China, Japan, and Germany will adopt the economics of the late Milton Friedman.

    Current trends in immigration do not support the cosmopolitan claim that national borders are breaking down. Neither the fact that a country like the United States chooses to admit large numbers of legal immigrants nor the fact that it chooses to tolerate large numbers of illegalimmigrants demonstrates that it is powerless to do otherwise. With respect to transnational flows of labor, all advanced industrial countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions — ranging from issuing national identity cards to building border fences — to secure their borders and airports against illegal immigrants. The assertion of effective state control over immigration is driven, in part, by fear of international terrorism, but also by a backlash against poor immigrants among native-born citizens of developed countries — a backlash that is likely to deepen if the Great Recession is prolonged over many years.

    At the same time that advanced countries are seeking to reduce unwanted immigration, many are competing for skilled immigrants. Britain, Australia, and Canada, for example, have adopted a "points system" in which educated immigrants are favored over the uneducated. When these trends are put together, the result is the opposite of the borderless world with free flows of labor predicted by prophets of globalization a decade ago. Most countries in the 21st century are likely to combine a tough attitude toward illegal immigration with selective legal immigration favoring skilled workers.

    What about the political trends of the 21st century? The historical pattern is clear. The breakup of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires after World War I produced many new nation-states and some new multinational states, like Yugoslavia. Following World War II, the decolonization of the European empires in Asia and Africa produced dozens of new states, some of them multinational (like Nigeria and Pakistan, which may themselves break apart like Yugoslavia). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, new states were again added to the United Nations General Assembly. It is a safe bet that the maps of the world in 2050 and 2100 will show still more independent countries than exist today.

    The conventional wisdom of today’s cosmopolitans holds that ethnocultural nationalism is a barbaric relic of an earlier stage of civilization and that as enlightenment and prosperity spread, people become more cosmopolitan. But far from being moribund, nationalism — defined not as aggression or xenophobia, but as a preference for the nation-state as the unit of legitimate government — remains the most powerful force in global politics for the third century in a row.
    Thus nationalism is not atavistic; indeed, it is modern — just as modern as industrialism and urbanism. The trend of reorganizing a world of premodern dynastic empires and city-states into a world of nation-states, in which most (though not all) states are identified with a majority ethnocultural group, has paralleled the conversion, in the economic realm, of an agrarian world into an industrial world.

    As societies become urban and industrial, village societies give way to anonymous urban societies in which individuals identify with larger "imagined communities." These need not be national — Islamists, for example, identify with the imagined community of the Muslim ummah. But the community that has proven most effective in attracting the loyalty of individuals in modern, large-scale societies is the nation, which can be defined minimally in terms of shared language and customs, as in most liberal democracies, or maximally, in terms of shared "race" and/or religion, as in illiberal nationalism.

    It follows that as people become more educated and more prosperous they are more likely to prefer to be members of the majority in a nation-state rather than minorities in someone else’s nation-state or one of several squabbling nationalities in a multinational state. As the world grows richer, movements by stateless nations, from the Scots to the Kurds, to obtain nation-states of their own, whether by peaceful or violent means, are likely to increase, not decrease.
    Arguably, we are still in the early stages of the technological era in economics and the era of the nation-state in politics. In the most likely scenario, the 21st century will witness the completion of two trends that have been underway since the 18th — the conversion of all humanity from an agrarian lifestyle to an urban-industrial one, and the replacement of premodern forms of political organization almost everywhere by nation-states.

    2.
    In recognizing the continuing, and likely expanding, hegemony of the nation-state as the primary unit of global political, economic, and social organization, we need not deny the simultaneous expansion of cosmopolitan sympathies. Liberalization of government controls on trade and finance, greater cross-border immigration and global travel, and the constitution of something approaching a global public through mass media communication of serial cosmopol­itan "moments" all contribute to the spread of cosmopolitan sentiments. But those sympathies are likely to continue to exist alongside national identities and allegiances.

    To be sure, global initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals and other antipoverty programs, as well as post-Cold War military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have been justified, to some extent, on cosmopolitan grounds. The US intervention in Libya, to take one recent example, appears to have involved a protracted debate within the Obama Administration between advocates of the cosmopolitan notion of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) and pragmatists opposed to the application of US military power in conflicts where there is no clear national interest. In this debate, the cosmopolitans appear to have prevailed.

    But we should be careful not to read too much into these examples. In virtually every case, the nation-state remains the institution through which economic and military resources are deployed in service of cosmopolitan objectives. In many cases, it is often difficult to disentangle where national interest ends and cosmopolitan interest begins. The wars in the Balkans and the Middle East can just as easily be explained in terms of the national interests of the United States and its allies in defeating sponsors of terrorist attacks (Afghanistan), securing US regional military hegemony (Iraq and Libya), and averting destabilizing flows of refugees to Europe (a motivation behind European participation in the Balkan and Libyan wars), as through cosmopolitan ones. As such, even where cosmopolitan sentiments succeed in galvanizing national or international action in response to global and regional challenges, those responses are likely to only further establish the nation-state as the focal point for making those decisions and the primary institution through which such interventions are likely to be carried out.

    The resulting organization of global affairs is better explained by liberal internationalism than by cosmopolitanism. In this view, nation-states, rather than individuals, corporations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), will continue to be the main actors in world politics (though certainly not the only ones) for generations to come. Liberal internationalists maintain that all human beings have inalienable rights, which should be secured by governments resting on their consent. While those rights-securing governments may take various forms, the nation-state is the largest unit that has been able to combine effective government with a sense of solidarity among its citizens. The nation to which the state corresponds can be defined broadly, in terms of a shared culture and language, and it can be generous to minority nationalities that may share its territories. But there is a point at which linguistic and cultural diversity undermine the minimum of community needed to maintain a sense of shared citizenship. A global government would be a Tower of Babel which few would be willing to obey, to provide with taxes, or to support with military service.

    Liberal internationalism answers the question of how the world can be organized, if each people, however defined, has a right to its own sovereign, accountable nation-state. The alternative to both Hobbesian anarchy and global cosmopolitanism is cooperation by nation-states. This cooperation can take the form of international law, international arbitration, and international agencies, as well as military alliances and concerts of power. But international is not supranational. Countries may delegate powers to international agencies for some purposes, but as long as the delegations are revocable, they are not surrendering sovereignty.

    3.
    The most important distinctions in 21st century world politics will be based on scale. By the middle of this century, the greatest powers may eventually be those, such as China, India, and the United States, which combine (or will combine) at least moderately developed industrial economies with populations of half a billion people or more. 

    The US investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that by 2050 China will have the largest economy in the world, followed by the United States and India. The next tier might be occupied by Russia, Brazil, and Japan, and a third tier would include Germany, Britain, and other once-mighty European economic powers.4 Just as the Italian city-states of the Renaissance were dwarfed and marginalized by the national monarchies north of the Alps in the 16th and 17th centuries, so the large nation-states of the past — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan — will be overshadowed by the titans of the 21st and 22nd centuries.

    The United States will owe its position in the club of titans to its immigration-fed population growth, which could produce an American population of 400-600 million by 2050. The 2010 medium fertility estimations of the United Nations suggested that in 2050 the most populous nations would be India (1.7 billion) and China (1.3 billion), followed by the United States (400 million), Nigeria (400 million), and Indonesia (300 million).5 It is Europe, not the United States, which faces a significant decline in relative population, wealth, and power. Europe, which accounted for 22 percent of the world’s population in 1945 and 12 percent in 2000, may have only 6 percent in 2050. Because GDP is based on working-age population and productivity, even though Europeans will grow richer, the European share of the global economy may decline from 22 percent today — roughly comparable to that of the United States — to only 12 percent in 2050.6

    In modern industrial societies, technology and politics combine in what Edward Luttwak has called "geoeconomics." Technological economies of scale reward big enterprises in large, unified markets. As champions of the global market ceaselessly point out, technological and commercial economies of scale are best realized at the global level. But psychological and political economies of scale are best realized by nation-states.

    In theory, both economic and political economies of scale could be realized by multinational blocs, but in practice this outcome is unlikely. As early as the 1840s, British and French observers speculated that the future would be dominated by two giant states, the United States and Russia. The imperialism of the industrial era, from the 1870s to World War II, was (among other things) an attempt by medium-sized nation-states like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to create economic areas comparable in scale to those that existed inside the borders of the United States and Tsarist Russia (later the Soviet Union).

    After World War II, largely at the insistence of the United States, the international system outlawed old-fashioned empire building. But even if 20th century history had taken a different course, it is doubtful that multinational empires, held together by repression and, in the case of maritime empires like the British and Japanese, separated by oceans, could have competed in the long run with giant nation-states.

    The former Western European imperial powers have sought to achieve the same result by partially pooling their sovereignty in the European Union. But European countries retain their sovereignty in foreign policy, rendering a unified voice impossible in conflicts including the Balkan wars, the Iraq War, and the Libyan War. Meanwhile, the Greek financial crisis has proven that the European Union lacks the overarching central economic institutions, like a central bank with emergency lending capabilities, necessary to function as an efficient monetary and commercial union. Because of popular resistance to further political integration, the European Union is no more likely to be the successful equivalent of a giant nation-state than the former European empires proved to be.

    Psychological economies of scale favor nation-states with a strong sense of solidarity among their citizens that makes them willing to fight in wars, pay taxes, and tolerate redistribution for the common good. China, with its overwhelming Han majority, has a far greater sense of national identity and solidarity than much smaller multinational states like Canada and Belgium, which are in danger of breaking up along ethno-national lines as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have done.

    It follows, then, that in the future, as in the past, the economic gains from scale will be reaped chiefly by entities with immense, free, internal markets congruent with political boundaries. Concerns about national security and domestic distribution will always constrain market integration among nation-states. In a post-imperial, post-dynastic world, the most successful great powers will be very big nation-states.

    4.
    Contrary to the claims of the prophets of cosmopolitanism, the world is likely to remain divided among great sovereign powers for ages to come. Sometimes they will compete, at other times they will collaborate, but they are unlikely to sacrifice their sovereignty by merging into a single global government; if one were established, by force or intimidation, it would probably break apart quickly.

    The ideas of postmodernity and second modernity appeal primarily to thinkers in European nations where it is necessary to transcend and pool sovereignty in order to compete with huge nation-states like the United States and China. Large nation-states, in contrast, are powerful on the basis of their internal populations, resources, and economies, so it is unsurprising that they see no benefit in surrendering their sovereign powers to supranational organizations dominated by smaller countries. In a world of sovereign nation-states, the biggest nation-states are more sovereign than the others. Unilateralism is natural for the great powers. Whales do not consult the barnacles on their sides or the schools of small fish who swim in their wake.

    The rise of the giants is likely to lead to less, not more, emphasis on international organizations like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. If the United States, China, and India account for much of the world economy in fifty to a hundred years, then they may prefer setting the rules of world trade and investment by bilateral or trilateral negotiations. Why should giants consult with dozens or hundreds of pygmies before acting? International law has traditionally been championed by small- or moderate-sized, neutral countries (including the United States in the 19th century). Its influence may decline in an age in which a few titanic continental states have hundreds of millions or billions of inhabitants.

    Unfortunately, cosmopolitanism is not simply a quaint, harmless religious faith held by global elites. Confusing the cosmopolitan "ought" with the cosmopolitan "is" results in all sorts of disastrously wrongheaded policies. If, for example, the world really is on the verge of full economic and political integration, then outsourcing all US manufacturing capacity to China might make sense in the same way that it might be reasonable for a state like California to outsource all of its manufacturing capacity to other US states. They share the same tax, regulatory, and social welfare systems; they make shared national investments in infrastructure and education; and they share the same military and national security interests. But in a world in which nation-states are likely to continue to retain their sovereignty and in which economic nationalism continues to reign, trade and investment policies that presuppose a borderless world make no sense at all.

    The cosmopolitan error has similarly distorted international efforts to address global challenges. International climate policy has persistently foundered upon the basic realities of an international political economy that continues to be defined by the interests of national economies. International development and antipoverty efforts in recent decades have similarly failed to align themselves with the basic economic interests of donor economies. As such, the cosmopolitan error has had real consequences for both national efforts to build healthy, equitable economies and international efforts to address serious global problems and risks.

    The frequently-made argument that extensive supranational cooperation is necessary to solve global problems is incorrect. Without question, destructive, zero-sum national rivalries are a threat to a peaceful and prosperous world — on this point, liberal internationalists and liberal cosmopolitans can agree.

    Fortunately, most of the world-order goals of cosmopolitanism can be achieved by enlightened liberal internationalism without the need to sacrifice or weaken the democratic nation-state, the organization in which most of the progress toward equality and economic security over the last three centuries has taken place. Contrary to the commonly held views of pundits and science-fiction­­ writers, a world government or a true global market is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future. But a successful and enlightened liberal internationalism would permit us to enjoy the benefits of both without the costs of either. 

    This piece was first published by the Breakthrough Journal.

    Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of The Next American Nation.

    Photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    1. Friedman, Thomas. 2005. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Cooper, Robert. 2000. The Postmodern State and the World Order. London: Demos. (back)

    2. Rugman, Alan. 2001. The Myth of Globalization: Why Global Strategy is a Myth and How to Profit from the Realities of Regional Markets. AMACOM. (back)

    3. Nolan, Peter and Jin Zhang. 2010. "Global Capitalism After the Financial Crisis." New Left Review 64. July/Aug (102). (back)

    4. Wilson, Dominic and Roopa Purushothaman. 2003. "Dreaming with BRICS: The Path to 2050." Global Economics Paper Number 99. Goldman Sachs. October 1.(back)

    5. United Nations. 2010. Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision. (back)

    6. Institut Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI) 2002. "Le Commerce Mondiale au XXIe siecle [World Trade in the 21st Century] Scenarios for the European Union."; Walker, Martin. 2003. "French Study Says Europe Fading," UPI, May 14. (back)

  • Has America Caught the British Disease?

    As the economy stalls, analysts are worrying that the United States might repeat the experience of Japan’s “lost decade” (actually, two lost decades). Is America turning Japanese? We should be more worried about the prospect that America is turning British.

    The United Kingdom went from creating the first industrial economy and establishing a global empire to lagging Italy by the 1970s. The neoliberal reforms of Thatcher and Blair, intended to modernize the economy, merely replaced a rotting manufacturing economy with an unstable rentier economy centered in the City of London. With a zombie economy characterized by industrial wastelands, off-limits aristocratic landholdings, tourist kitsch and a financial sector that choked on its own excesses, Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” looks more like “Ghoul Britannia.”

    The decline of Britain was generations in the making, as Corelli Barnett has argued in his “The Pride and the Fall Books,” a series of polemics that include “The Audit of War” and “The Collapse of British Power.” The industrial strength that made the island nation the pioneer of the modern era was the result of unfashionable people – middle-class manufacturers – in the unfashionable industrial towns of the British midlands.

    Unfortunately, Britain’s industrial revolution was not accompanied by a revolution in values that emphasized making things over inheriting things. The old elite of aristocratic parasites, Church of England drones, and their snobbish retainers like elite lawyers and professors despised upwardly mobile arrivistes, although their children and grand-children might become socially acceptable if they abandoned “trade” for the lifestyle of genteel rentiers and were laundered through public schools like Eton and Oxbridge. The equivalent of Germany’s technical high schools and polytechnics and America’s agricultural and mechanical colleges were (and are) sneered at in Britain as vulgar “redbrick” universities.

    The failure to change Britain’s elite attitudes was accompanied by a failure to change Britain’s temporarily-successful free trade policies when they became anachronistic. From the Tudor era until the nineteenth century, the British state used mercantilist policies of the kind nowadays associated with the “East Asian model” – selective protectionism, subsidies to exporters, procurement, taxes on resource material exports to keep prices low. The American colonies, forbidden to manufacture anything and forced to supply the metropole with food and raw materials in return for high-value-added British manufactures, were part of the mercantilist system, like Scotland, Ireland and India.

    By the 1840s, Britain’s technological supremacy allowed it to take off the protectionist training wheels and practice and preach free trade, confident that its manufactured exports would kill off infant industries in other countries. Beginning in the 1870s, however, the newly-united Germany and post-Civil War America adopted their own high-tariff policies of industry-supporting mercantilism. Despite the warnings of trade reformers like Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880s and 1890s, the British continued to practice one-way free trade, allowing German and American corporations based in their own giant, protected domestic markets to increase their shares of the market in Britain, its dominions and its colonies.

    As British industry shrank under American and German competition, the City of London became even more important. Finance was a clean business, untainted by the grime and odor of the factory, and could be practiced by gentlemen. The British discovered too late that finance follows industry, as the epicenter of global banking migrated from London to New York during World War I.

    Today the U.S. is repeating Britain’s mistakes. First the Japanese and now the Chinese have used a variety of methods, from nontariff barriers (Japan) to currency manipulation (both) to keep U.S. products out of their markets while enjoying unimpeded access to America’s consumer market, the biggest in the world. As in Britain, the center of gravity in the business world has shifted from manufacturing to finance. The catastrophic deregulation of the U.S. financial industry was based on the argument that unless the U.S. scrapped the New Deal era regulations that provided decades of financial stability and steady growth, Wall Street might lose out to the City of London or Hong Kong or Shanghai. For America’s bipartisan oligarchy, Wall Street is more important than Detroit.

    Not content to re-enact the British cycle of deindustrialization and decline, the U.S. imports British pundits to lecture Americans on nineteenth-century free market ideology. Asking dogmatic British free marketers how to organize a successful economy in the twenty-first century is the equivalent of asking unreconstructed Japanese militarists how to run a successful foreign policy or asking Iranian mullahs how to create a world-class R&D sector.

    Innovation without production is not the answer, as Britain’s sad history shows. Britain continued to have a world-class science and technology sector, inventing the jet engine and radar, among other things. But the British were unable to commercialize the products of British R&D because they lacked adequate mass production industries. Similarly, innovation will enrich few Americans other than technologists and venture capitalists if the new products that result are then licensed to be produced in industrial Asia or industrial Europe.

    The irony is that, while the American colonists were right to rebel against their role of hewers of wood and drawers of water in the British Empire, the British mercantile system of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries was a great success story, producing not only temporary British supremacy but also modern technological civilization. The Germans, Japanese and Chinese have always practiced subtle and not-so-subtle versions of the technonationalism that Britain pursued before its misplaced confidence led it to adopt the free market ideology that accelerated its downfall. Modern America has more to learn from the pre-liberal, industrializing Britain of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Adam Smith denounced than from the post-1840s Britain that sat nobly on its laurels as it sank beneath the waves it briefly ruled.

    Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of The Next American Nation.

    Photo by **Maurice**

  • Can Obama be deprogrammed?

    In my first foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new, thankfully ephemeral profession: “deprogrammers” who for pay would kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of isolation, interrogation and maybe reruns of “The Waltons.”

    A reactionary Republican state senator from the Houston area, who was heartily despised by my senator, introduced a bill granting parents the right to hire deprogrammers to kidnap adult children who belonged to what the parents regarded as cults and then confine them in motels for several weeks, subject to psychological coercion, without notifying the authorities. Needless to say, this deprogramming law was the greatest threat to the tradition of habeas corpus until another reactionary Texan was installed in the White House in 2001. The bill was laughed to death, when, during a hearing, the sponsor was asked if it could be used to deprogram young people who had joined a certain well-known cult. “Why, yes, Senator,” the Republican replied, “it would apply to cults like the Unitarians.”

    Boy, do we need deprogrammers now, to liberate Barack Obama from the cult of neoliberalism.

    By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the “Third Way.” The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original “third way” between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a “capitalist society” or a “market democracy” but rather a democratic republic with a “mixed economy,” in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production.

    When it came to the private sector, the New Dealers, with some exceptions, approved of Big Business, Big Unions and Big Government, which formed the system of checks and balances that John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing power.” But most New Dealers dreaded and distrusted bankers. They thought that finance should be strictly regulated and subordinated to the real economy of factories and home ownership. They were economic internationalists because they wanted to open foreign markets to U.S. factory products, not because they hoped that the Asian masses some day would pay high overdraft fees to U.S. multinational banks.

    New Dealers approved of social insurance systems like Social Security and Medicare, which were rights (entitlements) not charity and which mostly redistributed income within the middle class, from workers to nonworkers (the retired and the temporarily unemployed). But contrary to conservative propaganda, New Deal liberals disliked means-tested antipoverty programs and despised what Franklin Roosevelt called “the dole.” Roosevelt and his most important protégé, Lyndon Johnson, preferred workfare to welfare. They preferred a high-wage, low-welfare society to a low-wage, high-welfare society. To maintain the high-wage system that would minimize welfare payments to able-bodied adults, New Deal liberals did not hesitate to regulate the labor market, by means of pro-union legislation, a high minimum wage, and low levels of immigration (which were raised only at the end of the New Deal period, beginning in 1965). It was only in the 1960s that Democrats became identified with redistributionist welfarism — and then only because of the influence of the New Left, which denounced the New Deal as “corporate liberalism.”

    Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the New Deal system — large-scale public investment and R&D, regulated monopolies and oligopolies, the subordination of banking to productive industry, high wages and universal social insurance — created the world’s first mass middle class. The system was far from perfect. Southern segregationist Democrats crippled many of its progressive features and the industrial unions were afflicted by complacency and corruption. But for all its flaws, the New Deal era is still remembered as the Golden Age of the American economy.

    And then America went downhill.

    The “stagflation” of the 1970s had multiple sources, including the oil price shock following the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and the revival of German and Japanese industrial competition (China was still recovering from the damage done by Mao). During the previous generation, libertarian conservatives like Milton Friedman had been marginalized. But in the 1970s they gained a wider audience, blaming the New Deal model and claiming that the answer to every question (before the question was even asked) was “the market.”

    The free-market fundamentalists found an audience among Democrats as well as Republicans. A growing number of Democratic economists and economic policymakers were attracted to the revival of free-market economics, among them Obama’s chief economic advisor Larry Summers, a professed admirer of Milton Friedman. These center-right Democrats agreed with the libertarians that the New Deal approach to the economy had been too interventionist. At the same time, they thought that government had a role in providing a safety net. The result was what came to be called “neoliberalism” in the 1980s and 1990s — a synthesis of conservative free-market economics with “progressive” welfare-state redistribution for the losers. Its institutional base was the Democratic Leadership Council, headed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and the affiliated Progressive Policy Institute.

    Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress’s dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a “knowledge economy.” While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage “knowledge jobs” of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor.

    The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish “Putting People First” program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin’s influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.

    By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president’s office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin’s son James helped select Obama’s economic team may not be irrelevant.

    Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama’s team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to “market failures,” the private sector will not provide.

    Healthcare? New Deal liberals favored a single-payer system like Social Security and Medicare. Obama, however, says that single payer is out of the question because the U.S. is not Canada. (Evidently the New Deal America of FDR and LBJ was too “Canadian.”) The goal is not to provide universal healthcare, rather it is to provide universal health insurance, by means that, even if they include a shriveled “public option,” don’t upset the bloated American private health insurance industry.

    Education? In the 1990s, the conventional wisdom of the neoliberal Democrats held that the “jobs of the future” were “knowledge jobs.” America’s workers would sit in offices with diplomas on the wall and design new products that would be made in third-world sweatshops. We could cede the brawn work and keep the brain work. Since then, we’ve learned that brain work follows brawn work overseas. R&D, finance and insurance jobs tend to follow the factories to Asia.

    Education is also used by neoliberals to explain stagnant wages in the U.S. By claiming that American workers are insufficiently educated for the “knowledge economy,” neoliberal Democrats divert attention from the real reasons for stagnant and declining wages — the offshoring of manufacturing, the decline of labor unions, and, at the bottom of the labor market, a declining minimum wage and mass unskilled immigration. One study after another since the 1990s has refuted the theory that wage inequality results from skill-biased technical change. But the neoliberal cultists around Obama who write his economic speeches either don’t know or don’t care. Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell Americans that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren’t a surplus of underemployed college grads already.

    Environment? Here the differences between the New Deal Democrats and the Obama Democrats could not be wider. Their pro-industrial program did not prevent New Deal Democrats from being passionate about resource conservation and wilderness preservation. They did not hesitate to use regulations to shut down pollution. And their approach to energy was based on direct government R&D (the Manhattan Project) and direct public deployment (the TVA).

    Contrast the straightforward New Deal approaches with the energy and environment policies of Obama and the Democratic leadership, which are at once too conservative and too radical. They are too conservative, because cap and trade relies on a system of market incentives that are not only indirect and feeble but likely to create a subprime market in carbon, enriching a few green profiteers. At the same time, they are too radical, because any serious attempt to shift the U.S. economy in a green direction by hiking the costs of non-renewable energy would accelerate the transfer of U.S. industry to Asia — and with it not only industry-related “knowledge jobs” but also the manufacture of those overhyped icons of the “green economy,” solar panels and windmills.

    While we can’t go back to the New Deal of the mid-20th century in its details, we need to re-create its spirit. But short of confining them in motel rooms and making them watch newsreels about the Hoover Dam, Glass-Steagall, the TVA and the Manhattan Project, is it possible to liberate President Obama and the Democratic leadership from the cult of neoliberalism?

    This article first appeared at Salon.com

    Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the American Infrastructure Initiative.

    Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

  • What Way for the Stimulus? Post-Industrial America vs. Neo-Industrial America

    As a result of the economic crisis, there is a broad consensus in favor of large-scale public investment in infrastructure in the U.S., both as part of a temporary stimulus program and to promote long-term modernization of America’s transportation, energy, telecom and water utility grids. But this momentary consensus masks the continuing disagreement on whether the U.S. government can legitimately promote American industries, and, if so, which industries. This is a problem for infrastructure policy, because different national infrastructures correspond to different national economic strategies.

    Consider the antebellum U.S. in Henry Clay’s American System: federal infrastructure investment in canals and later railroads (“internal improvements”) was part of a package that included import-substitution tariffs to protect infant U.S. industries from British competition. For Clay and his Whig allies and followers, including future Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln, internal improvements and tariffs were not ends in themselves. They were instruments to be used in the pursuit of the Whig-Republican vision of a decentralized, mixed industrial and agricultural economy where business owners, mostly small, and free workers, mostly prosperous, could realize the utopia of Clay’s “self-made man.”

    From Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis, the Southern planters who opposed such ambitious schemes had no objection to infrastructure as such. They favored infrastructure tailored to suit the needs of their semi-colonial slave plantation economy, based on exports of cotton and other commodities to British and Western European factories. Local wharves and harbors that facilitated the shipment of crops to industrial Britain were acceptable to the planters. They opposed infrastructure that would encourage industrialization in the South or the U.S. as a whole, out of fear that urbanization and industrialization would threaten their local dominance over both black slaves and poor white yeoman farmers. They also feared they would be marginalized in national politics – as they indeed were – by industrialists, merchants and financiers.

    Today, the rivalry is not between the champions of an industrial America and an agrarian America. Rather, it is a rivalry between the champions of a neo-industrial America, which includes world-class industrial agriculture, and a post-industrial America, in which most if not all manufacturing and even agriculture will be outsourced. In this formulation, post-industrial America emerges as a consumerist paradise populated by investors, executives of multinational companies, rentiers, realtors, government and nonprofit bureaucrats, and a supporting cast of service sector proletarians including nursing aides, nannies, gardeners, security guards and restaurant and hotel workers.

    Just as there was one logical infrastructure for the industrializing North and one for the anti-industrial plantation South in the nineteenth century, so in the twenty-first century a different infrastructure would be appropriate, depending on whether the goal is a post-industrial America or a neo-industrial America.

    A post-industrial infrastructure can be simple, local and substantially foreign.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can be simple since it involves little more than the roads and harbors needed to bring in high-value-added imports from abroad and ship out low-value-added American commodities. Adequate harbors are necessary, as are adequate highways to help ship U.S. soybeans and timber to industrial Asia while bringing Chinese, Japanese and Korean goods to Wal-Marts for distribution.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can also be local. Just as the Southern planters were indifferent or hostile to regional or national infrastructure projects, so the elites of the service sector are interested chiefly in the infrastructure needs of the half dozen or so coastal megalopolitan areas where they live. Many favor high-speed rail to connect nearby big cities on the coasts, while denouncing federal investment in non-metropolitan areas as boondoggles. The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy of post-industrial America could function reasonably well as long as a handful of colossal city-states – Boswash, Northern California, Greater LA, the Texas Triangle – had state-of-the-art local telecom and transportation and energy grids. So what if the rest of the continent decayed?

    Finally, the post-industrial infrastructure can be largely foreign. Most of the urban service sector elite favors both outsourcing American industry and importing a new metropolitan immigrant proletariat willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits than native Americans. To be sure, someone must build the components of the metro infrastructure and put them in place. But steel can be shipped in from Asia and assembled in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Houston by immigrants, legal or illegal. Better yet, the metro-supportive infrastructure can be leased or permanently sold to foreign consortiums and even foreign sovereign wealth funds, in order to avoid the need to raise taxes to pay for upfront costs or repay bonds over the long term. The “leakage” of federal stimulus spending to benefit Chinese factories, law-breaking Latin American illegal immigrants and petrostate sovereign wealth funds will not bother elites who are not only post-industrial but to a large extent too sophisticated to worry about narrow patriotism.

    If the infrastructure of a post-industrial America would be simple, local and largely foreign, the infrastructure of a neo-industrial America should be complex, national and predominantly American.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure necessarily must be complex, because the purpose of a neo-industrial infrastructure would be onshoring – arresting and in some cases reversing the transfer of high-value-added manufacturing and services to other countries. This requires something more than freight rail bringing Chinese imports to Wal-Mart and airports helping to deliver Amazon.com boxes to urban apartments. It requires an infrastructure tailored to the needs of an entire complex ecosystem of factories, design offices, and their suppliers and contractors. And that infrastructure not only must be rebuilt in existing industrial areas like Detroit but also built from scratch in areas such as the Great Plains. It would aim to put many of tomorrow’s factories and research parks in today’s depopulating rural areas and derelict inner cities.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure must be national and inclusive in scope. Its goal resonates with the aspiration of Henry Clay Whigs, Lincoln Republicans and William Jennings Bryan Populists – a decentralized, prosperous middle-class society of small and medium-sized towns as opposed to a country where half a billion people are crammed into a few plutocratic megacities and forced to live in dense apartment blocks.

    Such decentralization – contrary to the claims of some urbanists and greens – need not mean excessive “sprawl.” This is still a very large country with lots of land, as anyone who spends time away from the coasts recognizes.

    But more important, there can only be an independent middle-class majority in a United States with 400 or 500 million people in 2050 if most Americans live and work in relatively low-density areas where homes are affordable and small business rents are not crippling. That means building new towns and new industrial centers away from the existing ones, to spread out the population and accommodate tens of millions of new immigrants with desirable skills. The rich, who will remain concentrated in a few metro areas, where they can socialize, compete and conspire with one another, must be taxed by the federal government to subsidize the infrastructure of the entire continental U.S., not just their own cities, metro areas and states.

    Last but not least, a neo-industrial infrastructure must be predominantly national with respect to its components and its workforce. It would be self-defeating to design an infrastructure friendly to American industries and workers and then hire foreign industries and foreign workers to build it. Most or all federal infrastructure spending should be reserved for corporations and suppliers whose high-value-added production takes place on American soil. And all jobs directly or indirectly related to infrastructure construction should be reserved for citizens or legal immigrants. Law-abiding American citizens should not be taxed to subsidize law-breaking illegal immigrant workers and the unpatriotic, criminal contractors who employ them. This is not “nativism.” The right kind of legal immigration would be an important part of any neo-industrial strategy, as would taking advantage of foreign direct investment by foreign companies and sovereign wealth funds in mutually beneficial ways.

    The debate about infrastructure, then, is also a debate about the future industrial profile of America. Will America in the twenty-first century be neo-industrial or post-industrial? This debate, in turn, may well determine whether the U.S. will become a decentralized, continental middle-class society or a collection of plutocratic, hierarchical city-states. The stakes could not be higher.

    Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the American Infrastructure Initiative.

  • Old Manhattan Had a Farm

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    As a child of the early Sixties, I fondly remember the days when colossal albeit stupid technological projects were fashionable. I remember in particular a cartoon that showed a subway running from the U.S. to China right through the center of the earth. Of course, this brings to mind Thoreau’s quip that, while the telegraph might connect Maine to Texas, would Maine and Texas have anything to say to each other? But the very point of the trans-core subway was its pointlessness. If titanic, useless engineering projects like the Hoover Dam are impressive, then how much more impressive are titanic, useless engineering projects!

    In the Seventies, thanks to environmentalism, grand engineering projects fell out of favor. E. F. Schumacher and J. R. Tolkein were the new gods. Skyscrapers and dams were passe. Utopia was a sod-roofed hobbit hole designed by Amory Lovins. But human fascination with large-scale projects could not be satisfied by designing high-tech composting bins in the backyard. So now we have the arrival of something new: It’s the gee-whiz engineering boondoggle of yesteryear resurrected with a thin veneer of greenwash turning it into… Call it a greendoggle.

    Inside a high-rise was that farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Scientific American, a once-sober magazine that seems to be going down-market along with National Geographic, has just published its own flashy Earth 3.0 issue, with stories like “MisLEEDING? When Green Architecture isn’t Green” and “China’s Eco-City.” On page 74 you will find “GROWING VERTICAL”: Cultivating crops in downtown skyscrapers might save bushels of energy and provide city dwellers with distinctively fresh food.” The hero of the article is Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist at Columbia University, who proposes growing food downtown in glass-walled buildings.

    Scientific American, of course, gushes over the idea as a way to plan “more sustainable cities,“ sustainability being the ultimate planning buzzword of the moment. A brief internet search reveals widespread discussion of vertical farming—not only Professor Despommier’s vertical farms and feedlots, but proposals for raising produce on green roofs downtown.

    At first sight, the idea seems plausible. True, vertical farming would be a non-starter if urban rents were higher than rural rents. But we all know that land is just as cheap in downtown Manhattan as it is in rural Nebraska, right? One wonders, though, why farming moved off the island a more than a century ago.

    Professor Despommier claims that food grown indoors would be pesticide-free, unlike that dirty outdoor produce. Once again, totally plausible. Big American cities are as free of rats and roaches as Ireland is of snakes. The Museum of Natural History has a glass case containing the last rat found in New York City, way back before World War I. (Just don’t look down at the tracks when you are waiting for a subway).

    But then if we admit there are millions of rats and billions of roaches, then the crops growing in vertical farms would have to be protected by enough rat and roach poison to kill Xerxes’ army. Fortunately, in rat- and roach-free urban America, that is not a consideration. And even if it were, we would not need to worry that health inspectors would be bribed to overlook the rodent droppings and roach eggs in our tenth-story grown arugula. The civil servants in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia are known worldwide for their incorruptibility.

    With some algae here
    And some chickens there

    Still, I do worry about the urban politicians. It’s bad enough that a mayor can pressure landlords to provide a girlfriend with an apartment for a discount. What will happen when members of the City Council start twisting the arms of realtors to give them discounts on eight-storey vertical ranchettes on Central Park West? Who needs to go to the Hamptons, when you can have your own rent-control winery on the penthouse floor?

    And then there’s the matter of competition for housing downtown. For a decade, would-be homeowners in big cities have seen prices driven up by speculators, who buy condos and then keep them empty until they can flip them. Will would-be condo owners now have to compete for airy downtown lofts with Archer Daniels Midland?

    Here a cell
    There a cell
    Everywhere a solar cell

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m for the industrialization of agriculture. I don’t doubt that, a century or two from now, much of the human diet will come from in vitro meat and fruit and vegetables, grown indoors in clean laboratory conditions and laced with the appropriate vitamins and amino acids. Back in the 1920s, before they led their nations, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt both predicted laboratory-grown food in their popular writings, and it’s coming. But, for the most part, the food labs of the twenty-second century like the robot factories will be located where land is cheap, in distant rural areas or in the outer exurban expanses of the metropolis.

    Oops, I forgot, acreage is cheap in downtown Manhattan. Never mind.

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Professor Despommier’s skyscraper farms, and the community gardens on top of the Sears Tower, solve two worrisome non-problems which together create an urgent un-crisis. The first non-problem is the alleged lack of fresh produce in present-day supermarkets, a problem that doesn’t exist in any grocery store I’ve patronized anywhere in this country. The second non-problem is the alleged loss of wilderness to agriculture. In fact, thanks to the increasing efficiency of American agriculture, more food is grown on less land all the time. Some retired farmland goes to suburbs and exurbs, but the majority of it is being reforested. The wilderness is devouring farmland in North America, not vice versa.

    But that’s the nature of a boondoggle, and the coming thing, the greendoggle. It’s an overly-elaborate technological answer to a nonexistent problem.

    Why do such ideas get such attention in the prestige press? I think the answer lies in the psychology of America’s urban overclass. Deep down the urban trust-funders and professionals want the “urban archipelago” to secede from the rest of the United States. The sooner they become self-sufficient in terms of food, the sooner they can build walls around their post-American city-states. Then, when peak oil leads to the apocalyptic crash of automobile civilization, the urbanites can pull up the draw-bridges. From the safety of their hydroponic penthouses they can look through telescopes at the besieging mob of working-class hinterlanders with potbellies and bad hairdos. Who in that day of reckoning would not rather be downtown? After all, the hinterlanders will control only the farms, factories, mines and working population, but the urbanites will have…will have…worthless pieces of paper….

    Hmmm. Back to the drawing board.

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O
    Inside a high-rise was that farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O
    With some algae here
    And a koi pond there
    Here a cell
    There a cell
    Everywhere a solar cell
    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics” (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and “What Lincoln Believed” (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest.

  • Michael Lind

  • Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape

    One of the greatest ironies of our time is the fact that today’s leading progressives tend to despise the very decentralized landscape that an earlier generation of New Deal liberals created.

    Franklin Roosevelt and his successors from Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sought to shift industry and population from the crowded industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. They did this through rural electrification based on hydropower projects, factories supplying the military and federal aid to citizens seeking to buy single-family homes in low-density suburbs.

    This is precisely the environment – which brought so much opportunity and improved living conditions to so many – that today’s progressives so often despise. Since the 1960s, environmentalists, for example, have waged a campaign against the great dams that symbolized New Deal economic development policies. Artificial lakes that generate electricity for millions of suburban homeowners and businesses, and have brought an end to devastating, cyclical floods, are condemned by progressives for having wiped out local fauna and flora. And it goes without saying that the middle-class swimmers, picnickers and motor-boaters that enjoy government-created lakes on weekends are… well, vulgar.

    Similarly, the defense plants that the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy-Johnson administrations scattered throughout the country are often lambasted as emblems of the fascistic “military-industrial complex,” part of a wicked “Gun Belt.” In fact, industry is increasingly seen as undesirable by today’s Arcadian progressives, who appear to believe that it would have been better to leave the farmers of rural America as quaint specimens of authentic folk life.

    But nothing riles the progressives of today than the low-density, single-family home suburbs made possible by New Deal liberal homeownership policies. Since the 1950s, intellectuals on the left have been bemoaning the alleged cultural sterility and conformity of the suburbs. Now anti-sprawl campaigners allege that the suburbs are also destroying the planet.

    So the question is: How did the American left, in a short period of time, come to repudiate the New Deal and the American landscape it created? The answer is simple: today’s center-left, which calls itself progressive rather than liberal, is not the heir of New Deal liberalism. It is the heir instead of early twentieth century elite Progressives, who were shoved aside and marginalized during the heyday of New Deal liberalism.

    The original Progressives were overwhelmingly professionals and patricians of old Anglo-American stock in the Northeast and Midwest, many of them the children of Protestant clergymen, teachers or professors. They despised the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age, but also tended to view European immigrants and white and black Southerners as benighted primitives.

    Their vision of the ideal society, influenced by the Hegelian Idealist culture of Bismarckian Germany, was one in which a university-trained elite ran everything with minimal interference by ignorant voters and crass politicians. As heirs of the moralistic Northern Protestant Whig and Republican traditions, these Progressives also had a strong interest in the social engineering of private behavior, from prohibition to eugenic sterilization.

    From Reconstruction until the Depression, Progressive moralism and elitism alienated European immigrants and rural Southerners and Westerners alike. This benefited the industrial capitalists of the dominant Republican party. Franklin Roosevelt created a powerful, but fundamentally unstable, Democratic majority by adding many former Republican Progressives to the old Democratic coalition of Northern white “ethnics” and white Southerners.

    Yet in the process Roosevelt helped undermine many of the signature initiatives of the progressives, starting with the repeal of Prohibition, a policy loathed by German and Irish Catholic voters. It signaled a repudiation of the Whig-Republican-Progressive ambition to use the federal government for moral reform and social engineering. (FDR’s tactical appeasement of Southern segregation had a similar tactical logic).

    Another goal of Progressives, economic planning, died with the collapse of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in the first Roosevelt term. Jettisoning the Progressive dream of a planned economy run by technocrats, the Roosevelt administration instead focused pragmatically on state-capitalist public infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Association (TVA) and the Lower Colorado River Association (LCRA).

    Plans for an all-powerful executive civil service subordinate to the White House – a progressive reform that FDR unwisely favored – were rejected by a Congress jealous of its prerogatives and suspicious of executive power. Finally, nanny-state supervision of the poor, another Progressive theme, found little sympathy among New Deal Democrats, who preferred universal social insurance to means-tested public assistance, and preferred employing the able-bodied poor in public works to what FDR called “the narcotic” of the “dole.”

    The New Deal ultimately left little of the old Progressive project but created what could be considered a Golden Age that lasted until the 1970s for the white lower middle class majority. Progressive intellectuals and activists, however, sensed that they had been marginalized. Over-represented in the prestige press and the universities, they increasingly denounced what they saw as the vulgarity of the New Deal’s constituency.

    The assault on the suburbs was one of the most powerful expressions of this discontent. It was led by two figures. One was Jane Jacobs, the romantic chronicler of dense urban life, and its villain in New York’s highway-building Robert Moses. A rival school, headed by Jacobs’ enemy Lewis Mumford, sang the praises of planned “organic” villages – “highwayless towns” connected by “townless highways.” The Mumfordian strain of Progressive planning is represented today by the New Urbanism, with its hyper-regulated low-rise pedestrian communities.

    The resurgent progressives also clung to their vision of a society in which an enlightened, nonpartisan elite governs the ignorant masses from above. The Civil Rights Revolution, and the era of judicial activism that followed, permitted progressives to transfer power from the elected political class to the federal judiciary. By the 1970s and 1980s, federal judges were regulating practically all aspects of American life. Social engineering schemes like busing for racial balance and race-based affirmative action, which “color-blind” New Deal liberal opponents of segregation like Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson opposed, now became critical pillars of progressive ideology.

    The New Dealers had been ardent conservationists, but their conservationism focused not only on nature but also the well-being of people. New Deal soil conservation and agricultural productivity policies allowed the amount of land in cultivation to decline, freeing up vast tracts of land for wilderness or habitation. Farmers, middle class suburbanites and nature all gained.

    This approach is repudiated by most contemporary progressives, who know nothing about farms except that they are cruel to livestock. By the 1970s many progressives abandoned liberal conservationism for radical environmentalism, which seeks to protect nature by separating it from humanity and industry. Radical environmentalism tends to shade into misanthropy, as in the proposal by two New Jersey environmentalists to turn much of the Great Plains into a human-free “Buffalo Commons.” (Curiously, nobody seems to have proposed evacuating New Jersey in order to create a “Migratory Bird Park.”) The radical Green goal of “rewilding” North America by creating “wildlife corridors” from which humans are banned repudiates the New Deal liberal vision of allowing working-class Americans to enjoy the scenery of national parks.

    So in every respect except racism and opposition to immigration, today’s progressives are genuine heirs not of the New Deal liberals but of the capital-P Progressive economic planners and social engineers of the early twentieth century. Even their social base is the same as in 1908 – college-educated professionals, particularly those in the nonprofit sector and education, like public school teachers and academics.

    This class – enlarged ironically by New Deal liberal programs like the G.I. Bill and student loans – has been increased in number by upwardly-mobile Americans to whom mass university education imparts a blend of the worldviews of old-fashioned Northeastern progressives and the old Bohemian left-intelligentsia. This enlarged college-educated professional class has allied itself with African-Americans and Latinos in the identity centered post-McGovern Democratic party.

    With perfect symbolism, the two bases of the alliance of white progressives and nonwhite Democrats – college campuses and inner cities, allied against the middle-class and working-class suburbs – correspond to the alternate urban utopias of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs respectively, if we consider the college campus to be a Mumfordian paradise.

    With good reason, then, today’s progressives despise the suburban, middle-class America created by yesterday’s New Deal liberals. Today’s progressives may invoke the New Deal, but they are the heirs not of mid-century liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson but rather of the Progressive social engineers who believed that enlightened elites should alter both the built environment and human behavior to meet their social goals. Some things never change.

    Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics” (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and “What Lincoln Believed” (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest.