Phase 3: Profit

David Brooks’s column on GM’s “restructuring” addiction has him at his snarky best:

… if you are in the restructuring business, you can’t let these stray thoughts get in the way of your restructuring. After all, restructuring is your life. Restructuring is forever. Restructuring is like what dieting is for many of us: You think about it every day. You believe it’s about to work. Nothing really changes.

When the economy cratered last fall, the professionals at G.M. went into Super-Duper Restructuring Overdrive. In October, they warned the Bush administration of a possible bankruptcy filing and started restructuring. In December, they came back asking for a loan while they … (wait for it) … restructured.

The Bush advisers decided in December that bankruptcy without preparation would be a disaster. They decided what all administrations decide — that the best time for a bankruptcy filing is a few months from now, and it always will be. In the meantime, restructuring would continue, federally subsidized.

Today, G.M. and Chrysler have once again come up with restructuring plans. By an amazing coincidence, the plans are again insufficient. In an extremely precedented move, the Obama administration has decided that the best time for possible bankruptcy is — a few months from now. The restructuring will continue.

Meanwhile, and in related news, Megan McArdle reads through the details of the latest restructuring efforts and comes up with a parallel:

Hey – it could work!

P.S. Given last night’s post, this bit of Brooks’s column is also relevant:

… by enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are now completely implicated in the coming G.M. wreck. Over the next few months, the White House will be subject to a gigantic lobbying barrage. The Midwestern delegations, swing states all, will pull out all the stops to prevent plant foreclosures. Unions will be furious if the Obama-run company rips up the union contract. Is the White House ready for the headline “Obama to Middle America: Drop Dead”? It would take a party with a political death wish to see this through.

Filed under: economics, government/law, politics, transportation

The Child and the City

Concerning errand running, Ryan Avent writes:

I’ve often been mystified by the notion that drivable suburbanism is the superior developmental pattern for getting things done quickly. Obviously a big trip to the grocery or hardware store is more easily done with a car, but when taking many small trips, rather than one big one, I think walkable neighborhoods win out more often than people think. Going from (say) the doctor, to the pharmacist, to a restaurant for lunch, and back to work is maddening in a car in a place like Raleigh. But when I was working in downtown Washington, it was fast and refreshing to walk the few blocks from each spot to the next.

Me too! Though in my case the various places I tend to need to go are usually spread out far enough that walking (or even biking) isn’t always or even usually the quicker way to get things done. But last year, when we had a borrowed car that is now back in the possession of its owners, I still found myself choosing very often to walk for fifteen minutes each way rather than drive for three simply because driving (and, yes, parking) was miserable, and because I’d much rather spend my time smelling flowers and listening to birds than trying not to run into parked cars or over cyclists on our narrow Berkeley streets.

That said, the realities of parenthood can often complicate this story quite a bit – and not just because children pine for open space to play in, and going to a public park, no matter how close, can really be a hassle. My son, for example, seems to have been constituted from birth so as to refuse to ride in his stroller more than once a day – and even then only after a fair amount of bribery. And so despite having taught him to “hurry” (which is hilarious), it still takes quite a lot of time (and effort, and patience, and …) to run errands with him in tow: this will get easier as he gets older of course, but then there will be another one, and so the story will repeat itself.

Now, all of that is made a lot more workable by the fact that my wife is able to stay at home, and I am very often able to work (or: pretend to work) from home as well. Which of course has profound influences on the ways we parent, and budget our time for running errands, and cook and eat, too: if both of us were coming home at the end of the day from full-time jobs, I can’t imagine how we’d manage ever to walk to the market instead of driving, or take Jack on weekday trips to the park, or feed ourselves in the ways that we do.

All of which is just to say that these are complicated matters! I’m certainly grateful, as is Angela, for the ways that circumstances have conspired to enable us to live in a dense-ish, eminently walkable neighborhood like ours, and at this point in our lives we wouldn’t trade it for anything else. But change one or two factors – the weather, say, or our financial circumstances or our all-around good health – and the complex web that holds things together starts to fray pretty quickly. Which means that even if we leave aside the (certainly mystifying, at least by my lights) fact that some people actually seem to prefer driving to walking, there’s simply no one-size-fits-all solution to the need to get around town. I’m certainly not intending to imply that Ryan A. would disagree with any of this – indeed, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t. But many are the dreams of the committed urbanist that have died with the birth of his children.

Filed under: family, transportation, urbanism

Stimulate Me, Baby!

Like Megan McArdle, I thought Ryan Avent was way too hard on David Brooks’s latest column, which I took to be making the perfectly obvious point that not all attempts at government-led economic stimulation – in particular, those that are “politically designed” and “ad hoc” – actually work, but that if stimulation is what we’re going in for then a spending package focused on infrastructure development would be a decent way to go. This is in fact very similar to the point that was made this morning by (economic Nobelist!) Paul Krugman:

… what the economy needs now is something to take the place of retrenching consumers. That means a major fiscal stimulus. And this time the stimulus should take the form of actual government spending rather than rebate checks that consumers probably wouldn’t spend.

Moreover, there’s actually pretty solid evidence that spending money on infrastructure is one of the best ways to stimulate the economy (via Ezra Klein):

Of course, you could jump ship at any number of junctures here, and it’s entirely reasonable to claim that Brooks’s desired stimulus package is too focused on building more highways. (Then again, it’s also reasonable to think that it isn’t.) But calling Brooks a know-nothing and accusing him of “arguing against stimulus on the same day the economic Nobelist sharing the page with him argues for it” seems to me to be giving the man a bit less than is his due. Or maybe that’s just me.

Filed under: economics, government/law, transportation

About That Bridge

Reihan Salam defends Sarah Palin. I dunno; maybe he’s right.

Your move, Sullivan.

Filed under: government/law, transportation

Avent on Privatization

A while back I asked what “liberal pro-transit types” thought of highway privatization measures and other such things. Ryan Avent has since taken up the topic, in a helpful post that combines what I think are appropriate measures of hope and concern. Money quote:

We’re not going to find ourselves in an ideal world, with a sim-city private manager trying to optimize total metropolitan output subject to certain, social welfare maximizing environmental constraints. We’re going to be handing over pieces of a complicated, interconnected system to private firms, and in doing so, we’re going to be reducing the influence of a (one assumes) social-optima oriented government on structures that display a lot of positive and negative externalities.

It would be beyond stupid for me to suggest that governments have performed these planning tasks ably in past decades. That doesn’t mean that efficiently managed private projects are going to produce better net metropolitan outcomes.

It should go without saying that that parenthetical “one assumes” is pretty crucial, since as Ryan for one will be happy to tell you government policies very often aren’t oriented in the right sorts of ways, and I think that we can all agree that a road-oriented privatized system that at least has drivers pay their own way is better than a road-oriented government-run system that puts the coast of construction and upkeep on the backs of drivers and non-drivers alike. But no doubt there’s a lot of work to be done to try and tweak privatization measures so that they slant in a more pro-transit direction and ensure that drivers foot the bill for at least a significant portion of their negative externalities. But I’m happy to see Ryan writing about this topic, and doing so with what I for one found to be a prima facie surprising amount of sympathy for something that I had taken to be nothing more than a libertarian hobby-horse.

RTWT, and more please!

(Image via Flickrer grazie, davvero.)

Filed under: government/law, transportation

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Developers?

I have been meaning for a while to say that I sympathize entirely with Ryan Avent’s ongoing frustration with the attitudes of my former Brookland neighbors toward the District’s plans (.pdf) to build up the area around the Brookland/CUA Metro station. I’ve recently been witness to a similar sort of hysteria over proposals to construct a mixed-use building along a similarly barren stretch of four-lane thoroughfare right near my home, and so I’m well aware of what Ryan’s up against. Obviously there are tricky issues here having to do with the rights of residents to make decisions that are not in others’ – or even their own – best interest (people are, after all, allowed e.g. to vote for John McCain), but the fact is that both of these look like clear cases where the residents are simply wrong, and the neighborhood commons simply aren’t theirs to ruin: the residents should be told this, and the developments in question should be permitted to move ahead. Density, especially of the pedestrian-centered sort, makes for economic growth, social cohesion, and safety for the surrounding areas – and when it comes to areas that already have an essentially urban character, there’s usually no compelling reason to stand in its way.

But I do think it’s worth remarking on how much of the anti-development rhetoric that holds these kinds of projects back involves exactly the sort of tropes that the Left has been so skilled at teaching people to play. It is always the People vs. the Capitalists, the Powerless vs. the Powerful, Green Space vs. Pollution, the Peasants vs. the Moneyed Class. That these are cases where such tropes are being misplayed – as I noted above, pedestrian- and transit-centered mixed-use development of these sorts is good for pretty much everyone affected, and helps to save the environment along the way – is not the issue: training people to think, and to articulate their blindly irrational fears, in these sorts of ideological terms leaves them unable to recognize a good developer when they see one. Once such styles of thought are in place, it is then immensely hard to remove the blinders and evaluate things in something more like an “objective” fashion.

That’s not to say that conservatives and libertarians don’t have their own such tendencies, and Matt Yglesias does well to note that folks on my side of the aisle have had an unfortunate habit of getting far less excited about the kind of deregulation that makes for healthy urban and suburban planning than they do about things like opening up the coasts and National Parks to oil drilling. He’s right, and while I am by no means convinced that increasing density is going to be a cure-all, there is no denying that the stupidity Matt is complaining about is a genuine scandal. When it comes to urban design, many of the issues at stake are ones where there’s no reason why pro-environment liberals, anti-regulatory and free-market libertarians, and traditionalist, anti-sprawl conservatives should be able to band together and work toward common goals. The challenge lies in finding ways to speak a common language.

(Image via Flickrer Tidewater Muse.)

Filed under: conservatism, politics, transportation, urbanism

The times they are a-changin’

Ford goes small:

The Ford Motor Company, which devoted itself for nearly 20 years to putting millions of Americans into big pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles, is about to drastically alter its focus to building more small cars. [...]

Among the changes, Ford is expected to announce that it will convert three of its North American assembly plants from trucks to cars, according to people familiar with the plans.

As the article goes on to note, Ford has 14 manufacturing plants in North America, eight of which are currently being used to build trucks, full-sized vans, and SUV’s. That the plants will be converted over to the production of smaller vehicles instead of simply closed down is of course a cause for further happiness. The two-door Hyundai Accent that I have parked at my parents’ home in Virginia looks better and better by the day.

(Photo via Flickrer j.r.trauben.)

Filed under: economics, transportation

Waiting on the government

Ryan Avent writes:

When [Matt Yglesias] or I make the decision to ride the train or burn coal for fun we consider the costs and benefits of those actions to ourselves only. We say, is this good or bad for me, given the costs of the activity and available alternatives? What we do NOT do is consider the social costs of our decision. When I get on the train, I spend no time at all thinking about how that decision might benefit drivers, who’ll have one less car on the road to deal with. And, for the most part, I spend no time at all thinking about how getting on the train affects my personal carbon footprint. Why should I? From my perspective, that tiny shift from driving to taking Metro has essentially no effect on CO2 concentrations and climate change.

In slightly different contexts, such a combination of calls for government action with an unwillingness to take the first step oneself would of course be called hypocrisy, and not unreasonably so. Here, it seems clear that it’s the last observation – that Ryan’s individual choice (it is not clear how his “perspective” enters into the story) “has essentially no effect” on the climate – that’s meant to deflect this charge, but I don’t think that can be accomplished this easily. “Why should I?” Well, because it’s the right thing to do; or because saying that everyone else should do it creates something like a moral imperative that you do it first; or because a lifetime of singly inconsequential decisions can add up to a considerable result (compare: that one disposable diaper doesn’t make much waste, but making a habit of it leaves behind a ton – literally – of barely-decomposable trash over the course of a year); or because getting your own life in order might inspire or shame others to follow your lead or at least make the possibility of doing so seem to be more reasonably within reach. Ryan’s sweeping claims about the self-centeredness and inattention to social and ecological costs in what “we” say and do may do quite well at capturing a certain sort of mindset, but it’s surely not the only one. And deciding that you’re going to sit around and do your own thing until Uncle Sam comes and bends you into shape strikes me as choosing from among the very worst of these possible options.

I don’t want to go on and on about this – I did that just the other day, actually – but it does seem to me to be a deeply important point. Of course there can be a place for less subtle forms of coercion nudging in certain sorts of places, but “individual virtue” – which is, of course exactly what the President refused to call for in the remarks that set off this whole discussion – ought to have primacy of place, and the demand to change one’s way of life usually won’t come across as anything but hypocritical and imposing unless the person doing the demanding has already got his or her own house well enough in order. Want to save the Earth? Stop waiting for solutions from above, and get the train rolling (no pun intended, really) by leaving your car at home.

Filed under: environment, government/law, morality, transportation

Gas taxes and road maintenance

A quick thought: it’s entirely reasonable to say that taxes on gasoline are a much more sensible way to fund road maintenance than a mixture of property and income taxes, proceeds from state lotteries, and so on. But one problem here is that fuel-efficient vehicles are no less hard on roads than gas-guzzling ones, and so an approach like this is one which tends – again – to privilege the pocketbooks of a certain sort of wealthy, Prius-driving type over those of the rest. If the goal is to make drivers pay for wear and tear, then such an outcome is inequitable and unjust; if the purpose is simply to use the higher prices to discourage driving or at least encourage the purchase of cars that use less gas, then I’m on record as being troubled for reasons that are by now familiar. Things like congestion pricing, highway and bridge tolls, increased costs for parking, and nifty pay-per-mile schemes (whether publicly or privately run) are better ideas, so long as any such measure is offset by corresponding reductions in taxes of other sorts.

Filed under: energy, taxation, transportation

Technology bites

I just spent an hour of my life writing a response, for James’s blog, to Ezra Klein’s fine post on why eating too much meat is bad for the environment. The upshot of what I had to say, of which you can get some sense if you track down the partial draft that accidentally ended up in James’s atom feed, was that I agree almost entirely with Ezra about meat but still disagree about gasoline and other such things, primarily because the transportation and home-energy equivalents of what I called the “Macaroni Option” – eating macaroni for dinner because it’s cheaper than beef – aren’t available for lots of poor folks who have little or no access to mass transportation or alternative forms of energy and so would be slammed especially hard by taxes on carbon. It went on from there, and concluded by suggesting that one upshot of helping rural communities be less dependent on fossil fuels, which I think is something that ought to precede taxing (their) consumption of gasoline or emissions of carbon, might very well be a turning away from the sort of factory farming that Ezra began by objecting to.

In any case, I clicked the wrong button and the post disappeared into cyberspace, which is why I’m writing this now. Consider me frustrated, and Ezra’s thoughtful challenge at least sort of addressed. And score this one for writing with a pen and paper.

(Image via Flickrer Zach Klein.)

Filed under: agriculture, energy, environment, food, taxation, transportation