A couple months back, I posted an entry criticizing the various initiatives discussed by Bill Gates in a TED Talk regarding education reform. I continue to believe that my criticisms represent valid concerns. However, when a friend of mine asked me what I would suggest in lieu of Gates' initiatives, I had nothing to offer. My friend then retorted that my criticisms were, in light of my failure to present viable alternatives, irresponsible and unproductive.
I agree with my friend and have come to appreciate more what a policy perspective entails. Policy-making is inherently a forward-looking, problem-solving enterprise. It engages with real constraints and by virtue of its future orientation contains seeds of optimism. Critical thinking and analysis are great things that one picks up from a liberal arts education. But a policy perspective demands more than critical thinking. It demands that we take the next step to ask, What now? How do we move productively forward given available resources and constraints?
I intend to better incorporate the set of questions implicit in a policy orientation into my daily thinking.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Demise of Stacey's Bookstore
I am currently reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I am only half way through, but the book already has me seeing cities through different eyes. The story of Stacey's Bookstore is a case in point.
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In March of this year, Stacey's Bookstore, not long after celebrating its 85th year of existence as an independent bookstore, closed its doors for good. I used to frequent Stacey's. On the second floor, there was a large sunlit reading area where readers could read free of pressure to consume. No Starbucks or Seattle's Best attached. The reading area was often arrayed with rows of seats for the appearance of guest authors and a weekly lecture series. Employees were most often middle-aged or older, well-read individuals who were long-time San Franciscans and could speak passionately about their favorite titles or reading spots in the city. As someone who wants eventually to be a bookstore proprietor, I appreciated Stacey's as a cultural asset, a place that strove to be a community center, a cultural hub in addition to being a place to buy books.
When I first saw signs for the clearance sale that anticipated the store's closing, I felt along with other loyal patrons that something special was being lost. It was easy to understand, though. The economy was in shambles. Online retailing had long ago changed the landscape of brick-and-mortar book sales. And how was a mom-and-pop store supposed to compete with national chains such as Borders or Barnes & Noble? It was easy to cast Stacey's Bookstore as the unhappy victim of changing economic and social circumstances, and that is precisely how the story was reported.
Now, reading Jacobs' book, I am beginning to understand the demise of Stacey's Bookstore in a new light. Stacey's Bookstore, located in San Francisco's Financial District, was doomed to failure from the get-go as a result of its specific location in San Francisco's urban fabric. What now seems remarkable to me is that the bookstore lasted as long as it did. Applying the analytical framework developed by Jacobs in her book, two factors are prominent:
1) The Financial District, as one might infer from its name, is not a district that boasts great functional diversity. People work in the Financial District. One does not go to the Financial District for entertainment or commerce or for its cultural vitality, and one certainly does not live there. The result is extremely lopsided pedestrian traffic. Venture into the Financial District Monday through Friday nine to five and it feels quite lively, but it feels quite like a ghost town outside standard work hours and weekdays. Business at Stacey's was premised on weekday noontime and after-work pedestrian traffic. That leaves for a lot of dead hours in between, and it is extremely difficult to sustain a bookstore let alone a cultural hub in this context.
2) Aged buildings in the Financial District are nonexistent. As pictures show, Stacey's Bookstore resided in a building that looks and feels very new, surrounded by office buildings that also look and feel very new. The advantage of aged buildings in cities is that they usually require lower capital and maintenance costs, demanding lower rent. As a result, aged buildings are better able to support businesses with lower profit margins, ideal for small independent establishments. Without aged buildings, you get a lot of franchise stores like Quizno's, Chipotle, Subway or Staples. As Jacobs writes, "great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes" (212). No wonder then that the Beat writers hung out at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.
In short, the Financial District is not really a place that is equipped to support a viable center for cultural activity. This reality is a property of the city, its layout and urban planning. The demise of Stacey's Bookstore can in large part be understood by the overwhelming dullness of San Francisco's Financial District. Its vacated space remains vacant.
---
In March of this year, Stacey's Bookstore, not long after celebrating its 85th year of existence as an independent bookstore, closed its doors for good. I used to frequent Stacey's. On the second floor, there was a large sunlit reading area where readers could read free of pressure to consume. No Starbucks or Seattle's Best attached. The reading area was often arrayed with rows of seats for the appearance of guest authors and a weekly lecture series. Employees were most often middle-aged or older, well-read individuals who were long-time San Franciscans and could speak passionately about their favorite titles or reading spots in the city. As someone who wants eventually to be a bookstore proprietor, I appreciated Stacey's as a cultural asset, a place that strove to be a community center, a cultural hub in addition to being a place to buy books.
When I first saw signs for the clearance sale that anticipated the store's closing, I felt along with other loyal patrons that something special was being lost. It was easy to understand, though. The economy was in shambles. Online retailing had long ago changed the landscape of brick-and-mortar book sales. And how was a mom-and-pop store supposed to compete with national chains such as Borders or Barnes & Noble? It was easy to cast Stacey's Bookstore as the unhappy victim of changing economic and social circumstances, and that is precisely how the story was reported.
Now, reading Jacobs' book, I am beginning to understand the demise of Stacey's Bookstore in a new light. Stacey's Bookstore, located in San Francisco's Financial District, was doomed to failure from the get-go as a result of its specific location in San Francisco's urban fabric. What now seems remarkable to me is that the bookstore lasted as long as it did. Applying the analytical framework developed by Jacobs in her book, two factors are prominent:
1) The Financial District, as one might infer from its name, is not a district that boasts great functional diversity. People work in the Financial District. One does not go to the Financial District for entertainment or commerce or for its cultural vitality, and one certainly does not live there. The result is extremely lopsided pedestrian traffic. Venture into the Financial District Monday through Friday nine to five and it feels quite lively, but it feels quite like a ghost town outside standard work hours and weekdays. Business at Stacey's was premised on weekday noontime and after-work pedestrian traffic. That leaves for a lot of dead hours in between, and it is extremely difficult to sustain a bookstore let alone a cultural hub in this context.
2) Aged buildings in the Financial District are nonexistent. As pictures show, Stacey's Bookstore resided in a building that looks and feels very new, surrounded by office buildings that also look and feel very new. The advantage of aged buildings in cities is that they usually require lower capital and maintenance costs, demanding lower rent. As a result, aged buildings are better able to support businesses with lower profit margins, ideal for small independent establishments. Without aged buildings, you get a lot of franchise stores like Quizno's, Chipotle, Subway or Staples. As Jacobs writes, "great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes" (212). No wonder then that the Beat writers hung out at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.
In short, the Financial District is not really a place that is equipped to support a viable center for cultural activity. This reality is a property of the city, its layout and urban planning. The demise of Stacey's Bookstore can in large part be understood by the overwhelming dullness of San Francisco's Financial District. Its vacated space remains vacant.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Hating on Agribusiness
It's so easy to hate on agribusiness these days. Such industrial behemoths as Monsanto and Cargill, they are the bullies in our story, the Goliaths, the colonial oppressors against whom it is our moral obligation to fight the good fight. They've infiltrated Washington, D.C. with their lobbyists, co-opted the political process, insulated themselves from popular pressure in order to pursue their single-minded pursuit of profit. They pillage our planet with their environmentally destructive practices; they ignore the welfare of animals, workers and family farms; they feed the masses with diabetes-inducing Frankenfood, helping us along in our journey to exploding the national healthcare budget. Oh, they are so evil. It is so, so easy to hate on agribusiness.
Hating on agribusiness has a long history, beginning with Upton Sinclair's muckraking in The Jungle. More recently, books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillema, documentary films such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc. have helped fan popular resentment of agribusiness. But as with all such linear, good versus evil stories, we should view this tale, which has so captivated popular imagination, with some amount of skepticism.
Rather than blindly throw our weight behind Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, the organic food movement or small-scale farms or the holistic, wholesome grass farming methods of individuals such as Joel Salatin, we should listen to the views of dissenters. For many environmentalists, the ruthless efficiency of agribusiness and the use of genetically engineered crops are in fact an environmental imperative. James Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia, writes:
Lovelock goes on to argue that we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that all "man-made chemicals" are harmful with "natural chemicals" somehow beyond reproach and always salutary. Stewart Brand, in a recent TED Talk, echoes these concerns about the too-easy categorization of agricultural methods and the land-intensity of agriculture as he comes out strongly in favor of genetically engineered crops. What to do about these concerns that detract from the linear simplicity of the story told by agribusiness-haters?
As ever, a Manichean worldview serves us poorly. There are never easy solutions and always trade-offs to be weighed and considered...
Hating on agribusiness has a long history, beginning with Upton Sinclair's muckraking in The Jungle. More recently, books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillema, documentary films such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc. have helped fan popular resentment of agribusiness. But as with all such linear, good versus evil stories, we should view this tale, which has so captivated popular imagination, with some amount of skepticism.
Rather than blindly throw our weight behind Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, the organic food movement or small-scale farms or the holistic, wholesome grass farming methods of individuals such as Joel Salatin, we should listen to the views of dissenters. For many environmentalists, the ruthless efficiency of agribusiness and the use of genetically engineered crops are in fact an environmental imperative. James Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia, writes:
As I have said before, we cannot farm more than about half the Earth's land surface without impairing Gaia's capacity to keep a comfortable planet. Sadly, at our present numbers the lower productivity of organic farms compared with intensive agriculture makes it a dubious enterprise. (121)
Lovelock goes on to argue that we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that all "man-made chemicals" are harmful with "natural chemicals" somehow beyond reproach and always salutary. Stewart Brand, in a recent TED Talk, echoes these concerns about the too-easy categorization of agricultural methods and the land-intensity of agriculture as he comes out strongly in favor of genetically engineered crops. What to do about these concerns that detract from the linear simplicity of the story told by agribusiness-haters?
As ever, a Manichean worldview serves us poorly. There are never easy solutions and always trade-offs to be weighed and considered...
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
What I've Read This Year
Once you graduate from college, you no longer have a syllabus to dictate your reading material. During my first year out of college, I read books that had some way or another found their way onto my bookshelf in previous years but remained unread. The result was a fairly random selection of books with little in terms of coherence or focus.
The trouble with a random selection of books is that it becomes difficult to contextualize what you are reading. Context is precisely what a course syllabus provides, and context is what most enables you to learn and achieve a balanced perspective on a topic. In an effort to increase the efficacy of my reading, I have tried recently to choose books that at least participate in the same conversations. From the past eight months or so, this is what I have read chronologically:
The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones
The Subprime Solution, Robert Shiller
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Iliad, Homer
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins
Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein
The dominance of nonfiction in this reading selection is interesting to me, and I suppose this reflects a change in my tastes and priorities. The fiction I've read has been pretty random, but the nonfiction can be organized according to a number of themes that I find myself caring about more and more. These themes include: 1) sustainability and today's environmental movement; 2) development economics; and 3) behavioral economics.
I want to fashion my future reading lists according to these three broad themes (with the occasional novel to satisfy my cravings for fiction). Next up, I have:
Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Would love to hear suggestions. Right now, I especially want to find a book that deals with the intersection of urban planning and sustainability issues.
The trouble with a random selection of books is that it becomes difficult to contextualize what you are reading. Context is precisely what a course syllabus provides, and context is what most enables you to learn and achieve a balanced perspective on a topic. In an effort to increase the efficacy of my reading, I have tried recently to choose books that at least participate in the same conversations. From the past eight months or so, this is what I have read chronologically:
The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones
The Subprime Solution, Robert Shiller
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Iliad, Homer
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins
Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein
The dominance of nonfiction in this reading selection is interesting to me, and I suppose this reflects a change in my tastes and priorities. The fiction I've read has been pretty random, but the nonfiction can be organized according to a number of themes that I find myself caring about more and more. These themes include: 1) sustainability and today's environmental movement; 2) development economics; and 3) behavioral economics.
I want to fashion my future reading lists according to these three broad themes (with the occasional novel to satisfy my cravings for fiction). Next up, I have:
Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Would love to hear suggestions. Right now, I especially want to find a book that deals with the intersection of urban planning and sustainability issues.
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