A Sense of Place

1) My grand-uncle was born in Dong Shih, a small farming town in the central highlands of Taiwan. He grew up speaking Hakka, the dialect of his parents, and Japanese, the language of formal schooling during Japanese occupation. My grand-uncle has lived through colonialism, World War II, forty years of martial law and an economic miracle that saw Taiwan engage the global economy at unprecedented levels. While his beginnings may have been humble and provincial, his knowledge of the world is vast and his experiences diverse. My grand-uncle forged a career as a successful businessman, but as life would have it, his wife became ill at a young age and was largely confined to the house. He refused to leave his wife's side and never once left the country even as opportunities for travel became commonplace and it became clear that my grand-aunt's health would neither worsen terribly nor substantially improve.

A couple years ago, my grand-aunt passed away. So at the age of seventy, my grand-uncle left Taiwan for the first time in his life to go to Japan. Upon his return, I was eager to hear his impressions of the wider world, what it was like for him to step off Taiwanese soil for the first time. With a proud grin, he responded to my inquiries, "Taiwan is a great place to live."

2) A couple weeks ago, I participated in a tour of the Village Bottoms district of West Oakland, which for over half a century has been the object of systematic marginalization. I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, and I must admit that I know embarrassingly little about the Bay Area and its history. Fortunately for me, the leader of the tour, Marcel Diallo, a Village Bottoms native, intimated vast and deep knowledge of the neighborhood. Every block we walked he infused with rich history. For years, he has labored to revitalize the neighborhood for which he harbors obvious love. At a venue that Marcel has toiled to designate as a cultural space, there hangs a portrait of his grandmother. On the portrait reads a quote from Marcel's grandmother: "When I sat for this portrait in 1951, West Oakland was one of the few places we as Black folks were allowed to live. Today I wouldn't leave the Bottoms if they paid me."

3) I was talking to a colleague the other day trying to figure out how she landed in San Francisco after growing up her whole life in Michigan. She told me she had been ready for something new and wanted to experience for herself all the hullaballoo about San Francisco. Three fantastic years, she tells me, she has been in San Francisco. Now she's itching to move on to something new again. "You can only do Bay to Breakers so many times. You know what I mean?"

You've Gots to be Kidding Me

There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions and from a quarter of a continent away. (Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert 333)

An Explosion of Good Will

From David Bornstein's How to Change the World: "In the United States and Canada, for example, almost everyone has heard about the explosion of dot-coms--a much smaller phenomenon--but millions have still not heard the big story: the worldwide explosion of dot-orgs" (6). The book begins with an account of how the number of NGOs and nonprofits has ballooned over the last couple decades. Readers, I presume, are supposed to applaud what is taken as a proxy for an explosion of good will.

My training in economics has me asking a number of questions:

1) What is driving growth in what Bornstein calls "the citizen sector?" My economic intuition tells me it is something other than good will.

2) NGOs and nonprofits form to address social goods that are neglected by both private and public sectors. Why are these social goods being neglected? Government exists for the provision of public goods, or when possible, to enforce legislation (taxes and property rights) that helps internalize externalities. What role does that leave for the citizen sector?

3) From what are resources being diverted to fund newly formed NGOs and nonprofits? Does this represent an efficient allocation of resources?

4) If there is a loss in efficiency, can we count growth in the citizen sector as a boon to society? How might we begin to answer this question?

5) How do market forces and competition operate in the citizen sector?

The book doesn't answer many or any of these questions. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for its stories of ground-level, piecemeal change throughout the world. The Ashoka Foundation sounds fascinating and definitely seems to be onto something.

No doubt there is abundant literature to answer some of the questions that I have posed. Now if only I could find some of what is out there...

Storytelling

Recently, Chris Blattman linked to this essay about how book clubs diminish the intimacy of the reading experience.

For me, the essay brought to mind my undergraduate study of postcolonial literature, which helped me appreciate the diversity of different models in reading. The author of the essay, Adam Sternbergh, no doubt relies upon a Western model that envisions an intimate, singular connection between text and reader. Implicit in the model is a highly individuated reader, a liberal self isolated from community and context. No surprise then that Sternbergh romanticizes the ideal of reading Moby Dick "while sailing the world alone."

For myself, I draw inspiration for my reading from a different model. In an essay on oral subjectivity, Cynthia Ward writes, "The value of the oral tale to the oral culture lies not entirely in the tale itself but, perhaps more significantly, in the discussion it generates after it is told." This insight accords with my experience of texts that come alive in discussion. In such cases, the give-and-take of discussion heightens the reading experience rather than cheapens it.

The Policy Imperative

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.

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.

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:

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...