O novo prefeito "frances" de New York: vai conhecer o mesmo fracasso que Hollande? - Nicole Gelinas

Os americanos já têm o melhor presidente "europeu" que eles poderiam querer: Obama estaria ótimo como líder socialista de algum país europeu, mas para azar dele, precisa enfrentar os conservadores republicanos e os ultra-conservadores do Tea Party dos EUA.
Bem, agora a maior cidade americana já tem um perfeito prefeito "francês", aliás de origem italiana, e portanto meio "comunista", para o gosto dos americanos.
Vamos ver como ele se sai. Mas essa mania de querer taxar os ricos vai acabar fazendo com que Wall Street se mude para o outro lado do rio, para New Jersey...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

NICOLE GELINAS

De Blasio’s French Lessons

Gotham’s new mayor sounds like François Hollande, and he risks similar results.

The City Journ7 January 2014

In his inaugural address last Wednesday, New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, promised to “commit” the city he now leads “to a new progressive direction.” As Gotham embarks on a “dramatic new approach,” he promised, “the world will watch as we succeed.” De Blasio should be watching the world instead—particularly France. The policy prescription that brought de Blasio to office—higher income taxes on New York’s wealthy—is exactly what French president François Hollande proposed to win his own post nearly two years ago. Since then, Hollande’s approval rating has plummeted to record lows for a French leader. French citizens have grown tired of symbolic anti-rich gestures; they want real solutions to real problems.

Hollande, who won office in May 2012, was one of the first leftist Western politicians to benefit from two global trends after 2008: disillusionment with incumbent politicians and dismay at income inequality. Hollande’s opponent and predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was well settled in office during the economic collapse of 2008—a toxic place to be for any Western leader. But Sarkozy, like former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, was also practically a cartoon embodiment of the second target of anger. Sarkozy was the “bling-bling” president who outfitted the presidential jet with a top-of-the-line oven so that he could eat gourmet food in the air, the president who traded in his (second) wife for a model-turned-singer-turned-movie-star, the president who loved hanging out with the world’s 1 percent on yachts and private beaches. In expelling a sitting head of state for the first time in three decades, the French made it clear that they wanted change.

But victory came almost too easily. Hollande didn’t have to put forward any serious policy proposals to win. France’s problems were straightforward and remain so: persistent deficits, caused not by the economic crisis but by ever-growing retirement costs; plus high unemployment, caused by high taxes and heavy social mandates on employers—including the near-impossibility of firing a permanent worker. Hollande had little to say about these issues. Instead, his plan was simple: tax the rich. He increased top-bracket income taxes from 41 percent to 45 percent and imposed a temporary two-year levyof 75 percent on income above 1 million euros. In his inauguration speech, he said that “to put France back on her feet, in a fair way,” he would “discourage exorbitant income and remuneration.” Though he acknowledged France’s intractable problems, the closest he got to a solution was to say that “Europe needs projects.”

In the nearly two years that followed, Hollande clung to this platform even as France’s fiscal and economic situation worsened. Unemployment has risenfrom 10.2 to 10.9 percent, even as it has fallen slightly across the West (and fallen more in the United States and Britain). In November, Standard & Poor’s downgraded France’s credit from AA+ to AA. The cut was an explicit no-confidence vote in Hollande, with analysts saying that “we believe the French government’s reforms to taxation, as well as to product, services and labor markets, will not substantially raise France’s medium-term growth prospects and that ongoing high unemployment is weakening support for further significant fiscal and structural policy measures.” (France had lost its top AAA rating in Sarkozy’s waning days.) Meanwhile, toward the end of last year, Hollande’s approval rating fell to 25 percent as Sarkozy watched,possibly plotting a comeback.

Hollande’s disastrous performance in office stems from two factors. First, Hollande couldn’t levy a punitive tax on the rich without sending them or their money fleeing for at least two years. The new president’s tax hike, then, was always going to be largely symbolic. It likely won’t raise even 1 billion euros in the context of a nearly 400-billion-euro budget. Ineffectual though it may be as a revenue raiser, the new tax threatens to do huge damage to the French economy. Newspapers have run complaints from soccer teams worried that they’ll lose their best players and from tech entrepreneurs concerned that they won’t be able to raise start-up capital.

Imposing the tax has been an administrative headache as well. A year ago, France’s top court declared the tax unconstitutional. It took another year for Hollande to restructure the tax to pass constitutional muster. In the meantime, French citizens have watched their already precarious economic fortunes deteriorate while other taxes, including the broad-based value-added tax on goods and services, have risen to fund ever-higher spending. Now, in the face of public anger and frustration, Hollande is promising to cuttaxes on the middle class and on businesses. To do that, he’s finally getting somewhat serious about spending cuts.

De Blasio can take a lesson here. Yes, there are differences between France and New York. New York’s economy, having recovered all the jobs lost since 2008 and added 145,000 new ones, is in better shape than France’s (and most of America’s). The barriers to hiring workers in New York are not nearly as great as in France (though national mandates, such as Obamacare, have made them worse).

Still, the parallels are striking. Voters propelled de Blasio into office on little more than a vague notion of fixing inequality. Like Hollande, de Blasio’s fix is a tax increase, albeit a less extreme one. He would hike taxes by 14 percent on those making more than half a million dollars annually for five years. Like Hollande, de Blasio will have difficulty pushing the tax through: he needs Albany’s approval first. And even if he succeeds, de Blasio’s tax hike, like Hollande’s, will be little more than symbolic. The rich already pay more than their fair share; they earn about a third of the city’s income and pay more than 40 percent of income taxes. And education spending, which de Blasio wants to expand with the new revenues, has already nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching $24.6 billion during Bloomberg’s final year in office. This Monday, de Blasio made it clear that the tax hike is necessary politically, rather than economically or fiscally. When reporters asked him whether he’d drop the idea if New York governor Andrew Cuomo gives him another source of state money instead, the new mayor answered: “I want to go over this again: We have a goal. We believe in this goal. We believe it’s the right thing to do. We are sticking to this goal.” In other words, the means—a new levy on the rich—matter more than the supposed end.

New York has serious problems that the new mayor must address. Pension and health costs for city workers and retirees now consume one-third of the city-funded budget, double their share when Bloomberg took office. (Bloomberg himself recently called this growth one of urban America’s biggest challenges.) The city’s labor contracts all expired years ago. But New York cannot afford retroactive raises or future-year raises unless union members agree to big retirement-benefit and productivity concessions. These rising costs threaten New York’s ability to expand and modernize infrastructure and to maintain quality of life, as the city cuts its current workforce to take care of its retirees.

De Blasio ignored these issues in his inaugural address. His speech—though innocuous compared with what other speakers said that day—was notable mostly for its lack of content. As Hollande said of France, de Blasio said he’d make New York “a fairer, more just, more progressive place,” through a “tax on the wealthiest among us.” Let’s hope that it doesn’t take him as long to learn the lesson that Hollande has finally absorbed: soaking the rich may win elections, at least in today’s political environment, but it’s of little use once you’re in office.

Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Mandela, um cristao - a explicacao de Guy Sorman, para um homem detodas as estacoes...

Comunista, pacifista, tolerante, graças à sua fé cristã, segundo Sorman.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Nelson Mandela, Christian

A little-appreciated factor in his political development

GUY SORMAN
The City Journal, 9 December 2013

Nelson Mandela lived several lives: Communist militant, pacifist prisoner, and charismatic president. He was also the only recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to receive both the USSR’s International Lenin Peace Prize and the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. What was the thread linking these successive and somewhat contradictory lives? Let me propose a hypothesis that his prison guards would certainly confirm, as would the Afrikaners who negotiated the end of apartheid with him: Mandela’s Christian faith led him from violence to redemption.
Mandela was a Christian, as I learned during a long conversation with him at a 1992 meeting in Durban of the South African Foundation, a business-backed anti-apartheid organization. The aura surrounding him then, felt by all who spoke with Mandela, was more mystical than political. Most South Africans, whatever their skin color, are Christians. The country’s ruling Afrikaners saw themselves as a tribe of Israel in exile. They adhered to an assiduous reading of the Old Testament, and an understanding of Christianity that they spread throughout South Africa. The reconciliation between the African National Congress (ANC) and the apartheid government of F.W. de Klerk (president until 1991) was an act of shared faith between two men who belonged to the same syncretic Christian tradition. The West’s economic blockade contributed to ending apartheid but did not bring Mandela and de Klerk together. It was not only the boycott of South African oranges by European and American consumers that overcame apartheid, but also belief in Christ.
Faith also explains and clarifies the path that led Mandela from Communism to liberal democracy and from violent action to peaceful reconciliation. Recall that in 1962, Mandela was sentenced to life in prison for his role in organizing bombings of police stations—a very real crime. In the years when Mandela played a significant but not leading role in the organization, the ANC was a branch of the Communist International. With Soviet support, the ANC preached violent revolution. Mandela’s incarceration was politically unjust, but it was well-founded legally, as Mandela himself never denied. While in prison, he lost faith in revolution and in Communism. Was this because of the collapse of the USSR, as his adversaries believed at the time? Or was it the result of a personal meditation? The latter seems more likely: Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island, filled with his books and manuscripts, had something of a monastic spirit.
Christ was not the only prophet who served as inspiration to Mandela in his cell. There was also Gandhi, who, like Mandela, had practiced law in South Africa. In his work in the Indian community of Durban, where he conceived of and applied the principle of nonviolence to overcome white racism, Gandhi acknowledged the direct inspiration of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The lesson was not lost on Mandela: non-violence and the force of truth (satyagraha) are more effective than violent confrontation, but only when applied within a society that shares the same Christian and humanist values. As Mandela would, Gandhi appealed to the conscience of whites, both in South Africa and beyond; he won effective recognition by the British as the figurehead of Indian independence before he arrived in India. Similarly, Mandela was “recognized” outside of South Africa as the obvious leader of national liberation, before achieving this status domestically. (Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, who succeeded in persuading American and British Protestants that the end of apartheid was an ethical imperative, played a key role as well.)
Mandela’s faith made possible not only the reconciliation of blacks and whites under the same national flag, but also—and this is often overlooked in Europe and America—the reconciliation of enemy groups among South Africa’s numerous black factions and communities. In the age of apartheid, hostility between the Xhosas (Mandela’s ethnic group) and the Zulus (ethnic group of the current president, Jacob Zuma), was at least as intense as that between blacks and whites. In those days, the Zulus often sided with whites against the Xhosas, Indians, and other “mixed” minorities. South Africa was then, and remains, an ethnic puzzle.
The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, founded by President Mandela and led by Bishop Tutu, is perhaps the most concrete example of Mandela’s Christian faith. Instead of the vengeance and reprisals that were expected and feared after years of interracial violence, the commission focused on confession and forgiveness. Most of those who admitted misdeeds and even crimes—whether committed in the name of or in opposition to apartheid—received amnesty. Many returned to civil life, exonerated by their admission of guilt.
Few twentieth-century statesmen have improved our world. Even fewer were inspired by religious faith rather than ideology. The European Union’s Christian founders —France’s Robert Schuman, Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer—prayed together before making decisions. Poland’s Lech Walesa and South Korea’s Kim Dae-Jung, both fervent Catholics and Nobel Peace Prize winners, forgave their Soviet and military oppressors by explicitly referring to their faith. This is the paradox of an age we call secular, but which is in truth haunted by transcendence.

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor and French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including Economics Does Not Lie. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel.

A Journey Inside the Whale: Washington, uma cidade de burocratas federais...

Muito do que é dito sobre Washington, pode ser aplicado igualmente a Brasília: essas cidades aproveitam sua condição de capitais de um regime federal para se imunizarem contra acidentes econômicos que atingem outras cidades e estados. Ou seja, independente do estado da economia, os burocratas continuam a ganhar bem, a gastar, a consumir. E o resto da população paga por isso.
Washington também já teve como Brasilia, os piores políticos que se possa imaginar: corruptos, bandidos, ignorantes. Algo se pode consertar, como foi feito em Washington, mas nem sempre.
Pelo menos no que se refere a Brasília, a decadência continua (mas isso a capital partilha com todo o país: estamos num processo acelerado de decadência institucional, de erosão moral, de subdesenvolvimento político e de involução mental).
Aproveitem para conhecer um pouco mais a história da capital imperial.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Aaron M. Renn

Hail Columbia!

The federal government’s relentless expansion has made Washington, D.C., America’s real Second City.

The City Journal,  February 3, 2013

The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance.

Illustrations by Arnold Roth

In fact, we’re witnessing the start of Washington’s emergence as America’s new Second City. Whether that’s a good thing for America is another question.
Washington is an artificial capital, a city conjured into existence shortly after the Revolutionary War. Its location was the result of political horse-trading. Virginia congressmen agreed to let the federal government assume the states’ war debts, even though Virginia itself was already paid up; in exchange, the new capital would be located in the South.
The city’s early boosters hoped that its location on the Potomac River would help it grow into a commercial as well as a political capital, but that didn’t happen. While other cities got state backing for their business endeavors—a good example is the Erie Canal, built by New York State, which benefited New York City enormously—Washington was run by a Congress more interested in national affairs than in local ones. The city stagnated at first. Its growth finally picked up during the Civil War, but it wasn’t until the Great Depression and World War II, with their expansion of the role of the government in American life, that Washington grew prosperous. During the war, average family income there was higher than in New York or Los Angeles.
It was also a heavily black city—by 1957, the country’s first major city with a black majority. But back in the 1870s, Congress, motivated by racist fears of black votes, had replaced the city’s elected mayors with a board of commissioners appointed by the U.S. president. That change, coming just a few years after black males had won the right to vote in Washington local elections, hobbled the city’s ambitions and set the stage for its troubled legacy in race relations. It wasn’t until 1973, when the civil rights movement had made the disenfranchisement of the city’s blacks untenable, that D.C. regained local control. Unfortunately, a number of factors—including the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and a series of disastrous urban policies enacted by the federal government—set the stage for the emergence of political opportunists, including the infamous Mayor Marion Barry. During his tenure in the 1980s, unchecked corruption, ineptly delivered city services, soaring crime, horrendous public schools, financial chaos, and racial tensions made the city a byword for dysfunction nationally. So did the 1990 video that caught Barry smoking crack in a hotel room.
Nevertheless, the metropolitan area surrounding Washington continued to grow and thrive. And when the 2000s arrived, the expansion of the federal government not only catapulted the region into a new league of success but also transformed the troubled city at its center.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.
The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. Since 2001, Washington has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate of its peer group. Over the course of the entire decade, it ranked second in job growth, trailing only Houston. That wasn’t just because of the federal agencies and gigantic contractors of Washington stereotype. The region has also been a hotbed of entrepreneurship—much of it, to be sure, dependent on federal dollars. During the 2000s, it had 385 firms named to the Inc. 500 lists of fastest-growing companies in America, according to Kauffman Foundation research—by far the most of any metro area. From 2000 through 2011, according to rankings developed by Praxis Strategy Group, Washington’s low-profile but powerful tech sector had the country’s second-highest job growth, after Seattle’s. The region is also one of America’s top life-sciences centers.
Then there’s economic output. During the 2000s, per-capita GDP grew faster in Washington than in any of its peer regions except the Bay Area. Today, Washington’s per-capita GDP is the country’s second-highest—again, after the Bay Area. Unlike Washington, however, the Bay Area hemorrhaged jobs over the course of the decade. Related to Washington’s impressive output is its astonishing median household income, the highest of any metro area with more than 1 million people. A remarkable seven of the ten highest-income counties in America are in metro Washington. And during the 2000s, per-capita income rose in Washington faster than in any of its peer metros.
Finally, Washington’s population is the best-educated in America. Almost half of all adults in the Washington region have college degrees, the highest proportion of any metro area with more than 1 million people. The same is true of graduate degrees: almost 23 percent of Washingtonians hold them.
The region’s success relates to two larger points. The first involves the fact that prosperous urban regions in America are increasingly divided into two kinds. Some, like the Bay Area, embrace a “vertical” model of success, generating increases in economic output and per-capita income with stagnant or declining population and jobs. Others, like Dallas, are “horizontal,” featuring growth in population and jobs but stagnant or declining output and income. But Washington is an exception: it is the only metropolitan area with a population of at least 1 million that achieves the best of both worlds, combining Dallas-style population and job growth with the fabulous output and wealth of a San Francisco. In that respect, it is a city without peer in America.
The second point to emphasize is the sheer scale of Washington’s performance. If you consider the claim that it’s becoming America’s new Second City an exaggeration, note that its huge recent growth has brought its economic size much closer to Chicago’s—not just in per-capita terms but in absolute ones, too. Back in 2001, Chicago’s economy was 52 percent bigger than Washington’s; by the end of the decade, the gap had shrunk to 24 percent. Similarly, in 2000, total personal income was 62 percent greater in Chicago than in Washington—a difference that had dwindled to 31 percent by the end of 2010. Chicago has just 16 percent more people with college degrees than Washington does. And Washington has more people with graduate degrees than Chicago does and is closing in on Los Angeles.
None of these measurements, by the way, includes nearby Baltimore. The combined Washington-Baltimore area is now the fourth-largest in the country, with about a million fewer people than Chicago. In roughly 15 years, if current growth rates hold, Washington-Baltimore will pass the 10-million-person threshold necessary to be counted as a megacity.
It isn’t just the Washington metropolitan region that’s thriving. The current boom is accomplishing something that previous ones didn’t: transforming the city itself, the District of Columbia. The District’s population grew during the 2000s for the first time since 1950. It suffers less from the problems that once tarnished its image: strained race relations, high crime, ineptly delivered public services, local financial crises. Many city services, such as planning and transportation, have been heavily professionalized and are even touted nationally as innovative models.
True, corruption, especially in real-estate deals, remains alive and well. A parade of local politicians, including current mayor Vincent Gray, is under a cloud, and even Marion Barry is still around as a city council member. But with a torrent of investment, new residents, and prosperity flooding in, it hardly seems to matter. The District grew by more than 1,000 new residents per month between 2010 and 2011. It ended the 2011 fiscal year with a budget surplus of $240 million and the 2012 fiscal year with a surplus of $140 million. In the past, people put up with a dysfunctional city government so that they could be near the federal one. Today, by contrast, the District is a desirable place to live in its own right, much like Manhattan or San Francisco.
This trend is affecting every aspect of urban life. Real estate has been thriving, of course. Washington has the nation’s lowest office-vacancy rate, along with some of its highest commercial rents. Last January, the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate put Washington in third place on its list of top global cities for foreign investment, behind only New York and London.
Residential real estate is also booming. “People seem to have a hidden assumption that every house in the District will eventually be crowding $1 million,” wrote Megan McArdle in the Daily Beast in September (adding, however, that “this doesn’t seem possible to me”). Rents are high, with lower-cost apartments disappearing rapidly as investors pay current residents as much as $10,000 to move out so that their apartments can be rented to others at higher rates. In 2011, buoyed by robust demand, builders broke ground on more than 15,000 new apartment units throughout the Washington region. “Much of the building is taking place in the District,” noted the Washington Post, adding that “the vast majority are ‘Class A’ units aimed at young professionals eager to live in walkable communities near shopping and public transportation.”
As that statement implies, the apartment boom is driven by a surge in younger residents, especially in the region’s core. The District owes almost all its population growth to people in their twenties and thirties; 48 percent of its households are single-person, a nationwide high. What’s attracting these upscale young? At warp speed, Washington has become a New York–style urban playground and employment market. As Time recently reported,

every week brings fresh evidence of continuing prosperity: a new restaurant, a new nightclub, another restored 19th century townhouse in a previously dodgy neighborhood selling for $1 million or more. Start-ups are hiring through Craigslist, and just opened lobbying firms have no trouble collaring clients. Storefronts that stood abandoned five years ago fill with pricey gourmet-food shops.

Similarly, Ross Douthat observed in the New York Times that

over the [last] decade. . . . the changes to Washington have been staggering to watch. High-rises have leaped up, office buildings have risen, neighborhoods have been transformed. Streets once deserted after dusk are now crowded with restaurants and bars. A luxurious waterfront area is taking shape around the stadium that the playoff-bound Nationals call home. Million-dollar listings abound in neighborhoods that 10 years ago were transitional at best.

But Washington isn’t Portland, a youth mecca where, the quip goes, “young people go to retire.” Geographer Jim Russell notes that “Washington’s young talent is super-ambitious. They are driven to succeed in a very competitive talent market.” Jobs on Capitol Hill or in high-profile nonprofits are highly coveted and hard to land. Like New York, Washington is one of the world’s toughest arenas, a place where the best and brightest come to prove themselves.
They aren’t just white hipsters, either. The Washington metro area is 26.4 percent black, Number Eight in the country among metros with more than a million people. Stereotypes of the city dwell on its black underclass and its history of electing black nationalist politicians like Barry. But the area has a large black middle class as well—above all, in Prince George’s County, just across the Maryland state line. That county is over 65 percent black, and its median household income is $70,700, making it the highest-income majority-black county in the United States.
Immigrants, too, have been flourishing in Washington. By the end of 2010, nearly 22 percent of the metropolitan area’s population was foreign-born, up from 17.3 percent in 2000—the biggest increase among the ten largest American metro areas. A lot of these immigrants are Latino, as in many American cities. But Washington’s immigrant base is highly diverse. For example, tens of thousands of Indian immigrants, many of them tech entrepreneurs, live near Dulles International Airport, in an area that the Atlantic has labeled the “Silicon Valley of the East.” The region also attracts immigrants from East Asian and African countries, such as Korea, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. Many are highly educated. “We have a lot of really highly skilled, really highly educated immigrants in technical fields,” George Mason University’s Lisa Sturtevant told the Washington Examiner last year. And, Russell adds, “D.C. is a global talent market increasingly on par with New York and London. It is drawing the cream of the crop from around the world, and they are paid top dollar.”
The international origins of both talent and investment in Washington signal something new: it’s becoming an important global city. “In a globalizing world, capitals count for less than global business centers,” journalist Richard Longworth wrote in 2009, adding that “Washington, a one-dimensional company town if there ever was one,” never made anyone’s list of global cities. That view of Washington is increasingly dated. Yes, it’s still a government town, but it’s the town of the most important government there is, and that distinction matters. Washington is home to a massive number of embassies and international institutions, of course. Almost 1,500 foreign correspondents from 113 countries are based there, giving Washington a global news-media reach on par with New York’s. Even domestically, the news media industry has consolidated into Washington, along with New York, writes Matthew Yglesias in Slate. A recent meta-analysis of various surveys by economist Richard Florida ranked Washington the Number Three global city in America, behind only New York and Chicago.

But what solidifies Washington’s emerging status as America’s new Second City isn’t its economic performance or its emerging global-city profile. Both of those are secondary effects of the real change in Washington: the increasingly intrusive control of the federal government over American life.
Traditionally, Washington thrived through a “leaky bucket” model, redirecting some of the gigantic money flow through the federal pipeline to itself. The 2000s were an especially good time for the region, as two wars, plus 9/11-related defense and homeland-security procurement, fueled the boom. These days, about a third of the Washington-area economy depends on the federal government. But with $16 trillion in national debt and large deficits projected as far as the eye can see, the gravy train may be coming to a halt. Some, like Steven Cochrane of Moody’s Analytics, think that fiscal retrenchment would spell the end of D.C.’s new prosperity. “The days of Washington being the leader in terms of job growth and economic strength are really over,” Cochrane told the Washington Post in early 2011. “I think there’s no way that [the pace of job growth] could be kept up any longer, particularly now that the federal government is undergoing pretty strict [budget] scrutiny.”
The leaky-bucket model may indeed be nearing its limits. But Washington has discovered a new way to extract value from the federal government, based not just on spending but on an ever-expanding regulatory state. An array of programs—the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts governing finance; the government’s auto-industry takeover; the EPA’s declaration that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—takes regulation to new levels of detail and intrusiveness, even extending to the micromanagement of particular companies. The trend began long before President Obama took office, but its quintessence is Obamacare, an annexation by the federal government of one-sixth of the American economy via 2,000 pages of byzantine legislation, not counting the thousands of pages of implementing regulations still to come.
All this intrusion emanates from the legislative and especially the regulatory machinery in Washington. The city has become, in effect, the Brussels of America. So a wider and wider variety of businesses and organizations must be located there to lobby the government that decides their fate. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, total spending on lobbying rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to $3.3 billion in 2011.) These firms pay local taxes. So do their workers, who also buy houses, patronize stores, pay tuition at private schools, employ local doctors and lawyers, and so on. The regulatory superstate is turbocharging Washington’s local economy.
This new basis for prosperity could pay huge dividends to the region. The model here might be the defense industry, which has already centralized many operations in the area. Northrop Grumman, for example, recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Washington. Boeing shifted its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago to be closer to defense operations and customers in Washington. Other industries, such as health insurance, may follow suit. Even if they don’t relocate to D.C. entirely, they’ll need to be represented there. City Journal contributing editor Joel Kotkin has speculated that “when everything from zoning [to] the location of industrial plants and healthcare is under Washington’s control, the capital could conceivably even emerge as a challenger to New York’s two century reign as the country’s most important city.” The mere fact that such heresy can be uttered illustrates Washington’s new power.
So Washington can boast demographic and economic growth, a highly educated workforce, an emerging elite-global-city profile, and regulatory hegemony that ensures that America will continue to pay it tribute, even if the federal government manages to restrain its spending. This looks like a winning recipe locally, and it gives the region a legitimate claim to be America’s new Second City.
But it’s a loser for America. Even more than the old leaky-bucket system did, the regulatory superstate depends on inflicting pain on the rest of the country, pain that only Washington itself can relieve—if you pay up and have the right connections, that is. Washington’s fortunes and America’s are increasingly at odds. The region is prospering because it’s becoming something that would have horrified the Founders: an imperial capital on the Potomac.

Aaron M. Renn is an urban analyst, consultant, and publisher of the urban policy website The Urbanophile.

Protectionism, US style - Steven Malanga (The City Journal)

Storm of Protectionism
Steven Malanga
The City Journal, January 20. 2013

It’s time to repeal the Jones Act.

New York–area residents facing gasoline shortages in Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath must have wondered about the federal government’s announcement that it would suspend the Jones Act to ease long lines at the pump. Most of them had probably never heard of one of the most onerous pieces of protectionist legislation of the twentieth century. Still in force nearly 100 years after its passage, it exacts a significant toll on the economy.
Officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that all goods and people moving by water from one American port to another travel on American-built, American-owned, American-manned ships. The act’s original proponents argued that it was essential to national security, since it helped preserve a maritime fleet that could support the country’s armed forces and supply the nation during wars. Over time, American shipping interests and powerful maritime unions also became fierce defenders of the act, believing that it protected American jobs. Their defense has largely succeeded. Only in emergencies like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy does the federal government occasionally suspend the Jones Act to get goods flowing more quickly and cheaply. Those brief pauses reveal how much better the market would work without the act.
Like most protectionist legislation, the act costs more than it generates in economic activity. In a 1996 article in the Canadian Journal of Economics, four researchers (including two economists at the U.S. International Trade Commission) wrote that the act allowed “domestic shippers to charge rates substantially above comparable world prices,” reducing shipping by water in the United States and increasing the annual cost of goods by about $6 billion (in today’s dollars). Older studies, they recalled, estimated the cost as high as $10 billion (again, in today’s dollars). The act might save 15,000 jobs in the American shipping industry, but at a price that reduced national income by hundreds of thousands of dollars per job saved. The only trade restrictions worse for the American economy, the authors concluded, were limitations on textile and garment imports. Those “multi-fiber agreements,” in effect at the time of the economists’ study, have since expired.
The Jones Act has also long outlived its national-security rationale. In a 1991 article in Regulation, Rob Quartel, a commissioner at the Federal Maritime Commission, described how U.S. armed forces in the Gulf War moved massive amounts of matériel and personnel using their own ships and those controlled by NATO allies. Only six of the 59 ships that the military employed were Jones Act–subsidized vessels. As Quartel noted, the country’s merchant-marine fleet has continued to shrink, largely because the Jones Act has made American shippers globally uncompetitive. With a monopoly at home, why get better?
Growing evidence of the act’s cost and ineffectiveness has led to calls to rescind it. In 2003, Hawaii congressman Ed Case introduced legislation to free his state from the Jones Act, saying that it so limited competition among shippers serving the state that it had produced a “crippling drag on an already-challenged economy and the very quality of life in Hawaii.” The protectionist legislation, Case argued, “is just an anachronism: most of the world’s shipping is by way of an international merchant marine functioning in an open, competitive market. And those few U.S. flag cargo lines that remain have maneuvered the Jones Act to develop virtual monopolies over domestic cargo shipping.” Similarly, in 2010, Arizona senator John McCain introduced legislation to repeal the act, observing that it “hinders free trade and favors labor unions over consumers.”
These efforts have failed, mostly because of the power of maritime unions and shipping interests, which would rather preserve their hold on a narrow but uncompetitive slice of the marketplace than compete more forcefully around the world. Over the years, both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have pledged their allegiance to the act in return for the support of the shipping cartel that benefits from it. The losers are American consumers and businesses. It shouldn’t take acts of God like Sandy to show us that the Jones Act should go.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.

O problema da (i)legalidade das drogas - The City Journal

A analogia com limites de velocidade pode ser fraca, mas os anarco-libertários tampouco discutiram em profundidade os problemas advindos da legalização. Tudo vai ser descriminalizado? O Estado vai vender? Será um mercado livre, com altos impostos sobre o consumo? Algum monopólio estatal?
E os que causarem danos à sociedade vão ser multados e podem ir para a cadeia, como os criminosos do trânsito?
Seria preciso debater todas essas questões.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

On the Legalization of Drugs

Living in a civilized society means accepting laws that we didn’t make.

The City Journall, 5 December 2012

Discussing drug legalization with libertarians, as I did recently, can be a frustrating experience. This is in part because they rarely say exactly what they mean by “legalization.” Do they mean a controlled market that would barely represent a retreat from state regulation and interference, or an uncontrolled one, in which we would all be able to buy methamphetamine or crack at our local store?

There is a much deeper problem, though: their conception of what it is to live in a civilized society. They seem to think of people as egoistic particles that occasionally bump into one another rather than as necessarily and essentially social beings. No doubt there are some egoistic particles among us, but they represent only a tiny proportion of the total. On the matter of drugs, libertarians argue that it is no business of the state to tell citizens what to take or not to take, and that doing so is therefore an oppressive curtailment of freedom. The drug laws, they insist, don’t work in practice, because so many people break them—with impunity or not, as the case may be.

Let us draw an analogy with speed limits. They undoubtedly curtail our freedom; they are undoubtedly unevenly enforced; and it is likewise undoubtedly true that they don’t work, in the sense that there can hardly be a single driver in the world who has not knowingly broken them. Indeed, it is probable that most drivers break speed limits every time they drive a car. But does that mean that speed limits do not work? No. Does anyone suppose that if there were no speed limits, people would not drive faster? You have only to drive on a German autobahn, where there are no speed limits, to get your answer.

Now, a libertarian would say that responsible citizens should be able to determine for themselves at what speed to drive. It doesn’t take much intelligence or judgment to do so. It must be remembered also, by analogy with the frequent harmlessness of drugs, that most speeding does not end in a fatal accident. Not all speeding is abuse of speeding, therefore; and if while speeding a person causes a fatality to others, he must take the consequences, financial and other. The prospect of those consequences should be enough to cause him to adjust his speed to what is sensible and safe; and as an adult, he is the best judge of the speed at which he is capable of driving safely. If a man gets home safe and sound, he has, ipso facto, driven at a sensible speed.

Alas, this is strange philosophical anthropology. People are not—I am not—like that. I can see that other people should not drive above a certain speed, but I cannot see that I should not do so. They, of course, have a mirror-image view: they think that they are safe and that I am dangerous. But though we all consider ourselves safe, the fact is that speeding makes us more likely to have an accident or to kill someone.

Living in a civilized society means accepting laws that one did not make oneself, and that in any given situation may seem unnecessary; one has no right to complain if punished for breaking them. I accept the law as necessary even as I break it. One is not oneself the arbiter of everything. In some circumstances, it is right to prevent potential harms to third parties such as speeding and taking drugs produce rather than to wait for them actually to occur. It is a matter of judgment, not of principle, when those circumstances exist—and in my opinion, the taking of methamphetamine falls well this side of justifiable prevention.

Of course, restrictions on freedom may become onerous, and petty regulations may whittle away freedom altogether. But all freedoms are not created equal; a hierarchy exists among them; and a restriction on the freedom to intoxicate yourself or drive down Fifth Avenue at 100 miles an hour is not to be compared with a restriction on the freedom to say what you think. Speech codes are therefore a much more serious assault on liberty than are drug laws.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Friedman: o baixinho mais influente do pensamento econômico do seculo XX

OK, eu sei que o teórico mais influente do pensamento econômico no século XX foi o "altinho" John Maynard Keynes, mas este era um semi-aristocrático pensador, ligado ao mundo das artes e da alta finança, e talvez não tenha conhecido a economia real dos homens que trabalham com seus braços e suor, como fez Milton Keynes, filho de imigrantes pobres que se converteu do New Deal ao liberalismo clássico, que ele enriqueceu com seu pensamento inovador. Keynes saiu da economia neoclássica -- com algumas tinturas de socialismo fabiano -- para o intervencionismo salvacionista, que Friedman rejeitava com base em seus raciocínios e a experiência de vida, ao registrar tantos fracassos do dirigismo estatal.
Um homem que ainda não triunfou totalmente, mas que vai triunfar ainda mais, ao assistirmos por ele ao fracasso dos experimentos keynesianos. 
Alguns anos atrás, eu também escrevi uma homenagem a ele e a Roberto Campos, o economista brasileiro provavelmente mais próximo das ideias de Milton Friedman; ver aqui: http://www.pralmeida.org/05DocsPRA/1686FriedmanBobFields.pdf
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

DANIEL J. FLYNN

Monetarism and the Man

Remembering Milton Friedman on his 100th birthday

The City Journal, 31 July 2012 (Summer 2012, vol. 22, n.3)

After Milton Friedman’s death on November 16, 2006, the diminutive intellectual cast such a long shadow that even as staunch an adversary as Paul Krugman begrudgingly remembered him as “a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the public that ever lived.” But upon his birth to immigrant parents 100 years ago today, the chances of Friedman’s becoming an academic, let alone one of the century’s most influential, seemed remote. And yet it’s Friedman’s obscure beginnings—not the months he spent on the bestseller list in 1980 or the day in 1976 when he shook hands in Stockholm with the King of Sweden—that best explain his impact.

Milton Friedman changed the world. The University of Chicago professor touted floating exchange rates, an end to wage-and-price controls, legalization of private gold ownership, dramatic tax reductions, and an end to conscription. And all of these things came to pass. Friedman the monetarist warned in the 1960s of “inflationary recessions” and rejected a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment presumed by the Phillips Curve. Fellow economists laughed at him before the 1970s laughed at them. Fledgling market economies from Europe to South America to Asia relied on Friedman as a guide.

How did this small man make such big changes? The answer lies as much in his story as it does in his solutions.

Friedman’s economics worked because he had worked. Friedman explained to fellow economists in the 1950s that “theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to ‘explain.’” He rejected ideas that worked in smart men’s heads but failed in working men’s lives. Former Obama cabinet member Austan Goolsbee (Skull & Bones ’91) can afford his bad ideas; his most famous forebear on the University of Chicago faculty couldn’t. The future Nobel Prize winner scooped ice cream in his parents’ in-home parlor, sold fireworks by the roadside, waited tables in exchange for lunch, and peddled clothing and books to his fellow Rutgers undergraduates. Friedman came from the real world. So did his economics.

Friedman sought to persuade adversaries, not demonize them. Friedman shifted from New Dealer to libertarian. If he could be won over, then others could, too. He converted without condemning, and he debated adversarieswith unfailing patience and graciousness. When conversing with progressives, the modern-liberal-turned-classical-liberal found it easier to offer counterproposals (e.g., a negative income tax to replace welfare) than to use a word—“no”—that progressives don’t appreciate. “If someone wants to achieve something, it’s easier to say ‘here is a better way of achieving your objectives’ than to say ‘you’re wrong,’” Friedman’s son David, also an economist, told me. “He made arguments that people found hard to answer. He made them politely, and without implying that the people who disagreed with him were stupid or wicked.”

A product of the concrete jungle didn’t retreat into an idealist’s fantasyland. Friedman was an odd creature: a pragmatic libertarian. Instead of arguing for the privatization of schools, a position that might have made him feel good but would have done no public good, he advocated vouchers, so that parents could choose among competing public and private institutions. Some communities adopted the policy. His arguments appealed to his opponents’ sympathies, which left friends and foes exasperated. Consider some quotes from his fascinating, lengthy 1973 Playboy interview: “Under free enterprise, a person who has a prejudice has to pay for that prejudice”; “the minimum-wage rate is the most anti-Negro law on the books”; “you tax the people of Watts to send children from Beverly Hills to college.” In life and work, the ever-practical Friedman approached the world as it was. He earned a state scholarship to a state college, worked for the federal government during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and propagated his ten-part 1980 documentary series, Free to Choose, via public television.

“If my fellow citizens are going to be so foolish as to establish these [programs], there is no reason I shouldn’t benefit from them,” he explained to the Associated Press on the eve of Free to Choose’s PBS premiere. “I was long an enemy of rent control, but that did not prevent me from living in a rent-controlled apartment.”

The son of immigrants appropriately judged ideas on merit, not connections. At a time when pundits often echo party talking points, Friedman’s principled public intellectualism was bracing. He opposed the Iraq war, the drug war, and the draft. He didn’t mute his criticisms of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or even Fed chairman Arthur Burns—his former professor—when they ran afoul of his principles. Friedman embodied the Aristotelian wisdom: “Where both are dear, it is right to prefer truth to friends.” Good ethics proved a good career move. When honesty talks, people listen.

Friedman spoke the everyman’s language so well because it was his native tongue. Economists do numbers; words, not so much. Friedman spoke with the authority, but not the pedanticism, of an academic. “Professors sometimes have the habit of writing only for other professors, but your book is written in a way that the man on the street will understand and get your message,” Senator Barry Goldwater observed on the eve of Capitalism and Freedom’s 1962 publication. Every three weeks, from 1966 to 1984, Friedman descended from the ivory tower, and readers ascended from the style section, to tackle complex matters accessibly in his Newsweek column. So relaxed with his ideas was Friedman that he spoke to viewers of Free to Choosewithout a script. TV, glossy magazines, pamphlets—Friedman took his ideas to the people. The banker’s suit and geeky glasses may have deluded some into thinking that he was raised in an economics department; he grew up in Rahway, New Jersey. Coming from the masses made him better equipped to speak to them.

Ironically, Friedman regarded biography as nothing; ideas, everything. Behind the scenes, Friedman confessed to the Free to Choose producers that he was “unhappy with any [narrative] string that is not primarily intellectual.” The proposed reliance on the star’s compelling life story made him uneasy in the extreme. The documentary had to be about his ideas, not him.

That was part of his decency. But in reflecting on the economist’s influence on the 100th anniversary of his birth, biography matters. A good man is the best salesman of great ideas. Knowing how Milton Friedman remade the world requires knowing Milton Friedman.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America, which explores, among others, Milton Friedman.

Contra acoes afirmativas - Nathan Glazer

HOWARD HUSOCK

Nathan Glazer’s Warning

Social policy often does more harm than good, says one of the last of the original neocons.

The City Journal, vol. 21, n. 3, Summer 2011

KRIS SNIBBE/HARVARD STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Glazer has written about everything from ethnicity to urban architecture.

The Obama administration is entering a field not cultivated on a major scale since the 1960s: social policy. Unlike safety-net entitlements, such as health insurance and cash welfare, social policy—or social engineering, to use the more critical term—uses government action to try to change and improve people and their neighborhoods. For instance, the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods are supposed to replicate, in 21 cities, what the Harlem Children’s Zone has done in Manhattan—to “create plans to provide cradle-to-career services that improve the educational achievement and healthy development of children,” as a White House press release modestly puts it. The administration’s Social Innovation Fund seeks to promote “youth development, economic opportunity or healthy futures” by identifying dozens of small private programs—in areas like job training, nutrition, exercise, and after-school reading and math help—and using federal dollars to expand them to additional sites and cities.

These initiatives bring to mind the Great Society years, when the federal government, trying to improve citizens from coast to coast, decided to do it by enormously expanding smaller, more localized nonprofit programs. The theory was that this approach would avoid the faceless bureaucratism that characterized government-run enterprises. The Model Cities project, for example, was born when Lyndon Johnson decided to “add three zeroes,” as Ford Foundation executive Paul Ylvisaker once told me, to a Ford program called Gray Areas, in which citizen boards would somehow use foundation funds to reverse the decline of poor neighborhoods. Other Great Society projects that tried to implement social policy through new or existing nonprofit organizations included Head Start, which sought to improve early-childhood education, and Community Action Programs, which offered a variety of services, including job training, adult literacy, and nutrition education.

President Obama’s revival of an ambitious social policy agenda makes this a good time to reexamine the work of one of the most brilliant critics of the first wave: Nathan Glazer, now 88, a Harvard sociologist and one of the last of the founding generation of neoconservatives (a term often applied to him, though he has never really embraced it). In his bluntly titled 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer examined two decades’ worth of programs and reached a sobering conclusion: “Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”

What gave that conclusion special power was the intellectual journey that Glazer took to reach it. Well after his days as a student Trotskyite at the CCNY of the 1940s, Glazer’s work displayed the hallmarks of cultural liberalism. He first came to prominence as a junior coauthor of David Riesman’s landmark sociological analysis of 1950s America, The Lonely Crowd—a book that coined the terms “inner-directed” and “other-directed” and was understood as critical of the era’s purported conformity.

In 1963, the future neocon published his own landmark study, Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel Patrick Moynihan as his junior coauthor), which argued that the broader American identity hadn’t swamped the individual ethnic identities of New York’s Jews, Italians, Irish, “Negroes,” and Puerto Ricans. The book laid the groundwork for a multicultural view of American society; indeed, the left-liberal journalist Richard Rovere called it “perhaps the most perceptive inquiry into American minorities ever made.” So if, as Martin Peretz has famously suggested, neoconservatism is a conversation with liberalism, Glazer has held that conversation not just with other intellectuals but with himself.

But even in Beyond the Melting Pot, one can detect traces of a scholar willing to question traditional liberal assumptions. In his chapter on New York’s blacks, Glazer wrote that

the rate of illegitimacy among Negroes is about fourteen or fifteen times that among whites. . . . Broken homes and illegitimacy do not necessarily mean poor upbringing and emotional problems. But they mean it more often when the mother is forced to work, . . . when the father is incapable of contributing to support, . . . when fathers and mothers refuse to accept responsibility for and resent their children, as Negro parents, overwhelmed by difficulties, so often do. . . .

All this cannot be irrelevant to the academic performance of Negro children, and indeed it is relevant to a much wider range of problems than educational ones alone. In particular, it is probably the Negro boy who suffers in this situation. . . . It is pointless to ignore the fact that the concentration of problems in the Negro community is exceptional, and that prejudice, low income, poor education explain only so much.

These were farsighted observations, offered at a time when discussions of poverty, such as Michael Harrington’s The Other America, tended simplistically to blame it on the inherent injustice of the American economic system. Glazer had established a framework for understanding the problems of the poor—a framework that, like much of his later work, emphasized the fundamental importance of the family.

Glazer also employed a relatively new method: supporting his arguments with data from social scientists’ evaluations of public programs. Such evaluations were themselves relatively new. The Urban Institute, whose self-described mission is “to bridge the gap between the lonely scholar in search of truth and the decision-maker in search of progress,” wasn’t founded until 1968. Other major contrarians who critiqued progressivism took very different approaches: Jane Jacobs, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities was based, in good part, on her own observations; Edward Banfield, whose pathbreaking neoconservative critique of emerging urban policy, The Unheavenly City, was statistically informed but relied more on his own logic and common sense than on program evaluations; and Irving Kristol, who was more essayist and political philosopher than social scientist.

Glazer, by contrast, immersed himself in social science. Take a chapter inThe Limits of Social Policy called “Education, Training and Poverty: What Worked?” In that chapter, Glazer reviews the social-science literature on 18 social programs, from the Job Corps to Head Start, from Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the School Breakfast program, as well as a “meta-evaluation” based on 42 studies of early-childhood education programs. His conclusions aren’t polemical, but they are withering nonetheless. “At least some of the states known for high expenditure on education and social needs have shown remarkably poor records.” “After having done badly in schooling, we do not do well at making up for the failure through work-training programs, though we have certainly tried.” And crucially: “The evaluations of specific programs that were available during the first ten years after the launching of the [War on Poverty] confirmed the verdict: nothing worked, and, in particular, nothing that one did in education worked.”

Glazer would become particularly prominent in the debate over race-based affirmative action, though in this case his opposition began not with data but with values. In his 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination, he wrote that we must “reestablish the simple and clear understanding that rights attach to the individual, not the group, and that public policy must be exercised without distinction of race, color, or national origin.” The view may have been shaped by Beyond the Melting Pot; Glazer clearly hoped that blacks would follow the other ethnic groups about which he and Moynihan had written, taking the path from modest occupations to the professions and the middle class.

But once again (and even more so in the 1987 edition of Affirmative Discrimination), Glazer turned to social-science research, this time highlighting what would become an almost clichéd hallmark of social policy: unintended consequences. He closely parsed the evidence, much of which compared hiring in firms covered by affirmative action (such as federal contractors with contracts worth more than $50,000 and more than 50 employees) with hiring in firms not required to develop race-related hiring goals. A RAND Corporation report called “Closing the Gap: Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks” had concluded that affirmative action had “at best . . . marginally altered black wage gains.” Glazer quoted RAND’s finding that affirmative action appeared to have attracted blacks to employers covered by its rules—leading less to improved black employment than to a “radical reshuffling of black jobs in the labor force. . . . Black employment in the non-covered sector plummeted.”

Such reliance on data and research would become the calling card of The Public Interest, the great neoconservative journal that Glazer coedited with Kristol for three decades after the departure of founding coeditor Daniel Bell. As James Q. Wilson has observed, it was a periodical predicated on the theory that “it is a good idea to know more about proposed or enacted policies than can be inferred from an ideology or extracted from journalism.” Head Start, for instance, may have a catchy name linked to a cause that’s virtually impossible to oppose, but that doesn’t mean that it’s effective in helping disadvantaged preschoolers get ready to learn.

The news about social policy, it’s worth noting, hasn’t improved. A recent report by Isabel Sawhill and Jon Baron for the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy—an organization very much in the Glazer tradition—observed that yet another negative evaluation of Head Start (it has “almost no effect on children’s cognitive, social-emotional, or health outcomes at the end of 1st grade”) was “the 10th instance since 1990 in which an entire federal social program has been evaluated using the scientific ‘gold standard’ method of randomly assigning individuals to a program or control group. Nine of those evaluations found weak or no positive effects.”

What makes Glazer so relevant today isn’t merely his close reading of social-science data. One could well conclude, after all, that poor program evaluations merely highlight the need for better programs—that we should learn from our mistakes and keep tweaking. Glazer’s criticisms go a crucial step further: his doubt that social policies can succeed is rooted in a faith in traditional institutions that can only be called conservative.

A Glazer essay in the very first issue of The Public Interest, “Paradoxes of American Poverty,” signaled skepticism about the grandiosity of social policy, wherein “radicals, liberals and even some conservatives call for a social and psychological revolution, requiring us to develop a completely different attitude to the casualties of industrial society, an attitude capable of reaching them and remaking them as human beings rather than simply providing better care.” Glazer was especially concerned that such efforts tended to focus on individuals. “We seem incapable of thinking in family terms,” he wrote, despite the fact that “familial loyalties” were what allowed “impoverished countries—far, far poorer than our own—to manage with almost no system of public welfare at all.”

This emerges as a key Glazer theme: that social policy must be evaluated not just in terms of its own stated goals but also in terms of its effects on a society rich in family and community institutions that serve as a foundation for happiness and achievement. Any social policy, he writes in Limits, must be judged against “the simple reality that every piece of social policy substitutes for some traditional arrangement, whether good or bad, a new arrangement in which public authorities take over, at least in part, the role of the family, of the ethnic and neighborhood group, of voluntary associations.” In doing so, Glazer continues, “social policy weakens the position of these traditional agents and further encourages needy people to depend on the government for help rather than on the traditional structures. This is the basic force behind the ever growing demand for more social programs and their frequent failure to satisfy our hopes.”

Glazer goes further still, asserting that “the breakdown of traditional modes of behavior is the chief cause of our social problems.” This means that it might often be better for government not to get involved in social policy at all. “I am increasingly convinced,” he writes, “that some important part of the solution to our social problems lies in traditional practices and traditional restraints. Since the past is not recoverable, what guidance can this possibly give? It gives two forms of guidance: first, it counsels hesitation in the development of social policies that sanction the abandonment of traditional practices.” Such a view recalls Moynihan’s much-maligned observation that “benign neglect” might help poor blacks more than the War on Poverty did. But Glazer also offers an alternative: “Second, and perhaps more helpful, it suggests that the creation and building of new traditions, or new versions of old traditions, must be taken more seriously as a requirement of social policy itself.”

The Glazerian status quo ante—the sometimes informal institutions that we replace at our peril—includes the unplanned city and the architecture that it spawns. This interest is far from unrelated to Glazer’s unease with social policy; in fact, he understands urban planning as an aspect of such policy. In 2007, Glazer, who had served briefly in a federal housing agency back in the early 1960s, published From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City. Modernist buildings began as a utopian cause, Glazer pointed out—indeed, as social policy crafted by technocratic elites for the benefit of the working class. Glazer candidly remembers seeing a photo of a dozen blocks of tenements that had been razed to make way for housing projects: “I recall, as a social-minded, and socialist, youth, looking at this picture, proud at what had been done, worried about how long it would take to clear away the surrounding sea of slums.” But those tenements that survived, he continues, “are now often more desirable not only to poor people but to middle-class people too.” Glazer cites the East Harlem brownstones of his youth: “No one has ever had a good word for this nondesign, this simple adaptation to market needs—until we started destroying it. Then we discovered that the brownstones could provide good living quarters; . . . that the tenements, once the severe overcrowding was remedied, . . . also provided good living space.”

These observations lead Glazer to questions that transcend architecture and again arrive at social policy. “Why is it that the sophisticated intelligence of socially minded architects and planners didn’t produce satisfactory environments for those with the least choice? Even worse: why is it . . . that environments built by commercial builders, trying to simply make a profit as best they could, so often beat out architects’ environments in terms of appeal to ordinary people?” For Glazer, the architects’ and planners’ failure reflects their distance from, even lack of interest in, the lives and desires of those of modest means. He quotes Norman Dennis’s 1970 study of Sunderland, a city in England: “As Edmund Burke said in another connection, the high level of satisfaction in areas like [the ones scheduled to be torn down] ‘is the result of a choice not of one day or one set of people. . . . It is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasion, tempers, dispositions and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people which disclose themselves only in a long period of time.’ ”

Just as families and buildings risk harm from social policy, so too do nonprofit social-services organizations. In The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer makes clear that the sort of marriage between government and nonprofits that the Obama White House is pursuing may fundamentally change what makes the helping organizations of civil society so great. As an example, he points to the Meals on Wheels programs that bring food to elderly shut-ins. These programs were effective and cheap back when local charities ran them on their own. “They are small, they rely on volunteers to cook and deliver the meals (often using their own cars and their own gasoline), they are sponsored by churches and other voluntary organizations, they depend on local contributions for the cost of food and whatever paid staff they use, they generally charge for the meals but provide them free for those who cannot afford to pay. All in all, a useful and economic service.”

But then Congress voted to provide federal assistance to the programs. The result was a “host of potential difficulties,” including requirements “that each service must provide more than one hundred meals daily, that they provide auxiliary social services to meals recipients, that they cooperate with area-wide comprehensive planning services for the elderly, that they train their staffs and send them to seminars provided by the Administration on Aging, . . . that they have full-time directors.” Glazer’s concluding reflection can be applied to other programs as well: “When one realizes that meals-on-wheels programs are small, use volunteers, are unacquainted with elaborate paperwork and regulations involved in qualifying for federal assistance, one sees the difficulties they will have in satisfying government regulations and in also remaining who they are.” Government’s seemingly benign endeavor to extend the reach of local social programs, then, is deeply hazardous.

It would be an oversimplification of Glazer’s work to say that he rules out the possibility of government programs’ improving the lives of the poor. As he put it in Joseph Dorman’s brilliant 1998 documentary Arguing the World: “[When] I look at policies that are trying to improve welfare, I think you must keep on trying even if you have not had great success.”

But when pressed about which policies are most worth trying, Glazer is apt to emphasize those that support the traditional family—including a male wage earner—as the building block of upward mobility and community stability. That’s why he continues to underscore that the policy prescription of Moynihan’s groundbreaking 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” was a jobs program to provide work for black fathers and increase the likelihood of marriage and family formation. Glazer remains rueful that the uproar over the candid report—which clearly built on Beyond the Melting Pot and which he advised Moynihan about during “long walks in Central Park”—prevented the adoption of that prescription. As Glazer tells me now: “I think then it would have worked. But . . . a lot has happened. There have been drug epidemics. There have been different kinds of social programs. . . . There’s been an undermining of those Southern black migrations to the North. In the early sixties, it was still a working migration, a migration of people who came to work. And now it is a population that has been affected by 40 years of programs and environments which have created a permanent, large workless population.”

His focus on drawing the workless into work leads him to support some policies to which contemporary conservatives object, notably a European-style health-insurance system and the legislation commonly known as Obamacare. As Glazer sees it, the reform, by extending Medicaid to people more prosperous than those it currently covers, removes a disincentive to work harder and make more money. “Our jobs for poor people are on the whole made very unattractive,” he says. “Compare that to Europe, where it isn’t only immigrants who do poor jobs and where those jobs are much more attractive. They’re more attractive because they include things like vacations. They include health care. The jobs don’t include it, but health care comes anyway.”

So Glazer remains open to government-sponsored social-insurance schemes—because of his belief in work as a foundation for family life. Americans, he notes in The Limits of Social Policy, “like to see government benefits assisting their own hard efforts, rather than simply maintaining others in failure.”

The Urban Crisis After 40 Years:
An interview with Nathan Glazer

I meet Nathan Glazer at his Victorian home a few blocks from Harvard Square. At 88, he is still inclined to walk—quickly, like a native New Yorker—to lunch on Massachusetts Avenue, and he is still quick to pull out a clipping from this morning’s Wall Street Journal to support a point. I’ve told him that our discussion will focus on cities and social policy, including the “urban crisis” that first drew him to Harvard in 1969. Glazer begins the conversation by posing a query about public housing, in which we have a strong mutual interest. . . . more

In the late 1990s, Glazer toyed with the idea that blacks’ exceptional situation—an abiding preoccupation of his career—might mean that affirmative action and similar efforts were unavoidable.

That change of heart briefly made him a liberal hero. But in his most recent writing, he has returned to the view that there is no substitute for upward mobility achieved through hard work and solid families. In the July 2010 issue of The American Interest, he wrote: “I believe the view is spreading that the improvement of the black condition must depend in greater degree on the work of blacks themselves. . . . Complex as it is, to frame a self-help policy narrative based on what is generally understood as the American immigrant path may be the best choice available: acceptance of how hard it is to get ahead in America, but recognition that one’s efforts can and often will succeed. That approach, after all, does have the merit of being largely true.”

That’s an insight to which our first African-American president should pay close attention as he tests again the limits of social policy.

Howard Husock, a contributing editor of City Journal, is the Manhattan Institute’s vice president for policy research and the director of its Social Entrepreneurship Initiative.