Labor transitions, capital investment, and the societal meaning we all crave

[Pointedstick]

Let me try out a libertarian-and-free-market--friendly way to explain why factory workers failed to transition into the new economy and instead are slowly driving and shooting themselves to death in between Trump rallies.

"Good, high-paying jobs" come from capital investment. The factory model is an example: the capitalist invests in his factory, you work the machines in his factory, lots of stuff pops out the other end, and your per-hour productivity is high so he can pay you a lot. A factory job like this is still basically manual labor but the high wage comes from the fact that the factory workers are operating a fantastically efficient machine instead of simple hand tools.

Another form of capital investment is directed by the worker by himself, in himself. He gains skills, becomes educated, holds credentials, and so on. In this way, his labor is more valuable in his chosen field even absent a huge capital investment by a capitalist. And when both are paired together, his productivity can be so high that he earns an enormous wage (doctors, engineers, etc).

During the industrial revolution, farmers transitioned fairly seamlessly to factory jobs because the capitalists did all the capital investment work for them. They built a bunch of factories and the workers simply shifted from one form of manual labor to another--tilling fields to pulling levers.

But as manufacturing jobs decline, there's no hero capitalist waiting in the wings with a big efficient production process he's put millions of dollars that you can plug into and earn a good living. In modern times, workers are now expected to invest in themselves by going to college, learning useful skills, getting credentialed, and so on.

The people who make up the farmers-turned-factory-workers social class has never had to do this before. It's all new to them. And during the same time, college became an expensive trap, full of opportunities to waste years and thousands of dollars and wind up with nothing. A bunch of them went to college, gained nothing of value except some big debts, and concluded that they'd been sold a pack of lies, instead of realizing that it was yet another example where they needed to take initiative instead of waiting for a third party to prepare everything for them like the factory-owning capitalists did during the industrial revolution. The road was simply a minefield that they didn't see because they'd never needed to look for those kinds of mines before.

In other words, these people are probably not going to successfully make this transition without a lot of help that has not been and probably won't be forthcoming, because the nature of the world of today goes against their culture and conditioning.

[Maddy]

Very interesting subject, and one I've been thinking about lately as employment opportunities continue to dry up around me in a small town whose economy has historically centered around logging and cattle production.  Here, the "factory" model has never predominated, and large segments of the population have depended upon themselves to supply both the capital and labor necessary to create their own jobs.  Yet things are changing rapidly as it becomes increasingly difficult to do that.

I was recently chatting with a cattle producer about what's happening.  He's been in the business over 45 years, and with each year that passes, he wonders how much longer he can stay in business given the inability to get easy short-term financing, given the escalation of input costs (primarily feed, which ultimately boils down to the cost of land), and given the ability of large agricultural conglomerates to manipulate market prices in a way that forces the small producer out. 

Another factor we discussed was the dramatically different mindset of young people.  Here, you often see two distinct generations living side-by-side within a single family, and the pattern is unmistakeable.  The 60-somethings who have lived here all their lives typically have amassed a good deal of land and equipment, not to mention a formidable set of skills, and they're never without work.  But a huge number of their children--now in their 30s and 40s--have virtually nothing going for them.  Absolutely no "get up and go."

[WildAboutHarry]

I recently came across Distributism, something I'd never heard of, probably thanks to the quality of my state college economics courses.  Although since the spell checker choked on Distributism, perhaps it is a really obscure avenue of economics.

Basically it seems to be pro-private property, with the means of production distributed to individuals/families/small groups.  Ideally production would be done at the lowest level of organization possible (i.e. individual, family, small business, etc.).

This approach obviously requires the ability and willingness to assume risk, which doesn't seem to conform to today's "culture and conditioning".

[Pointedstick]

The natural progression is for a goods-based economy to transition to a service-based economy as so many goods get produced so easily and cheaply that the demand for them just can't keep up. How much beef do people really need or want to eat every year? How many cars do people really want? At what point do people conclude that more housing square footage isn't actually yielding anything valuable? Etc.

The problem I think is that this process has gotten warped. Many goods are produced at the lowest possible levels of price and quality, which inevitably leads to foreign manufacturing and the need to replace them all the time. Nothing lasts. So the demand for new goods hasn't fallen like it should have. And many important services--like education, healthcare, and childcare--have gotten ridiculously expensive due primarily to government mismanagement and overregulation. So many people can't really afford these things, and spend huge quantities of their income on them anyway, depleting their income and savings and keeping them trapped in wage slavery for jobs that are themselves rapidly disappearing.

And the basic design of American towns and cities exacerbates these problems for the most economically vulnerable. Even in small towns, you usually need a car to get anywhere due to the car-centric layout. Cars are expensive, even the cheap ones; each car probably has an all-in yearly cost of $4-7k, which is a huge amount of money if you're not earning a lot. So you have two wage earners who work shit jobs halfway across down, driving beat-up rattletraps to get there, spending up to half their take-home pay on transportation. What's left goes to housing, health care, and food. Forget being able to pay off your mortgage early or have enough money to start a service-based business.

[Pointedstick]

I recently came across Distributism, something I'd never heard of, probably thanks to the quality of my state college economics courses.  Although since the spell checker choked on Distributism, perhaps it is a really obscure avenue of economics.

Basically it seems to be pro-private property, with the means of production distributed to individuals/families/small groups.  Ideally production would be done at the lowest level of organization possible (i.e. individual, family, small business, etc.).

This approach obviously requires the ability and willingness to assume risk, which doesn't seem to conform to today's "culture and conditioning".

I read a sad local story the other day. The cops busted a guy for illegally running a home engine repair business. Evidently the noise was annoying the neighbors.

It all just seemed so sad. People in my town apparently have engines that need to be repaired. This man can repair them. But he's not allowed to, because he's required to operate out of a commercial location or get a home business permit, which, with the noise complaints, he probably won't get now. So he would need to rent commercial real estate far from his house (he lives in a car-dependent subdivision), get insurance, comply with a whole host of regulations, start collecting sales taxes, etc. Huge hurdles for a blue-collar guy who knows how to repair engines.

Last I heard he was fighting the city, and will certainly fail. He will lose his livelihood and maybe his house (which is large; he probably has a huge mortgage). He might even have to pay a big fine to the city that he can't afford or go to jail. And the people who need their engines repaired will have to look elsewhere. The city will lose out on the tax revenue that might have been able to collect from his income, and property taxes may go unpaid if his house is abandoned.

A lot of this is because of zoning: residential areas aren't supposed to have businesses. And zoning is of course is an artifact of car-dependence: once cars are everywhere, people want to get away from them. You don't need zoning in a city that's walkable with few cars. It didn't exist before that. In such a walkable city, this guy could probably operate his business legally from home, with some simple and cheap noise-dampening measures, or rent very inexpensive commercial real estate on the ground level of a multi-story building (perhaps even his own building) that he can walk to.

It all just seemed so sad.

[Libertarian666]

As usual, government is the real problem.

If there really is a vast reserve of unemployed people who are intrinsically capable of doing useful work (which I believe is true), and no one is hiring them and training them, the reason must lie with government, because entrepreneurs would otherwise take advantage of this resource to make a lot of money.

What are the possible ways that the government can interfere with this process? I can think of a few but I'm sure I'm overlooking some:

Minimum wage laws.
Licensing laws.
Unemployment taxes and other regulations.

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=Pointedstick]I read a sad local story the other day. The cops busted a guy for illegally running a home engine repair business. Evidently the noise was annoying the neighbors.
[/quote]

That is a sad story, but I can certainly see some of the motivations for such regulation:  noise, safe disposal of lubricants, etc.  And a business that brings obvious, large objects like cars to the neighborhood is more difficult to conceal than running other sorts of home businesses.

I'm not convinced that the real motivation behind such actions is to raise revenue, though.  I think the bureaucracy - cops, code enforcement, planning and zoning departments, etc. - need to justify their existence.

[Pointedstick]

I agree that many of those regulations promote important goals (keep down noise, prevent industrial waste from contaminating the land, reduce undesirable vehicle traffic, etc). But, as usual, government figures out a way to promote those goals in the most hostile manner possible.

It just seems so sad how many of these problems have been created because of poor systems design. Examples:
- The town was originally laid out with cars in mind, not people, with huge streets, lots of parking,
- Large numbers of engines need to be repaired in the first place because the town is car-dependent
etc (translation: people could spend their incomes on more desirable things if they had fewer broken engines)
- Zoning laws and their associated bureaucracy and government overhead are only needed because of the car-dependence
- Large houses are built because of the large plots and large distance between residential neighborhoods and anywhere people want to go; housing becomes wasteful and expensive and people struggle to afford large houses that have large areas that are barely used
- Noise would be less of a problem if buildings were better insulated; government mandates insulation, but not enough to actually be effective for this or other purposes, and allows a variety of other grievous construction blunders.

So many of these problems would simply not exist with better systems design in the first place. Then the government could be much smaller, employment would be higher, taxes could be lower, everyone could have more money and mobility and time, etc. It could be a really wonderful place for everyone to live instead of the government hassling people for trying to make a living in an unauthorized way.

This kind of thing is an annoyance for people like you and me. We could figure out a way to comply with the regulations, pay the fees and taxes, rent the commercial real estate, hire out the yard work and property maintenance, pay the high health insurance premiums, etc. But for people at the margins of society, with few skills and little money, these hurdles are practically insurmountable.

[Pointedstick]

Yeah, this is a tough one.  On the one hand, in the world we live in, I can see why people like the idea of zoning.  At its most basic level, it is a way of preserving the commons.

I don't think it is. The commons is already preserved by the government owning it. What zoning attempts to preserve is the livable atmosphere of a place that is dominated by automobiles, because cars are people-hostile: they are noisy, ugly, polluting, dangerous, and take up a huge amount of space. People want to be far away from cars on the road, which has the inherent problem that once you need a car to get everywhere, this means that people want to be far away from desirable destinations that require car transport, increasing the need for cars in the first place! The only practical solution is to have streets too small for cars to comfortably drive, and then people will want to be close to commercial and institutional destinations, and then proximity rather than separation becomes desirable, and then nobody wants either cars or zoning. Houses will shrink, lots will shrink, prices will fall, housing will become affordable again, and people who don't make a lot of money will be able to afford to comfortably live in their modest houses with no cars, and can open up nearby service-based businesses to serve their neighbors whose proximity will will actually be desirable, not problematic.

On the other hand, as you've described it, this specific case seems like one where everybody loses:

He will lose his livelihood and maybe his house (which is large; he probably has a huge mortgage). He might even have to pay a big fine to the city that he can't afford or go to jail. And the people who need their engines repaired will have to look elsewhere. The city will lose out on the tax revenue that might have been able to collect from his income, and property taxes may go unpaid if his house is abandoned.

Do you know if re-zoning is possible?

It's always possible but it doesn't really make sense to re-zone a single house in a residential neighborhood to be commercial. He couldn't legally live there, among other issues. I doubt his neighbors would be too pleased. The suburban model is one where people are unaccustomed to living near commercial activity and don't like it, because it brings lots of cars, which is exactly what they were trying to get away from by living in a suburb far from the commercial activity.

[jafs]

A number of those problems could be minimized by better individual choices.

People could buy smaller houses, more reliable cars, etc.

Also, builders and car manufacturers could supply better products.

It's not all the fault of government, as far as I can see.

And, even in more urban denser neighborhoods, people may still have objections to noisy polluting businesses close by.

Essentially, if people made choices that took into account other people's rights and desires, much of government wouldn't be necessary.  But, since that's often not the case,...

[Pointedstick]

A number of those problems could be minimized by better individual choices.

People could buy smaller houses, more reliable cars, etc.

Also, builders and car manufacturers could supply better products.

It's not all the fault of government, as far as I can see.

No, it's not all the fault of government. But government creates the environment in which these decisions are made, which has a huge effect on them.

People can't buy smaller houses if there are no smaller houses available to buy, for example (the only smaller housing being far less desirable condos). And why would the houses be large? Because the government often mandates minimum lot size and square footage to promote a certain neighborhood character.

Why might builders not build better houses? because as the square footage of houses increases, the cost of better materials skyrockets. This would make houses unaffordable to people, so they build what the market can afford given the limitations placed on them by the government: low quality and large size.

People can't buy more reliable cars if those more reliable cars are far more expensive. And why might people be unable to afford more expensive cars? Because too much of their income is tied up in housing and health care!

And why do people need cars in the first place? Because the government laid out the streets to be 60 feet wide when planning the town and zoned the businesses 2 or 3 miles away from the houses, baking in car-dependence from the start.

And so on. I'm not trying to pin everything on the government here, because it's true that people make their own decisions, but people don't exist in a vacuum, and government has an enormous influence on the material and social context that influences our decisions.

[jafs]

I'd never buy an expensive too-large house in the suburbs if I couldn't afford it.

The housing market is to some extent driven by consumer preferences - if a lot of people wanted smaller less expensive houses and weren't willing to buy large more expensive ones, the market would certainly reflect that.  In fact, that seems to be happening to some degree already.

Consumer Reports does an excellent job of testing and reporting on good cars, including what good used cars are available.

If you don't want to live in a car-dependent area, you can choose to live somewhere you don't need one, or need one as much, can't you?

I share your sympathy/compassion for folks at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum who have trouble making ends meet, but I'm not sure the folks living in big expensive houses in the suburbs are the same folks at all.

[Pointedstick]

I'd never buy an expensive too-large house in the suburbs if I couldn't afford it.

If you lost your job or otherwise experienced an extended loss or drop in income, could you afford your current residence?

The housing market is to some extent driven by consumer preferences - if a lot of people wanted smaller less expensive houses and weren't willing to buy large more expensive ones, the market would certainly reflect that.  In fact, that seems to be happening to some degree already.

That's true, however the interplay between supply and demand is complex. The market supplies what people demand, but people only demand what the market supplies. These things can move very slowly at times. Even if people would prefer an alternative, if that alternative isn't actually available, they might not realize it.

Consumer Reports does an excellent job of testing and reporting on good cars, including what good used cars are available.

If you don't want to live in a car-dependent area, you can choose to live somewhere you don't need one, or need one as much, can't you?

In the USA, there aren't many such places, and most of them are extremely expensive, out of reach for a lot of people. People move to the suburbs precisely because they are affordable. American cities are generally divided between nice neighborhoods where the poor and working class can't reasonably afford to live and crime-ridden dumps where nobody wants to move to.

I share your sympathy/compassion for folks at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum who have trouble making ends meet, but I'm not sure the folks living in big expensive houses in the suburbs are the same folks at all.

I think there's a substantial amount of overlap. A lot of these people are barely affording their lifestyle. One shock, and the whole house of cards collapses. There's definitely poor decision-making at play here, but the whole lifestyle itself came about through a variety of post-WWII government policies that systematically encouraged the growth of suburbs and automobile transportation. It's really quite a fascinating history.

[jafs]

For a while, yes.  But I get your point, and agree that a major underlying factor at work is the loss of good jobs - in fact, I think that's a bigger factor than government policies.

We live in a smallish city - a college town - and it's very possible to live without needing a car much here.  So there are alternatives to large cities or suburbs.  But there aren't tons of good jobs here, and people need to go where the jobs are (see above).

My general sense is that suburbs came about largely because cities got more crowded, less safe, etc. and so people wanted more space, quieter and safer places to live, etc.  And, then, ironically, as people who could afford it moved out of the cities, the cities declined further.  Is that not the case?

We're definitely seeing a return to the idea of walk-able cities, with denser and smaller housing, partly because of ecological concerns.

[jafs]

I think your version of what's happening, as the thread started, is pretty good.

If we add in the increasing diversion of money to those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom/middle, it seems like a pretty good explanation of what's happening and why.  As those at the lower end make/keep less, they have fewer options, including the option to get more training/education.

And, of course, training programs often paint a rosier picture of the job prospects for graduates, since they want/need to attract students.

[jafs]

I've never thought of suburbs as being cheaper than cities - I looked it up, and there are a few comparisons that suggest cities are cheaper, if you factor in transportation costs (being able to get by without a car or with one instead of two seems to be a big difference over time).

Of course, you get a smaller living space in a city, and it's noisier and more crowded, probably higher crime, etc.

[Pointedstick]

For a while, yes.  But I get your point, and agree that a major underlying factor at work is the loss of good jobs - in fact, I think that's a bigger factor than government policies.

We live in a smallish city - a college town - and it's very possible to live without needing a car much here.  So there are alternatives to large cities or suburbs.  But there aren't tons of good jobs here, and people need to go where the jobs are (see above).

Right, the jobs are the problem. And if they need a car to get to the jobs, it doesn't really matter much how walkable their city is.

My general sense is that suburbs came about largely because cities got more crowded, less safe, etc. and so people wanted more space, quieter and safer places to live, etc.  And, then, ironically, as people who could afford it moved out of the cities, the cities declined further.  Is that not the case?

Basically. It's a really interesting history! However, the problem was never excessive crowdedness in the first place. European and Asian cities are very dense but people love them. They go on vacation there, in fact.

A city can be perfectly quiet and safe, and the lack of space can feel magical instead of constricting. The problem is cars. They're loud and ugly and dangerous, and they make people feel unsafe and want to separate themselves from them. This separation destroys walkability, which destroys small street-level businesses without parking, so more parking is added, which further increases distances, which requires larger streets where cars can go faster, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. All of this encourages crime and economically disadvantages people who can barely afford to own cars, and makes the city a smelly, dangerous, polluted dump. So people want to escape for something else, which in our case is a suburb, which further destroys the social fabric of the city and it turns into a ghetto where only poor people and criminals live, starting a cycle of "urban renewal" that leads to gentrification and all the poor people being pushed out into the cheaper suburbs, where they can barely afford to live because they need two or three cars to get anywhere and their huge house (all the houses in the suburbs are huge) costs a lot of time and money to maintain. This is where a lot of American cities are at right now.

[jafs]

One factor that Wikipedia mentions is the migration north of many black people, and corresponding racial issues/violence, and that white folks started moving out of the cities ("white flight").

When I grew up in NY, nobody had a car, and everybody walked/took public transportation.  I loved that experience - it definitely increases your sense of connection/community, when people are walking together or riding the bus together, etc. rather than being isolated in your own little cars.  But, now, I also love being able to get into my car and drive to a restaurant, parking close by and not having to walk much.

Also, the infrastructure in NY is strained to the breaking point, and a lot of stuff seems not to work well, or is on the verge of collapse.  I also like things to work well.

Even if it were more affordable, I seriously doubt that I'd choose to live in NY now, even though there are a lot of great things there.

[Pointedstick]

I think your version of what's happening, as the thread started, is pretty good.

If we add in the increasing diversion of money to those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom/middle, it seems like a pretty good explanation of what's happening and why.  As those at the lower end make/keep less, they have fewer options, including the option to get more training/education.

Of course, this is an outcome, not a cause. It started when manufacturing productivity started to grow faster than workers' wages. What happened was that, as always, the machines got more efficient. But employment fell. Turned out there was a limit for demand. We could produce the same amount or more with less labor, so we did, rather than producing even more with the same amount of labor input.

To a certain extent this should be seen as good! We don't need to infinitely consume. There's a limit to how much stuff people want and need, same as food. We don't lament the fact that only 3% of people have to be farmers. If we can produce more with less labor, that's great. The only problem is ensuring that the displaced laborers transition to something else. But those displaced factory workers didn't smoothly become personal trainers, nurses, and app developers like the displaced farmers had become factory workers. Nobody helped them, and they didn't have the mindset and culture to do it on their own, so they became economically disadvantaged.

So lots of people had less money, and they became more price-sensitive. Wal-Mart and other similar firms came along and said, "here, have some really cheap stuff that you can now afford despite your very low income!" Of course the stuff is only cheap because it's low quality and made abroad, further depressing domestic manufacturing, putting the remaining employed american workers in a worse bargaining position against capital, and and plopping the poorest people onto a treadmill of buying crap that breaks and needs to be replaced.

[jafs]

I think there's also been a clear and deliberate shifting of money upwards, even when productivity of workers has increased - they don't get compensated for the increases in their productivity.  It's been said before, but bears repeating, that Wal-Mart pays their employees so little that they need government assistance to get by, while the Walton family is one of the wealthiest in the country.

And, I agree we don't need to always consume more, and that we should have and should still be helping people transition with stuff like job training programs.

The underlying issue of the connection between spending and a healthy economy is still a concern for me.  If/when people buy less, it means less money circulating and has a negative effect on the economy, even if it's a better personal decision (and better for the environment as well).  I haven't been able to sort that one out yet.

[Pointedstick]

The underlying issue of the connection between spending and a healthy economy is still a concern for me.  If/when people buy less, it means less money circulating and has a negative effect on the economy, even if it's a better personal decision (and better for the environment as well).  I haven't been able to sort that one out yet.

I think the problem is revealed by the low savings rate in the USA. This shows that most people are pretty much stretched to the limit all the time. So whenever there's the tiniest uptick in unemployment, people get wiped out because they don't have the savings to survive. Whenever demand falls slightly, wages fall and people lose their houses. Etc. The best way to break the connection between constant spending and economic health is to have a society where average people who have never heard of Early Retirement Extreme or Mr Money Mustache are able to have a reasonable savings rate without trying too hard--say 20% minimum. A high savings rate would introduce a lot of slack into the economy such that short-term adjustments in employment, demand, or wages wouldn't cause everything to fall apart.

How would you get people to lower their spending en masse? Decrease the costs associated with housing, transportation, health care, education, child care, and food. And so many of these are connected.

For example, people need to pay for childcare because both parents are commonly working these days. Two working parents means you need two cars most of the time. It also means nobody available to keep up the household and prepare healthy meals, which means a lot of take-out, prepared food, and restaurant meals, which are more expensive than groceries and make people fat and sick. And the house and property are so big (average new construction is now like 2,600 sf) that maybe you need to hire cleaning and landscaping services. But wait… the reason both parents are working in the first place is to afford the mortgage on this big expensive house! So why did they buy such a stupid big expensive house? Because the only houses in the neighborhoods with good public schools are big and expensive.

If you solve the problems of education and housing, all the other ones begin to solve themselves. Mom can stop working at a deathless job she hates, the childcare bill can be slashed or eliminated, everyone can eat healthy food, the food and cleaning bills fall, nobody is obese, and all the preventable lifestyle diseases disappear and stop burdening the healthcare system, which reduces prices.

If you further re-design cities to reduce car dependence and fix health care with either market-based or single-payer reforms that actually work, then maybe they don't even need any cars at all, and they can walk everywhere and take the train, subway, or bus, and can get rid of their $1,000+ monthly car and health insurance bills! Now  this family can probably save 35% of their income no sweat, and if dad loses his job for a few months or wants to quit and start a small business of his own, it's no big deal.

This also means that the unemployment comp system might not even be necessary! That frees up a huge chunk of the federal budget that can go towards projects that increase the nation's capital stock, like infrastructure or R&D. Or it can be used to lower taxes and further increase people's savings rate. So many good things can happen.

[jafs]

That all sounds good to me 

I didn't see how we solve the problem of education - that seems to be a bedrock issue that the rest kind of piles up on top of.  How do we do that?

Also, I think that people buy bigger and more expensive houses than they need for other reasons, too, like image and status stuff.

And, though your version certainly reduces the drastic consequences of short term and short changes in consumption, which is a very good thing, isn't the overall health of the economy still linked to spending?  If everybody reduced their spending permanently, wouldn't that have drastic negative consequences overall?

[Pointedstick]

The school system's primary problem is the fact that the "neighborhood school" system interacts poorly with the other problems I've mentioned, and causes the respectable, well-to-do families to cluster in "good neighborhoods" that have good schools. In these neighborhoods schools get better and housing prices go up, and it becomes a cycle where poorer people are priced out and have to live in shittier neighborhoods. The good teachers are attracted to the good schools and leave the bad schools, so the bad schools become hell pits with terrible teachers and kids from very difficult backgrounds who aren't able to learn well in a normal school environment that assumes kids who want to learn. The huge morass of state and federal laws box these schools in with numerous requirements and restrictions, and so they may even have to resort to pseudo-fraud to make their students appear capable of passing standardized tests.

The best solution to this problem is to eliminate the phenomenon of "good neighborhoods" that become expensive magnets for families who want their kids to get good educations but can't afford private schooling (i.e. most of them). Make every neighborhood good and then all the schools have enough good students and good teachers that the minority of problem students don't drag it down (this very phenomenon happened to my elementary school when I was a kid and made a big impression on me).

So how do you make every neighborhood a good neighborhood? Well, you make it walkable and affordable, which means small streets, no cars required, small houses, small lots, street-level shops… See how everything's interrelated?

Another problem is the existence of entrenched underclasses in American society, and this is the rough, difficult-to-talk-about part. Kids from these backgrounds may have to deal with poverty, malnutrition, divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, the denigration of education, a toxic social environment, etc. It's a real tragedy. Right now these kids are clustered in normal schools with bad teachers. If instead, they could be put in special schools that emphasized discipline, respect, attentiveness, and mastery of remedial skills, with qualified high-quality teachers, that might really work. This is the contemporary "no excuses" approach that so far appears to be working well, despite seeming cruel to people who prefer softness and compassion.

[jafs]

Nice - a beautiful circular situation 

And, not everybody wants to live that densely - I know I don't anymore.

But, it sounds as if you'd be a good city planner/designer if you wanted to do that.

[Maddy]

Good neighborhoods require good people, and after nearly 70 years of social engineering (including implementation of "neighborhood villages") and the expenditure of many billions of dollars, it's clear that there are a whole lot of people who are bound and determined to f*** up their lives and take their neighborhoods down with them.