Why It's So Hard to Get Real
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Basically he points out that the quest for "authenticity" is both opposed to progress ("consumer culture"...) and rather a quest of social markers. But he jumps to the conclusion that we should consequently "accept [modernity's] trade-offs". It seems like a typical example of paralogism: either your for us (our current implementation of progress, the powers in place) or you're against us. There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin?
Nevertheless, what he points about "authenticity" is important as people who reject consumerism tend to throw the baby out with bath water and seek a return to an idealized past. The problem here is the lack of visible alternatives to our regimes (so, in some sense, the powerfull media and propanda industry).
However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!
Yes. I agree. Moving away from old mistakes (e.g. suburbia and car culture) is not a departure from modernity. No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress.
In any case, the old regime is going to die. It's unsustainable, and it's already showing its cracks. This is why I don't invest in the stock market. It was a great idea between 1930 and 2000, as American corporations managed to become increasingly dominant in modern life, but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.
Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily imply less powerful corporations: they're already fighting for the control of what we are allowed to create, how we can interact (privacy), what we can do with our stuff, which crops we will eat, etc. I'm an optimist though: I hope they won't eventually succeed.
> No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks,
You're assuming that everyone in suburbia spends 80 minutes commuting. Some do, some don't.
You're also assuming that commute times are uniform and that minimizing them is the only goal.
In my household, commute time is 10 minutes by one person and 60 by the other. Moving closer to the 60 would move us farther from other things that are important to us.
> and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress.
You're assuming that people value living closer together. Some don't. They'll gladly pay extra commute time to avoid it.
I write "extra" because that time on the train/bus is also commute time, and it isn't necessarily better time than car time. Yes, some people do prefer train time to driving, but not everyone thinks that 30 minutes on a train (or bus) is better than 80 minutes in a car. (If you need to run errands or do something, the car wins.) And even fewer like the train/bus if it's the same or more time.
I think that people who don't like suburbia's tradeoffs shouldn't live there. The same is true of cities....
Not everyone is a DINK couple. Some people even drive because that makes it possible for them to quickly get to their kids in an emergency. (Parents value such things.)
I grew up in suburban Sydney and was always confused by why Americans derided suburbs so much; but then I saw American suburbs. All they need is better planning. Throw in some more commercial districts, and prevent the building of zillions of identical houses by discouraging a single builder from building hundreds of houses; instead sell individual lots to individuals who can then contract with their own builders.
Slightly OT, but if anyone here ever wants to witness a textbook example of suburbia run amok, creating a wasteland of little value to humanity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga
You're forgetting that many of the suburbians see cities every day because that's where they work....
What fraction of the urban crowd have a comparable experience? ("I grew up in a suburb and hated it" doesn't count.)
FWIW, almost all of suburban South Bay housing has a grocery store within 20 walking minutes. (There may be a spot in the middle of Atherton that doesn't. The rural areas of Woodside and Portola Valley don't.) I mention that because of the claim above about how to "fix" American suburbs.
I don't think either group of commuters is getting the real experience of the place they are commuting to (the skyscraper forest is not the real city, and the office park is not the real suburb), but I think most members of both groups are legitimately glad when they go home and get away from a place that they don't like to be.
Driving into SF and taking Muni takes you through and over residential neighborhoods.
Neither 101 nor 280 are elevated enough to see beyond the biz that line them.
That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?
That's an interesting collection of suburb streets because they're counter-examples to the claims made by urbanites about suburbs. (With the exception of University, they have restaurants, grocery stores, and so on within walking distance. Since University goes through downtown PA, one might guess that there's a grocery store within a block or two - which there is.)
I assumed that the urbanites making those claims were making them out of ignorance. If those are streets that they experience, my assumption is wrong.
> What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?
I can see that the houses are packed close together, where there are houses. I can see the apartments. I can see the street life.
Note that most workers experience some aspects of the pedestrian life at lunch. They walk by the restaurants, the neighborhood grocery stores, and nightclubs.
Not everyone thinks that having a couple of nightclubs within walking distance is a good thing. If you do, great - you should live near them.
My point is that there's nothing wrong with someone else having different priorities.
What's your basis for "too few and too far apart"?
All of "suburb" SF Bay Peninsula has grocery stores and neighborhood restaurants within 20 minutes walking from residences. (The rural areas, Woodside, Portola Valley, the Santa Cruz mountains, Ladera, etc. don't.)
The same is true of the Sacramento valley towns that I know, Davis, Sacramento, Woodland, Roseville.
That's why I asked where these "grocery stores are miles away" suburbs are.
Downtown PA is arguably the worst (on the Peninsula) when it comes to grocery access by foot because its store is Whole Foods. (Atherton may be as bad. I don't know about Monte Sereno.)
In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away. I have walked there once but am unlikely to ever do it again. In the other direction, California Avenue is 1.5 miles away, and then after that it's another 4 miles to Castro Street. People are certainly capable of walking these distances but I don't believe that they actually do.
That may be, but you get to argue that detail with the folks above. (We can then get out a map and see how much of the Peninsula qualifies.)
> In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away.
So what? There are closer restaurants and grocery stores. (It's not possible to have everything within 1 mile, or even 10 miles.)
The requirement was that "a grocery store and restaurants within walking distance". Peninsula cities satisfy that requirement, even though, like everywhere else, there are restaurants and grocery stores that aren't within that distance.
For example, no one would argue that SF doesn't have restaurants within walking distance of most residences even though most SF residences are not within walking distance of Zuma.
I'm familiar with a fair number of US suburbs (mostly in California) and that's true of all of them.
How about some actual examples of American suburbs for which this isn't true?
Gentrification has turned affordable housing in dense city centres into a thing of the past - now "downtown living" is purely a luxury, wealthy thing in most cities. This has dealt a great blow to the poor of this country, as they are forced to relocate to suburbs inaccessible via reasonable public transit. To even get to work on time involves buying, insuring, and maintaining a car, which no matter which way you cut it is considerably more expensive than any bus/subway pass I've ever seen.
It is often difficult for the middle and upper classes to see just how financially debilitating the car culture has been on the poor. A lot of this is the cultural ingrained notion that driving around is the "right" way to travel, and some bias against transit (smelly, unseemly people, personal safety concerns, etc) - I know some people who live in suburbia, who have come from transit-heavy countries/cities, who would jump at the chance to get rid of at least one car from the garage if they could.
Are you arguing that their concerns are not based in fact or that they shouldn't care about such things?
Good for you. My point is that other people are, wait for it, different. More to the point, they're getting something out of their drive that they value. It's okay that you don't agree with them, but it's not okay to insist that they're wrong or that they don't exist.
> When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.
That's your opinion. Their opinion is different. Why doesn't their opinion deserve as much respect as yours?
It's quite possible for the dominance of corporations to remain the same or even increase even as the share of the economy held by the S&P 500 goes down.
I'm betting that corps will continue to be as dominant, if not more so.
I agree with this statement, but not with the conclusion you seem to be drawing from it. It is quite likely that the share of the world economy held by the top 500 US based corporations (S&P 500 only includes companies that are actively traded in the US...) will decline.
The world economy is becoming more diverse as other nations rise to prominence, wealth and technology slowly and finally start to spread and more and more startups are created even within the US. So, yes the S&P 500 is likely to represent an ever smaller percentage of the total market.
However, you seem to be assuming that means the S&P 500 itself will contract. You must remember that the world economy is not a zero sum game. It is quite plausible (I will not speculate on probabily here, but very plausible) that the S&P 500 in particular and the US share of the world economy shrinks in relation to the total, while still growing in an absolute sense.
Even if you really believe the actual value of the S&P 500 in particular and the US economy in general will decrease in absolute value (not just relative share), then the answer is not to refuse to invest, but to diversify and include more foreign stocks.
That's fine as long as you realize that it's your definition of progress. I spend between 70-90 minutes commuting by car each day and I have no problem with it: it's normally quite relaxing. There's essentially no traffic for me to deal with since I live out in the country and commute to a suburban job. And one of the reasons we moved out here is because we don't want to live next to everyone else.
I really wish people would quit with the assumption that everyone else wants what they want!
There does seem to be correlation. Whether it's coincidence or causation (in either direction) is unclear.
Why should we ignore this?
FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it.
> However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!
This "resilent" claim is interesting. The dependent systems haven't had the mass famines that are a staple of the decentralized ones.
Yes, I agree that there are lots of potential failure points in centralized agriculture. However, experience matters too.
Note that there actually isn't "a" centralized agriculture system, there are many, one or more for each common foodstuff.
For example, Kansas grows lots of wheat, but so does Canada, so crop failures in Kansas don't have a huge effect in California, even though CA doesn't grow much wheat. (I'm guessing that CA doesn't produce much wheat, so substitute a state that doesn't produce wheat if CA does.)
There is one counter-example - "gas from corn" in the US had a horrible effect on food prices in Mexico. (We'd be better off importing methanol from Brazil.)
Second point: I was not formulating a binary centralized vs decentralized debate where transporting food is not allowed or we go back to the Middle-Age; I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008). It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.
If I misrepresented you, feel free to demonstrate said misrepresentations.
> I fail to see the correlation between proponents of "authenticity" and dictator regimes. First, in the article authenticity proponents are pictured as "anti-globalization" activists:
Do you really want to argue that anti-globalization folks are not (mostly) left of US center? Or that they don't idealize rather crappy third world countries?
> I rarely see vegetarians as mostly concerned by marxism.
Good for you, but no one said that they were. Few people, including vegetarians are "mostly concerned" with Marxism and it's quite possible to criticize consumer culture from a non-Marxist perspective. Nevertheless, a lot of such criticism is from such a perspective. That's why I wrote "FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it."
> Moreover it is questionnable to correlate dictator regimes with Marxism: many south-amercian or african regimes are/were backed by the US/France/etc...
The existence of non-Marxist dictatorial regimes doesn't imply that Marxist regimes don't tend toward the dictatorial. Note also that western countries have supported somewhat Marxist clients.
> I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008).
How about some supporting evidence for the "more autonomy" theory? IIRC, the rice crisis was due to a price increase that wasn't even noticed in the US. That's why I mentioned the recent corn crisis in Mexico. Prices went up more in the US, but Mexico had food riots.
> It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or
I'm not interested in "common sense", I'm interested in what's actually true.
If cotton gives them a GDP of $2000/year while rice gives them a GDP of $500/year, cotton gives them a much bigger cushion if the rice price doubles. Yes, a cotton failure hurts, but so does a rice failure.
An extra $500/year can make a huge difference at this level. It may let them save enough to survive a bad year.
> that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that GMOs double their yield and the price is equal to 10% of their crop vs a "traditional" price of 0. That still looks like a 90% benefit. Why is that bad?
Of course, if the benefit is 10% but the extra cost is 50%, it's a bad deal, but foreign corps aren't in a position to force anyone to buy. (Their govts are, but that's a different problem.)
If you're going to argue that someone close to the edge shouldn't do what's most profitable for them, please provide the numbers.
Anyway, it talked about consumerism as being all about defining yourself by what you consume, and how this makes you a dull person who never does anything worthwhile or interesting. By this definition the obsessive "organic" or "local food" types are just as boringly consumerist as any Manolo-obsessed bar skank or the douchebag driving the BMW he can't really afford. Anti-consumerism is a form of consumerism just as mind-dulling as consumerism itself.
I am forced by geography to shop at a rather hippieish supermarket in Berkeley (the Berkeley Bowl) where I always pity those fellow shoppers who have nothing more interesting to think about than how to optimise the organicness of their purchases in order to increase their own self-image. Personally I try not to buy anything labelled "organic" and to always choose plastic over paper, just to cancel some of them out.
I'm a pretty left-wing liberal, and for me Rebel Sell was a powerful antidote to the sometimes-ridiculous conceits and dogmas of the left - including the belief that mainstream culture is phony (think The Matrix or, more recently, Wall-E), the sheeple are all brainwashed, and the best thing the Hipster Elect can do for them is to try and wake them up.
My problem with many rejections of consumerism is that in fact they are rejections of the consumerism of people with fewer dollars and perhaps degrees. I hoped the peak of absurdity was reached when the NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the Reverend Billy, who does anti-Starbucks stunts. It did not seem to bother those who wrote in the following week that the magazine routinely features outfits in the fashion section that would cover the monthly mortgage on a pretty good house in much of the country.
Also reminds me of the Chicago term "Trixie". The Wikipedia entry nails the definition: "a "blond, late-twenties woman with a ponytail who works in PR or marketing, drives a black Jetta, gets manicures and no-foam skim lattes."[5] Trixies typically also have a small dog (a pug, puggle or shiba inu) and know all of the other neighborhood dog owners by their dogs name." I'm sure that nowadays Trixie only buys local organic produce.
Therefore, the authenticity movement likes brutal third world dictators
I for one, love modernity, buy some food from local sources, some others even from the "hippie" stores, other from the local cheapie chain supermarkets. It's always balancing quality, convenience, budget and our health. We all have a different sense for what is a good balance between those criteria.
Surely the author has a different perspective than mine, and may be right for even a majority of cases, there are definitely those that seek validation and some sense of self worth with their behaviour. Others, and this is my perspective, just want to be pragmatic and maybe not too stupid.
When the chips are down, almost no one wants to get rid of modernity. The anti-vaccine morons and the creationist loons and the Tea Party slobs are out there, but they're on the fringe. On the other hand, the concerns being voiced in the "authenticity" movement are legitimate; is it really good for us, as a nation, to have an economy that relies on an environmentally costly fuel that we have to import from religiously bigoted and psychopathic despots?
Peak oil precisely means that it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it. We've used up most of the cheap, easy-to-reach oil and now we're paying more (and producing more pollution) to get at the expensive, hard-to-reach oil.
(seriously, over here owning a car is a huge measure of wealth, even if it is a 1994 clunker like mine)