Disturbing and purging my mind:

— The financial reporting Pro Publica won its Pulitzer for.

— Also a much-deserved commentary award for David Leonhardt.

— Will Carl Gustav XVI’s visit to Afghanistan be a turning point that restores Sweden to its 17th century great power status?

— “For the Greeks, women were naturally ‘hot’ and men were ‘cool’; women needed the cooling power of sex with men to keep from going crazy.”

— Jason Furman on Wal-Mart (PDF).

— Fun with DC redistricting.

— The climate fallback plan.

— Roundup on how Randal O’Toole is wrong.

Hosting a seder tonight, so naturally it’s Joy Division “Passover”

I’ve always thought there was something about the Lincoln administration’s determination to fight and win the Civil War that was a bit odd. Secession gave the regionally based Republican Party large congressional majorities that wouldn’t exist if southern states had representation in congress. What’s more, the Republican Party’s controversial policy objective of banning slavery from the western territories could have been easily achieved by the much more modest policy of simply ensuring military control over the territories. Some fighting in border states such as Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky is easy to understand but why try to reconquer the Deep South?

In an interesting new paper (PDF), Zachary Liskow suggests economic motives were at the root:

Specifically, using voting patterns as representations of the Northern population’s preferences, this paper tests empirically whether the economic motivations of its manufacturing interests might have been important components of Northerners’ support of the decision to fight. The hypothesis that the North had economic motivations for keeping the South in the Union yields a specific prediction: counties with relatively large amounts of these manufacturing interests should shift their votes from Democrats to Republicans between 1860 and 1864. The reason is the following: the best way to keep the South in the Union before the Civil War was to vote for the Democrats, reducing the likelihood of secession by voting for the party more accommodating to Southern slavery interests. However, the best way to keep the South in the Union during the war was to vote for the Republicans, who were more likely to pursue the war until victory was achieved.

Using county-level census data and voting data from the 1860 and 1864 presidential elections, I find that there is a significant shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing employment. This shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing together amounts to 2.25% of voters in Northern states; that is, taking the results literally suggests that 2.25% of Northern voters shifted their votes to the Republicans out of a desire to protect their manufacturing interests by keeping the South in the Union.

The basic story here would be something like northern manufacturing interests wanted to keep the southern client base behind the US tariff wall in order to maintain privileged access to the market rather than compete on a level playing field with British goods.

(cc photo by jaywphotos)

Ben Adler, reviewing Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York makes the excellent point that you can’t discuss the social underpinnings of these trends in isolation from the economic fundamentals of supply and demand:

Osman writes engagingly for an academic, but he does lapse into jargon, throwing around undefined sociological terms like “Fordist” and “gemeinschaft” with abandon. Osman’s narrative also focuses excessively on the cultural shifts that drove gentrification rather than the raw economic fundamentals. As many of his quotes and anecdotes illustrate, gentrifiers often did not want to discover the next neighborhood; they simply could not afford the last one. Osman writes: “Rather than seeking race and class homogeneity, middle class beatniks, radicals, settlement workers, and gay men pushed into poor districts in search of diversity.’” Seeking out diversity was certainly one factor, but so was the simple fact that the beatniks could no longer afford to buy brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Osman acknowledges as much only pages later: “In some cases, white-collar professionals offset their anxiety about racial mixing with their desire for attractive, affordable central city housing.”

And the reason for this price surge is an important story, which Osman largely neglects: The government has favored suburban sprawl over walkable, mixed-use urban environments. So while one-third of Americans have stated in surveys that they would rather live in an urban environment, only 10 to 15 percent of housing fits that description. This in turn means exorbitant prices for the precious few urban neighborhoods, even ones that just a few years earlier would have been ignored by the wealthy precisely because they had a little too much “diversity.”

Neighborhoods are, in part, expressions of specific historical moments. You would never build something exactly like “Brownstone Brooklyn” or Paris or Amsterdam or Cambridge, MA or Georgetown starting in the 21st century. Anything you build after the invention of the automobile is going to be more oriented around automobile usage than a neighborhood built before the invention of the automobile. But instead of saying “given that cars exist and people like that, market-oriented development of new neighborhoods will probably be more auto-oriented than old neighborhoods” the country has been engaged in a decades-long experiment in car-focused industrial policy. We’ve had large scale investment in moving cars around combined with widespread adoption (even in New York City!) of regulations mandating the construction of lots of parking alongside all new buildings. Having made traditional walkable neighborhoods illegal to build, it then turns out that many of the existing ones become prohibitively expensive. Since you have to be somewhat eccentric to want to pay a premium for walkability, the neighborhoods can then come to be defined by the idiosyncratic tastes of their residents while the policy-favored suburbs are associated with conformity. But in a level playing field market place you’d see less of a price differential, and urbanism would be both more common and more “normal,” though still a bit of a minority taste.