anotherpanacea

Tag: The City

  • Democracy and Coffee

    Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…

  • Social Capital and Diversity

    I’ve written about Robert Putnam before in this space, but I’ve been holding off on commenting on his most recent ‘discovery’ that ethnic diversity leads to significant losses of public trust. Apparently the full Skytte lecture will be published sometime soon in Scandinavian Political Studies. Still no sign of it, though the Financial Times published…

  • Robert Putnam on Commuting

    Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…

  • Walmart: A sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism

    I came across a blog a while back that argued that Walmart’s size and distribution has put them in a state-like position vis-a-vis their workers, the communities in which their stores are based, and the regulation of their distributors. When you think about it, there’s a strong congruity between communist architecture and Sam’s Club chic.…

  • Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy

    Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army…

  • Is charity a good indicator of civic virtue?

    Arthur C. Brooks is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. His recent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, develops a number of data sets to show that conservatives give a larger percentage of their income than liberals. There’s a review here, but it doesn’t answer some of the most…