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Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Housing Roundup #7, published by Zvi on March 5, 2024 on LessWrong. Legalize housing. It is both a good slogan and also a good idea. The struggle is real, ongoing and ever-present. Do not sleep on it. The Housing Theory of Everything applies broadly, even to the issue of AI. If we built enough housing that life vastly improved and people could envision a positive future, they would be far more inclined to think well about AI. In Brief What will AI do to housing? If we consider what the author here calls a 'reasonably optimistic' scenario and what I'd call a 'maximally disappointingly useless' scenario, all AI does is replace some amount of some forms of labor. Given current AI capabilities, it won't replace construction, so some other sectors get cheaper, making housing relatively more expensive. Housing costs rise, the crisis gets more acute. Chris Arnade says we live in a high-regulation low-trust society in America, and this is why our cities have squalor and cannot have nice things. I do not buy it. I think America remains a high-trust society in the central sense. We trust individuals, and we are right to do so. We do not trust our government to be competent, and are right not to do so, but the problem there is not the lack of trust. Reading the details of Arnade's complaints pointed to the Housing Theory of Everything and general government regulatory issues. Why are so many of the things not nice, or not there at all? Homelessness, which is caused by lack of housing. The other half, that we spend tons of money for public works that are terrible, is because such government functions are broken. So none of this is terribly complicated. Matt Yglesias makes the case against subsidizing home ownership. Among other things, it creates NIMBYs that oppose building housing, it results in inefficient allocation of the housing stock, it encourages people to invest in a highly concentrated way we otherwise notice is highly unwise and so on. He does not give proper attention to the positives, particularly the ability to invest in and customize a place of one's own, and does not address the 'community buy-in' argument except to notice that one main impact of that, going NIMBY, is an active negative. Also he does not mention that the subsidies involved increase inequality, and the whole thing makes everyone who needs to rent much worse off. I agree that our subsidies for homeownership are highly inefficient and dumb. A neutral approach would be best. Zoning does not only ruin housing. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour skipped New Zealand because there were not sufficient resource consent permits available to let her perform at Eden Park. They only get six concerts a year, you see. With Pink's two shows on March 8 and March 9 and Coldplay's three shows on November 13, 15 and 16, it leaves Eden Park with only one concert slot this year. Considering the Grammy winner is playing seven shows across two Australian venues this February, Sautner says: "Clearly, this wasn't sufficient to host Taylor Swift." … The venue also needs to consider the duration of concerts in any conversations - as the parameters of Eden Park's resource consent means shows need a scheduled finishing time of 10.30pm, something that may have been too difficult for Swift to commit to. A short video making the basic and obviously correct case that we should focus on creating dense walkable areas in major cities. There is huge demand for this, supplying it makes people vastly more productive and happier, it is better for the planet, it is a pure win all around. Jonathan Berk: "Only 1% of the land in America's 35 largest cities is walkable. But those areas generate a whopping 20% of the US GDP." Legalize Housing Wait, is that, yeah, I think it is, well I'll be. Let's go. Elizabeth Warren: 40 years ago, a typical single-fam...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Housing Roundup #7, published by Zvi on March 5, 2024 on LessWrong. Legalize housing. It is both a good slogan and also a good idea. The struggle is real, ongoing and ever-present. Do not sleep on it. The Housing Theory of Everything applies broadly, even to the issue of AI. If we built enough housing that life vastly improved and people could envision a positive future, they would be far more inclined to think well about AI. In Brief What will AI do to housing? If we consider what the author here calls a 'reasonably optimistic' scenario and what I'd call a 'maximally disappointingly useless' scenario, all AI does is replace some amount of some forms of labor. Given current AI capabilities, it won't replace construction, so some other sectors get cheaper, making housing relatively more expensive. Housing costs rise, the crisis gets more acute. Chris Arnade says we live in a high-regulation low-trust society in America, and this is why our cities have squalor and cannot have nice things. I do not buy it. I think America remains a high-trust society in the central sense. We trust individuals, and we are right to do so. We do not trust our government to be competent, and are right not to do so, but the problem there is not the lack of trust. Reading the details of Arnade's complaints pointed to the Housing Theory of Everything and general government regulatory issues. Why are so many of the things not nice, or not there at all? Homelessness, which is caused by lack of housing. The other half, that we spend tons of money for public works that are terrible, is because such government functions are broken. So none of this is terribly complicated. Matt Yglesias makes the case against subsidizing home ownership. Among other things, it creates NIMBYs that oppose building housing, it results in inefficient allocation of the housing stock, it encourages people to invest in a highly concentrated way we otherwise notice is highly unwise and so on. He does not give proper attention to the positives, particularly the ability to invest in and customize a place of one's own, and does not address the 'community buy-in' argument except to notice that one main impact of that, going NIMBY, is an active negative. Also he does not mention that the subsidies involved increase inequality, and the whole thing makes everyone who needs to rent much worse off. I agree that our subsidies for homeownership are highly inefficient and dumb. A neutral approach would be best. Zoning does not only ruin housing. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour skipped New Zealand because there were not sufficient resource consent permits available to let her perform at Eden Park. They only get six concerts a year, you see. With Pink's two shows on March 8 and March 9 and Coldplay's three shows on November 13, 15 and 16, it leaves Eden Park with only one concert slot this year. Considering the Grammy winner is playing seven shows across two Australian venues this February, Sautner says: "Clearly, this wasn't sufficient to host Taylor Swift." … The venue also needs to consider the duration of concerts in any conversations - as the parameters of Eden Park's resource consent means shows need a scheduled finishing time of 10.30pm, something that may have been too difficult for Swift to commit to. A short video making the basic and obviously correct case that we should focus on creating dense walkable areas in major cities. There is huge demand for this, supplying it makes people vastly more productive and happier, it is better for the planet, it is a pure win all around. Jonathan Berk: "Only 1% of the land in America's 35 largest cities is walkable. But those areas generate a whopping 20% of the US GDP." Legalize Housing Wait, is that, yeah, I think it is, well I'll be. Let's go. Elizabeth Warren: 40 years ago, a typical single-fam...

"From the environmental aspect, composing has so many benefits. When you compost your food instead of throw way in the landfill, it gets proper aeration and it has oxygen to properly decompose so it doesn't release harmful greenhouse gasses like methane into the environment. So it's helping kind of the global warming movement on one aspect. And then from another lens, I'm taking AP environmental science right now and my teacher was talking about how one of the main reasons that they're requiring compost in California is because they're running out of landfill space.  And so landfill space is obviously really detrimental to a lot of ecosystems because you're displacing those natural lands to put in manmade things like the landfills.  And so when we compost our food, we're not taking up those lands and taking those lands away from natural ecosystems.  And lastly, composting is known as black gold. And so, compost is really valuable to a lot of plants, and so, when we compost instead of just throwing it away, we create that natural fertilizer, so composting also reduces the use of synthetic fertilizers, which cause so many problems in the ecosystem." Grades of Green is an international non-profit organization, originally founded in Southern California by moms to “educate, empower and inspire students to take action and achieve long lasting environmental impact in their schools and communities.”  Special Project Manager, Glenn Arnade, proudly introduced me to a high-school student named Cordelia O'Rouke, who spearheaded a program to get local schools to start composting the food scraps from their cafeterias.  In California, the State Senate Bill 1383 enacted in January 2022 requires the food and compostable materials be kept out of the landfill.  Empowered by the bill and the support/structure provided by Grades of Green, Cordelia has so far reached approximately 4,000 students at 4 different schools and trained them to engage in composting programs to divert the cafeteria food scraps.   Cordelia discussed the benefits of composting and how it can help the environment by reducing greenhouse gasses and landfill space, and also shared tips on how to compost, including adding more brown waste and finding the right composting method based on individual goals and living situations.

Die studierte Tiermedizinerin und Ökologin ist seit ihrem 30. Lebensjahr auf einen Rollstuhl angewiesen. Ihr Gespür für Gerechtigkeit und der Drang dafür zu kämpfen, ließen sie zur Journalistin und Aktivistin werden. So wurde Dr. Sigrid Geschäftsführerin der Interessenvertretung Selbstbestimmt Leben e.V. und ist heute als Sprecherin der LIGA Selbstvertretung aktiv und wurde mehrfach für ihre aktivistische Arbeit ausgezeichnet. Dr. Sigrid Arnade spricht über inklusive Bildung, wie speziell Frauen mit Behinderung bedroht, benachteiligt und vergessen werden, weshalb Barrierefreiheit in Deutschland aktuell noch nicht umgesetzt wird und wieso Veränderung nur gemeinsam geht.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Today's podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade's father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, the vast majority of his high school classmates did not go to college. Eventually, he exited academia for a 20-year stint on Wall Street, before ultimately settling into a life of photography and writing.  He talks about how he was always out of place in the world of high finance due to his socialist politics, continuing a lifelong pattern of being an outsider. In 2013, Andrade began to explore the poor and working-class neighborhoods of New York City on a lark, photographing sex workers and drug addicts. Arnade's subjects eventually expanded to include the poor and working-class more generally across the US. In particular, he began a project where he photographed people at McDonald's all across the country, a portrait of what he termed “Back Row America” (as opposed to upper-middle-class “Front Row America”). Arnade and I talk about his peculiar position of being the target of progressive animus due to his prediction in 2016 that Donald Trump could actually win the election, based on his interaction with working-class Americans. Despite his socialist bona fides, he believes that his critics will never forgive him for being right about Trump's popularity among the working class.  Today Arnade has a new project, walking across cities, both photographing what he sees, and writing up his impressions, back on his Substack. 

In this eclectic episode we round up various minor Spanish incursions into today's United States, including the "discovery" of San Diego, the origin of the name "California," the murder of some friars at -- this is no surprise -- Tampa Bay, and Tristan de Luna's failed expedition to establish a colony at Pensacola. We also wonder why the Spanish were always launching these big expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season, and get a taste of marine archeology. Enjoy! https://subscribebyemail.com/thehistoryoftheamericans.com/?feed=podcast Selected references for this episode Caleb Curren, "Archeological Data Indicates that the University of West Florida's “Luna Colony” is Actually a Native Village" Pensacola New Journal, "Luna's colony unearthed in Pensacola" Roger C. Smith, "The Emanuel Point Ship: a 16th-century Vessel of Spanish Colonization" Della A. Scott-Ireton, "An Examination of the Luna Colonization Fleet" Charles W. Arnade, "Tristan de Luna and Ochuse (Pensacola Bay) 1559" Luis Cáncer (Wikipedia) Harry Kelsey, Discovering Cabrillo

Orwell explains in 1937 the disposition of the typical “socialist” living in England, and why it is so many people become averse to socialism because of these people alone, comprised of bourgeois intellectuals who have no actual affinity for the working classes, and working-class scribblers who work their way into the intellectual literati but are so hostile to everything that it seems they just want to burn it all down.  Orwell questions, what is it these people, these “Socialists”, really want?  When they seem to have no love for their fellow man.  He suggests that, for many of them, socialism is a way to institute control on society, to implement order amongst those who do not share their cultural values.  Orwell begins with descriptions of working conditions for miners in Industrial England, whom he went to live among and observe; it sounds like very difficult and back-breaking work, indeed, and their living conditions do not sound so great; many went without luxuries such as sheets, taken for granted across the world today for many years now.  In the second part of the book, he gets to the meat on class and the reigning economic order of things; though I believe his beliefs that central planning and “socialism” are not the answer, he thoroughly explains issues of class, and why it is that socialism so quickly morphs into Fascism.  He explains how the average socialist does not see what socialism would actually be as truly revolutionary – which, it is, in theory.  The socialist, whether he is of proletarian origin or middle-class, imagines a World much like the existing one, except one maybe with less poverty, but still having the pub down the street, and the corner store selling all the wares you would want.  In England, the bourgeois classes would disdain someone more “conservative”, who spoke of the superiority of England to other nations; but those same people would speak of the superiority of their own region in England to the other regions as if it were nothing.  He outlines how little actual commitment to the idea of brotherhood and love for one another there is amongst the ranks of socialists, hateful men such as George Bernard Shaw who disdain the non-intellectual classes, and whose “radical” ideas “change to their opposite” at the first sight of “reality.”  He explains the typical middle-class socialist as a 1937-era stereotypical Ultimate frisbee-playing type hippie, a “Sandal-wearer” who wants to go around doing yoga and ordering others about.  As Dostoevsky points out, the normal human response to such a person is to give them the middle finger and to tell them to pound sand.  If you look beyond the fact that Owell was not an economist, his argument is really that we ought to love our fellow man, which is in essence his argument for socialism.  His illustration of class difference points out the inherent fact that humans have values.  These value judgments are made from the conservative religious classes to the woke vegan-cheese eating, Prius driving classes.  Orwell really argues for the need for mutual toleration, at the very least. * “A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role.  He does not act, he is acted upon.  He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other.  Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union.  I was told immediately that “they” would never allow it.  Who were “they” ? I asked.  Nobody seemed to know; but evidently “they” were omnipotent.” * “A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants... “educated” people tend to come to the front... their “education” is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted...” * Thus, expectations of what ones role in society is inevitably has a role on how someone acts in it.  Whether or not one is willing to try and buck authority has less to do with being educated, and more to do with ones mindset.  This parallels some of the points made by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliars about children who learn to “come to the front” and insert themselves in situations that will further their interests. * "Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, ‘When we were told about it,' meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted.  He added that when he was a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it, and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people...” * On efforts to try to alleviate these conditions, there are premonitions of Arnade's Dignity. “...are definitely fine buildings.  But there is something ruthless and soulless about the whole business.  Take, for instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house.  You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them—in some estates there is even a regulation that every garden must have the same kind of hedge.  you are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeon.  The Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping homer pigeons...”  Thus, you can take the help, but it is a bargain with the devil where you can no longer determine how your own life is lived. * Of his time spent with the miners, who were of a different class and culture than him, “I cannot end this chapter without remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was received everywhere.  I did not go alone—I always had some local friend among the unemployed to show me round—but even so, it is an impertinence to go poking into strangers' houses and asking to see the cracks in the bedroom wall.  Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning them and what I wanted to see.  If any unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell.”  I think this mirrors experiences of traveling in the Midwest, of people who are extremely nice and generally welcoming, despite what is depicted in the media about their politics and thoughts. * On anonymity and the city, “Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.” * “...you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you...” * “It is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness.  It ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his own home...” * “But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit.  So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure.  Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment—far worse than any hardship, worst than the demoralisation of enforced idleness...” * “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.  A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.  I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion.  The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.  And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables... and... non-alcoholic drinks... and... distilled liquors.” * “The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.  And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food... when you are unemployed, which is to say, when you are... bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food.  You want something a little bit “tasty.””  When you have nothing else, you can at least have food that you enjoy. * “There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness.  A yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior... the North... is ‘real' life...”* “Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as "fat and sluggish," but even water, when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent man of " advanced " opinions who would have nothing but contempt for nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as "One Britisher is worth three foreigners," and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalise” * You have Americans who denounce people who are Patriotic, who denounce those who think that there are too many immigrants coming and taking the jobs, or whatever it is.  But those same Americans, those "citizens of the World", are just as prejudiced against non-"multiculturalists."  You don't see woke hipsters looking to saddle up with a can of Bud to watch some NASCAR and praise Jesus.  They think that they are better, that their values are better, that everyone should go get an education and stop living in Indiana.  So, each class of society has prejudice, it takes different forms.  There is an inherently antagonistic relationship between the classes because each thinks its way of living is the right way.  In a Democracy, in theory, we say that you are free to determine how to live for yourself. * “To be working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly... there is much in the middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.”  Thus, the two different approaches to life and living. * “This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes... Its happiness depends mainly upon one question—whether Father is in work.  But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire... belongs only to our own moment... and could not belong either to the future or the past.  Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future... In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated,'... The furniture will be made of rubber, glass and steel.  If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth.  Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene.  And there won't be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way... Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio... but the memory of working-class interiors... that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.”  Thus, everything that defines happiness and the meaning of life for the working classes is what the classes of progress want to kill.  Progress says, your life is meaningless. * “To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mind, “common” people seemed almost sub-human.  They had coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners, they hated everyone who was not like themselves, and if they got half a chance they would insult you in brutal ways.  That was our view of them, and though it was false it was understandable.  For one must remember that before the war there was much more overt class-hatred in England... in those days you were likely to be insulted simply for looking like a member of the upper classes... the time when it was impossible for a well-dressed person to walk through a slum street without being hooted at...”  This, the inherent antagonism between the classes. * “If you treat people as the English working class have been treated during the past two centuries, you must expect them to resent it.  On the other hand the children of shaby-genteel families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the working class, typified for them by prowling gangs...” * “I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important.  To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another... snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism...” * “Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is struggling to keep up appearances on four or five hundred a year that he is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are mad...In his eyes the workers are not a submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.  Hence that queer watchful anxiety lest the working class shall grow too prosperous... for miners to buy a motor-car, even one car between four or five of them, is a monstrosity, a sort of crime against nature.”  The poor man of middle-class origin fears for the middle class who wants to sweep away everything that is dear to him, his meaningless learning and culture. * “Look at any bourgeois Socialist... he idealises the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs.  Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has... [sat] indoors with his cap on, or even [drank] his tea out of the saucer... I have listened by the hour to [bourgeois Socialist] tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners... Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.  So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.”  The working class “smells” indeed. * “In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns. Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men... by 1918 everyone under forty was in a bad temper with his elders... a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority... The dominance of ‘old men' was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution... was derided merely because ‘old men' were in favour of it. For several years it was all the fashion to be a ‘Bolshie'... England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce-reform, atheism, birth-control—things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times... At that time we all thought of ourselves as enlightened creatures of a new age, casting off the orthodoxy that had been forced upon us by those detested ‘old men'. We retained, basically, the snobbish outlook of our class, we took it for granted that we could continue to draw our dividends or tumble into soft jobs, but also it seemed natural to us to be ‘agin the Government'.”  Thus, the ebb and flow of left to right, and the lack of actual, genuine revolutionary spirit amongst the so-thought progressive classes.   * Of his own insolence and class-bias as the protector of the 1% but disdainer of the 90%, “So to the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie, such as myself, ‘common people' still appeared brutal and repulsive. Looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus-conductors" * Of smelling the sweat of other soldiers, “All I knew was that it was lower-class sweat that I was smelling, and the thought of it made me sick.” * On the wrongness of foreign occupation, “...no modem man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression... people who live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country where you are not wanted. The result is that every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt... All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part..” * On the inhumanity of prisons and capital punishment, “I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of the whole machinery of so-called justice... It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups... the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest—things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders... the worst criminal who ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge.”  * "… I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was sentimental nonsense. I see now as I did not see then, that it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly; the alternative is Al Capone. But the feeling that punishment is evil arises inescapably in those who have to administer it.” * “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself” regarding his feelings in Colonial Burma * “I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths.  At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue.  Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed' in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” * On the inescapable nature of class difference, echoes Dostoevsky in Dead House.  “I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference... It is not a question of dislike or distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible... I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me ‘sir'; and all of them... softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it.” * Of the sentimentalist (John Galsworthy) vs. Reality... “But is it so certain that he really wants it overthrown? On the contrary, in his fight against an immovable tyranny he is upheld by the consciousness that it is immovable. When things happen unexpectedly and the world-order which he has known begins to crumble, he feels somewhat differently about it... This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”  Another version of this same quote, “...the opinions of the sentimentalist change into their opposites at the first touch of reality.” * “For in the last resort, the only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate?” The answer for man, maybe most, is no; the status quo is just fine. * “The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.”* Of the propensity for words to attempt as a substitute for action, “Hence the temptation to believe that it [class difference] can be shouted out of existence with a few scoutmasterish bellows of goodwill... Let's pal up and get our shoulders to the wheel and remember that we're all equal...” * “For me to get outside the class bracket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well.  I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable...”  People have standards, and this is to be human. * “For it is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being... being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions” * “I have pointed out that the left-wing opinions of the average ‘intellectual' are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in fact he believes in... It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are... This at any rate is what he says,... the bourgeoisie are ‘dead' (a favourite word of abuse nowadays and very effective because meaningless), bourgeois culture is bankrupt, bourgeois “values” are despicable, and so on...” * On trying to break down class barriers, “If you secretly think of yourself as a gentleman and as such the superior of the greengrocer's errand boy, it is far better to say so than to tell lies about it.  Ultimately you have got to drop your snobbishness, but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are really ready to do so.” * “Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him... I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian'. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person but of touch with common humanity.” * On how “socialist” literature is incomprehensible to normal people, “You can see the same tendency in Socialist literature, which, even when it is not openly written de haut en bos, is always completely removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought... As for the technical jargon of the Communists, it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook.” * “…no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency... His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centering round the same things as at present—family life, the pub, football, and local politics.” * Of Orthodoxy, “One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the ‘educated' are completely orthodox. The most immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics—I don't mean the real Catholics, I mean the converts… is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man.  But the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently, can be orthodox or heretical; hence the campaigns…  against tea and in favour of beer... tea-drinking' is ‘pagan', while beer-drinking is ‘Christian', and coffee is ‘the puritan's opium'... [W]hat I am interested in here is the attitude of mind that can make even food and drink an occasion for religious intolerance. A working-class Catholic would never be so absurdly consistent as that. He does not spend his time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic neighbours. Tell an Irish dock-labourer in the slums of Liverpool that his cup of tea is ‘pagan', and he will call you a fool... It is only the ‘educated' man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot.” * “The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard… Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw.  How much understanding or even awareness of working class life do they display?  Shaw himself declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage ‘as an object of compassion… At best his attitude to the working class is the sniggering Punch attitude... he finds them merely contemptible and disgusting.  Poverty and, what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence.  Hence his worship of “Great” men and appetite for dictatorships...” * “The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them', the Lower Orders.” * “The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.” * “This, then, is the superficial aspect of the ordinary man's recoil from Socialism... The whole thing amounts to a kind of malaise produced by dislike of individual Socialists... Is it childish to be influenced by that kind of thing? Is it silly? Is it even contemptible? It is all that, but the point is that it happens, and therefore it is important to keep it in mind.”* “Work, you see, is done ‘to provide us with leisure'. Leisure for what? Leisure to become more like Mr Beevers, presumably.” Regarding the disdain for work of progressives, and the love of the machine. (John Beevers, World Without Faith). * “The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty...” * “The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness...” * “The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is traveling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death.”  A good analogy for cycling vs. Cars. * “They [Socialists] have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of ‘progress'. It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtue...”  The Socialist and Communist seek to dismiss all those things which normal men hold dear, and tell them they are not men, and that what they desire in their soul is wrong or false. * On Fascism, a good analysis that could be applied to modern China, “...it is quite easy to imagine a world-society, economically collectivist—that is, with the profit principle eliminated—but with all political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small caste of rulers and their bravos. That or something like it is the objective of Fascism. And that, of course, is the slave-state, or rather the slave-world; it would probably be a stable form of society, and the chances are, considering the enormous wealth of the world if scientifically exploited, that the slaves would be well-fed and contented. It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the ‘beehive state', which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark. It is against this beastly possibility that we have got to combine.” * On accepting the blessings of your Orthodox leaders vs. Actually evaluating something on its merits, “an incensed reader wrote to say, ‘Dear Comrade, we don't want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare. Can't you give us something a bit more proletarian?' etc., etc. The editor's reply was simple. ‘If you will turn to the index of Marx's Capital,' he wrote, ‘you will find that Shakespeare is mentioned several times.' And please notice that this was enough to silence the objector. Once Shakespeare had received the benediction of Marx, he became respectable. That is the mentality that drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement.” * Orwell wonders of his status in society as a relatively poor writer, “Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners” * “But if you are constantly bullying me about my ‘bourgeois ideology', if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I. am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonizing me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power.”  Echoing Dostoevsky and how progressives antagonize the people whom they should be trying to persuade.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com

In this episode of Talk Justice, LSC Vice Chair Father Pius Pietrzyk interviews Chris Arnade, author of “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.” Leaving behind a 20-year career on Wall Street, Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx and later across the country. His work looks at the resilience of what he calls “America's Back Row”—those who lack the credentials and advantages to get ahead.

Chris Arnade was a quant on Wall Street before growing disillusioned with his "front row" life and started visited neighborhoods where people told him not to go. What he found there changed his way of understanding the world, including the role of faith in providing Americans of all stripes with a sense of dignity. It also challenged his confident, though not obnoxious, atheism. His collection of photos and reflections on what he saw and experienced in his travels and what it taught him about class, race, religion, and politics in America are found in his book Dignity, available wherever fine books are sold. https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/dp/0525534733

When the Large Hadron Collider opened in 2008, deep beneath the French-Swiss border, some people feared it would be the literal end of the world—that slamming particles together at 99.999999% the speed of light would create an all-consuming black hole, or even strangelets, hypothetical particles that may convert existing matter into “strange matter.” Twelve years later, scientists continue to smash particles together in the name of discovering what the universe is made of, and the earth is still here...for now. Why bring that up here, in a podcast about building stronger and more financially resilient cities? Because right now it feels like Americans are the ones in the collider. That’s the metaphor our friend Chris Arnade used in an excellent article on what the COVID-19 crisis is revealing about the United States. He writes: In physics, to reveal deeper truths, you slam particles together to expose their inner structure. The pandemic has been like that, slamming different parts of the country together, revealing it to be deeply divided by geography, race, education, and wealth. It is hard to imagine it once fit together or will ever fit together again. Each week on Upzoned, host Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, takes one article from the news and she “upzones” it, looking at it through the Strong Towns lens. In this episode Abby is joined by Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau, and together they discuss Chris Arnade’s American Compass article, “Chaos in the Time of Covid.” Abby and Rachel talk about how Americans are experiencing the pandemic very differently from one another, Arnade’s ability to lift the veil on communities too often obscured or ignored, and whether or not politics has become a religion. Abby and Rachel also discuss reasons for hope, including the way divisions often start to break down at the neighborhood level.  Then in the Downzone, Rachel recommends a book from her Strong Towns colleague on how faith communities can join in the work of neighborhood revitalization. And Abby discusses her experience—both as a presenter and as an attendee—at last week’s CNU virtual gathering. What about you? Do you believe, as Chris Arnade seems to, that the colliding particles of American society will continue to decay and dissipate? Or do you see reasons for hope in your community? Listen to this episode, then let us know over on the Strong Towns Community site. Additional Show Notes “Chaos in the Time of Covid,” by Chris Arnade “Rise of the Essential Class,” by Pete Saunders Chris Arnade (Twitter) Abby Kinney (Twitter) Rachel Quednau (Twitter) Gould Evans Studio for City Design Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom (Soundcloud) Slow Church, by Strong Towns content manager John Pattison The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein Additional Strong Towns content featuring Chris Arnade 2019: “The Dignity of Local Community: A Conversation with Chris Arnade” (Strong Towns Podcast) “Dignity in an Alienated America,” by Charles Marohn “The Best Books I Read in 2019,” by Charles Marohn 2017: “Approaching America with Divided Eyes” (Strong Towns Podcast)

Our special guest on tomorrow's podcast is Chris Arnade, the author of *Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.* Please let us know what questions you'd like to add to the following list that we've proposed to Mr. Arnade.1. Would it be right to say that your book, *Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America*, is about accompanying those that have been left behind and listening to them?2. How is it that MacDonald's plays so great a role in your travels?3. Why are storefront churches so vital to people “in the back row”?4. What leads to widespread addiction among the people that you met?5. How does prostitution tend to stem from abuse?6. Do people “in the front row” and those “in the back row” often differ sharply in how they view family and home?7. There are many rows on buses. Has your investigation prompted any special insight into the many people in the middle rows?8. How would you evaluate St. John Paul II's observation, in his encyclical Faith and Reason, that “the possibility of discovering the real meaning of life is cast into doubt,” and so “many people stumble through life to the very edge of the abyss without knowing where they are going.”9. Early in your account you introduce a young woman, Takeesha, who in defining herself says she is a “child of God.” How do you understand her words?10. The lead editorial in Sunday's L.A. Times rejects medical triage proposals that assign different values to different human beings as “an affront to human dignity.” What do you see as the foundation of that dignity?Hoping that you will give us a listen!

Falls nicht alle Patienten intensivmedizinisch versorgt werden können, haben Menschen mit körperlichen und geistigen Beeinträchtigungen weniger Chancen, behandelt zu werden. Das legen ärztliche Empfehlungen nahe. Ein Skandal, meint Sigrid Arnade. Moderation: Susanne Führer www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Tacheles Hören bis: 19.01.2038 04:14 Direkter Link zur Audiodatei

Zomer 1566: Het begin van Nederland. In een vlaag van religieuze helderheid (of verstandsverbijstering) stormen de aanhangers van Luther en Calvijn de kerken binnen om daar de beelden en het glas-in-lood te ontheiligen. Daarmee is de Beeldenstorm een feit en Nederland zoals we dat nu kennen (korte versie) geboren. Maar is dat wel zo? Tim&Paul weten dat niet, maar dr. David de Boer gelukkig wel. David promoveerde in 2019, met het proefschrift 'Religious persecution and transnational compassion in the Dutch vernacular press'. Een man die alles weet over de religieuze grimmigheden van de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw. We praten met hem over Luther, Calvijn, hosties en bloedende standbeelden. 1566, never forget. Meer lezen? Arnade, P. J., Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: the Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Edwards, Jr., M U., Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther. Elliott, J.H., Europe divided, 1559–1598. Pettegree, A., The Reformation World.

Bo and Bud welcome back to the show Chris Arnade, author of "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" to talk about the local and global dynamic in America. 

There are two guests on this week's special 250th episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chris Arnade is a photographer and contributing writer for the New York Times, Atlantic, Guardian, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. His new book is Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. Arnade reflects on leaving his job as a stock trader on Wall Street and embarking on a quest across America during the rise of Trump in an effort to see just how broken American society is and was. Arnade also shares how his walks across New York City and taking pictures of everyday people -- the working class, the poor, people without homes, hustlers, immigrants, migrants, and others -- impacted his understanding of life and human dignity and became the basis of his new book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. Arnade also reflects on the power of listening and how in many ways the poor and homeless are more honorable and good than the rich and the powerful. Investigative journalist and author Sam Quinones is the second guest on this week's show. He is a journalist, storyteller, and former LA Times reporter. Quinones' most recent book is Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. Dreamland won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015. Quinones explains how Big Pharma and their opiates took over huge swaths of Trumplandia and other parts of the United States through "pain management" -- and then enterprising Mexican drug kingpins were able to leverage that opportunity to import huge amounts of heroin into the country. Quinones also explains what he learned from meeting one of the most important figures in the U.S.-Mexico heroin trade and if Donald Trump's wall will do anything to stem the tide of drugs (and addiction) in America. Chauncey DeVega reflects on America in a time of moral inversion when white supremacists and other right-wing street hooligans and paramilitaries can march openly in American cities such as Portland and it is the anti-fascists who are somehow labeled as "terrorists". Chauncey is deeply worried that tens of millions of Americans no longer know right from wrong in the Age of Trump. And Chauncey also shares some little-known history about the true origins of the Statue of Liberty and how African-Americans struggling against Jim and Jane Crow understood the statue to be an affront and insult. At the end of this week's special 250th episode of the podcast Chauncey shares an exciting story about the newly discovered bones of a 5-foot-tall prehistoric penguin. SELECTED LINKS OF INTEREST FOR THIS EPISODE OF THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW    How Stephen Miller authors Trump's immigration policy Ken Cuccinelli's ancestors were dirt-poor Italian immigrants — no different than those Trump wants to bar He sounded the alarm on "Hateland": Daryl Johnson warned us about right-wing terror in 2009 Whose "America" is it? Neil Diamond's big, inclusive vision vs. Donald Trump's narrow hatred Statue of Liberty created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, new museum recounts National Park Service -- Abolition and the Statue of Liberty The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman Newly Discovered 'Monster' Penguin Was As Tall As an Adult Human WHERE CAN YOU FIND ME? On Twitter: https://twitter.com/chaunceydevega On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chauncey.devega My email: chaunceydevega@gmail.com Leave a voicemail for The Chauncey DeVega Show: (262) 864-0154 HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW? Via Paypal at ChaunceyDeVega.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thechaunceydevegashow  Please subscribe to and follow my new podcast The Truth Report https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-truth-report-with-chauncey-devega/id1465522298 http://thetruthreportwithchaunceydevega.libsyn.com/ Music at the end of this week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show is by JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound. You can listen to some of their great music on Spotify.   

In 2017, writer, photographer, and reformed-Wall-Streeter-turned-social-critic Chris Arnade appeared as a guest on the Strong Towns Podcast, in an episode that has been one of our most popular and was featured in our Greatest Hits series (listen to it here). Today we've brought him back for another conversation. Arnade became a journalist by accident—the culmination of a journey that began as a series of long walks in his city of New York to “the places they tell you not to go,” talking to anyone who would talk to him. Since then, through photographic essays that approximate a 21st-century version of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, he has become possibly the most powerful chronicler working today of what he calls “back row America”—those dealing with poverty, addiction, homelessness, unemployment, social disintegration in communities that are rarely heard from and even more rarely really heard. Dignity, Arnade’s new book about the people in the “back row” (as opposed to the front row of the college-educated elite) has rapidly become one of the most talked-about releases of 2019. Combining photos, interviews, and narrative segments, Dignity intentionally foregrounds the voices of the people that Arnade interviews, rather than Arnade’s own interpretation of their situations or needs. Why “Just Move” Isn’t an Answer A central theme of Arnade’s work is the differences in value system and priorities that make policies promulgated by Front Row experts with elite credentials often a poor fit for the challenges of Back Row America. For example, to America’s educated and mobile elite, it might seem intuitive that the best solution to the lack of jobs or upward mobility in a place like Appalachia or inner-city Baltimore is, “Just move.” And policies might be designed to help people acquire the means to move—providing institutional social services, or lowering the barriers (such as housing cost) to living in places with booming job markets and good schools. Many of Arnade’s subjects see it differently, and he wants his reader to understand why. Maybe they’re helping a family member stay sober. Maybe they’re supporting a friend or relative or don’t want to be far from their children. Maybe it’s something more intangible than that: “Often, place—and the value of place—and it can be as simple as the metaphysical greatness you get from the lakes or hills or trees in your yard. Those things are free to people. The idea of continuity, of being in a place and knowing it values you and you value it: that doesn’t cost anything…. It’s very hard to measure the importance of staying in a community all your life, the network of connections you have, the fact that you wake up every morning and you look out and you see the same lake, and you know every nook and cranny of the lake, or you know the people around the lake. That’s hard to put a price tag on, so we tend to think about it as, “Oh, that’s not very important. People can just find another lake.” Arnade’s subjects span the full spectrum of the American “back row” experience, from rural whites to inner-city people of color. And he doesn’t shy away from the uglier sides of this experience—the vicious cycle of addiction, or the resurgence of overt racism—but he does urge us to avoid platitudes and facile moral judgments, in favor of understanding the systemic reasons that a community is in disarray. Listen to this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast for more about Dignity, the overlap of Arnade’s themes with the Strong Towns movement, and what kind of policy-making process might be more responsive to the needs of all Americans and not just the preferences of elites. (Hint: it sounds a lot like the Strong Towns approach!)

Photographer, author, and former Wall St. trader Chris Arnade talks about his book, Dignity, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Arnade quit his Wall Street trading job and criss-crossed America photographing and getting to know the addicted and homeless who struggle to find work and struggle to survive. The conversation centers on what Arnade learned about Americans and about himself.

One day, Chris Arnade strolled into an area of New York City he rarely ventured into: the Bronx. That day began a journey, spent in McDonalds and churches, in drug dens and places where the homeless congregate, for the Wall Street trader. In his new book, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America," Arnade highlights the America too many of our elites would rather ignore. He joins the podcast to share what he learned about politics (and why he correctly predicted Donald Trump would win in 2016), religion, addiction, and much more. We also cover these stories:•There were 144,000 migrants apprehended at the U.S. - Mexico border in May.•A teacher who is transitioning from male to female made a video he showed to his elementary school students to explain his new persona.•YouTube is tightening its censorship. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For the fifth installment of our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series, we revisit a 2017 conversation between Strong Towns podcast host Chuck Marohn and acclaimed writer and photographer Chris Arnade. Arnade has a history that makes him unusually well-positioned to see things from multiple angles. His life has taken him from a small town in Florida, to a PhD in particle physics, to 20 years as a Wall Street bond trader, to producing a powerful series of photographic essays for The Guardian on the toll of addiction and social disintegration in America’s small towns and big cities alike. In 2011, disenchanted with the Wall Street life and looking for a change, Arnade began taking a lot of long walks around his adopted city of New York. But with a catch: he made a point of walking around all the neighborhoods they tell you not to go to—“because they’re too dangerous, or because I’m too white.” Arnade talked with whoever would talk with him, and listened to their life stories. He found something the media, even the liberal media, rarely discuss: “There was a lot of dignity, a lot of community. These neighborhoods weren’t wastelands, and they were filled with people doing their best to struggle against a system that was stacked against them.” As a non-journalist, Arnade was able to break a cardinal rule of journalism: don’t get involved. He made friends with addicts and homeless people, helped them out with cash when needed, went to court hearings with them, gave them rides, and learned a lot about an America that is invisible to many of us. Strong Towns’s Chuck Marohn was prompted to interview Arnade after reading a Medium piece on Cairo, Illinois. (Arnade’s original piece appears to have been deleted.) Cairo, located on a narrow peninsula of solid ground where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge, has endured decades of steep decline. Home to about 2,000 people, mostly African-American and mostly poor, very little industry remains in the city, and the historic downtown is so empty that, Arnade says, on his visit there he couldn’t find a place to use the restroom. As a planner and engineer, Marohn, upon viewing photos of Cairo’s desolation, was taken by the town’s legacy of failed experiments to bring back the prosperity it had lost—such as the striking visual of an ornate “Historic Downtown Cairo” arch framing a street of boarded up shops. Arnade, on the other hand, helps us understand the sociology of a place like Cairo, Illinois, or Portsmouth, Ohio, or Hunts Point in the Bronx. In this conversation, Marohn and Arnade discuss how the longer-term consequences of the loss of a locally self-sustaining economy are often more severe than the easily quantified short-term ones. They’re the human toll of overdoses and suicides. To an economist, economic consolidation can look like a thousand jobs lost here, a thousand jobs gained there, and a percentage point of GDP on a spreadsheet. But to a town that has lost its major employer, Arnade says, “They hadn’t just lost the factory. Once the factory was gone, they lost all forms of community and all forms of meaning. Then the churches started falling apart. Then the families started falling apart.” Marohn and Arnade discuss the alienation that results from economic dislocation, and how conventional prescriptions fall short as an answer: How anomie—the feeling of not being a meaningful part of anything bigger than yourself fuels America’s epidemic of addiction and suicide Why “education is the solution” doesn’t always work Why people don’t leave struggling towns for opportunity elsewhere, and sometimes shouldn’t How society’s “front-row kids” and “back-row kids” fail to understand each other How small-town, provincial society can be exclusionary and judgmental—but so can elite, educated society

Chuck Marohn interviews Chris Arnade, who writes for the Guardian, has a PhD in particle physics from Johns Hopkins and previously worked as a bond trader in New York City. Arnade has spent the last several years documenting addiction and poverty in towns across America.  In this interview, he discusses why walking in neighborhoods that he was told not to visit in New York led him away from trading and toward his current role as a writer. He talks about a life getting to know people on the margins of society—people living in poverty and dealing with addiction—and the struggles of small towns in America. You can find Chris Arnade writing and sharing photos often on Medium.