More Wisdom from Mr. Smith

. . . in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV, II, II. 1759

Compare: Wisdom from Mr. Schelling
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Contrast: Scarcity and the Arts

Catchment Area - The Sam's Club Effect

Assuming a constant allowable travel time, the catchment area of a retail outlet, etc. goes up geometrically with increased speed of travel.

However, if you can assume with less frequent visits (i.e. larger quantities with each trip,) the allowable travel time goes up, then the catchment area increases still further with the square of the distance travelled. Hence, the Sam's Club Effect.

[Catchment Area = Pi X (Allowable Travel Time X Speed of Travel) Squared]

Compare: The March away from Density

Raining on the New Urbanist parade: Why the Romantic school of urban design is dangerous

Of some of the more popular projects in mixed-use development, I’m seeing a disturbing distinction: transience vs. permanence in housing. This is a smaller subset of the larger New Urbanist program that tries to reproduce the structures of the functioning city – only all of a piece. The question is: do they reproduce the deep structure, or only its superficial appearance?

Permanence, for good or ill, seems to depend on the presence of children; family is probably the most popular reason to stay in the same place for different stages of one’s life. Permanence means consistent, predictable demand. Long-term investment depends on consistent, predictable demand. Homogenous, transient groups result in a “trendiness” phenomenon, as those that can live wherever they wish move to the most desirable location at the moment. Long-term investment with deep stakeholders results in durability, as the lure of somewhere else is mollified by commitments made to where you’ve sunk roots. Community adjustment depends on overlapping development, as the old and less-than-successful is supplanted by the new and unanticipated. Overlapping development requires long time-horizons to anticipate need shifts. Without diverse economic activity and deep stakeholding, demand activity can be catastrophically affected by a single period or occurrence: a crime event, the loss of a single local employer, newer housing across the city. If demand activity falls apart suddenly, the positive character of the area evaporates overnight as vacancy and abandonment replaces liveliness and watchfulness.


Once again, the question to ask is what is the time horizon of the developer? Will there be this adjusting, refining second and third-stage neighborhood development, or is the initial project all that there will be? An area with no buy-in, no fixed commitments, runs the risk of becoming a ready-made ghetto if its economic reason for being disappears. If the only good reason it can muster is transient popularity – watch out. Near the end of her life Jane Jacobs wrote a book called The Nature of Economies, which basically postulates that the health of an economy of whatever size depends on overlap and diversity – metaphorically compared with mature forest growth. My fear is that the Atlantic Yards and Mockingbird Stations of the world are monocultures; and when their single crop suffers a setback they’ll meet erosion and famine. Beware the demographers! In projects with construction methods (I’m thinking specifically of EIFS) that have a life-cycle of less than twenty years, the danger is heightened substantially.

Tell-tales of the healthy neighborhood: Child care. Pharmacies. General grocery. Schools. Professional offices (accounting, optometry, chiropractry, dentistry, etc.) Things that are unglamorous generally.

Why has no one written this book?

[For both real and fake versions of the American town – see Matt Minnix - World Traveler’s photos to the left]

A Collage: Out with Friends

Mr. Smith Responds to Mr. Pascal

That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and that a campaign at Versailles or St. James’s is often worth two either in Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from many a venerable but discontented old officer. But what is considered as the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly sovereigns, has been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine perfection; and the duties of devotion, the public and private worship of the Deity, have been represented, even by men of virtue and abilities, as the sole virtues which can either entitle to reward, or exempt from punishment, in the life to come.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, III, II. 1759

When I grow up, I want to hang out with David Hume.

Invisible Lifeblood

All of the pipelines in the United States. Compare:Surprise! It's All About Oil

(Kind of makes me nostalgic for home.)

The Piggy Problem

Studying people, The Lord of the Flies seems to pop up from time to time. How does a group of relatively-restrained people self-organize into a violent tribe with restraints removed? (Schelling may be instructive here.) There seems to be a real issue of scale with group interaction. For instance, why do market forces seem to work reasonably well and be regarded as fair at large scales, but seem absolutely out of place in a group of five? (e.g. what would happen if you asked explicit payment from a co-worker for a favor.) That’s something that’s always bothered me about Ayn Rand’s work; her characters operate in the market at every scale – and so often come across as monstrous for it. There’s been some work done in evolutionary psychology that may hold an answer. There seems to be a biological limit to the number of people we can keep track of well – i.e. the number of people that can be tracked for their reciprocity, loyalty to the tribe, forthrightness, etc. The market, then, is a surrogate for memory? There’s a rich field to be mined here just on the Game Theory side of things.

Which brings up an interesting topic: Is group evolution possible? Which is to say, is it possible to select for traits that benefit the group to the detriment of the individual? I think that this goes against classical Natural Selection theory, but seems to dovetail nicely with philosophical observations dating back millennia. If (so the argument goes) you’re programmed to help both yourself and your cousins, then at least some of your genes are more likely to survive (in them.) Nietzsche might agree; the group evolution argument seems to conform with his ideas about the origin and purpose for Good and Bad (as distinct from Good and Evil.) So might, for that matter (at least obliquely,) Aristotle. From the Iliad on down the survival of the tribe is a recurrent theme. Why can’t there be a feedback loop between culture and biology?

Reading list: The Selfish Gene, Beyond Good and Evil, Consilience, Adam Smith, Nicomachian Ethics, anything by Gould, The Golden Bough, The Science of Good and Evil, Von Neumann.

Adam Smith, Theater Critic?

The propriety of every passion exited by objects peculiarly related to ourselves, the pitch which the spectator can go along with, must lie, it is evident, in a certain mediocrity. If the passion is too high, or if it is too low, he cannot enter into it. Grief and resentment for private misfortunes and injuries may easily, for example, be too high, and in the greater part of mankind they are so. They may likewise, though this more rarely happens, be too low. We denominate the excess, weakness and fury : and we call the defect, stupidity, insensibility, and the want of spirit. We can enter into neither of them, but are astonished and confounded to see them.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I, II, Introduction, 1759

(He, apparently, no fan of the yelling-and-screaming school either.)