The Mandelbrot Critique

A geometrical shape has a scale, a characteristic size. To Mandelbrot, art that satisfies lacks scale, in the sense that it contains important elements at all sizes. Against the Seagram Building, he offers the architecture of the Beaux-Arts, with its sculptures and gargoyles, its quoins and jamb stones, its cartouches decorated with scrollwork, its cornices topped with cheneaux and lined with dentils. A Beaux-Arts paragon like the Paris Opera has no scale because it has every scale. An observer seeing the building from any distance finds some detail that draws the eye. The composition changes as one approaches and new elements of the structure come into play.

From Chaos, James Gleick, p.117 (emphasis mine)

Compare: What we've lost

Confusion in the Ranks

I spent the evening at a function for people trying to start a North Texas chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, of much previous discussion. The speaker, the author of the stillborn first version of the Snider Plaza Redevelopment Plan, back when it dealt with something other than parking, epitomizes the confusion in the NU ranks. Points of interest from the presentation:

a) proposals to link neighborhoods through trails and open space. This was followed by a D/FW study showing that property values increased with proximity to parks / open space. Fine. Good. However, doesn’t that undermine the whole idea of the “walkable” neighborhood? Doesn’t open space by definition mean places where retail and offices and other housing aren’t? This has been a popular idea running through parts of the movement (notably in California,) but seems to run contrary to the economic viability of the whole enterprise. (i.e. more open space = fewer people in the pedestrian catchment area = less viability in walkable community function and retail. – Ask a resident of Greenwich Village.)

b) description of the inevitable demographic trends toward denser housing. Lots of basically unsupported assertions here. Sure, the population is aging. Sure, child-onset is delayed. However, families with children still seem to evidence a demand for the single-family house with yard, etc, etc. You either have multi-generational neighborhoods or you don’t. Trying to say that empty-nesters moving out of the suburbs will result in lifelong community if families with children won’t move in town with them is trying to have your cake and eat it too. The housing-demand doughnut hole is still the most important demographic.

c) impending population increase numbers (it’s a Dallas thing, Detroiters wouldn’t understand.) He showed a study assuming present growth rates, and assuming present development patterns, and then asked “where are all these people going to go?” I wonder if this guy has ever seen Southern California. Conventional “sprawl” is a story of the multi-node landscape spread across miles and miles and miles of area. North Texas, keep in mind, has no natural geographic barriers to development. There is no inevitable reason that Dallas-Fort Worth can’t become Dallas-Fort Worth-Frisco-Irving-Sherman-Denton-Bowie. Sure, the Ennis to Denton commute would be a killer, but so is the San Juan Capistrano to Santa Barbara one.

Questions asked and unanswered: How does large-scale retail fit into the neighborhood? (by yours truly,) and Doesn’t the whole school district thing throw a wrench the in the whole issue?

Let us gently suffer the romantics.

I think I’ll join.

The Fraud Problem

Most of the moral ills that people attribute to capitalism can probably be traced to the problem of fraud. This, I think, is the major distinction between “capitalism” railed against and resisted and the “free enterprise” of the idealist. It’s a question of freedom. In the classical Smithian form, a free buyer and free seller come together and strike a bargain that does them both good. The problem arises when one of the parties enters into the arrangement with bad faith. Stiglitz, Akerlof, and others have written some fascinating stuff on the concept of information asymmetry , the idea of how a transaction is affected when one party has important information that the other does not. In the long run this kind of thing should (used to?) work itself out as the withholding party ruins his reputation for straightforwardness and no one is willing to do business with him anymore. No one wants to deal with a swindler.

So why are there so many people out there that haven’t gotten this essential idea? What is it about climate / culture / education that leads the Enrons and Providians to try again and again to profit from dishonesty? If all of the spin and advertising in the world couldn’t save Detroit (and the city too, for that matter,) is it ever reasonable to believe that the same doesn’t hold true across the board? I wonder if this can be tied to an excess of competition (in the Vince Lombardi win-at-all-costs sense,) in the messages received growing up. Long-term enterprise, after all, is fundamentally cooperative; Deming proved that to all of us. An organization that doesn’t have at least internal trust (Enron again) is doomed to fail in the medium to long term.

This, I suspect, is also at the heart of the decline of the Republican Party. The Goldwater message of individual freedom that resonated with so many and reached apotheosis in the Regan revolution was hollowed out by late comers mouthing similar-sounding rhetoric but missing the essential point. A “market solution” is no solution if the market is rigged (i.e. not transmitting information properly.) Feeding tax dollars back to selected business isn’t at all the same as people spending the money individually – it’s actually closer to fascism. (Defined as central control with industry held privately.) The lesson here is people don’t viscerally respond to empty phrases any more than they recall pleasant memories. As soon as enough history sullies the phrase from the memory: game over.

So why so much institutional fraud? From Merck to Citibank to AT&T to the electric company (cf the TXU buyout) some of the most trusted institutions of commerce seem to have adopted all of the integrity of the street hustler. Moral failing of short-sighted baby boomers? A problem of ever-increasing scale making personal reputation and repeat business less important? Increased commerce filling the air with so much noise that the word-of-mouth signals of old have been drowned out? (Don’t take my word for the trend, read Elizabeth Warren )

There’s something deeply resonant here about how the species organizes itself. Cheater detection was a well–developed skill of the hunter-gatherer. Whole forms of civilization coalesced around finding and avoiding fraud. What’s the modern answer?

It all makes one wonder.

The Beginning of the End

. . . of the perfect apartment.

Forget Me Not

Reading Jane Jacobs final book, about the impending dark age, got me thinking about some of the research in Mann’s 1491. One of Jacobs’ themes is the potential for “cultural amnesia,” or the withering away of useful knowledge as it was no longer transferred between generations. The Native American parallel is breathtaking; as losses to strange and unexplained epidemics mounted to the eighty- and ninety-percent ranges, their world must have been one of untrained apprentices trying to fill the shoes of aged experts, skeleton crews trying to support complex infrastructure maintenance, and a whole generation suddenly cut off from the hard-won knowledge of generations past that had been the key to survival. Probably a great feather in the cap of the group selection camp (see No Australopithecus . . . below.) Add to all of this the inevitable civil wars as a) these superstitious people looked for someone to blame, and b) complex balances of power were suddenly disrupted, and the catastrophe makes Gibbon’s work on Rome look like a walk in the park. Apparently the Jamestown and Plymouth crowds were only allowed to stay because there was no longer the strength to repel them, and the local Indians were looking for any allies they could get. The irony.

How much, then, of culture can be written down? What percentage of the population would North America have to lose to reach a point of non-renewal? There has already been a loss of information simply from its unpopularity; from craft skills to architectural ornament to the underlying logic of cross-ventilation and the meanings of traditional ceremony. Tzonis wrote an inquiry into the meaning of Classical ornament vis-à-vis pagan religion that’s always worried me in its implication for forgetfulness – and the danger of the Taliban and their North American equivalents.

If dogma is the enemy of longevity is tradition its ally? At what point should inquiry yield to longstanding trial and error? Where does the enlightenment fit into all of this?