Cyreenik Says
This linkage of available men and housing prices definitely goes in the hard to predict category. This 13 Jul 13 Economist article, Women and the property market: Married to the mortgage, talks about this surprising social linkage in East Asia: The competition among men for eligible brides is supporting high housing prices. The reasoning is that brides and their families see owning a home as a big plus. From the article,
"In China mortgages often precede marriages. According to popular belief, if a man and his family cannot buy property he will struggle to find a bride. In choosing a husband, three-quarters of women consider his ability to provide a home, according to a recent survey of young people in China’s coastal cities by Horizon China, a Beijing-based market-research firm. Even if a woman herself dismisses this criterion, her family and friends, not to mention the country’s estate agents, will not let her forget it."
It makes sense after you hear it's happening, but definitely hard to predict before it starts happening and someone notices the pattern.
This is such a non-surprise. But it's a much bigger, much more important event than the Zimmerman trial, so here is what I think about it.
Many reasons are being given by different pundits for the downward spiral of Detroit, and I'll give mine: This is the result of a vicious combination of blind spot thinking and rewarding system gaming. Sadly, this combination comes up routinely in human history. (here's a full essay about it)
The blind spot is Detroit's residents thinking that fairness matters more than growth and not being willing to recognize the economic consequences of this premise. Detroit became a social filter: Those that felt fairness was not top of the list left. Those that stayed exploited this blind spot to game the system.
The Detroit administrations turned from promoting enterprise to promoting culture. They crafted an impressive "whine list" to explain why the depopulation didn't matter and it wasn't their fault anyway. Instead of crafting a social and legal groundwork fruitful for new and varied enterprises they built up an administering framework that promoted a bread and circus lifestyle. They spent their attention on promoting and financing convention centers and sports arenas. And in the process they mixed in lots of cheap shot system gaming that was justified as fighting poverty and racism.
And the residents learned from their leaders. Over time, learning how to whine well in various ways paid off for the average resident, and learning how to work special deals with city officials paid off for the elite. For those that remained, that is. Again, so many people left! And those that stayed remained blind to this red waving flag!
This thinking mix -- fairness plus gaming -- was an emotionally potent combination for those that chose to remain in Detroit. It was disgusting and stupid thinking for those who chose to leave. And fortunately for those choosing to leave, there were many other places to go to in America that were very interested in supporting new and different kinds of enterprise-growing of all sorts.
This ability to walk away from a bad situation and create a good one elsewhere is still a great virtue of the American Way.
Update: This 13 Jul 13 Economist article, Mayors and Mammon, talks about alternate ways of handling Detroit-style challenges. From the article, "Michael Bloomberg is a successful businessman as well as a popular mayor. But he is hardly alone in regarding himself as the CEO of his city. A growing number of mayors see their job as promoting business-friendly environments and selling their cities abroad."
Update: This 29 Jul 13 WSJ editorial, Bill Nojay: Lessons From a Front-Row Seat for Detroit's Dysfunction, is a good description of the environment fairness blind spot thinking creates as the frustration and disenfranchisement grow large and ripe. From the article, "But equally at fault for its fiscal demise are the city's management structure and union and civil-service rules that hamstring efforts to make municipal services more efficient."
Update: This 17 Aug 13 Economist article, Down towns, talks about "When cities start to decline, economic diversity is the thing that can save them". I agree in part, but Cleveland had diverse manufacturing in its heyday, and that wasn't enough to save it. Diversity is nice, but flexibility is even more important.
It is interesting how deeply emotional a public trial often gets. Now that a verdict has been announced in the Zimmerman case a lot of people are publicly and enthusiastically expressing their anger over the jury's choice. And this is far from the only example. There have been famous trials almost every decade, there are several others going on right now, and afternoon TV is cluttered with Judge [fill in first name] shows. Public trials capture a lot of attention and enthusiasm.
This emotion to have the community judge someone is not new. The community making adverse judgments about a member goes back to prehistoric times. What happened then we call witch hunting today. But it was the community quickly deciding a person had acted wrongly and needed punishment. Today this having the community get emotionally worked up about another person's terrible actions is called "trial by media".
The deep and enthusiastic emotion behind this activity implies that such thinking has served human communities well for thousands of generations. It has become instinctive thinking. My guess is that it served well as a protection against betrayal. Betrayal can be hugely damaging to a community, so this protection measure didn't have to be right every time to be more benefit than cost.
The community making snap judgments about a person being guilty of a terrible crime worked well for many generations, and now we live with that instinct as part of our modern thinking.
This thought was inspired by a 29 Jun 13 Economist article, Stuffed: The House rejects the farm bill, which talks about farm subsidies. From the article, "For the first time in at least 40 years, the House of Representatives rejected a farm bill on June 20th. Recriminations have been flying. Republicans say the Democrats are 'not able to govern'; Democrats retort that the Republicans are 'amateur'. Stuffed as it was with costly handouts to rich farmers, the bill was hardly worth mourning. But because the two sides cannot work together, the chances of serious reform now seem remote."
The odd part about this brouhaha is that these farm subsidies regularly pass through Congress with so little popular uproar. Even odder, this farm subsidizing blind spot happens the developed world over -- France, Japan and South Korea come to mind from news articles I've read over the years. And as this article points out, this is a topic which brings out intense emotional thinking among legislators.
Farming strokes several different emotions in non-farming folk. (emotions are instinctive thinking) Producing food is always vital, so it strokes the "protecting the community" emotion and the "checking the food for purity" emotion. Historically farmers have been poor people, so it strokes "helping the poor" emotion. And there is the romance of living in the idyllic countryside.
But like all good intentions, the results can be terribly twisted if good head thinking isn't applied as well good heart thinking. In the case of farming, this is an industry now, not a lifestyle. Fewer than five percent of the American population is farmers, compared to half or more in pre-Industrial Age lifestyles. So today's farm subsidies are helping many agribusinesses not many poor rural folk. And those businesses have lobbies that are very happy to direct how the good intentions should be twisted. One great example of "goat sacrificing" is how sugar is treated. For five decades the sugar lobby has convinced Congress that protective trade barriers are a good idea. These barriers are sustained even with popular opinion what it is today about eating sugar -- a true head scratcher, and just one example of thousands.
Yes, it's time to take a cool-headed look at farm subsidizing, and end most of it. This is too emotional a topic to put in the hands of politicians.
Update: A 12 Jul 13 WSJ editorial, A Healthy Farm Rebellion, on this same topic which also reveals the emotional heat.
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