“Lads, do you remember all that contaminated mozzarella we had?”
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0328/mozzarella.html
Sorry, so very, very sorry about that.
I also had another one a few months ago, to which the obvious follow-on is “, fails to recall Armenian genocide”.
Thank you, you’re too kind.
A few things I’ve been reading / listening to recently, all from America:
In ‘Clogged Arteries‘, Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes say transport funding in the US has been spread too thinly and not targeted towards the congested cities where it can do most good. They link this overly-egalitarian approach to the proliferation of ‘earmarks’ in federal transportation legislation, ie the ‘everyone gets a new highway’ approach to consensus-building.
In this speech (see also here and here), Jonathan Kozol attacks (among other things) unequal public school funding: New York City spends $11,000 per child in public schools, compared to $19,000 in nearby suburbs and $22,000 on Long Island, never mind the fact that children in the city tend to come from more problematic backgrounds. Much of this disparity is due to the funding of local schools from local property taxes with little redistribution according to needs.
In ‘The Inherited Ghetto‘, Patrick Sharkey describes the forces varying from outright to indirect discrimination that have contributed to the ongoing racial segregation of residential America. Notably, the response to the growing economic marginalisation of blacks in urban areas due to industrial decline and middle class flight to the suburbs was not to try and regenerate cities but to institute mass incarceration.
Finally, in ‘A Level Playing Field for Cities‘, Ed Glaeser gives a handy summary of how these issues fit together:
While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty.
I think there’s a fairly different approach to these kind of issues in England, which seems to have smaller spatial inequalities and greater concern over ‘postcode lotteries’ in public services and the like. The absence of a legacy of extreme racism may have a lot to do with this, but I’d also link it to the much greater centralisation of government and public finance in England. I’ve tended to see this a bad thing as it reduces local government’s incentive and ability to pro-actively develop their area, but it does have the effect of smoothing out inequalities - obviously by greater redistribution, but also in a prior sense in that when services are funded by local taxes the incentive to surround yourself with rich people and keep as far away from poor people as possible is that much stronger. It’s also worth noting that Glaeser criticises American land use restrictions of the ‘maximum density’ type, while restrictions on sprawl (which I believe he also dislikes) have arguably contributed to the relatively good performance of English cities.
Anyway, these issues clearly have ramifications beyond economics and local government finance. If I had the academic chops I’d like to try and write something about it all under the general heading of ’spatial justice’ (as compared to ’social justice’) that also brought in issues of political and environmental rights, but I don’t really have a clue where to start.
