Quotables

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Some thoughtful things I’ve read or heard recently:

  • Danielle Allen was among the most brilliant profs I ever had in college, and this podcast interview with the Metropolitan Abundance Project does not disappoint. I wish I’d heard this advice from Allen before ever going to planning school: “Planner: yes, give us the macro concept. Then, ask the question of: what actions do we need to take in our local context that would actually achieve that macro concept? Then, how do we use a combination of carrots and sticks to deliver that — and along the way, how do we check that the things we’re doing… achieve alignment with our high priority values?”
    • Instead, the “implementation” section of a plan was always treated like an afterthought at best and a joke at worst, just taking goals and almost randomly assigning them out. Much of my “What a Planner Learned” presentation was exactly asking about the actions cities need to take to actually achieve Middle Housing abundance.
    • “There’s a million things we could do. It’s just a matter of shifting the status quo, building the political will, shifting the culture in order to make all of these things happen as quickly as possible. There’s room for innovation, but there’s absolutely nothing that we need to wait for.” Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
  • Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us, paraphrasing Katherine W. Phillips: “It’s the mental friction that creates diversity’s productive energy”. Phillips: “When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not… This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.” In Kahnemann’s terminology, a diverse group offers a prompt to push thinking through to the slower but better System 2.
  • Saving this Greg Shill quote for my streetcar museum speech about the end of the era: “Lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties… Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy.”
    • “The American love affair with the automobile” was always a myth — corporate propaganda, in fact, coined for DuPont (then 23% owner of GM). And now cars are increasingly shunned as yesteryear’s technology.
  • “Once I dipped a toe into the story of preppy clothes, I quickly realized this was a much, much larger tale. It is—hear me out— perhaps, the most incredible fashion arc of the 20th century. The story is long and ramifying and extremely revealing about American notions of taste, class and democracy.” – the introduction to “American Ivy,” a podcast/blog series about the history of what in my youth I had assumed was exclusionary apparel — but turns out to be an incredibly American story about reinvention and simulacra, starring Asian photographers, Jewish tailors, and African American musicians.