Tag: community

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Bureaucracy and Community Resilience

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of vision.

Jim Collins

Bureaucracies are inherently anti-democratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

I’ve had way too much experience with bureaucracies in my almost fifty years working with the federal government.  In the next couple of blogs, I’ll be looking at bureaucracy through the lens of community resilience.

First, a word of disclaimer.  My view of bureaucracy is well summarized in some of Moore’s laws of bureaucracy:

  • Bureaucracies have no heart.
  • Bureaucracies are perverse.
  • Bureaucracies will thrash about, causing much cost, pain and destruction.

If I (and so many others) feel this way, why do we still have bureaucracies?  There are two reasons for this that more or less mirror the quotes above.

  1. Most importantly, bureaucracies exist to carry out routine functions efficiently and in a consistent manner – bureaucracies are the wheels that keep organizations (governments, businesses…) running more or less smoothly.  But this also implies a more fundamental role for bureaucracies.  Their rules, regulations, and procedures encapsulate the organization’s corporate memory of what works, at least within a bureaucracy’s domain.  However, the more rigid this procedural structure, the more resistant the bureaucracy is to change.
  2. Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating.  As formulated in Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:  In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.  In other words, in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Larger organizations – and communities – tend to be more bureaucratic because they tend to do more things on a routine basis. All too often, however, their bureaucracies are rigid and resistant to change. But resilience is all about managing and adapting to change.  Achieving resilience thus means tearing down the walls between balkanized bureaucracies that are busily making their silos into fortresses.  This leads to a paradox:  if a community is working to become more resilient, it will try to take action through its tried and proven bureaucratic channels, the ones least prone to change.  Further, since adapting to major disruptions (e.g., pandemics, recessions) generally does not neatly fit into a single bureaucracy’s purview, it forces bureaucracies to interact with one another in non-routine ways.  If the community’s bureaucracies are flexible, the community is likely to be more resilient; if not, any efforts to enhance the community’s resilience become much more difficult. 

Of course, these are general thoughts.  However, they lead to some specific things to consider in determining whether a community’s bureaucracies will help or hinder efforts to become more resilient.

  • History.  If a bureaucracy is a sort of corporate memory container, then look at the challenges the community, esp. the bureaucracy, has faced.  Were they varied?  Were some of them relatively recent?  Were they successfully met?  “No” answers may indicate that the bureaucracy is too rigid.
  • The age of the bureaucracy.  Just like people, a bureaucracy can get “hardening of the arteries” with age.  It can accrete documentation requirements, for example, that continue on long after the need for a document has disappeared.  In a crisis, these will sow frustration in both the public and the bureaucracy and slow down recovery.
  • Collaboration.  Has the bureaucracy worked with others outside their domain to solve crosscutting problems?  City governments such as San Diego and Baltimore that are managed in a fashion that forces bureaucracies to work together toward common crosscutting goals are likely to be more resilient than ones that are managed in a more stovepiped manner.
  • Leadership.  Is the leadership of the bureaucracy open to new ideas?  Does the leadership have experience working outside the bureaucracy?  Has any of the leadership come from outside the bureaucracy?  Again, “No” answers raise red flags.
  • Innovation.  Has the bureaucracy periodically changed how it does business?  Is continuous improvement a part of its culture?
  • Number.  More bureaucracies imply more organizations that must be aligned to actually make something happen.
  • Accountability. Do community leaders hold their bureaucrats accountable for how they have served the people?

Bureaucracy can be a boon or a bane to community resilience. It’s up to the community – through its leaders – to determine which it is to be.

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Community culture and community resilience

Culture outperforms strategy every time; culture with strategy is unbeatable.

Quint Studer

A community’s culture is one of the most overlooked – and misunderstood – contributors to its future fitness. A community’s culture is primarily its history – not the one in books but the one embedded in its mind, its heart and its soul. A community’s culture shapes its shared values, and how its residents expect each other to behave. It thus conditions how a community approaches its problems, and whether the community can even recognize its problems.

A community’s culture is related to but different from its social capital. A community’s social capital resides in its connections – how the community is wired, and how effectively those wires enable the community to share information. A community’s culture conditions which connections are made, how messages are framed and even which information is shared. Thus, a community’s culture is a sort of skeleton supporting its social connection and directing where they form.

One of the ways that a community’s culture is manifested is in whether or not the community has a “can-do” attitude. Some time ago, I read an interview of the CEO of Fluor, focusing on his move of the giant construction company from California to Texas.

[When the 2006 move became known] “California made no attempt to keep us… things started to happen quickly [in Texas], without us initiating them. The Irving Chamber of Commerce did orientation sessions for employees and spouses, even helping with new-house searches. Or ‘little things:’ Irving on its own renamed a street Fluor Drive, which in California or the Northeast would be laughable.”

This sort of attitude implies a community self-confidence that results in decisive action.

A community’s culture also reveals itself in how – whether – it recognizes its problems. When working with the Navajos, one of the striking features of their culture is the implicit prohibition against talking about bad things that might happen. This was based on the fear that talking about them would lead to them occurring. This sort of “whistling in the dark” makes it very difficult to prepare for or mitigate against disaster.

So how do I know whether my community has a culture that makes it future fit, that makes it resilient? There are several signposts.

First and foremost, the trajectory of the community. If the community’s quality of life is improving, that’s a sign of a proactive culture, indicating a self-confident community. If the community’s quality of life is deteriorating, the community is going to become less confident and less able to tackle its problems. Its future fitness is questionable.

Next, the unity of purpose within the community. As Paolo Freire has said: One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Thus, if a community’s leaders are pushing programs that negatively impact a large swath of the community – that, in fact, are counter to their cultural values – the community has a culture that is in conflict with itself. It cannot confidently attack its problems. In fact, it may not even address them until they balloon into a crisis.

Then consider how tolerant the community’s culture is. As Joel Salatin says: The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers. If one part of a community refuses to let other – different – voices be heard, then the community effectively is limiting its approach to solving its problems to only those “approved” by the intolerant. Effectively, it’s like a general stubbornly concentrating on taking the hills in front of him while refusing to look at the mountains behind. Whether it’s banning books or refusing to listen to parents’ concerns, this kind of community culture will impair a community’s fitness to face the future.

Finally – and closely allied to its tolerance – look at the community’s open-ness, its willingness to accept new people and new ideas. The quote from Fluor’s CEO about Irving, TX, indicates a culture that knows how to adapt to new people and to accept new ideas. In solving their problems, “open” communities will be open to innovations, whatever their source. “Open” communities will also be the most likely to see and seize opportunities brought on by changing circumstances.

Most importantly, “open” communities are the ones most likely to have some sort of strategic vision for their community. They know what they want to become. They may even have mapped out a plan for their future. These communities – their actions compounded from culture and strategy – will be the ones best able to cope with change and to seize the opportunities inherent in change. They will be the most future fit, the most resilient.

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Insights from Scale, by Geoffrey West

To sustain open-ended growth in light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations.

Geoffrey West

I recently finished reading this book (official title is Scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies, whew!) published in 2017. Somehow, I missed it when it first came out; I found a reference to it in something else I was reading. West is a former President of the Santa Fe Institute and a distinguished nuclear physicist – in spite of that his book is relatively easy reading.

The general basis of the book is that there are properties of cities that scale in certain ways with population. In general, infrastructure scales sublinearly with population. As an example, if we graphed miles of roads vs population of cities from around the world we’d get a line that would curve down from a straight line. In other words, the larger the city the fewer miles of road per person (Mathematically, road miles scales with population raised to the ~0.85 power, 1 being linear).

However, some properties do scale linearly with population. For example, “the total number of establishments in each city regardless of what business they conduct turns out to be linearly proportional to its population size. Double the size of a city and on average you’ll find twice as many businesses. The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size. Similarly, the data also show that the total number of employees working in these establishments also scales approximately linearly with population size: on average, there are only about 8 employees for every establishment, again regardless of the size of the city.”

On the other hand, socioeconomic properties scale superlinearly (curve up from a straight line, with exponent ~1.15). “The larger the city, the higher the wages, the greater the GDP, the more crime, the more cases of AIDS and flu [and covid, as we saw during the pandemic], the more restaurants, the more patents produced, and so on, all following the “15 percent rule” on a per capita basis in urban systems across the globe.” Both what’s good and what’s bad about cities, in one mathematical relation!

This seems to imply that population growth leads to socio-economic growth indefinitely. But, as West points out, growth can’t go on indefinitely. Similar to Moore’s Law for computer chips (doubling in power every two years), eventually you come up against some physical limitation that slows down growth. Unlimited growth inevitably leads to collapse…unless…

And that leads to what I see as the most important reason to read the book: West’s insights on growth, innovation and change. Innovation leading to positive change can enable continued growth. Thus, West posits a sort of symbiotic relationship among the three.

“Change and, by implication, innovation, must occur in order to continue growing and avoid collapse. Growth and the continual need to be adapting to the challenges of new or changing environments, often in the form of “improvement” or increasing efficiency, are major drivers of innovation.”

He also has a valuable insight about the rate of transformation. He points out that communities trying to fundamentally change and rise above their peers must temper their desire with the knowledge that positive transformation can be a very slow process. “Perhaps the most salient feature is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs. Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings. So even as the population has increased and the overall GDP and standard of living have risen across the entire urban system, relative individual performance hasn’t changed very much. Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it’s likely to be crappy still.” This is an interesting sort of echo of the Law of Conservation of Community Momentum.

In the book, West concentrates on the overall trends. However, the real opportunities for fruitful investigation by the rest of us are the outliers to the trends.

What communities have leapfrogged their peers? How have they done it? New Orleans after Katrina seemed to have done this in several areas, e.g., education. But now NOLA seems to be backsliding – reverting to the mean or even worse, especially in violent crime. I think this book is essential reading for those interested in our communities – both for the hidden relationships it reveals and for the food for thought it provides.

I read this appreciation of George Orwell this morning. Well worth your time.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/17/why-orwell-matters/

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The Price of Time and Our Communities’ Futures

Only entropy comes easy.

Anton Chekhov

I have been reading excerpts from Edward Chancellor’s The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest for the last few weeks. I suggest you get a copy – I think it will become one of those books that shape people’s thoughts and color public dialogue. It illuminates the path our country took to get into its current economic mess. It is an in-depth study of what I wrote about in “Masked Villains.”

Chancellor has an interesting metaphor that I want to borrow. Suppose there are two cities, separated by a raging river. One city is the Present and one is our desired Future. There is a bridge that crosses the river – the only way we can get to that Future.

But we live in the Present, and have to meet the Present’s daily needs: food, clothing, shelter, education for our kids, medical care … And so, it is all too easy to forget about the bridge to our Future. But there is a price to pay for our forgetfulness, for our neglect – entropy. Entropy is the price of that wasted time.

Entropy is perhaps the most difficult physical property to understand. Temperature, mass, distance, velocity, volume, and even time are all concepts that we almost intuitively understand. And yet entropy is in some ways the most important, because of its ties to our own mortality.

Entropy is Nature’s drive toward randomness, seen in the buildup of waste products and the dissipation of energy and order. It is the loss of information in messages, the fading of memories, and the decaying of our bodies and bridges. Entropy embodies uncertainty, risk, and friction.

It takes effort – energy – to combat entropy. Our bodies’ systems geared toward repairing the day to day wear and tear on our bodies first and foremost rely on our internal energy generation systems. As we age, those systems become less and less efficient until our bodies no longer are able to withstand entropy’s inexorable pull. Thus, in a very real sense, entropy kills.

At the community level, entropy means concrete will inevitably crack, stone will erode, and iron will rust. We often call these the ravages of Time, but just as it takes effort to maintain our bodies, maintaining our physical infrastructure also requires effort – energy. In fact, all of our infrastructures – whether physical, social or economic – require effort if they are to be remain viable parts of our communities.

If we neglect them, they will inevitably crumble: the concrete pillars holding up a condo will fail; our children will forget how to interact with others on a human level; our businesses will waste their capital on meaningless gestures instead of investing in themselves. One need only look at our frayed social networks and our confused and conflicted culture to recognize entropy’s fingerprints.

Because of entropy, our communities will always face chronic slow-onset crises that eventually will require immediate attention and action. It is all too easy to become so wrapped up in the Present’s crises that we forget to maintain the bridge to our Future. The Chekhov quote is a stark reminder of how easy it is to forget, and of how hard it is to remember to invest in our bridges toward our Futures. If we don’t invest and maintain those bridges, we risk their collapse. And if they collapse, we may fall into the river’s swift current, perhaps never to find our desired Future.

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A side note. The sharp-eyed may note that Chancellor in effect is calling interest (e.g., on loans), not entropy, the Price of Time. In effect, interest is a measure of the entropy of financial systems. When the interest rate is decided by the financial market without government interference, it is a reasonably accurate measure of the financial system’s entropy. In times of low monetary volatility, market interest rates tend to be low, indicating the market’s conclusion that the loss in value of the loan’s principal over the term of the loan is relatively low. As market volatility and perceived risk (uncertainty) increase, the interest charged increases. So, too, with increasing length of the loan – longer time, larger uncertainty.

Unfortunately, when central bankers do silly things like giving us negative interest rates (where we still are now in almost all of the developed world), then the measure becomes highly inaccurate.

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Flawed Men

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Four men – four Presidents – honored in granite. Men of their times, with all of the imperfections of those times, but whose deeds transcended their eras and shaped our futures.

The first President, always the one asked to lead: the Continental army, the Constitutional Convention, the nation as first President. The indispensable man for the birth of our nation. And yet a slave owner, and a sometimes scheming land developer.

The third President; his words have gone down in history as the definition of freedom and human rights. Sparked both the American and French Revolutions. And yet a slave owner who recognized slavery’s inhumanity but continued to own slaves, and a sort of moral coward who never battled his opponents head-on, always relying on proxies.

The 26th President; shaped the modern Presidency. The first conservationist President, won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese war, the trust-buster always on the side of the common man. And yet he preached eugenics, to stop “degenerates” from breeding.

The sixteenth President; saved the Union in its darkest hour, freed the slaves, and wrote the greatest memorial to those who have fallen in war in the English language. And yet he was clinically depressed and married into a family of slaveholders.

In recent years, their reputations have come under attack: statues removed, their names expunged from public buildings, their lives dissected and their flaws magnified. And yet they accomplished so much.

Today we here in the US honor those who have paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy. In small towns across the country (and a few – too few! – large cities), there will be parades and other festivities to remember them. But too often we forget that these fallen heroes were also flawed, just as the four on Mt Rushmore were. Some were racists, some were thieves, some were rapists – the litany of their flaws goes on. As humans, our common lot is imperfection. And yet because of what these flawed men and women did, we can celebrate with family and friends – backyard barbecues, going to the beach, taking in a ballgame, using the holiday to reconnect.

The lesson for me is that though we are all flawed – even the greatest of us – we can all accomplish great things, working together. Even as those we honor today achieved so much for us. But to honor them we must step into life’s arena as they did. We must accept that we are all flawed, but overlook the flaws in others so that – together – we dare greatly to build a better life for all.

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A Tale of Three Cities

A community is a group of individuals and organizations bound together by geography and self-interest to efficiently carry out common functions.

Community and Regional Resilience Institute

One of the things that frustrates me the most about communities and community resilience is that too few community professionals and researchers seem to recognize that communities are open systems. Even for cities whose total population remains almost unchanged from year to year, there is a roiling of the humanity hidden by the statistics. Old faces disappear, new voices are heard. For example, at this time, the number of people moving into San Francisco, California, is roughly the same as the number of people who are leaving. San Francisco’s thriving economy and vibrant cultural scene provide employment and entertainment opportunities which continue to attract many, especially young professionals. However, the high cost of living, the increase in crime and the ineffectiveness of the city in protecting people and their property have forced many to leave, especially those with families or small businesses. Both those arriving and those leaving are “voting with their feet” based on their perceived self-interest.

It should be no surprise that this phenomenon is universal. The Huns, Vandals and Goths stormed into Europe to plunder and then settle because they saw the promise of a better life – better than staying where they were. The Choctaw and Chickasaw formed cities up and down the Mississippi basin, and then abandoned them periodically to find fresher land for farming. During the ‘20s and ’30s, African-Americans left the American southland by the tens of thousands to find better jobs and lives in the North.

In that sense, our cities’ vitality depends on their ability to provide people with the quality of life that they want. Self-interest thus is a major component of a community’s resilience. The following comes from a book that I’m writing with the help of Jennifer Adams. It illustrates the influence that self-interest – seeking a better quality of life – has played in the evolution of three cities.

Over the last seventy years, no three cities in the US have experienced population declines comparable to those of Youngstown, OH; St. Louis, MO; and Detroit, MI. Over that period, each has lost approximately two-thirds of their population. They each illustrate how residents’ perceived self-interests can impact a community’s vitality.

Throughout its history, St. Louis has been a major transportation hub. It was the jumping off point for most of the wagon trains that settled the West. By 1950, it had reached its population zenith of almost 860,000. However, its growth was limited by its geography, and after World War II, many left for the suburbs. This led to a drop in tax revenue, limiting the city’s ability to provide essential services, causing more people to leave – if they could. Qualitatively, parents felt the quality of their kids’ schooling had gone down. Many of the employers gradually followed their workforce out of the city – it was just more convenient for both employers and employees. This vicious cycle of people leaving, lowering taxes that pay for services, leading more people to leave, has continued. The city is a shadow of its former self, and has become one of the most dangerous in the nation (in terms of violent crime per capita). However, the growth of the rest of its metropolitan area (MSA) has more than made up for the city’s losses. While immigration is certainly a factor in the growth of the MSA, it appears that many who left the city merely moved out into the suburbs, seeking a better quality of life.

Detroit has a similar story to tell, with a slightly different twist. After World War II, Detroit boomed along with the auto industry. It reached its maximum population of almost 2 million in 1950. Like St. Louis, the city’s middle-class – white and black – began moving out of the city and into suburban areas starting in the late 1950’s, just as the auto industry began its slide due to foreign competition. Detroit then began spinning through the same dismal vicious cycle as St. Louis of people leaving, tax revenues dropping leading to reduced services which drove more people to leave the city. The poor level of service was compounded by poor governance which resulted in the takeover of the city by the state of Michigan in 2013, and a declaration of bankruptcy. One statistic exemplifies the sorry state of the city – in 2014, approximately 40% of the city’s streetlights weren’t working, leading to thousands of abandoned homes and soaring crime rates. Outside the city’s center, police response times were in hours not minutes. Public safety seemed the exception not the rule.

However, unlike St. Louis, the increasing population of the surrounding areas has not compensated for the losses of the city. There has been growth in the MSA, but it has been dampened by the gradual decline of the auto industry, increased automation and the resultant loss of jobs.

Up until the 1960’s, Youngstown, Ohio’s, economy was booming. Based on coal and then steel, throughout the first half of the twentieth century the city’s economic vitality provided jobs for native-born and immigrant Americans. Unfortunately, the city’s economy was not diversified; the city’s economic decline mirrored that of the American steel industry, starting in the late 1960’s. It is estimated that Youngstown lost 40,000 steel jobs, 400 small businesses closed and about one-half of the school tax revenues disappeared. Much of the population moved from the city to find jobs so that they could provide for their families. The population today is only about one-third that in 1950.

Unlike St. Louis and Detroit, Youngstown’s surrounding area has seen little net growth. The population of surrounding areas experienced a small expansion from 1950 to 1980, reflecting at least in part people moving from the city to more suburban areas, seeking a better quality of life. Beginning in 1980, Youngstown’s MSA also began contracting, reflecting the dependence of the area on steel industry jobs (and the steel industry’s interdependence with a declining American auto industry).

Taken together, these three stories point out how people’s perceptions of their self-interest – what’s best for them and their families – impact their communities. Starting in the 1950’s – while American industry was booming – families began moving to the suburbs. The suburbs were cleaner than the cities; they had parks and playgrounds and good schools for the kids; their white picket fences epitomized the American Dream.

And then, American industry stopped booming. The manufacturing jobs so necessary for the viability of cities like Detroit and Youngstown started to disappear. And the workforce that had made these cities such vital places in 1950’s then left to find new jobs so they could support their families.

The cities they left behind them are husks of their former selves. While other cities such as Pittsburgh also suffered through the same travails as these three, those cities have reinvented themselves and have become – perhaps – more livable than ever before. They have found ways to once again provide the services and amenities and jobs – the quality of life – that make for a viable city.

People eventually leave cities that don’t fulfill their needs – their self-interest. This is what makes the slow-motion suicide of cities like San Francisco and Baltimore so sad. Pittsburgh, and other cities that have reinvented themselves, have found ways to appeal to people’s self-interest. And as a result, these cities have regained some of their once-lost resilience.

Population of three cities and their Metropolitan Statistical Areas
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Beyond Sustainability and Resilience: Questions

The quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself.

Bernardo Moya

Over the last few months, I’ve been posting a series “Beyond Sustainability and Resilience.” It led me to suggesting that rather than aim for “sustainability” as she is most often understood, or “resilience’ as he is commonly understood, communities should aim to become Future Fit – ready to survive and thrive in turbulent times. In my latest post in the series, I identified trends that will impact our communities’ futures.

• “White out” and “why out” – Baby Boomers retiring from the labor force, and taking their corporate knowledge with them.
• “Show me the money” – the Baby Boomers’ children (and grandchildren) will inherit something like $60 trillion over the next decade, exacerbating current conundrums around housing, esp. affordable housing.
• “The Great Game” – in an increasingly competitive world, too many communities seem to be embracing mediocrity.
• “Where’s the beef?” – supply chains are snarled, preventing rapid progress in many areas where it’s needed.
• “Balloons” – not only where’s the beef, but can we even afford chicken?
• “Rising tides” – many coastal cities are afflicted by water where they don’t want it.
• “Separated by a common language” – too many things separate us, and trust seems a curious anachronism.

These are overlaid on local trends: demographic, economic, educational, physical and social. All of these are entangled and interact with national and global forces.
Together all will drive our communities toward a Future different from its Present.
“Drive toward” a Future, but not create it. Trends are not destiny; ultimately, a community’s own actions will determine what its Future will be.

In that Future, the community will face most (all?) of the challenges it has faced before, but will also face new ones, or new combinations. Some of these challenges will masquerade as the same as threats communities have faced before, but likely will require different solutions. The current inflation is a prime example. In the ‘70s, inflation ran rampant (Example: in May of ’74, I was offered a job with a starting salary of $18K. By December, my paycheck was over $20K.) – at least as bad as today. It took a recession to get the economy back on track.

Inflation is simply the result of too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. The inflation of the ‘70s was caused by a combination of very low interest rates, high unemployment, an extremely weak stock market, untying the dollar from gold, and high energy prices driven by OPEC. Our inflation today is driven by very low interest rates, a well-intentioned effort that pumped billions into the economy, supply chain bottlenecks that limited the supply of goods and rising energy prices due high demand after the pandemic. Some of these are the same (e.g., easy money and rising energy prices) but the solution to the current inflation is likely to be different (At least I hope so – who wants another recession?) because the combination of causes is different. For example, fixing our supply chain woes is likely to be a major component of any solution.

At this point, you’re probably asking “OK, Mr. Know-It-All. What should my community do to become Future Fit?” Ultimately, there’s no single answer. The actions a community takes depend on the potential risks and opportunities the community may encounter in the future – and they are very much community-specific. However, in the spirit of the quote above, I can offer some general questions that every community ought to ask itself.

• Quality of life. It’s almost axiomatic to say that a community is a system, made up of individuals and organizations interacting in a variety of ways for a common purpose. I’ve puzzled over what that common purpose might be for a while now, and I’ve concluded a community’s purpose is to provide the quality of life that its members want. For a big city, its “quality of life” may include a variety of entertainment and cultural choices. For a suburban community, its “quality of life” may revolve around white picket fences and recreational opportunities for kids. For a rural community, its “quality of life” may depend on being able to hike or hunt or fish. And for all communities, there are expectations regarding social and economic opportunities.

The first set of questions that a Future Fit community ought to have answers for revolves around the current quality of life it provides.

What is our community today – demographically and economically?
What are the essential aspects of our current “Quality of Life?”
Are there aspects of that we’d like to change (e.g., making life better for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder)?
Are there things we’re doing now that our citizens don’t value?

• Community’s trajectory. Inevitably, every community evolves over time. People move in, people move out; babies are born, the elderly die. Businesses are created; weaker businesses close their doors. These can lead to both slow and rapid changes in the community’s demographic and economic makeup, and to what the community sees as an acceptable quality of life. Future Fit communities will understand where they are being driven, and may take preventive action if they don’t like their future state. Questions they will answer may include:

If we take no action, how will our community evolve demographically and economically?
Do we like where we’re heading? If not, what are we going to do to change our path?
How will these evolutions impact the community’s expectations about quality of life?
What institutions may have to change to respond to evolving expectations?

• Threats. Most communities recognize that there are threats to their current quality of life. Natural disasters, the loss of a major employer, or rising tides all should be among a community’s “known knowns.” Truly Future Fit communities will also recognize that the future may bring new challenges, or new combinations of challenges. They will answer questions such as:

What are the threats to our community’s quality of life?
Have we mitigated those threats?
Do we have the resources to meet or recover from them if they occur?
What new threats may we face in the future?
How will we deal with them?

• Opportunities. In times of turbulent change like ours, there are always going to be opportunities for those willing and able to compete. Future Fit communities know they can’t go after everything that’s out there (although some of our community economic developers certainly try to); there are costs to competition. They know their own strengths and can judge when these make them competitive. They are prepared to use these strengths to maintain or improve the community’s quality of life. They will seek answers to questions such as:

What are our current strengths that we can build on?
In what areas can we be competitive – now and in the future?
What programs do we have in place that will ensure we have the human capacity to seize new opportunities?
How should we invest our resources to be competitive in the Future?
What current programs/policies actually prevent us from being competitive?
Where should we compete to maintain or improve our community’s quality of life?

Inevitably, the drivers toward the Future will impact each community so that its Future is different from its Present. Future Fit communities ideally will maintain (or improve) the quality of life they provide no matter how the Future evolves. Thus, the ability to maintain a community’s quality of life in a turbulent world becomes a yardstick for judging what actions to take to protect its Future.

I’m a big fan of Bari Weiss and the essays she writes or posts. The media and too many politicians blather about defunding the police, masking and a host of other controversies. But the simple truth is that none of these are nearly as important for our Future as our children’s success. In several of my own past posts I’ve written about the plight of young men, especially those of color. Just this week, we found that more than 80% of the third graders in Chicago are below grade level in reading, with boys performing worse than girls. We have way too much data on the what; this essay sheds new light on why so many boys do so poorly from one who was almost lost.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-boys-and-me

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Veteran’s Day – 2021

We were young then 
When we heard the trumpet’s call.
We were young then
‘Fore the war to end all wars.

We were young then
Embraced by war’s camaraderie.
We were young then
But saw scenes no one should see.

We were young then
And home was a distant dream.
We were young then
‘Midst the rain and mud and screams.

We were young then
Remembered with a sweetheart’s tears.
We were young then
Now frozen in our years.

Here in the US, it’s Veterans Day.  It started out as Armistice Day celebrating the end of World War I. This “war to end all wars” ushered in the era of modern horrors – poison gas, trenches, what we now know as PTSD – but without the modern medical miracles that have helped so many to survive. Over nine million soldiers died.

In the stories memorializing that day, the changes in our world are too often glossed over by saying “It was a more innocent time.”  A majority of Americans lived in rural areas (e.g., 60% lived in towns of 2500 less).  Though we had a standing army of nearly 200,000, the Army that fought in France was mostly draftees and volunteers.  Some of the farm boys still learned to march by “Hay foot, straw foot.”  About 120,000 of these young men died – half in combat, the others from disease. 

It was a time of small-town small-mindedness but also of small-town love of family and community and country. A town’s churches were more than merely the place we visited on Sundays; they were the social and often the political centers of our communities.  Charitable giving was done through the church; the women of the church took it upon themselves to take care of the sick and their families; the men worked together to build the community.

Many of us look wistfully back, wondering whether today’s youth would have the same innocence, the same sense of duty, the same willingness to give their all.  As Viet Nam and our Middle Eastern wars have shown us, some would – but many more would not. 

The same is true of our communities – some of us are taking purposeful action to strengthen our communities, but too many are not. Too many, like a subversive Fifth Column, are tearing down what has taken money and blood and lives to build. They gave their lives, but some of us cannot find five minutes to help make our own communities better places to live.  They invested their lives to ensure the safety of the American Dream; some would turn that dream into a nightmare. As you celebrate this holiday of remembrance, remember what they gave and why.  Remember their devotion to their communities and devote a little of your day – and the days ahead – to making your community a little better.

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Gödel’s Theorem and Economic Resilience

Logic is the anatomy of thought.

John Locke

Kurt Gödel was one of the last century’s preeminent mathematicians and philosophers. He is most famous for proving that for any system of logic, there are meaningful questions that can be asked, but that cannot be answered within that logical system.

It is easy to dismiss this as academic navel-gazing, but there are real-world examples of this. One of the over-riding issues of our times is the quest for social “justice.” But what is justice? Some say that government should take from those who have more and give to those who have less, and that is justice. But others (J D Vance and Wendell Berry) point out that this creates dependence and eventually is destructive. I can ask questions about justice, but can’t definitively answer them.

If I killed a man a thousand years ago in England, justice then would demand that I pay a wergild to the person’s family or lord to recompense them for their loss. Today, I would most likely either languish in prison (essentially a ward of the state) or be executed – the family of my victim would be uncompensated. Which “justice” is more just?

If we pass on to a higher plane, perhaps we’ll know. And, generally, that is one way to answer the unanswerable questions – move to a higher level framework. In the physical sciences, one of the great unresolved questions of the 19th century was – is light a particle or a wave? Newtonian physics said light was particulate, but couldn’t explain why light sometimes acted as a wave. It was only when quantum mechanics was developed (with Newtonian physics as a special case) that the question was finally answered with a resounding “Yes. Light is both particle and wave.” Quantum mechanics became that “higher plane” to explain light’s behavior; a new “logic” that subsumed Newtonian physics as a special case.

In the social sciences we have a similar situation – we can ask if a community or a community system (e.g., its economy) is resilient, but we can’t really answer that a priori within the logic of what we know. We have to develop the logic for that “higher plane” if we are to be able to predict resilience.

Shade Shutters, in a recent article,* has given us a glimpse of what that higher plane might be. He and his co-workers developed a quantitative measure for the economic structures of 938 urban areas. Rather than looking at this as a static property, they looked at the change of the economic structure over the period 2001-2017. Their primary interest was in finding a relationship between the evolution of an area’s economy and the economy’s performance during and after the Great Recession (GR). They chose the area’s per capita GDP as their performance measure.

They identified six clusters that were archetypes of an area’s economic evolution:

  • The economies in Cluster 1 were relatively stable prior to the GR, changed rapidly during the Recession, and then stopped changing, i.e., achieved a stable “New Normal.”
  • The economies in Cluster 6 behaved similarly, except that they had been significantly changing even before the GR.
  • The economies in Cluster 2 significantly changed prior to the Recession, and then essentially were stable.
  • The economies in Cluster 3 changed leading up to and in the early part of the Recession and then slowly evolved back to a prior configuration.
  • The economies in Cluster 4 had an almost constant rate of change in structure; there was little discernible influence of the GR on their makeup. I am tempted to think of them as the continuously adapting economies.
  • The economies in Cluster 5 had virtually no change before, during or after the Recession. In response to my query, Shutters indicated that these all seemed to be “micropolitan” – small urban centers.

Looking at the performance of each cluster, the economies in Cluster 4 (continuously adapting) were the only ones to show a net growth from the start of the GR through its recovery. All of the others lost ground in terms of their net change in per capita GCP. Somewhat surprisingly (to me), Cluster 5 – the unchanging one – did not perform the worst; the worst performing were the economies in Cluster 3, which had drifted back into their pre-Recession makeup.

Like all good research, Shutters’ work leads to lots of questions.

  • Besides the structural evolution of their economies, is there any other common thread that seems to key the best-performing archetype, or any of them? Geography, presence or absence of a dominant employer, prevalence of a certain type of industry, or trends. I would anticipate that communities with an “eds and meds” economy would tend to be more a Cluster 5, for example.
  • Cluster 3 is an anomaly to me – a sort of “Back to the Future” evolution. The figure seems to imply either that the Cluster’s evolution prior to the Great Recession was to an unstable state or that there was growth up to and into the Great Recession which was then chopped off. In a subsequent note, Shutters indicated that the evolution of Cluster 3 economies might reflect a temporary condition due to unemployment changing the apparent structure and then a recovery to the Old Normal.
  • A community’s economy is a more-or-less decentralized system. Its structural evolution reflects decisions made independently by scores of entrepreneurs and business owners. If the Invisible Hand was ever at work, it certainly has to be here.  Are these results applicable to other community systems, especially other decentralized ones (e.g., social systems)?
  • We tend to look at internal factors that cause a system to evolve in a certain way. But, in general, systems evolve in response to changes in their environment (everything that’s not a part of the system). The continuously adapting economies may simply be in an environment that is changing slowly enough that they can “keep up.”

Shutters has not yet reached that higher plane that will allow us to truly understand what makes a community resilient. But I believe his work points us toward that higher plane. Several years ago, I told a parable of foresters looking at fallen trees to try to understand the causes of their fall. I concluded the tale

[the foresters] are standing in the midst of a forest in which the trees are each bending to the wind and the other elements and then straightening when the wind or the rain or the snow dies down. And we as foresters are really most interested in what keeps the trees standing, not what makes them fall. So it should be with community recovery and resilience. Resilience does not arise from demonstrated weakness but rather from the exertion of strength. Thus, we need to know and understand the strengths of each community, how those strengths are exerted, and how we can nurture those strengths so that they become even stronger.

Shutters, as a wise forester, is focusing on recovery, not vulnerability. He is honed in on an economy’s dynamic character, not its static attributes. And by doing that, he is pointing to a path that I believe will lead to a greater understanding of what makes a community resilient. And if we achieve that understanding, the next – greater – challenge will be transform our communities so that they can adapt to their changing environments.

* Shutters, Shade T., S. S. Kandala, F. Wei, and A. P. Kinzig. “Resilience of Urban Economic Structures Following the Great Recession.” Sustainability 13, no. 2374 (2021).

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The Camden Way

All direction of public opinion and humor must originate in a few.

Edmund Burke

Late last spring, as the protests after the death of George Floyd gained momentum, politicians in the Twin Cities and elsewhere began calling to defund or disband police forces across the country. For a few days, calls went out to follow “the Camden Way,” by which was meant disbanding the entire police department. Almost as soon as it started, though, mentions of the Camden experiment stopped. And that’s too bad, because there are useful lessons there.

In the distant past when I was a boy, my father worked for Campbell Soup in Camden, NJ. Even then, the city was slowly sinking into the same morass that other industrial cities – Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh – were in. Crime, grime and a feeling of tired neglect were my impressions of the town at the time.

By 2012, the city’s population was only 60% of its high water mark in the ‘50’s. There were ~2000 violent crimes that year (among the highest per capita in the nation), including 67 homicides; and drugs were openly bought and sold in the city’s streets. The police force was considered to be one of the most corrupt in the nation, its officers known for both their brutality and their high absenteeism. They were represented by a powerful union that had won for them large benefit packages, but also had blocked meaningful reform. Their general approach to crime was reactive – sitting in their precincts waiting for something to happen, and then going to the scene of the crime and busting a few heads.

Scott Thomson, the police chief at the time and a Camden native, believed there was a better way. He believed – and believes – in community policing. He wanted his officers to be out in the neighborhoods, getting to know the residents, playing stickball with the kids in the streets. But he couldn’t do that with the force he had available. There weren’t enough police officers to cover the entire city. At the time, “austerity” was the watchword for all of New Jersey – there simply wasn’t any money for Thomson to hire additional officers to fill the shortfall. And even if he could, the contract with the union limited officers’ ability to get out into the streets.

Thomson’s first tried to negotiate a more flexible contract with the policemen’s union. He failed. At his urging, the city government then disbanded the entire municipal police department. From that point onward, city policing was to be carried out by a newly formed county police department, under Thomson’s leadership. Even though the pay and benefits were less, 2,000 applied for the 400 positions on the force.

Residents saw immediate changes. Officers were out in the neighborhoods much more. New officers were “encouraged” to knock on doors, introducing themselves and asking residents for suggestions about how the department could do a better job. The drug trade did not disappear, but was driven underground. The mindset of police officers was transformed from “warrior” to “guardian.” The emphasis shifted from making arrests to making residents feel safe. The police sponsored ice cream trucks, and hosted block parties and barbeques. As the Catholic bishop of Camden said, Thomson ushered in an ethos of respect for residents.

The change has resulted in a substantial drop in crime, especially violent crime. From 2012 to 2019, the number of homicides fell by ~60% – from 67 to 24. Even with the turmoil of 2020, it was roughly the same – 23. Total violent crimes dropped by almost 50% over that same eight-year period. Excessive force complaints decreased by 95% (only 3 last year).

But still there are critics. They note that crime has decreased but has not disappeared. Camden’s residents are still poor; far too many are unemployed; there are disparities in health care. In effect, the critics are saying to take money away from crimestopping to try to treat the community’s other social ills.

To me, these criticisms miss the mark. The safety of its citizens and their property is one of the essential foundations of a community. It is nearly impossible for the poor to climb out of poverty without this firm foundation – opportunity cannot flourish if safety languishes.

What Thomson achieved exemplifies Burke’s quote above. He and his peers in city government conceived a new – and demonstrably better – way to ensure the public’s safety. They molded public opinion so that residents would accept these tough decisions. And they made their conception a reality. Instead of sitting in their precincts waiting for crime to boil over, police officers are out in the community taking its temperature and turning down the heat however they can. Residents are part of the solution, not impediments. This is not perfection but certainly is progress.

And perhaps that progress is why mention of the Camden Way ended so quickly: it didn’t fit the Narrative. The narrative that the police are evil warriors wallowing in prejudice; that they are the cause of crime and not its solution; that our communities can flourish better without them. And that we thus need less, not more, policing.

An honest recounting of what Camden has achieved belies that narrative. Thomson, et al., changed “public opinion and humor” – the community’s view of the police – not through less but through more – and more effective – policing. Those cities that have tried the other way – defunding the police – have had more crime and less safety.

And indications are that at least some of these formerly flourishing communities – Portland, Seattle – are already suffering, as those who can – leave. Small business owners, in particular – those who buy the uniforms for Little League, who display signs for local events, whose coffee houses and restaurants are where the community’s sense of itself are nurtured – are leaving, eroding the community’s tax base for certain, but also taking with them important parts of the community’s heart and soul. The coming days will be the ultimate test of the resilience of these communities, let us hope they can heal their wounds and regain their vitality.