New and Old #141
Friday roundup and commentary
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I love stories that pull back the curtain on manufacturing issues, and the complex processes by which physical items actually get made. Like, cassette players. Or pastina. Or tiny generic dehumidifiers. Or the scales in Publix supermarkets. This is one of those stories.
On June 8, 1953, Martha Lillard celebrated her fifth birthday with a party at an amusement park in Oklahoma. A little over a week later, she woke up with a sore throat and a pain in her neck. Her family took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with polio.
She spent six months in the hospital, where she was put in a giant metal tank — a ventilator informally called an iron lung — to help her breathe. To this day, Lillard is one of the last people in the U.S. who still depends on an iron lung to survive.
What is that exactly?
The machines are giant ventilators about 7 feet long. Patients lie inside with just their heads resting outside; a seal around the patient's neck creates a vacuum. Bellows at the base of the device do the work of a human diaphragm — they create negative pressure so the user's lungs fill with air, and positive pressure allowing the person to exhale.
The problem is, even though she made it to a healthy old age, she had outlived the iron lung device itself:
The antiquated machines are now more likely to be found in a museum than in someone's home. In the 1990s, when her iron lung was breaking down, she called hospitals and museums that might have had old ones in storage. But they'd either thrown them away or didn't want to part with their collection. She eventually bought one from a man in Utah — the machine she still uses today.
The machines were once serviced by Philips Resperonics, but Lillard says the assistance she received from the company was minimal. Once, she says a technician was sent to service her machine and prepared to leave before putting the machine back together….
Wear on parts is her main issue now. The belts need to be replaced every few weeks, the cot inside every six months, the motor every 12 years or so.
Her most immediate need is collars. The collars create the critical airtight seal around the neck. Each one lasts only for a few months. And she has bought all the back stock of collars from places that don't produce them anymore.
It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode: sick person lives so long, they outlive the industrial era that produces the medical technology they rely on.
The thing you realize reading things like this is that manufactured products are irreducibly complex. There’s a level at which the ability to industrially produce something breaks down, and it’s at a much higher level than a single unit. These aren’t artisan products, and there’s a whole infrastructure that makes their existence possible. Pinning down exactly how mass manufacturing comes together, or falls apart, is very tricky. Almost spooky.
The Courage to Forget, The Hedgehog Review, Firmin DeBrabander, October 26, 2023
The King of Thebes is not impressed. Writing will “introduce forgetfulness,” he says. People will no longer “practice their memory because they will put their trust in writing… instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.” It is uncanny how his worries anticipate current critiques of technologies, which allow us to outsource cognitive duties and habits, and deactivate parts of our mind.
The real question of the piece:
What will I do with all these pictures? What does anyone do with them? I could outsource them to an album, either digital or print. But then I think of the hidebound tomes gathering dust in my parents’ basement—or worse, the decks of slideshows from overseas vacations, dispatched long ago, but not before they had tortured unwitting dinner party guests. I hardly found time to consult these supposedly cherished ancient images, honored records of my family history. Would I do better with my current collection? Why keep them?
A very interesting essay from an interesting magazine. I’ve thought about all of this myself, struggling with an overloaded phone—why do we keep everything and try to remember everything? Why do we miss actually seeing something in order to capture just the right pictures of it, which we’ll probably never look at again? Etc., etc.
And here, I guess, is the answer:
Why can’t I dispense with my data more quickly, more easily—or at all? Why am I compelled to collect and hang on to so much?…Because I can record, I should—I must. I must try to capture the present with this digital device….Who are these videos for? What are they for?
I won’t quote any more. It’s very good. Read the whole thing.
Are “BS Jobs” Vocations?, Ad Fontes, John Ehrett, November 1, 2023
What if the modern world—following the Industrial Revolution—has created a difficult intermediate category of job, one that does not tend toward the love of and service to one’s neighbor, but one that is not obviously sinful in itself?
Which leads to an interesting question:
Graeber’s thesis [on BS jobs], if correct, has substantial implications for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation. It may be difficult, for the Christian who finds herself inhabiting a make-work job, to understand how she can represent Christ to her neighbor in that context….
Ehrett is using a Lutheran idea here, but any Christian, and any person who would like to think their work amounts to something, can wonder this:
Graeber’s argument invites Protestants to consider whether there are paid, “respectable” jobs in the modern economy that simply do not satisfy the Lutheran criteria for vocations.
And, he goes on to ask, does using the market as a proxy for value—people pay for this, so it’s worth something—really capture everything that such a person should be concerned about? It’s interesting, because Protestantism is tied with the idea of work ethic and industry, yet maybe we’ve reached a point where the commercial has gone too far.
The Reason Amazon Sellers Have Such Strange Brand Names, SlashGear, Alex Hevesy, July 11, 2023
You probably know what that headline is talking about. Look up LED flashlights or oven mitts or bamboo cutting boards and you’ll get so many wacky fake brand names. My dad noticed once that most of the names were just printed onto the surface of the product, or even just on the box. That was one way, he thought, to distinguish a “real” product, with a nameplate or embossed logo, from a generic product printed with a whole bunch of different names but not made by anyone whose name was on the product or packaging. That’s the other thing you notice: amid all those names, there are only a handful of distinct products.
You get what you order the vast majority of the time, oftentimes with Amazon’s famously quick delivery and relatively pain-free return process. A writer for the New York Times reported that they ordered a pair of gloves from a brand named “FRETREE” and it arrived on time, exactly as ordered. Similarly, the Monsdle brand backpack you order on Prime Day will likely arrive with little fuss.
But why do so many sellers have wacky and outlandish names? It has to do with copyright law and online marketplace competition in China.
The internet is a bizarre place.
I have a little Amazon story: my wife bought me a cordless rechargeable car vacuum once from one of these companies. It had amazing reviews. It works, but not that well. Low suction, the dust cup and filter fall out while you’re vacuuming if you bump an edge. It holds a fine charge. It would probably be alright if it had been cheaper.
But what about the rave reviews? Well, the vacuum came with a card in the box, promising an Amazon gift card if the buyer left a five-star review.
For this special week, I’m including a fifth item, including two pieces from conservative publications on the skepticism around zoning reform. This is often a hostile audience, but, as you know from reading this newsletter, an important one, and one that I do believe can be friendly to at least some of urbanism broadly understood. And so I find it worthwhile to engage with these sorts of pieces and with people who hold this skepticism.
Folk Economics and the Politics of Housing, City Journal, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija, November 28, 2022
To set the stage:
New York’s leftist firebrand Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants cities to liberalize zoning; so, too, does Indiana’s conservative Senator Todd Young, whose YIMBY Act would encourage zoning reform. Opinion leaders across the political spectrum have joined the bandwagon, from the socialists at Jacobin to the libertarians at Reason, from the institutional liberals at the New York Times to their conservative counterparts at National Review.
In a new study based on nationally representative surveys of urban and suburban Americans, we found that the mass public isn’t fully on board with this agenda.
I can see why the idea that all the experts are getting behind an idea actually makes a lot of people skeptical. The authors focus here on the tough sell that we really do have a supply crunch, and that realtors/developers/investors/landlords/etc. aren’t to blame for manipulating the market. This isn’t a partisan view. It’s pretty much a non-economist view. But the surveys done for this piece also find strong support for transit-oriented development, i.e. increased allowance for density by or near rail and bus stops.
Maybe the through-line is that people support things that feel intuitive and sensible. The fact is that to the average person it does feel intuitive that housing prices can’t really be this high. And it also feels intuitive that relatively dense areas that already have transit are the most prime places to allow urbanization to unfold at higher densities.
Another bit suggesting this might be less left/right than you might think:
Why aren’t renters—and other people who say they want lower prices—more supportive of up-zoning? Part of the answer is that many people think that even a large increase in the production of new homes would have no effect on the prices of existing housing, or that, in some cases, it might even make existing housing more expensive. In this case at least, the “folk economics” of the mass public does not line up with the standard view of professional economists.
The respondents also believed conventional economic reasoning when it came to supply increases or decreases in other markets (cars, grain, etc.). Many just think housing is a unique market. That’s definitely a factor making a lot of regular people wonder what YIMBYs and housing advocates are on about. This supply question is not a hot-button culture-war-adjacent issue either. There is a lot of research now showing that zoning and other supply-increasing reforms do in fact hold down prices, and I guess we have to make that case even stronger.
Two Cheers for Zoning, American Affairs, Judge Glock, Winter 2022
Glock is at the Manhattan Institute, which publishes City Journal, so we have someone also broadly on the right here.
This is a defense of zoning (though not a completely uncritical one). For example:
The history, economics, and political science of local communities demonstrate that those who ascribe to free market beliefs should not despise zoning. Even passionate libertarians would not deny the ability of people to form or join a local government with some say over their property. Most zoning in America is of such a local and consensual nature.
He writes, though—almost certainly incorrectly—“In most of the nation, thanks to this local competition, zoning doesn’t have a significant impact on housing prices.”
Then there’s a long bit downplaying the influence of racism in shaping modern zoning (“claims that zoning is inherently racist or racially motivated are inaccurate,” he writes—well, inherently is doing some work there).
This raises a point I often make. When progressives frame zoning reform as a climate issue or a racial equity issue, they’re unwittingly telling a lot of conservatives, “This is a policy based on trumped-up left wing concerns, and therefore it’s illegitimate or, at least, I can ignore it.” If climate change were a non-issue and racism were a non-issue, the basic economic phenomenon of zoning squeezing housing supply—which the other City Journal writers clearly recognize—would still exist.
I’ll admit, this is a good challenge, and there are some more complex arguments in the piece I’m not really qualified to answer.
A rejection of zoning, therefore, entails not just a rejection of one or two policy mistakes made by central planners or scheming racists, but a belief that the same mistake has been made thousands of times, by every state and by most of the nineteen thousand local municipalities in the United States, over periods of decades. If zoning, and especially single-family zoning, is a mistake, it’s an abnormally common one.
I have a bit of an answer here, but that’s enough from me. Think about this. I will.
It’s a rather long article, and there are some interesting arguments for urbanists—particularly, like me, those who are conservatives—to think about.
Related Reading:
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