New and Old #173
Friday roundup and commentary
Drive Ethically: On The Morality of Speeding, Church Life Journal, Terence Sweeney, July 16, 2024
Too many of us think of too many matters as morality free zones, areas of human life that lack the ethical import which would require self-examination, shared deliberation, and direct concerns for others. This is perhaps worst exemplified with issues around road safety. To drive, or consider matters of road safety and efficiency, directly impacts life and limb.
To be indifferent to that is to be indifferent to the dignity of life. For Catholics in particular, we need to seriously consider our moral obligations when it comes to driving and legislating regarding our roads.
Good stuff. Popes have written on driving before; there was an old prayer a Catholic motorist organization sent out that went something like, Lord, let me understand the gravity of sitting behind the wheel. I remember my pastor used to say everything we just heard in church applies in the parish parking lot too. And yet it’s true that we rarely think of driving as a moral question at all.
More:
God the Father sent his Son to incarnate in the mundane and his spirit to renew the face of the mundane. We do not just image God, live out the incarnation, and participate in the Holy Spirit when we are at Mass. We do it—or fail to do it—behind the wheel or at the townhall about road safety.
And:
Thus, when we think about road design, traffic laws, and personal driving practices we should be preferring life. This means thinking of both the safety of human lives and the quality of human lives. Ensuring the safety of persons, a culture-enriching layout of roads, and the efficient movement of persons and goods is the basic order for which we should aim. Effectiveness of transport, speed of movement, and minimized obstruction to movement are important too but not more than living.
Now tell that to a traffic engineer.
Read the whole thing.
From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”
I’ve never played this game, but apparently it was programmed in a manner that made inexorable rent increases happen, in a way that has seemed to happen in a lot of markets in real life.
It’s a short piece but it’s a really interesting phenomenon, especially because the story makes it sound like it wasn’t exactly intentional.
Do People Think the Economy Is Bad Because the Media Failed, or Because the Economy Is Actually Bad?, The Nation, Dena Baker and Wesley Bignell, July 19, 2024
I always thought Dean Baker was interesting. I applied for an internship at his organization years ago (I didn’t get it), and one of his talking points about trade is very insightful: intellectual property protections and licensing requirements and things like that function as trade barriers for affluent professions, while trade barriers for less affluent professions are derided as “trade barriers.”
Anyway, I also find this controversy over a fairly strong economy versus low confidence in the economy in opinion polls really interesting.
Baker argues the economy is fine and the media is wrong. I don’t know, but this stands out to me:
Now that inflation has fallen back to its pre-pandemic pace by some measures, much of the media has chosen to highlight the absurd expectation that prices will go back down. Prices will not fall back to where they were four years ago, because nominal wages have risen by 22 percent. Anyone who expected prices to fall following the high inflation of the 1970s would have been rightly treated as a kook, not featured prominently in news stories on the state of the economy.
Yeah, a lot of regular people want to see a snap back to pre-pandemic prices and consider the absence of that to be “inflation.” Yeah, that isn’t generally how it works. (Higher interest rates on loans are also “inflation” for normal people, but not for economists.) This observation is kind of where I fall on this question, which is to sidestep “is the economy good?” and just acknowledge that a global crisis took place, a million Americans and many other millions died, and of course neither the economy nor a lot of social norms are just going to snap back.
We think of the post-war years as a time of explosive growth, but it took a few years after World War II ended for the economy to really pick up. The pandemic can only, at most, be said to have ended two years ago, and for many people never ended.
The other economist, who is apparently more progressive than Baker, has a less interesting answer, which comes down to this:
Yes, the standard metrics look good. But there is also the question of what kind of economy. By disassembling the pandemic welfare state, the government pushed millions of people into a more precarious position even if they’re employed, and even if their wages kept up with inflation.
I’ve featured a couple of articles here that I read in Sicily or found reading about it later. I think at least one other one was about the mafia. Sorry.
Sadly, the mafia is a very real thing there even today, and there’s nothing glamorous about it. Obviously, this is not what emptied out American urban cores, but it’s interesting to see something similar happen in a totally different place:
The market remained the beating heart of the city through centuries of war and modernization. “Ballarò may have had its crises but it’s never stopped [its activity],” explains Sorgi, though sellers claim that these days business is no longer good. They blame competition from larger, cheaper stores with lower prices as well as the city’s decision to make the area car-free….
Yet this decline may be more perceived than real. While many locals prefer the comfort of air-conditioned supermarkets to the hot, sunny market streets, there’s no shortage of other customers to replace them. Migrants have planted roots in the abandoned streets around the markets and are repopulating the city center.
American urban cores have often been repopulated by affluent people, while it’s aging American suburbs that are being reinvented by immigrants in many cases. That’s kind of reversed here. But it’s not necessarily typical:
“Typically, migrants stay in the suburbs, but here they live in the center,” says Giovanni Zinna, a social entrepreneur who co-founded Millevolti Capovolti, a multicultural co-working space and restaurant right by Ballarò. The immigrants who relocated to the old town, Zinna says, are a godsend for the market, because they “resume businesses that we don’t do, and make them sustainable.”
The article details the 20th-century decline of Palermo as corruption and decay emptied it out. And what’s left of the mafia, which is not nothing, doesn’t like the vibrant reinvention of the city right under its nose. Interesting read.
Related Reading:
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That "Drive Ethically" piece was so good. My own Christian background overemphasized formal, intentional actions as outreach, often at the expense of all the other unintentional actions that occur in these "morality free zones." Thanks for posting such varied and consistently interesting articles!
Glad to see your willingness to bring a Catholic perspective to an issue. I am a very defensive driver. I have an irrational fear that something large and metallic and weighing several tons is going to pop out of nowhere and hit my car, so that my eyes are open all the time. I think this is a very good irrational fear, and I am doing nothing to discourage it.