Nostalgia, Hindsight, and Opportunity

Maybe "better" and "worse" are too rigid to define the complexity of life

There are a few big questions I occasionally revisit here at this newsletter. One of them is the question of what exactly traditional or old-fashioned urbanism actually was or is. Was it dependent on a vanished stage of economic development or kind of economy? Is it possible to manifest that simply by reverse-engineering the land uses of that era?

Related to that is the question of opportunity—the sense that there was more opportunity in “the old days,” when America was a more entrepreneurial, rough-and-tumble place, teeming with inventors and industrialists and poor folks thinking they were buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

I asked the other day, Why does it feel like things are always getting worse?, and I got some interesting comments. I’m going to go through some of them today. Specifically, I was wondering what exactly we mean when we say a place is “too crowded”—I like to think we aren’t really opposed to density, but to things that feel like they’re downstream from density. Long lines, long waits, traffic jams, the feeling that there’s not quite enough of everything to go around. No spare capacity. Less customer service. Etc.

In that piece the other day, I specifically was wondering about labor costs, and whether we mistake the two totally separate processes of the country’s population going up and labor getting more expensive as related. This phenomenon of highly developed economies having very expensive labor is known as Baumol’s cost disease: “the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.”

I’m not an economist and I don’t know the subtleties of this concept, but it’s definitely a real phenomenon. What it means is that we’re so rich, we can’t afford a lot of things. Like repairing instead of replacing, or like big-box stores full of highly trained employees. So when people wonder whether we’re just too full or overcrowded for all those nice things to go around, maybe they’re just observing that they’ve lived through a shift in our economy.

But the interesting comments. This is why I write these open-ended pieces; the comments are always great and help develop a lot of ideas I haven’t really fully thought-out or been able to articulate.

This is the most insightful, to me:

I think people often falsely see the past as full of more opportunity than the future, because they can see the past with hindsight & how they could have benefited from it (eg. If I was my parents generation I would have bought up property in the East End/Brooklyn when it was dirt cheap) but they can see opportunities in the present or the future, because they don’t know what is a good bet/the long term results.

I’ve had a thought like this before, in a context having nothing to with nothing to do with urbanism or opportunity in this broad sense. My dad and I used to collect old electronics and housewares and things—clock radios with the mechanical flipping digits, Walkmans and other vintage audio stuff, early video games, random neat kitchen gadgets. I have a collection to this day, and I used to buy and sell these things to grow my collection. At one time I could identify most of the clock radios Panasonic ever made, in the golden age of quirky design (these would have been a few late ’70s models into the mid-late ’80s.)

When I first started to take an interest in this stuff and found these things were worth some money, my dad was kind of surprised. He remembered seeing all this stuff for sale in Kmart, back in the day. How could anybody pay big money for 40-year-old mass-produced junk? But they did! And time had given these things a sense of being unfamiliar and unique. I wouldn’t say they’d become antiques, but they’re obviously from a different period in design and technology, and for whatever reason that makes them desirable. An antique or a “vintage” item isn’t inherently those things; those are judgments or perceptions we place on them.

So what I’ve wondered with regard to this is, which pieces of mass-produced junk in a big-box store, right now, will be collectible and desirable in 40 or 50 years? What item in a Walmart, if you bought a bunch of them and stored them away new in their packages, would be worth a big premium as a “VINTAGE/RETRO NEW IN BOX BOXED” item? (eBay sellers love their screaming capital letters and duplicative keywords.)

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? We just don’t make things with the quality or design aesthetic that will cause them to be rediscovered a generation or two later. None of the sleek, blank electronic gadgets will ever inspire nostalgia. All the small kitchen appliances are plasticky and none of them will even make it to 40 years. Everything is lightweighted and cheapened to within an inch of its life.

And yet. Obviously, that’s probably what people would have said looking at the schlock in Kmart in 1970 or 1980. In those days “Made in Japan” was not necessarily a mark of quality. Let alone “Made in Korea,” which you were starting to see in the ’80s. If you were a collector in the 1980s, you’d be somehow unable to perceive all the stuff that would be desirable in the 2010s. That should inspire a deep humility.

Of course, there could be all sorts of things going on with the “why are things getting worse?” phenomenon, to the extent that it’s even real. For example, I mentioned how it feels like there are longer lines/waits at gas stations today versus when I was younger. One reader thought that was a real shift:

This is a great question! I’ve noticed the gas station thing in particular, and at least in that case it seems like it’s due to changes in behavior. People now leave their cars at the pump even when they’re done gassing up to go buy stuff inside, rather than moving the car to a designated space and freeing up the pump. This happens even at a place like Buc-ees in Texas that has nearly 100 pumps and a giant parking lot as well. It happens at four-pump stations in small towns. And the only place it doesn’t seem to happen is Costco, because there’s no convenience store. The long lines there are for other reasons.

Another reader made an interesting consumer-behavior point as well:

People don’t care as much about brand names. Looking around my living room at my kids’ toys, I see a few “Fisher-Price” and a bunch of “Melissa & Doug”, but the bulk of them are made by Chinese companies that none of us have heard of. And if we’re willing to buy so many unbranded products, that suggests there isn’t as much reward for a company to spend on the quality control necessary to maintain its brand.

Quick aside: I bought a little generic car vac/Dust Buster-type thing on Amazon, from one of these randomly named Chinese companies. It had very good reviews and it was cheap, so why not. The thing barely had any suction, and the dust cup fell out if you looked at it wrong, meaning more than once I accidentally dumped the small amount of dust I was able to vacuum up back onto the floor of the car.

The vacuum came with a little printed card in the box, promising a $10 Amazon gift card for buyers who left a five-star review. There you go. Now I have a Ryobi vacuum that uses their interchangeable batteries, and man, what a difference. Sometimes brand names are worth it.

I got a couple of great comments touching on the issues of scale and concentration, something I think about a lot. I had written about restaurants and customer service deterioration, which this was responding to:

The flip side of capitalism/consumerism is the consumer squeeze. Things that work on economies-of-scale in labor sooner or later get to a point where the human-interaction component is engineered out of the workflow. The big gas station probably replaced many more smaller station pumps. Restaurant reservations are now sold because everything core to a restaurant’s existence is squeezed between thin profits and consumers who are intolerant of sensible price hikes - so the restaurant becomes more of a broad marketing operation (and sometimes a cross-country Goldbelly seller) than a simple proprietorship.

Another excellent comment about the changes in restaurants, which tracks with my (subjective, limited) experience of eating out as a kid versus now:

A friend of mine used to work as a restaurant manager here in Boston and what he said is pretty informative: when he was working, the restaurants were mostly independent places, owned by individuals or small partnerships and they knew that their profits depended on having satisfied customers and that the best way to satisfy them was to have well-trained, knowledgeable staff. That meant that the staff got to eat the food that the customers did, so they would learn it, they could (illegally) buy bottles of the restaurants wine at cost so they could learn how it tasted and what it paired well with. Then about 15 years ago, the restaurants started being bought up by corporate ownership groups and the first thing they do is cut costs. Instead of eating the same food as the customers they get chicken tenders and French fries, instead of being able to buy wine, they get a staff tasting once a month where they taste all the wines — and by the end they’re so sloshed they can hardly remember their names — so they recite scripts. So the staff is less happy, the customers are less happy, but the restaurants profits are coming from $25 cocktails, so they don’t care.

You see it in retails all the time: businesses replace knowledgeable salespeople making good money for providing valuable services, with teenage associates making minimum wage, all to satisfy some earnings report somewhere.

I guess it’s like the stat revolution in baseball: optimize baseball around the Three True Outcomes of walks, strikeouts and home runs and you get teams that win, but are boring to watch.

And this was about concentration in general:

I read something a while back when I was wondering why my commute home always takes longer than my commute in and it also cited concentration as the cause. Heading to work you have people coming from all over the place and it’s only the last mile or so when they all meet together, but when everyone is going home that same group all leaving at the same time is going to cause a big jam at the beginning which will take longer to sort out and will affect your perception because it took so much longer to “get going”.

There’s also this comment, which isn’t nice, but probably does describe the psychology of corporate business owners:

Re: grocery store in hometown had free coffee and cream, new centrally located grocery stores don’t have this. In the past, particularly in smaller communities, the customer base for a nice grocery store was likely more homogenous and middle class.

As well, before social media, it was easier for stores to ban low income people who they didn’t perceive to be bona fide shoppers without consequences. If a poor person who was denied entry wanted to complain, they’d have to write a letter to a consumer watchdog or human rights tribunal, which requires writing and research skills (to look up addresses).

Nowadays, a person denied entry to a store can post a complaint on social media using a 20 second video, and it may lead to disapproval for the firm.

Thus means that a centrally located grocery store today is likely to have a wider cross-section of society walking in, including homeless and low-income people.

The grocery store views the free coffee as an inducement for customers who are going to spend a hundred dollars or so. In a small-town store in the 1980s, when they could bar poor people, they could ensure that most of the coffee was being sipped by middle class people with money to spend.

But in 2024, with poor or homeless people in the store, the firm is worried that penniless people will be drinking the coffee, and they are concerned that they won’t be making purchases. As a result, the free coffee is replaced with a coffee vending machine or a Starbucks.

If that’s true, and I’m not sure it is, I don’t really have an answer for it. Saying that communities should be socio-economic monocultures is not an option. Yet the anti-density folks may have a little bit of a point when they argue that social relations and manners can break down once you get to a point where you’ll never run into someone you know. That communities that are “too big” aren’t communal but atomized, because everyone is an individual in a sea, not in this together. I don’t know.

And here are two more abstract, psychological takes, taking issue with my premise:

I feel like most of this is just the nature of human experience. We forget the daily difficulties that have been solved by improvements but remember the niceties. Nostalgia is a powerful force that we need to fight against - because this kind of feeling that things used to be better is exactly the source of anti-density, and anti-immigrant, and anti-growth policies.

And:

Combining the insights of psychology and evolutionary anthropology, it is clear that human beings have a deep prejudice for noticing what is going wrong over what is going right. The fact that everything is okay is not in a threat to your existence. But failing to notice any negative, such as tiger or a snake or even overly spoiled food, could quickly lead to your demise. Thus, we are exquisitely attuned to what is going wrong.

In other words, the political-social-cultural idea of a lost golden age or a long, slow decline is really something in our evolutionary wiring not quite jibing with modernity. There are these moments when you can feel the gears of your brain turning, and the crazy thing about being human is you can perceive your own psychology working (or not working). And you can try to resist it.

And yes, while I think there are lots of specific things that have gotten “worse” if your baseline is 2000 or 2010 (or yeah, maybe even 1950—they sure made appliances with a lot of metal parts back then), this is kind of the right answer in general.

The big takeaway, to tie it all back to urbanism, is that in the built environment, in business, and in our communities, there’s just a constant background level of churn and change. You will always be disappointed—you will always feel like your perfect world is being slowly destroyed—if you mistake the moment you were happiest in your own life, or the moment you arrived in your neighborhood, for an objective ideal moment, compared to which every change is a degredation.

This is why I believe NIMBYism is mostly emotional and psychological. It’s a deeply human sentiment to want to hold onto what you have—to keep, you might say, only the good things the same. But it just isn’t possible. Giving up that NIMBY tendency means accepting the world and human nature as they exist.

Try thinking about that next time you’re stuck in traffic. For real.

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Related Reading:

Saturation

Living in the Motel

Back in Time on Small Roads

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