Renting A Dream

Richard Florida writing at the Atlantic offers up an informed and well-developed outlook on how the United States will respond to the current economic contraction. It is a fascinating read and likely more grounded than similar analysis offered by James Kunstler. He poses that creative urban areas benefit from a spillover of innovation that will lead them to be the central locations in the new American epoch.

Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,” according to a pioneering theory of urban evolution developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the SantaFe Institute. The rate at which living things convert food into energy—their metabolic rate—tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.

Florida also suggests that the government is supporting the ideal of home ownership to the detriment of society and suggests some incentives create a more mobile workforce.

If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.

I am curious how strong generation-xyz holds on to the dream of home ownership. It’s understandable how the greatest generation put owning a home on such a pedestal. In the red fearing aftermath of WWII nothing could have been less Communist than being the king of your own castle. The communes of the 1970’s tried to create a new model for living but they were just a flash in the pan. Now that we are almost thirty years removed from those ventures the modern generation may be more open to alternative and semi-communal living arrangements. Over the next thirty years condominiums, credit unions, farm shares and zip rides could all hold a much more prominent place in American life.

Who seddit?

As an avid reader of the Freakonomics blog I often glean over the posts of Fred Shapiro. He is the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations and often blegs readers for the relevant language of the 21st century.

I have always had an interest in quotes because they offer, theoretically, profound knowledge boiled down to simple language. In the grapevine of their growth quotes can get as maligned as the message in a childhood game of telephone. Even if the structure of a quote is held intact it can be attributed to someone who never uttered it, or to someone who is not the originator of the quote's essence.

Shapiro is the Sherlock Holmes of quotations and has begun taking on charges from readers. On Thursday he put a shock to my world as I learned that one of my favorite Winston Churchill quotes can actually be traced to earlier origins. For the sake of style I will repeat it in my preferred form and then provide Shapiro's insight.

"Any young man who is a conservative is without a heart, any old man who is a liberal is without a brain."

One of the pleasures of compiling The Yale Book of Quotations was tracing and cross-referencing different versions and precursors of famous quotes. This one is usually credited to Georges Clemenceau, but W. Gurney Benham’s Book of Quotations cites French premier and historian Francois Guizot (1787 to 1874), translating his statement as “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.” Benham asserts that “Clemenceau adopted this saying, substituting socialiste for republicain.”

But I was delighted to find that John Adams had expressed a similar idea well before Guizot entered adulthood. Thomas Jefferson preserved this quip, writing in a 1799 journal that Adams had said: “A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20.”

Let No Good Art Go Unlitigated

Shepard Fairey is feeling heat from the Associated Press on the eve of his exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Is this truly copyright infringement? Does it have any effect on the original image? Does anybody care? Boing Boing offers the video posted above along with the following nuggets from photographer and Fairey collaborator Glen E. Friedman:

#1 the shot is literally a dime a dozen shot, absolutely nothing special about it, Shepard made it special, in fact the un-cropped original i’ll attach here, as you can see was more important before he cropped it for his art. (george clooney made it special)!

#2 he actually donated every penny he made from it back into the campaign to get Obama elected. Unfortunately all the after market sales of his posters he has no control over, and the people who bootlegged his stuff and sold it of course he has no control over. and when he first created it it was mainly a wheat paste poster made to go around the country before super tuesday, it got viral after that. at which point he probably just should have approached AP for rights which he probably could have gotten pretty cheaply for this use, just to be 100%. but so goes the life of a graffiti/street artist. one is in The Smithsonian now.

#3 if Shepard did profit from the use other than the obvious gain we all receive by not having a total piece of shit head of state, i as the photographer would certainly be concerned, but when an image is used for charity or something other than straight merchandise that helps a "cause" not just someone's bank account, I’d be cool with that. But make merch of an already iconic image, and profit on it, or attach your brand to it? without release from the image maker or the subject? and indeed i will make sure you get dragged through hell if i can help it.