After Boss Tweed's profligate use of city funds, Green was brought in to return the city to fiscal responsibility and solvency (he even used his own money to cover police payroll). In 1898, [he consolidated] the five boroughs—Green was thereafter known as the "father of Greater New York."
[B]ut Green accomplished much more: he was a major reason we have the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the New York Public Library, and the Bronx Zoo. Riverside Park? Morningside Park? Ft. Washington Park? AHG was behind them all—truly the Greening of New York.
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Manhattan Users Guide: Andrew Haswell Green
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In Our Time's 500th episode
The BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time will broadcast its 500th episode in March. I'm a fan. I think I first mentioned IOT on Isebrand.com back in 2007 in a post about the brain. (No, "the brain" is not a reference to host Melvyn Bragg.) The IOT producers are soliciting ideas for future shows. Here's my list:
The Reign of the Despensers; The Special Relationship; The BBC; The Spanish-American War; Human Sacrifice; Resurrection; Terrorism; The Antichrist; Animation; Homosexuality; The Pub; Taxation; Museums; Libraries; Cognitive Dissonance; Spices; Sci-fi; Scent/Smell; The Olmecs; Game Theory. Hmmm, let's see.... Also: Collars (Non-clerical); What's the Point of Canada?; 42; Purple; The Sound of One Hand Clapping; Why is Everyone Clapping?; Please Stop Clapping; The Clap; Conspiracy - The Nelson Thomlinson School, LWT's The Southbank Show, and the House of Lords, What's the Connection?; and, Polyvinyl Chloride.
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New York becoming Wisconsin: Gross likes some grime
The...domestication of Manhattan has gone far enough. [T]he redesign of nasty, grotty, thrill-a-minute Times Square into a holding pen for clueless tourists; the move of the Washington Square fountain 22 feet to the east so it aligns with the arch and Fifth Avenue; even the routing of quirky neighborhood retailers and their replacement by Duane Reades, bank branches and chain stores.
.....
You just can't reconcile “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere” with Little Wisconsin, the new West Village micro-neighborhood that the Style section of the Times seemed to declare “hyper-sincere” and “disarmingly friendly.” We eat people from Wisconsin for lunch and use their bones as toothpicks
I see what Michael Gross sees and I also largely dislike it. But Gross might be off somewhat about causality. The cause is not only--probably not even primarily--any sort of nanny state-ism on Mayor Bloomberg's part. The main cause is the high cost of living, which rises relentlessly in part due to the policies and interests beloved of Crain's, for which Gross writes. The City's having its dynamism ripped from it not by muggers but developers; mom 'n' pop's aren't losing battles against crack dens but against bank branches and national chains (chains that, to be fair, Gross mentions); the nation's aspiring artists now going to Seattle and Austin instead of New York aren't fearful of New York, they literally can't afford it.
All in all, I don't dislike Crain's--it's pro-business without being in favor of reckless cowboy capitalism, and their economic liberalism (in the classic sense, the true sense of liberalism) is paired with a social liberalism, too, which I appreciate. Nonetheless, woe be unto the Crain's reader who might point out that the publication's perpetual reverence of all things financial industry, The Street, and real estate development reflect the same sort of priorities and values that are making New York like Kenosha. So, “unsafe” is good unless it’s the unsafe ideas of diversifying New York City's economy away from corporations and the banking and financial services industries. The character of a city springs mostly from the people who live in it. If you want a city--especially if you want a Manhattan--with more dynamism, make it more affordable for more interesting people doing a wider variety of work. Though lately they seem to have done well making everyone else's economic futures less safe, what makes the city hip isn't more and more Manhattanites in blue Brooks Brothers shirts and pink ties.
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Sweden's GDP Surges
STOCKHOLM—Sweden's gross domestic product surged in the fourth quarter of 2010, rising the most since records began, easily beating forecasts and offering further support to the Riksbank's plans to raise interest rates during 2011.
Economic output in Sweden grew 7.3% in the three months to Dec. 31 compared with the same period in 2009, beating economists' estimates of 6.9%, and expanded 1.2% compared with the third quarter against forecasts of 0.9%, Statistics Sweden said.
GDP growth of 7.3% was the biggest quarterly rise year-on-year since Statistics Sweden started measuring
via online.wsj.com
Rupert fell asleep and let someone in the newsroom spew some facts forth from the Wall Street Journal. Sweden: highest social spending in the world, 80% of the people are members of unions, a health system almost entirely free at the point of care, free education, strong environmental regulations, and lowest debt in the West: in fact it had a 2010 budget surplus and has a projected budget surplus for 2011. Oh, by the way, both Ikea and Nokia are shunning the dollar and using the yuan for trade.
Funny things happen when you do things to stop your nation from becoming an oligarchy with obscene wealth disparity (note Sweden's standing here) and when you don't focus so much on going abroad looking for dragons to expensively slay. (Sweden hasn't been to war since 1814.)
Okay, okay.... Sweden has only so many lessons applicable to the US. It's much smaller. It's a much more homogeneous culture. It has a lot more herring. It has Alexander Sskarsgard and Freddie Ljundberg, and jet fighters built by Saab. It doesn't have Dollywood. And economics is a lot more complicated than this post makes it out to be. But still, Sweden gets a lot of crap, falsehoods-based press in the US (all Swedes are suicidally unhappy sex-craved so-and-so's, blah, blah, blah) so I'm surprised that when there's some good news out of the Svea Rike it might get a mention in The Street's favorite Aussie-owned publication. Once in a great while I see a copy of the WSJ and remember that the first time I ever heard the phrase "corporate kleptocracy" actually uttered it was when a hedge fund manager marvelled at the American white lower and middle-classes' amazing ability to consistently vote against its own economic self-interests in the name of cowboy capitalism, stopping the queers, or a bit of both....all to the benefit of the manager and his clients among whom 99.9% of those same segments of voters will never be and could never be.)
Skål!
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Conservative nostalgia for Victorian era
The Victorians matched entrepreneurship with a passion for civic engagement and voluntarism: the historical blueprint for the [UK's Conservative-Liberal Democrats government's proposal for a] "big society". Churches provided schools and hospitals, friendly societies offered support for impoverished members, co-operatives helped small traders keep afloat. Robert Owen built a model mill town in Scotland that guaranteed free schools and hygienic living conditions to refugees from industrial Glasgow. Sweetmaker Joseph Rowntree gave his workers doctors and a pension, and set up a charitable trust that is still transforming lives today.
In a speech to the CBI, [Chancellor of the Exchequer] George Osborne argued that both parties in the coalition had revitalised themselves by revisiting their 19th-century roots. Indeed, when the Lib Dem David Laws gave his first speech to the Commons as the new chief secretary to the Treasury, the Tory MP Edward Leigh said: "I welcome the return to the Treasury of stern, unbending Gladstonian Liberalism." Laws acknowledged the comparison to the Liberal prime minister, adding: "I hope that this is not only Gladstonian Liberalism, but liberalism tinged with the social liberalism about which my party is so passionate." In other words, Victoriana stripped of its Christian moralism.
The government's promotion of Victorian values might be well intentioned. After all, self-reliance is preferable to welfare feudalism, and the dynamic capitalism of the 1800s did push Britain to new heights of economic and cultural achievement. But nostalgia without nuance is dangerous. Unregulated Victorian Britain was a country of dreadful poverty and moral hypocrisy. The dark streets of London thronged with anarchist bomb-throwers, child prostitutes and drug addicts. The empire was sustained with cold steel, and industrialisation uprooted old communities and patterns of life. Many contemporary conservatives mourned the death of rural England and resented the callous materialism of the free market. The 19th-century Conservative party was rescued from electoral annihilation by Benjamin Disraeli, a one nation Tory who won working-class votes by embracing social reform.
And this is a subtle point that government Victoriaphiles miss about our public services: the welfare state was the 20th century's answer to the social problems created in the 19th. Owen and Rowntree started out as private philanthropists, but they dreamed that one day free schools and hospitals funded by taxation would become national policy. The 19th century closed with the birth of the Labour party – the political summation of the era's reforming spirit. The Victorian revolution enriched and enfranchised the people and what did they do with their newfound money and power? They built the very welfare state the government is now intent on dismantling.
(Image: William Gladstone, 1861, who at the time was a Conservative and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Photo by John Jabez Edwin Mayal.)
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