You Can't Say It's Half Full When it's Three Quarters Empty
I like a lot of what Joel Kotkin has to say about American settlement trends. His vision of suburbia as a ‘self-sustaining archipelago of villages’ has a certain appeal, especially. But his recent Washington Post op-ed (posted at The New Geography) misses no opportunity to commit what I’ll call the “Nothing But Flowers Fallacy” after the Talking Heads song: the tendency to count on economic disruption to bring about salutary social change.
Says Kotkin:
…the effects of this meltdown won’t be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.
Maybe so. Or we could, for lack of better options, work jobs even farther from home, driving even longer distances on the same clogged highways to the same metropolitan cores and office park exurbs as always.
For one thing, [more limited economic options] may strengthen those long-weakening family ties. We’re already seeing signs of that. American family life today may not look like “Ozzie and Harriet,” with its two-parent nuclear family, but it reflects a pattern of earlier generations, when extended networks helped families withstand the dislocations of the westward expansion or of immigration.
With a majority of married women now working, parents are frequently sharing child-rearing duties, and other family members are getting into the act. Grandparents and other relatives help provide care for roughly half of all preschoolers in the country. As the cost of living rises, this trend could accelerate.
Sounds great! When I’d spend the night with my grandmother, she’d wake me up at 10:30 to watch Hogan’s Heroes, and in the morning I’d eat those little boxes of cereal that you could cut open and pour milk directly into. Just think how great it would have been if necessity forced my parents into leaving me with her all the time:
Researchers have documented high rates of asthma, weakened immune systems, poor eating and sleeping patterns, physical disabilities and hyperactivity among grandchildren being raised by their grandparents (Dowdell 1995; Minkler and Roe 1996; Shore and Hayslip 1994). Grandparents raising grandchildren also appear to be in poorer health than their counterparts. Small scale studies have noted high rates of depression, poor self-rated health, and multiple chronic health problems among grandparents raising their grandchildren (Dowdell 1995; Minkler and Roe 1993). On a national scale Minkler, Fuller-Thomson, and Driver (1997) found that grandparents raising their grandchildren were twice as likely to be clinically depressed when compared to grandparents who play more traditional roles.
Kotkin’s austere wonderland continues:
At the same time, difficulty in getting reasonable mortgages and the realities of diminished IRAs will force baby boomers and Generation Xers both to prolong their parental responsibilities and to delay their retirements. This, too, is already happening: According to one study, one-fourth of Gen-Xers still receive help from their parents. And as many as 40 percent of Americans between 20 and 34, according to another survey, live at least part-time with their parents.
This clustering of families, after decades of dispersion, will spur more localism, which has a simple premise: The longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with and care for those places.
Unless, of course, we end up with neighborhoods full of “accidental landlords” who rent their houses to occupants who can’t get enough credit to buy homes of their own, in which case the housing stock will suffer the fate of any resource under absentee control.
The article goes on; according to Kotkin, our anomic communities will also be knit back together by high energy and food prices. A good pandemic flu, presumably, is all we need to complete the rebirth of American localities.
Hoping that austerity will force us into solving our social problems seems incongruous with what I know of Kotkin and his work, and it’s a lousy mistake for anyone to make. A world of fewer jobs and higher prices will mean longer commutes, a frayed social contract, and tired grandparents. If we arrange our families and our living spaces poorly when affluence gives us choices, we are unlikely to suddenly flourish when those decisions are forced upon us. Hard times won’t compel Americans into becoming their better selves, and if we are heading into some bleak days, it’s best that we all understand that in advance.
Matt, these are interesting and challenging thoughts. A view similar to the one you criticize here has recently been articulated by Andy Crouch (writing from a specifically Christian point of view): “But the irony is that the fruit of the Great Depression was not only dramatically improved systems of economic governance and ultimately even greater prosperity, but people of a fundamentally different character. They suffered tremendous hardship and lived for the rest of their lives with astonishing thrift, even as the post-war economic expansion delivered them real wealth. (The terrible experience of combat in World War II had a similar effect on many of their children.) A friend recently told me that the highest average household net worth in his Midwestern city is found in neighborhoods filled with modest, $100,000-dollar homes. Most of the inhabitants are older. They have lived below their means, with discipline and integrity, their whole lives.” Don’t you think that learning of similar lessons is at least possible for our society?
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 23, 01:25 PM · #
Don’t you think that learning of similar lessons is at least possible for our society?
It is not only possible, it is essential!
— Turgidson · Oct 23, 04:36 PM · #
Alan,
Thanks for the link.
I don’t think that our society, in the main, is going to learn any new (or relearn any old) virtues from another economic crisis. The Depression generation included one cohort with the wherewithal and social capital to see it through, and they remain a social bulwark. The others left us a legacy of paternalism and heaps of musty Life magazines THAT CAN NEVER BE THROWN AWAY BECAUSE THEY MIGHT BE WORTH SOMETHING!
Americans are going into this new crisis, if that’s what it becomes, with even more fractured families and institutions.
Crouch’s comments might be more relevant to Christians and their specific role in hard times, but I still take issue with the essay. Yes, this is a teachable moment for all of us who should have been practicing ascesis all along, and it might encourage some of us to live more reasonable lives. But the first order of business is emphatically not to start “weeding the garden of culture” and building a social ethos like that of the (reimagined) Depression era. It is, quite simply, to help the less fortunate. I was disappointed that Crouch could write 2400 words about the proper Christian response to this potential emergency without a single mention of charity.
I’m aware that “salt of the earth” originally referred to (dare I say it these days?) an elite. As Christians, we are called to do for the earth what salt does to bread — preserve its flavor and its vital essence. In this sense, I am sympathetic to Crouch’s project. I’m not trying to demote Christians to a social welfare agency here, but our instincts and intellects should leap at opportunities for charity before drawing up schemes of social renewal.
— Matt Frost · Oct 23, 04:40 PM · #
Kotkin’s whole vision thing was built around the idea that we are wealthy enough to keep building new civilizations out on the exurban frontier. We never were.
We never had the human capital to keep building new exurbs to get away from the old ones.
— Steve Sailer · Oct 23, 09:53 PM · #
It seems to me that the foot is in the wrong shoe. For Christians [and others], the primary activity is charity. Develop that and the rest follows. So it was during the depression; so it was during the war. One was obliged to help the other.
But it is doubtful whether that lesson will be easily relearned. Immediate gratification is not easily unlearned.
Too much worldly success, too much comfort, too much shirking of responsibility to others [teste the pill and abortion].
— Gabriel Austin · Oct 25, 05:25 PM · #
Gabriel (and Alan),
Orthodox bomb-thrower David Bentley Hart touched on this when he was given the opportunity to disparage thrift as a Christian virtue. The book, I believe, is forthcoming.
Matt
— Matt Frost · Oct 27, 03:48 AM · #