David Brooks Is Right
Again
Patio Man and the Sprawl People was one of those touchstone essays that very much changed the way I thought about America. In the early 2000s when I made my money as an independent contractor flying around to major cities doing IT consulting for major corporations, I had a very good opportunity to see the truth of what he was saying. But before that, in a seven year stretch of living in LA, Brooklyn, Boston and Atlanta, the particular draw of the Sunbelt gave me the itch as well.
None of my LLMs can accurately remind me of the author whose book ‘Money’ helped me to understand that most people’s financial ambitions can be satisfied with a 20-25% bump in annual income, but that idea and the idea of quintiles made a big impression on my some time ago (between 1991 and 2003). I was always about raising the bridge, not lowering the river. I never really considered the idea of relocating to a place with less competition, lower taxes or cheaper real estate.
Ultimately, from a Stoic point of view, I sense some foolishness in the opinionmaking and overconfidence of elites. I mock the Ivy Cabal. The less elites work in the sunshine, the more isolated they become. The only way to think outside of this box is to understand something about social control. IE compare whichever meritocracy with fixed protocols and relatively stable enforcement with what happens in war. There is much more fog in war than in social control, many more unregulated transactions occur, including those things vaguely described as ‘war crimes’.
So I am considering two other related tangents that reinforce my look.
Such moves universally indict their advocates (and minions) as frail and brittle. I’m not sure what to suggest at this level of consideration.
When it turned out that my wife hated NYC, I grudgingly relocated to Atlanta and found things that Brooks said to be true. I didn’t know at the time that within a few months I would actually enjoy a downscale South. I didn’t expect Thai food delivery and first rate sushi. I didn’t expect Urban Outfitters. When I found much of my preferred lifestyle to be accessible in the South, I started to recognize how uselessly overcomplicated life in the Northeast actually was. Indeed, the experience of shopping at Kroger as compared to Stop & Shop was a revelation. Kroger by comparison was an absolute luxury, with lower prices. H.E.B. was even better, except on dry Sundays but what kind of drunk fool can’t work around that?
My first arguments using the term ‘overproduction’ came from my later understanding of why there was economic contagion in the failure of a few Wall Street firms. Too much of our national economy had fallen prey to a service industry inoculated from its own failure. If you are by any degrees Green, imagine that the whole of the electric vehicle and renewable energy sector became dependent on the fortunes of Exxon and Shell. The bulk of the revenue and profit was going to the Wall Street firms that were supposed to enable the rest of the economy - you know, like VCs in Silicon Valley kickstarted Google. They were supposed to be the tail, not the dog. Instead, the fancy financials made all the money, and when they cooked the books and were bailed out, we all suffered. I believe it was Sheila Bair among others who understood this all too well. She’s my goto on such matters.
I think the same overproduction in economics is substantial in higher education as Brooks says. It’s not that Wall Street shouldn’t be a meritocracy, it should not be a monopolistic one. Similarly, there is a certain truth in the self-immolation of the ‘check your privilege’ crowd. Yet they are bailed out by the same over-reliance on Wall Street that bailed them out when they shat the bed. This is the second set of institutions in which America has suffered a crisis of faith, or the third depending upon your view of the Catholic Church or the fourth depending upon your view of Detroit. Stellantis, is it? Well now it’s time for you to realize that big software is next. AI is something of an Edsel. One might even think of it as a Porsche 924, for those of you who know that story. Everybody is claiming it to be the future, and all of the ‘smart money’ is being predictable.
Ultimately, from a Stoic point of view, I sense some foolishness in the opinionmaking and overconfidence of elites. I mock the Ivy Cabal. The less elites work in the sunshine, the more isolated they become. The only way to think outside of this box is to understand something about social control. IE compare whichever meritocracy with fixed protocols and relatively stable enforcement with what happens in war. There is much more fog in war than in social control, many more unregulated transactions occur, including those things vaguely described as ‘war crimes’.
So I am considering two other related tangents that reinforce my look.
Such moves universally indict their advocates (and minions) as frail and brittle. I’m not sure what to suggest at this level of consideration.