The Deleted Scenes - Nostalgia, Hindsight, and Opportunity
Nostalgia, Hindsight, and OpportunityMaybe "better" and "worse" are too rigid to define the complexity of lifeThere 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’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:
Another reader made an interesting consumer-behavior point as well:
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:
Another excellent comment about the changes in restaurants, which tracks with my (subjective, limited) experience of eating out as a kid versus now:
And this was about concentration in general:
There’s also this comment, which isn’t nice, but probably does describe the psychology of corporate business owners:
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:
And:
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. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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