Bill Barnes

Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart, is a lament—wrapped around some data and analysis—for an American community and individual qualities that never existed but for which he mourns and wishes nonetheless.

In contrast to Thomas Edsall’s rather fierce Age of Austerity, which focuses on electoral politics and its policy consequences, Murray’s almost elegiac book is concerned with “new” white upper and lower classes and the content of their character and culture. (See related Emerging Issues columns: “Some People are More Equal than Others,” PA TIMES Online, March 19, 2012 and "Jeremiads on Class and the Nation’s Future: Inequality II" PA TIMES Online, April 23, 2012.)

Both are Big Think Books. Neither is fully satisfactory, but both are informative, readable and provocative. You should read the one that you think will make you angry and make you think.

Bill Barnes

There’s not much that’s cheerful in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart or Thomas Edsall’s Age of Austerity: no Fred and Ginger, no Ozzie and Harriet. No “Morning in America.”

Both authors say that the nation is sharply, deeply, and disastrously divided by class. Both significantly broaden the conversation about disparities in income and wealth, though in quite different directions. (See related article, “Some People are More Equal than Others,” PA TIMES Online, March 19, 2012.)

Bill Barnes

A good national conversation about inequality would be useful.

The prospects may seem poor because the current federal election campaigns are shaping up as more wild and desperate than informed and thoughtful. That’s a shame and a lost opportunity, especially because government policy often helps create and perpetuate inequality and because too much inequality is not good for either economic performance or for politics.

Bill Barnes

Most local leaders have worked through the optimistic “doing more with less” phase. Now, many are figuring out how to do less with less.

They are lighting out into new territory where the terrain is neither familiar nor welcoming.

Almost all cities will handle the financial stress. Budgets will be balanced. But, as one former mayor used to say: even if you balance your checkbook, that doesn’t mean you’re putting food on the table for the kids. Beyond the budgets, it’s the people and the place that matter.

Bill Barnes

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and PBS political pundit, is often right, usually on the Right, and always thoughtful and charmingly earnest. This time, however, he’s wrong, importantly wrong—twice.

Brooks’ September 15 column (“The Planning Fallacy”) advocates excessive caution and a small-bore way to think about what governments and planning can do about the economic and financial mess we’re in.

Bill Barnes

The mess in the U.S. economy is not an ordinary one. So, figuring out what is to be done is not ordinary either.

The difficulties go far beyond the policy processes in which all interests agree that pain must be endured: by goring someone else’s ox.

Bill Barnes

Aerotropolis spins out the consequences of that prophecy. Urban areas will re-orient—and new cities are even now being built—around airports because air travel is the latest logistical technology (think harbors, river ports, canals, railroads, cars) that determines where and how urban areas develop.

Bill Barnes

“There is no Frigate like a Book to take us Lands away.”–Emily Dickinson

A flotilla of Big Think Books (BTBs) about cities has heaved into view.

Five recent BTBs come from brand name authors, each with major capacity to produce and distribute. Glaeser, Florida, Kotkin, Calthorpe, and Kasarda may not be household names, but they have places in the lesser pantheon of economics and urban affairs.

Bill Barnes

Michael Pagano says that we are in a “unique time in the history of public finance,” a time when leaders and citizens can and should broach fundamental issues.

Pagano knows a thing or two about finance–the “lifeblood of municipalities.” He speaks from more than a quarter century of widely-respected scholarly and practical work in this field and from amidst his own budgetary turmoil as a Dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago.