Characteristics and traits in individuals can and do manifest themselves more generally across societies but the outcomes they predict can be very different due to scale. I’ve witnessed the Dunning-Kruger effect in myself and in my career over the years, only coming to understand my behavior and the behavior of colleagues in the context of self-awareness and the lack thereof. I’ve become much more humble regarding my ability to teach as I’ve improved: I wasn’t very good for at least my first four or five years but only getting fired from my first full time teaching gig really woke me up to how great an impediment my weaknesses were. I’m still not a spectacular disciplinarian and I need to have a very precise idea of what I want to accomplish in a class period to allow my showmanship and content knowledge to engage the students in ways which highlight those strengths.
In my career I’ve been surrounded, mostly, by people like me with certain strengths and weaknesses who’ve managed over time to become very good at what they do. On the other hand I’ve witnessed some amazing outliers; I mean people with absolutely no self awareness, and gaping holes in their instructional practice who not only have no idea (really, none) of how bad they are but who honestly believe themselves to be among the elite. In a playful interaction with what I might call the Peter “Vice Principal” I’ve seen the self confidence of these types put them into positions of authority and supervision with absolutely no understanding of even the most basic principles of classroom teaching.
For these people there is not enough Kool Aid in the world when it comes to imbibing the educational fads and the dogma of “21st Century Learning”; Yeah, it’s 2019…even if we teach them to plow a field with oxen…it’s still a 21st century skill at this point! I always think to myself: Socrates was a better teacher than I am despite never having attended a single professional development seminar for continuing education credit; but the Kool Aid is where I’d like to shift the focus of this essay.
We were picking up Luna’s friend to come over the house and finish a science project; Luna had been out most of the week performing in the lead role of “Anansi the Spider” (Giving 8 performances in 4 schools over three days!). Her partner lives in an area where a local developer has used the combination of tax credits for historic preservation AND low income housing to revive an entire neighborhood. This developer does incredible work, but what ends up shining through is the quality of the streetscape. Just getting out of the car to walk over to the door of her building, even on a frigid winter morning was a delight; there were families walking home from a trip to the corner store, kids headed out to play, grown-ups hopping in their cars and off to do their Saturday afternoon thing. I wish I had taken a picture, but here are some Google street views:
The society that built this neighborhood was confident, but not grandiose. Overall it conforms to design principles and concepts which had been acquired and internalized over thousands of years while accommodating novelties like gas lines and electricity. I’m sure the developers and engineers understood the limitations of the city’s water and sewer systems and made sure that their future tenants could count on potable water coming in, and not so potable water being taken away by the existing system without any heroic interventions. They also knew that their tenants would be walking distance from the region’s primary industrial employers, and within a few minutes of a street railway line to the downtown. And it was beautiful, from the fluer de lis over the entryway to the elm trees along the streets.
Enter post World War II horizontal style auto-oriented American development; The Sum of All Kool Aids, (Kools Aid?), and a death spiral of societal Dunning-Kruger. What we’ve done is so obviously horrific, so clearly without redemption, so unmistakably ruinous, so patently ugly, but even at a time when the resources to continue the project are diminishing, the impacts of its effluent are multiplying, and the consequences of its limitations are manifest we plow on without the slightest hesitation.
It doesn’t work. It’s ugly. It’s miserable. But people pay a premium for it. If you haven’t already, head over to Granola Shotgun and read Johnny’s two latest posts(Here, and here) and the comments: Homeless camps across from $1.2 million homes, home values of half that amount being viewed as “low”, zoning laws and regulations requiring that private condos look like Pruitt-Igoe, and people lining up to take out 50 year loans to buy units that might be lucky just to last that long. Johnny will comment something which ends with “shrug” or “meh”, and I see his perspective…at a societal level; it’s done, we’ll have to live with it.
It’s the individual I don’t understand: Someone has to buy it I guess, but why would you? With my oft repeated caveat: there is very little distinction between being prematurely correct and just being wrong: This economy and many of its housing markets have been distorted for decades. If you think your house is really worth much more than $200,000 dollars whatever it is and wherever it is in a nation where the median household income is around $60,000 a year, you’re insane. Once the Ponzi scheme of financialization, extreme indebtedness, and artificially low interest rates breaks down home values will fall to and through the level that actual people can actually afford sustainably; my guess is that most will be well under that number in unhyperinflated dollars…including my own…which already is!
I have no idea how much longer the Titanic will remain afloat. I’m trying to arrange my life so that I can still hear the string quartet playing on deck while I ensconce myself in a lifeboat. I’ve written too many times already about my status as an urban prepper though, so I shan’t bore you more with that now…next week perhaps.
all economies are always titanics ready for a big fall. ours today is so complex that i am not sure anyone on cnbc or fox business could possibly know when serious trouble is actually lurking. They didn’t (mostly) see 2008 coming , and since then it is stylish to be negative. That doesn’t mean it won’t collapse, but when?
I have a peculiar interpretation of the future of everything. We (Americans) think we live where we do because we choose it based on personal preferences. We like our front lawns and back yards or our condos in a downtown glass tower or our little hobby farm in the country. Whatever. But there’s an underlying reality that makes these places possible that we don’t acknowledge. And those forces can and do change over time. We’ve been shifting incrementally for a long time, and a tipping point is not far off. The reset to a new underlying reality will arrive soon enough and it will become obvious who the winners and losers will be. Of course we all reverse engineer our expectations of what that future will look like based on our individual biases. (I certainly have mine.) But none of us really knows for sure how things will play out.
Some thought experiments: Take away easy credit and near zero interest rates. (This is historically unprecedented and unlikely to persist.) Disrupt the 12,000 mile just-in-time attenuated supply chains. (Our present trade relations are fragile.) Remove half the current value of real estate and stocks. (The markets “correct” in regular cycles so no leap of faith is required here.) Toss in a semi-reliable electricity grid where the lights are on 85% of the time instead of 100%. (This is the norm for most places around the planet outside a few wealthy regions.) Who would be devastated? Who would hardly notice?
We all still remember 2008 don’t we? Pretty much everything you mentioned happened then, and urban design wasn’t improved. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that The Great Depression is what caused downtown’s decline in the US originally, and that the suburbs and highways which came in mass later were an outcome, not a cause. Even if there was no evidence of The Great Depression causing anything, there have been other recessions with no change in urban planning so at best the historical effects of economic decline are neutral.
Then again, it totally makes sense that sprawl is a product of economic decline because the costs of horizontal expansion are all borne by the basic labor of desperate men. Pouring concrete and digging ditches on flat land is comparatively easy; bricking and high-rise working like the building above is much more skilled labor.
On the building above, I find it pretty generic but the streetscape is very nice. They really understood in ye olden days that a good streetscape can hide a bunch of flaws in individual architecture, and that the 1st floor was most important in terms of architecture and design.
In 2018, anything above 1 story ‘looms’ over someone else’s property which ruins the streetscape. But we aren’t going to get the ‘loomers’ to change their mind through economic desperation, we have to do it via people wanting something else.
I find it somehow reassuring that you and Johnny still believe the energy is going to run out. It seems way more scary to think that it’s NOT going to run out!
The Peter Principle is still intact in the private sector. Except that utterly clueless management doesn’t even have to come up thru the ranks anymore, so completely isolated from what worker bees do. And it shows in increasingly mediocre corporate performance, notwithstanding illusory profitability from distorted externalities.