Health

Chicago Heat, Thirty Years Later

Pete Saunders — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:23:56 -0400

(Note: this is a post modified and updated from one written ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. I included some new reflections and context on that time. More than anything, however, I want to make clear that segregation and inequality benefits some people but also exacts deadly costs on others. Please take a look. -Pete)

Thirty years ago today, the intense heat in Chicago mercifully cooled down to a high of 94 degrees, signaling an end to one of the worst heat waves in the city’s history.

I vividly remember the day three days earlier when I experienced the single hottest day I ever felt, anywhere. That was when Chicago topped out at a very humid 106 degrees, with a heat index that made it feel like 125. I remember leaving Chicago's City Hall to walk outside, so I could feel what the terrible heat felt like.

I don’t know exactly why, but I decided to immerse myself in the heat, to take it all in. I walked the nearly two-mile journey from City Hall to Navy Pier on the lakefront, a place known for its cooling summer breezes off Lake Michigan. Meteorologists were already noting that no lake breeze was forming during this heat wave; in fact, there was no breeze at all. I remember looking at a still and silent Lake Michigan as if it was the world’s largest hot bath.

The humidity was absolutely oppressive. I’ve experienced 110+ degree temperatures during visits to Phoenix and Las Vegas before, but they simply do not compare with humid heat. I’ve experienced the stifling heat and humidity of the Deep South also. Without a doubt, 112 degrees in the desert is very hot. However the air retains a lightness to it. Humidity is heavy; it’s like adding weight on your back while trying to tolerate the heat.

Within a week's time, the cumulative effect of unrelenting heat and humidity led to more than 700 deaths in Chicago from heat strokes, dehydration and other heat-related illnesses., Almost all of them poor, without access to air conditioning in their homes or nearby, living in the most distressed neighborhoods in a city that was entirely unprepared to handle the onslaught. The vast majority of the heat-related deaths came from residents of the city's South and West sides. The 1995 Chicago heat wave is now known as one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, surpassed in the years since then only by Hurricane Katrina, though few have ever heard of it.

It was around this time that the notion of a bifurcated Chicago, one of deep economic and social differences between haves and have nots, began to solidify in my mind.

Chicago public radio station WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons gathered some rememberances of the event, aired last week. For further understanding of the event, I'd highly recommend reading Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg. It’s mentioned in my recent list of books that influenced my perception of the Midwest.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Chicago had so many dead bodies piling up during its 1995 heat wave that the city recruited refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow. Source: npr.org

The Aging States of America

John Scott — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:28:38 -0500

The United States is experiencing rapid growth in its older population, a triumphant result of long-term investments in health and medicine. There have never before been so many older Americans – particularly relative to working-age Americans. And the proportion of the country 65 and older will only keep growing in the years ahead: A decade from now, the number of older Americans will surpass those under 18 for the first time in history.

These changing demographics present both challenges and opportunities for the United States. Additional years of life will offer Americans more time for family, work, and leisure. But a growing elderly population will also need care, support, and integration into the workforce, which is certain to be costly and could threaten the country’s fiscal and economic stability. Avoiding that outcome will require giving workers new opportunities to save before they reach retirement, making the workplace more accessible for older workers and shoring up state and federal budgets.

A gray wave

By 2040, the U.S. population, which currently numbers about 330 million, is projected to hit 372 million. Over this time period, the composition of the population is also expected to shift dramatically. The number of Americans 65 and older will likely increase by 50%, going from 54 million to an estimated 82 million, while the number of those under 65 is expected to increase by just 5%. To grasp the economic implications of this shift, consider that in 2020, for every 100 working-age households – the core of the U.S. tax base – there were only 37 older households. In 2040, however, there will be 54 older households per 100 working-age households, potentially causing great strain not only on the working-age households but also on the government.

This great transformation can be attributed to three factors: birth rates, life expectancy, and migration. First, birth rates have been dropping ever since the end of the baby boom in the mid-1960s. In the United States in the late 1970s, women on average were giving birth to 2.2 children over their lifetimes. Today that number is just 1.7, and it’s not expected to rise (or fall) over the next 30 years. Many factors may have influenced the drop in fertility rates, including increased labor-force participation, earnings, and educational attainment by women; delays in marriage and childbearing; the use of contraceptives; and the cost of raising children.

Meanwhile, life expectancy is growing. In the United States, life expectancy at birth was 77.5 years in 2022 – and should surpass 84 years by 2050. Americans who reach the age of 65 are also living longer. In 1960, Americans who reached 65 could, on average, expect to live another 14.3 years; by 2022, that number was 18.9 years.

Finally, as a small counterbalance to the falling birth rate, migration to the United States – assuming current trends and no changes in public policy – will be a modestly net positive in the years ahead as more individuals migrate into the country than choose to leave. Indeed, as the U.S. fertility rate falls, growth of the country’s population will increasingly be driven by immigration.

Not ready to retire

Maintaining older Americans’ quality of life and protecting the country’s fiscal situation will require ensuring that Americans properly prepare for their retirement. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be happening. Pew-sponsored research published last year assessed the gap between the income that retirees will need – defined as 75% of their pre-retirement income – and the income they’ll likely receive based on current trends. The study found that by 2040, the average American retiree will earn $7,050 less per year than they’ll need.

Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.

John Scott directs the retirement savings project at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Photo: City of Greenville, NC via Flickr in Public Domain.

Our Incredible Shrinking Planet

Nicholas Eberstadt — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

If the 20th century was an era obsessed with the fear of a global population explosion – a time when governments, experts, and journalists fretted that population growth powered by high birth rates would soon outstrip the planet’s finite resources – the 21st century promises to be the opposite, a time when fears focus on the world’s population growing older and smaller.

As experts begin studying the coming implosion, the tendency thus far has been to emphasize the negative. We read about falling government tax revenues, less productivity and innovation, strained finances, depopulated militaries, and small families struggling to care for more numerous and longer-living older relatives. But that is only one part of the possible future. As we start preparing for the coming changes – and prepare we must – some humility is in order, for two reasons. First, many of the demographic prognoses that dominated headlines in the last century proved wrong. And second, if there is one constant running through all of history, it is that humans are remarkably ingenious and adaptable. There are thus good reasons to believe that we will avoid disaster this time too – that a shrinking world may prove just as manageable as a growing one did.

Older and fewer

Low birth rates are the sole reason we are heading toward global depopulation. Humanity’s life expectancy at birth has never been higher; in 2023, according to the U.N. Population Division (UNPD), the average lifespan worldwide was 73 years.

The UNPD also estimates that more than 70% of humanity now lives in countries with below-replacement fertility rates – that is, childbearing patterns insufficient to assure long-term population stability in the absence of compensatory migration. On every continent but Africa, fertility levels have fallen below the replacement level, generally benchmarked at 2.1 births per woman during her lifetime. And birth rates are continuing to decline almost everywhere.

The UNPD anticipates that the global population will peak in the year 2084 – at least, that is its current “medium variant” projection. Under this scenario, close to 40% of the people currently alive – a little over 3 billion people – will live to see that momentous demographic turning point. By the UNPD’s “low variant” projection, on the other hand, human numbers will top out in the year 2053 – roughly a generation from now. If that version of the future comes to pass, more than 6 billion people alive today, or almost three-quarters of our current population, will still be around when the planet begins its depopulation.

But the world’s population could start shrinking even sooner than that. Childbearing rates are currently plunging to levels that demographers would not have deemed possible just a few years ago. In the Indian city of Kolkata, for example, the fertility rate has reportedly fallen to one birth per woman – less than half the replacement rate. Bogota, Colombia, is now down to 0.9 births per woman. Last year, South Korea hit a fertility rate of just 0.72 births per woman – barely a third of the level necessary to maintain its population. We don’t know how far such extremely low birth rates will spread, or how low fertility can go. But since recent developments have already taken us into a demographic reality almost no one would have imagined even a decade ago, it would seem incautious to assert that no further surprises lie ahead.

Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development generally, and more specifically on international security in the Korean peninsula and Asia. Domestically, he focuses on poverty and social well-being. Dr. Eberstadt is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR).

Photo: Riba, a medical robot that is intended to assist nurses with patient care. Ars Electronica via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Ending the Phone Based Childhood

Aaron M. Renn — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has a new book out called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The Atlantic recently posted a very interesting excerpt and adaptation.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

…

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Ron Lach via Pexels.

A Piece of Civic Infrastructure That Works

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 20:28:58 -0500

How communities choose to shape their built environment and neighborhoods can powerfully impact a place’s sense of connectedness and how local relationships develop. However, in our time of digital distractions and social distrust, so many projects designed to promote social capital fail to meaningfully bring people together. Although numerous cities and communities have tried to improve social connections in recent years, many urban dwellers regularly report higher levels of loneliness and isolation compared to their suburban counterparts. Regrettably, politicos and planners continue to struggle with how to build connections amid our nationwide loneliness epidemic.

Because our built environment is so critical for community health and growth and there are so many failures to make improvements, I am always interested in new ways for people to connect and I recently came across something exciting in New York City.

What I found was a new installation of seats within the expansive plazas surrounding the World Trade Center. I first saw these seats a few days ago when my son and I were walking in lower Manhattan. While the area is not a heavily residential neighborhood, it houses the 9.11 memorial, a large transit center designed by noted architect Santiago Calatrava, a new performing arts center, and a significant number of offices, plus a plethora of boutiques and restaurants. My son and I have visited the area regularly over the years because of its rich density of festivals and markets—it’s also a great place to roam around.

For all the activity around the Trade Center complex, there are few places to sit, so we were thrilled to see the new seating. But there was a twist; these seats had been purposefully installed to promote conversation. The new seats were cubes that were painted white and had smiley faces on them with the statement “Happy to Chat.” One set of cubes was in an L-shape and the other in an oval shape,

If one opted to sit on a block, one had to be ready to talk. Of course, this cannot be enforced formally, but the city notes that sitting in these spots opens the person up to the possibility of a new human interaction. In a world where far too many people are cocooned in their devices, unable to have or carry a conversation with a stranger, these seats are a welcome sight. And these seats encourage social connections; sitting on the cubes does not “…necessarily mean you will talk to every person that walks past you. Instead, it signals that you are simply open to a comment, a compliment, or a conversation.“

In a world of so much social anomie and isolation from others, even simple and brief interactions can make a real difference in one’s health and happiness. It was a thrilling to watch strangers sit down on these cubes to chat, even briefly. People sitting on the cubes weren’t looking down at their phones, they were smiling and laughing in real space. And while these “chats” may not be the start of deep or repeated friendships, brief conversations like these can change a person’s day for the better. Repeated interactions, however large or small, can have a profound impact on someone’s day.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a profesor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: "Happy to Chat" signage.

Women, Electrified

Robert Bryce — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 20:28:38 -0500

Electricity is essential for all human beings. But it is particularly beneficial for women and girls because it frees them from the drudgery of energy poverty. Put short, electricity emancipates women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the washtub.

Numerous academic studies have shown the positive effect electrification has on women and girls. A 2002 study in Bangladesh by Abul Barkat, an economist at the University of Dhaka, found that the literacy rate for females in villages with electricity was 31% higher than it was in villages that lacked electricity. The study concluded that the availability of electricity has a “significant influence on education, especially on the quality of education. This influence is much more pronounced among the poor and girls in the electrified households than the poor and girls in non-electrified households.”

A 2010 study on post-apartheid electrification in South Africa found that “employment grows in places that get new access to electricity.” This was particularly true for women. The study found that electrification led to “large increases in the use of electric lighting and cooking, and reductions in wood-fuelled cooking over a five-year period, as well as a 9.5 percentage point increase in female employment.”

A 2012 study of rural electrification in India concluded that the availability of electricity had a significant impact on schooling for girls, finding:

“…electrification access increases school enrolment by about 6% for boys and 7.4% for girls. It also increases weekly study time by more than an hour, and the increase is slightly more for girls than boys. As a result of more study hours, children from households with electricity can be expected to perform better than their peers living in households without electricity.”

The same study found that “The impact of electrification on labour supply is positive for both men and women; that is, household access to electricity increases employment hours by more than 17% for women and only 1.5% for men.” Further, the study found that electrification reduces the overall poverty rate by 13.3%, and it concluded that “these findings indicate electrification’s substantial positive effect on overall household welfare.”

Complex studies are not needed to show that extreme shortages of electricity are a common factor in nearly every country where women and girls are vulnerable to illiteracy and child marriage. World Bank data shows that the countries with the highest female illiteracy rates are all in the Unplugged world. If you are a female in an impoverished country and do not have access to electricity, you are, effectively, a slave to the physical chores of the household: hauling water, making fires, grinding grain, and washing clothes. In 2014, the United Nations Children’s Fund released its “State of the World’s Children” report. It is a sobering document that details the plight of children around the world, and in particular, the plight of girls. Among the aspects that UNICEF examined was the issue of child marriage, that is, cases in which girls are married before age 18.

As seen in the graphic above, the 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are all in the Unplugged World. Furthermore, among those 10 countries, the rates of child marriage tend to be highest in the places where per capita electricity use is lowest. For instance, in Niger, between 2005 and 2012, according to UNICEF, about 28% of girls were married by the age of 15. By the age of 18, some 76% were married. As seen in the graphic and the Appendix, per capita electricity use in Niger is now about 18 kilowatt-hours per year. In the Central African Republic, electricity use is just 37 kilowatt-hours per capita per year. In Chad, it is 18 kilowatt-hours. In those three countries, the electricity usage rates are so small as to be insignificant. For example, a resident of Chad, who can use just 18 kilowatt-hours of electricity per annum, would, over the course of a year, only have enough power to boil a kettle of water every four days.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

The excerpt above is another installment of the paper I wrote for the Alliance For Responsible Citizenship. It covers the sections on electricity’s importance to women and girls, and why coal continues to be a dominant fuel for power generation around the world. If you want to read the entire report, it’s available here.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Zelina Richards, 12, and Florence Richards, 13, washing clothes by hand, Nicholas County, Kentucky, 1916. Library of Congress.

Woe, the Humanity: How AI Fits into Rising Anti-Humanism

Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 20:28:58 -0400

The future of humanity is becoming ever less human. The astounding capabilities of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence have triggered fears about the coming age of machines leaving little place for human creativity or employment. Even the architects of this brave new world are sounding the alarm. Sam Altman, chairman and CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, recently warned that artificial intelligence poses an “existential risk” to humanity and warned Congress that artificial intelligence “can go quite wrong.”

While history is littered with apocalyptic predictions, the new alarms are different because they are taking place amid broad cultural forces that suggest human beings have lost faith in themselves and connections with humanity in general.

The new worldview might best be described as anti-humanism. This notion rejects the idea that human beings are perennially ingenious, socially connected creatures capable of wondrous creations – religious scripture, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Beethoven, the science of Einstein. Instead, it casts people, society, and human life itself as a problem. Instead of seeing society as a tool to help people to build and flourish, it stresses the need to limit the damage humanity might do.

Many climate change activists, for example, argue that humanity’s extinction could be a net plus for planet earth. State-sanctioned euthanasia, which just a few years ago was considered a radical assault on the sanctity of life, is becoming common practice in many Western countries – available not just to the terminally ill but those who are just tired of living.

All this is taking place as social science research reveals that people are increasingly cutting themselves off from one another. The traditional pillars of community and connection ‒ family, friends, children, church, neighborhood ‒ have been withering, fostering an everyday existence defined for many people by loneliness. The larger notion of human beings as constituting a larger, collective project with some sense of common goal is being replaced by a solipsistic individualism, which negates the classical liberal values of self-determination and personal freedoms in a worldview that nullifies the societies they built.

These trends, which have been studied largely in isolation, could be amplified by the ascendance of artificial intelligence. As humanity wrestles with powerful new technologies, a growing body of research suggests that a more fundamental question may be whether human beings are willing to shape their own legacy in the new world order.

Anti-humanism has a long history – it can be traced back at least to Thomas Malthus, who warned in 1789 that overpopulation was the greatest threat to human prosperity. Although the British economist and cleric was not hostile to humanity and his dark predictions never came true, his claim that people are the problem has provided the cri de coeur for the modern environmental movement. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich’s best-seller “The Population Bomb,” which expressed horror at the proliferation of people, prophesied that continued surges in population would lead to mass starvation. Ehrlich and his acolytes urged extreme measures to stave off disaster, including adding sterilant to the water supply to prevent human reproduction.

These views have not gone away. The big business-funded Club of Rome report, issued in 1972, embraced an agenda of austerity and retrenchment to stave off population-driven mass starvation and social chaos. Humanity’s ancient effort to create safety and comfort – its commitment to progress and prosperity – was cast as a lethal threat.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Investigations.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: cottonbro studio

Still Wrong! Paul Ehrlich Interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes

Marian L. Tupy — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:28:58 -0500

CBS decided to start the new year with a 60 Minutes segment on overpopulation. That’s not really all that surprising. In recent months, many left-leaning media outlets profiled advocates of depopulation (here is The New York Times and here is The Atlantic), thereby helping to normalize their message of anti-humanism and anti-natalism. What is surprising is that CBS thought it wise to interview none other than the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ninety years old, looking healthy and sounding as self-assured as ever, Ehrlich revisited the main thesis of his 1968 book The Population Bomb. The book’s beginning will be familiar to many readers:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”

In fact, the world’s crude death rate per 1,000 people fell from 12.9 in 1965-1970 to 8.1 in 2020-2025. That’s a reduction of 37 percent. Famines, which were once common throughout the world, have disappeared outside of war zones. The world produces (or produced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) record amounts of food. Hundreds of millions of people did not starve to death in the 1970s or thereafter. Quite the opposite happened; the world’s population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022. That said, some 400 million people were prevented from being born in China because of the misbegotten one-child policy (1978-2015), which the writings of Paul Ehrlich helped to inspire.

I realize that CBS has no time or space for the authors of Superabundance – a book showing that resources are getting more, rather than less, abundant. But why not interview Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Romer, Angus Deaton, and Michael Kremer, who never bought into the overpopulation nonsense? And if that’s a stretch, why not interview smart Democrats, like Lawrence H. Summers (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury) or Jason Furman (Barack Obama’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers)? They, too, argue that we do not have an “overpopulation problem.” Or was 60 Minutes only looking for scholars willing to confirm the pre-determined narrative of doom and gloom?

CBS claims that the world has too many people consuming too much stuff, which threatens the biosphere (a.k.a. human life-support systems). Once again, remember that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, human life expectancy was rising, and the death rate was falling – even though the world’s population grew by 129 percent between the publication date of The Population Bomb and the present. So, humans are doing just fine, thank you very much! What about the biosphere? Let’s consider three trends that Ronald Bailey from Reason magazine and I looked at in our 2020 book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting.

The World Database on Protected Areas reported that 15 percent of the planet’s land surface was covered by protected areas in 2017. That’s an area almost double the size of the United States. Marine protected areas covered nearly 7 percent of the world’s oceans. That’s an area more than twice the size of South America. Plans are afoot to increase the size of the protected areas substantially.
The world is urbanizing. By 2050, 80 percent of humanity will live in cities. In other words, we are withdrawing from land, thereby increasing, not decreasing, the space available to plants and animals.
The Rockefeller University environmentalist Jesse H. Ausubel estimates that due to the continued improvements in the efficiency of farming practices, including rising crop yields, the world will see “a net reduction in use of arable land (i.e., land used for farming) in about 50 years totaling 10 times the area of Iowa, and shrinking global cropland to the level of 1960.”

Finally, the world has never been as wealthy and as determined to protect the environment. We have the technology to reintroduce species at the risk of depletion and, perhaps, even to resurrect long-extinct ones. Just last year, thanks to knowledge and investment from a wealthy country, humanity deflected a small asteroid for the first time. If wealth is allowed to grow, we may one day save the biosphere from a true mass extinction. Economic development, in other words, is the key to environmental protection, which is why all the environmental ranking tables are topped by economically advanced nations. To stress: rich countries are better stewards of the environment than poor ones. Just compare the quality of the environment in Denmark with Papua New Guinea.

None of the above is a license to be wantonly cruel to animals or careless about our surroundings. Living on a beautiful planet teeming with wildlife is a part of human flourishing. But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress (for a more academic discussion, see this article). Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming. The way forward, therefore, is to find a balance between environmental concerns and human flourishing – understanding that humans are not only destroyers, but also creators and protectors of the planet and that which thrives on it.

This piece first appeared at Human Progress.

Marian L. Tupy is a senior fellow in the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and editor of HumanProgress.org.

Why WFH Will Not Doom Cities

Pete Saunders — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times recently wrote a piece in which he questioned several top academics in economics and real estate on whether two outcomes of the Covid pandemic -- the Covid outmigration from cities to suburbs by affluent and the rise of the work-from-home phenomenon – will undermine the rise of cities over the last 30 years.

A quote from Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance with Columbia University’s Business School, underscores the point:

“In late February and early March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York and other population hubs. In Van Nieuwerburgh’s telling, the Covid-19 crisis “triggered a massive migration response. Many households fled urban centers. Most of these Covid migrants moved to the suburbs.”

As the pandemic endured and subsequent coronavirus variants prompted employers to postpone return-to-office plans, Van Nieuwerburgh noted, “Covid-induced migration patterns began to take on a more persistent character. Many households transitioned from temporarily renting a suburban home to purchasing a suburban home.” In Van Nieuwerburgh’s view — and that of many of his colleagues — what seemed like a transitory step to avoid infection has become a major force driving the future direction of urban America.”

Is Van Nieuwerburgh, and his colleagues, right in believing this? I don’t think so.

I don’t doubt the veracity of his comment. As a rule the academics cite the outflow of the affluent, the rise in vacant offices and storefronts in cities, and declining municipal revenues as the drivers for reversing three decades of city progress. Cities are indeed strained financially in ways they haven’t been in decades. Even before Covid, the lack of housing affordability and rising crime in large cities was playing a role as well. In fact, cities will indeed lose some people to the suburbs or other places.

However, academics like Van Nieuwerburgh and others overestimate the impact of current trends on cities today. Even more, they underestimate the function large cities now play in American society, a role that did not exist prior to the “golden era for large cities” that Edsall calls out in his article title.

For most of the twentieth century one could consider cities as our nation’s social and economic assimilator. Immigrants from around the world, and rural Blacks from the segregated Deep South, spent much of the century moving into cities, becoming established and acculturated, before moving on to the next stage. Often that was a move to suburbia that meant an escape from the social ills that often afflicted cities. The role of cities-as-assimilators probably reached its peak midcentury before being disrupted by the Civil Rights Movement. Cities began a rapid decline in the 1970s and 1980s, during which suburbs became the preeminent location for American social and economic development.

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Photo source: corporate-innovation.co

CSY Repost – What Happened to Addressing Inequality?

Pete Saunders — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

My father, a retired AME Church pastor, on occasion would start a sermon with a story about a pastor preaching a particularly fantastic sermon. The pastor was heaped with praise by his congregants after service. The following Sunday he preached the exact same sermon, to the puzzlement of the church members. The Sunday after that he did the same thing, and church deacons decided to talk to the pastor after service. “Pastor,” they said, “today makes three consecutive Sundays you’ve preached the exact same sermon. How long do you intend to keep doing this?” The pastor replied, “I’ll move on when the church members start living the lessons of the message.”

I’m about to apply the same approach to American metro inequality discourse.

It wasn’t that long ago – 2008, with the election of President Barack Obama – that the issue of economic inequality in America was thought to have been overcome. The nation had elected its first Black president and it was viewed as evidence that perhaps our nation was ready to enter a “post-racial” era. It was a demonstration of our commitment to the ideal that “all (wo)men are created equal.”

But that didn’t last long.

The fallout from the financial crisis and Great Recession over the ensuing years revealed the unequal nature of economic recovery. Gaps widened between the nation’s haves and have-nots: knowledge economy coastal cities versus the rural hinterlands; sunny locations promoting affordability and lifestyle versus gritty manufacturing-based cities. And it wasn’t only inter-regional inequality that was exposed. Intra-regional inequality, or the way we view differences in the quality of life of people within the same region, became more apparent. It refreshed concerns about who was thriving in the new American economy, and who wasn’t. The resentment among white working-class voters that pushed Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 added another layer to inequality discourse.

More recently, concerns of inequality hit another fervent peak in 2020, when the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery and Breonna Taylor were protested by people worldwide. Inequality discourse probably reached a peak in the summer of 2020. Since then it’s faded considerably as the nation turned its attention to other important matters like surviving the Covid pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, mass shooting tragedies, the war in Ukraine, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, obscenely high gas prices and existential threats to our system of government.

Racial, economic and social inequality, particularly in our nation’s cities, hasn’t disappeared. At a minimum inequality levels remain the same, and perhaps widened. If anything, our nation has become much better at identifying inequalities and their impact on American society, but no better at all at resolving it.

The Covid pandemic was a case study in how America identifies inequality yet failed to address it. Early in the pandemic we recognized that people of color were hospitalized and dying from Covid at substantially higher rates than whites, even when controlled for economic factors. We knew that the divide between the professional class that had the ability to weather the pandemic working from home, and the service class that was urged to work in direct contact with the public to keep the economy moving, was largely a divide between whites and people of color.

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