Meditation on Civic Virtue

My father was a New Hampshire man, a man who distrusted FDR, had no use for Harry Truman, and admired Herbert Hoover., but it's not quite what you think.  He was gentle and thoughtful, and he espoused a bedrock social theory:

"If people would just obey the law, we wouldn't have to hire so many police."

I think of him whenever I get back to Boston, where I more than once had occasion to admire his capacity to master the city's notoriously awful traffic. 

And in particular, when I stick my toe into a crosswalk.  I don't know, maybe the locals have this down, but I am never quite sure what will happen when I step into a Boston crosswalk.  Will I safely make it to the other side?  Or will I be swept along on the hood of some offended vehicle, while he driver yells at me to get offa his car (I think I saw this in a movie once).

Maybe my overdo it.  Maybe Boston pedestrians can move freely and safely like the mama and her brood in Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings.  But I tend to doubt it.  I always get the feeling that the oncoming driver regards me as an offense, just daring me to exercise my Constitutional right to reach the opposite side of the street in one piece (remind me again--which Amendment guarantees crosswalk safety?).

The other side of the coin is that I live in California.  And say what you like about this raucous brood: in my experience, Californians are positively fanatic about crosswalks.  They respect them. They stop.  They let you cross. For the most part they even obey the invisible crosswalk in the middle of the block.

And it's not just crosswalks. Back in the 80s, I spent a while bunking down way out in the San Fernando Valley, and taking the morning commuter bus in to the Federal Courthouse.  The trip was interesting, inter alia, because it involved the mother of all merges: the Five, coming in from the San Fernando, had to feed into the Ten, going south from Pasadena to Long Beach.  And here's the thing: not only to Californians respect crosswalks; they also merge.  I mean, every morning I'd see find myself part of this wall of cars trying to make its way onto the newly combined roadway. And every morning, it worked.  One goes.  The other goes.  One goes, the other goes, and in no time at all, life goes on as before.

I'll grant that that was a few years ago and thing might have changed. but I doubt it.  More generally, my take is that Californians really do know how to behave in traffic, with (this once, at least) a developed sense of civic virtue.  Mostly.  [One qualification; Mrs. Buce argues that Californians are actually quite good drivers, with the catch that you have to be as good as they are or you are going to gum up the whole works.  This seems right to me, but I don't think it spoils my point.]

I thought of all this again this week The Economist's excellent meditation on traffic roundabouts.  The whole thing is worth reading, but consider:

Roundabouts tend to work only when motorists observe the British virtues of fair play and stick to the rules. Alas, this is not always the case. ... If drivers do not yield, roundabouts degenerate swiftly into gridlock. And in places where driving standards are poor, people often plough straight onto them. In Nairobi, for example, the four roundabouts that mark the city’s heart are so badly jammed that policemen have been drafted in to act as human traffic lights. When it rains, the officers seek shelter and the mess gets even worse. 

 And there you have it: things work when people want them to work, and work to make them work.  Which is to say, my father had a point. Bust exactly when do they work; and perhaps more urgent, how do you encourage them to work?  Ah, now that is a fascinating and far more complicated story.  The truth is, I haven't the least idea how this kid of civic virtue is created or destroyed.  My consolation is that I don't think anyone else does either. 

"Private" Cities and the Concept of "The Public"

Alex Tabarrok offers up some diverting thoughts on cities as hotels--whole cities built on the private provision of "public" goods.  It's an absorbing read but I think it may be worthwhile to think hard about just how novel this phenomenon really is.  Marx, for starters, would have said that any government is just the running dog of the capitalist class.    The Nineteenth-Century coal and steel industries (and others) had their company towns (cf. "Sixteen Tons," infra.*).    California tax enclaves like the cities of Commerce or Industry or Emeryville operate almost as joint-stock companies. Joel adds the example of Indian casinos where you can function in a cradle-to-grave cocoon as long as you keep feeding those coins into the slot (and compare cruise ships?).   I spent my 20s in a postage-stamp sized suburb of Louisville structured deliberately to try to relate costs and  benefits for insiders, while dumping all the onerous burdens on somebody else--a predecessor in name if not in function to the proliferating gated communities of our own time.

So I suspect the real issue here is not the appropriateness of a private entity a provider of a particular service but the very notion of community.  I put the word "public" in quotes above. Two  of the most remarkable examples above come (respectively)  from Russia and the Congo--places where the very idea of "community" emerges as a kind of a cruel joke.    By contrast, it is fairly well accepted that the entities where "the state" plays the largest role are those with a high degree of cultural homogeneity,  where the citizens understand themselves as part of a shared enterprise.    It's the "shared enterprise" part that seems to me crucial--and also elusive,  precisely because when it works best it is more or less invisible.  That's the best segue I can think of into the best thing I read this weekend.  I steal from James Fallows (I'm actually not clear on Fallows' original source):

You're working on your 1972 F150 ..., it needs a new whats-it. You go down to the local auto parts store and say "I need a new whats-it for my F150" 

"What year?" 

"1972" "

Oh, 1972. 

"We're gonna have to order one of those," the parts guy says, his voice apologizing for and conveying a sense of inconvenience. 

"Oh. How long will it take to get one?" 

"Tomorrow morning at the earliest," he'll say gravely. "Maybe tomorrow afternoon." 

People have no idea how convenient their lives are, or how much opportunity cost is not lost and human capital is not lost because we have a socio-economic system that can get you a whats-it for a 1972 F150 in 12-24 hours. And yes, we're pissing it away.

I guess I'm struggling for my point here, but let me try again.  I suppose you could say that a well-run private enterprise would be best equipped to make sure that the 1972 whats-it showed up on time.  My argument is that even the private enterprise depends on a network of relationships and presumptions of which it may be barely conscious and without which it can barely survive. 

*The following is apparently not Merle Travis' "Sixteen Tons," but how would I know:

Majanlahti on Rome

Here's one so self-evidently compelling on its face that you can't imagine why nobody thought of it before.  It's Anthony Majanlahti, The Families Who Made Rome, subtitlted "A History and a Guide."  Think about it: you atour the ancient parts of Rome, you operate in terms of political figures: here Augustus, here Trajan, here Constantine.  When you do the much more extensive Renaissance elements, you're usually working in terms of the artists--Bernini, Bramante and suchlike.   But all those Renaissance piles have a political history behind them, not least in the sense that somebody had to stump up the money.  Here the sources get there due: the Colonna, Della Rovere, Fernese, Borghese, Barberini, Pamphlij, Chigi and suchlike who provided the gold to make it go.

Majanlahti has structured it as a tour guide.  I haven't had the opportunity to use it that way yet but I must say that it works pretty well as an informal general of the age.   In crude summary, then: what we have here is an odd sort of hybrid government perhaps like nothing so much as the Roman republic, where a network of rich and powerful clans jockey for position so they can line their private pockets with public wealth--and for "private pockets," read "lavish public display." 

The standard pattern has an almost tedious regularity: get one of your clan elected pope; let him cooperate with his "nipote"--the "nephews" (sometimes, actually nephews)--and set the family up for life.   Oddly enough, you didn't get a second short (the della Rovere were an exception)--but properly engineered, one was as good as forever.

It occurs to me also that we see a grand tradition unveil itself here.  We boring northerners sometimes make fun of their Italians for their skill at turning public resources to the service of private greed.  I think in particular of Ed Banfield's superb Moral Basis of a Backward Society where he displayed the physical and spiritual poverty of a "community" (if you can call it that) without any sense of civic virtue (here's a review I wrote of Banfield's book a while back).   The interesting modifier here is "backward;" read Majanlahti for an account of the same kind of self-serving in a society that is  not "backward" by any conventional definition.