I haven’t posted a picture of Jack lately. He’s been keeping us pretty busy. As you can see now he’s not a puppy puppy but an energetic, unruly adolescent.

We’ve actually had Samoyeds who were harder to handle than Jack who’s basically a good dog but he’s pretty trying now. Fortunately, we’re better equipped to deal with him than we were 20 years ago.

At Noah Smith’s Substack artist and architect Alfred Twu waxes poetic on the American city of the future. Here’s a snippet:

Renovating the City of Today
The city of tomorrow has many familiar streets and sights of the city of today – after all, it’s a remodel, not a rebuild. While other countries have the option of building new cities or neighborhoods beyond the edge of existing ones, the US already used up most land within commuting distance in the 20th century on low density suburbs. Most of us will live in places that already exist today, but with changes.

The Economy of the Future
Healthcare, education, and technology are expected to continue to be among the fastest growing jobs over the next couple of decades, especially when it comes to high paying jobs. Related to this, and also expected to grow, are two other categories of people: students and retirees. Both those providing and those using education and healthcare services want to be close to colleges and hospitals.

While high tech / green tech manufacturing will also grow, due to automation the factories themselves are not major employment centers, and due to the massive amounts of space needed, are located outside the city.

The Lifestyle of the Future
With people changing jobs on average every four years, it pays to be close to lots of them. This is one of the biggest feature of living in a city, especially for households with multiple people: you want to be able to change jobs without forcing your family to move.

This will be especially true for multigenerational households. Already making up nearly a quarter of the population, multigenerational households as well as other forms of group living are likely to grow in popularity in the future as rising productivity in the rest of the economy makes childcare and home healthcare, which are notoriously hard to automate, much more expensive to hire someone to do.

I would like to think that he’s right but I think he’s wrong. Let’s consider three models which illustrate why I think that: San Francisco, Detroit, and Paris.

Today’s San Francisco can be summarized as apartments and condos too expensive for any but the well-to-do to afford and homelessness, crime, and filth everywhere. Yes, that’s an oversimplification but I’m dealing in archetypes here.

Detroit is my next example. In 1950 Detroit’s population was almost two million people. Now it’s just over a half million. In many ways Detroit is like a ghost town. Grand buildings now dilapidated; mile after mile of abandoned buildings and empty lots where houses used to be. I’m sure that Detroit still has many nice neighborhoods but its modern day reality is that it has shrunk, abandoned.

My third example is Paris of 40 years ago. I haven’t been back recently but forty years ago the central city was quite lovely and, indeed, loved. That central city was surrounded by miles of dreary, rundown suburbs or banlieux as they call them.

In many ways Chicago is coming to be something like that. The Loop, the Gold Coast, and Lincoln Park are all still great. The South Side is coming to resemble Detroit and close-in suburbs like Maywood, Melrose Park, and Oak Park are becoming dreary and rundown.

So, contrary to Mr. Twu that’s what I think the city’s of America’s future will be like. The new cities will be increasingly divided between haves and have nots and the old cities will either be abandoned or ringed by poor, rundown suburbs.

I’m still stewing about voting on Tuesday. The ballot is a real chamber of horrors.

I’ll vote against Amendment 1. I’ll probably vote in favor of the tax increase for the Cook County Forest Preserve. Fun fact about Illinois: Illinois has more independently taxing jurisdictions than any other state. The forest preserve is one of those independent taxing authorities.

I’ll probably leave my vote for governor blank. In all honesty I can’t justify voting for either nudnik. Darren Bailey is a dolt and JB Pritzker is wrong about just about everything. Much of the ballot is like that.

I’ll vote for re-electing my state representative. I think my state senator is running unopposed. I won’t vote for him in any event—he voted in favor of the SAFE-T Act. I think we should eliminate cash bail for a lot of offenses but not the entire list in the present bill and in particular not for violent crimes.

Some interesting observations from Charlie Cook:

It has long been my view that the final races rated as Toss Ups rarely split down the middle, they break in the direction of the last gust of wind occurring in the days before Election Day (or in more recent years with so many ballots cast early, election weeks) but that does not explain the streaky nature of this races, why the last four elections would behave differently from the previous four elections.

Given how Toss Ups have broken in the last four elections, coupled with polling continually understating Republican support, it is little wonder why Democrats are so anxious right now. For much of the last two years, this election was behaving as we have come to expect midterm elections, as a straight-up referendum on the incumbent president and governing party. In August and September however, after the Supreme Court reversed the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, and after gas prices dropped from over $5 a gallon to under $4, it seemed to be more of a choice election. But over the last three weeks, it seems to have returned to the more conventional referendum dynamic.

How this election finishes is thus an open question. When does the curtain fall on this opera? The House, where individual races and candidates matter less and the behavior is more parliamentary, the outcome is very likely to be quite bad for Democrats. My personal hunch is Democrats suffer net losses of at least 20 seats, but in the Senate, the difference between either party picking up or losing a seat or two could easily be minimal. In the upper chamber, the party that wins three of the following four contests will be in the driver’s seat: the Democratic-held seats in Georgia and Nevada, and the two Republican open seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This post will be a bit of a jumble since I’m trying to accomplish several different things in it. I’m starting out by, as they say on Jeopardy, putting it in the form of a question: did the Biden Administration cause inflation deliberately? That’s what Daniel Turner says at RealClearEnergy:

Toomey outlines the numerous times Biden promised to “get rid of” the fossil fuel industry. Biden announced executive orders on his first day in office cancelling the Keystone pipeline and ending oil and gas leases on federal land. As the title of Toomey’s report suggests: energy inflation was by design.

For two years, I’ve discussed this issue on television and radio programs and asked the same question: How did the Biden administration not know what the consequences would be of such policies? Toomey answers the question: they did know. They desired these results.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I think that events developed much more rapidly than they expected and that the real problem is actually worse.

Josh Billings put it quite well: it ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you but what you do know that just ain’t so. Everything in Joe Biden’s lengthy career tells him that government spending is economic stimulus. That’s only true when there’s excess capacity as any good Keynesian would tell you. Otherwise it produces inflation: too much demand chasing too little supply.

They also think that climate change is a crisis or, at least, they want their supporters to think they believe that. I think it’s a risk rather than a crisis. That has implications for strategy and timing. Astonishingly, they don’t seem to relate the policies they’ve put in place with what has actually happened. I suspect from that they believe that the private sector responds instantly to new incentives regardless of what has happened before. That, too, just ain’t so. Investors need a reasonable expectation of return over the life of the investment. If that’s the way you define “corporate greed”, then Bernie Sanders is right—corporate greed is producing higher prices. But it’s only true if you define corporate greed as the inexplicable desire to make money on your investments.

You can’t even produce an instant response with government action anymore. There’s a year or so of planning and hearings followed by a lengthy and involved process during which the contracts are let. By the time any action has taken place a new administration is in office.

All of that presents a pretty gloomy outlook. Will a Republican Congress be able to curb inflation? I don’t believe so. Even with their best efforts it can only be accomplished by reducing demand and/or increasing supply while reducing spending. The spending reduction part is a necessity so that the Fed’s interest rate jiggering will work.

I have no idea what Kevin McCarthy’s priorities are but I suspect they are more minarchist than will produce any of those outcomes in the near term. We’ll see.

It’s a lot easier to break things that are maintaining a precarious balance than it is to build them back up again.

And I haven’t even touched on Ukraine yet.

I think there’s a lot of this going around. Looking at snapshots and believing they’re representative of the whole movie. I think that’s part of our political problem. It think it’s one of the causes of the high inflation we’re experiencing.

That’s how I interpret Fareed Zakaria’s remarks in his latest Washington Post column:

As an immigrant to the United States who has traveled a great deal around the world, I have always been certain that America was the best place for people like me — people who looked different, with brown skin and a strange name. I remember coming to America as a college student and feeling the openness and generosity of a country born of and made by immigrants. When visiting Britain around the same time, I could sense that I was treated politely but as an outsider.

He goes on to explain why he thinks that Britain is now more welcoming than we are.

I was a bit surprised by a number of things in the column. For one I don’t think that the United States has ever been that friendly to migrants. Please don’t quote “The New Colossus” to me or point to the Statue of Liberty. In 1883 most migrants came to the United States to farm. Those who did were tolerated to the extent that they farmed and there was lots of land seen as empty. The indigenous Americans had never seen the land as empty or available but that’s another subject.

There were anti-immigrant riots from the 1840s through the 1870s and in the early 20th century. To my knowledge there was also one immigrant lynched during World War I. That’s compared with no lynched Japanese-Americans during World War II although they were interred in camps. There’s also an anti-immigrant thread running through the riots of the 1960s and recent anti-immigrant violence going on right now.

I think that by and large my fellow Americans are good and decent people but I honestly wouldn’t characterize us as “friendly to migrants”.

I can’t comment on Britain but I would point out that the numbers are actually quite small. The United Kingdom has about 7% Asians and 3% blacks, most of whom reside in the big cities. Once you get out into the countryside you will encounter relatively few immigrants.

In his most recent Washington Post column George Will laments that the midterm campaign season has given us a master class in things we probably don’t want to know about ourselves. Here’s what was to me the most salient part:

If on Tuesday Hispanic voters continue their drift away from Democrats, the reasons might include these: Self-identified “strong progressives” are only about 10 percent of voters, but they have a disproportionate effect in setting perceptions of the Democratic Party. Sixty-six percent of them say this is not the world’s greatest country, and 94 percent say racism is built into the nation’s policies and institutions. Hispanics disagree with those propositions by 70 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Also, many Hispanics fled socialism, or have family memories of it, and are repelled by progressives who admire it from a safe distance.

I don’t think it’s just Hispanics.

I thought you might be amused (or infuriated, depending) on the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s reaction to President Biden’s pre-midterm plea to save democracy. It takes the form of “missing pages” from the president’s address:

“My fellow Americans, I’ve mentioned the MAGA threat. But to preserve democracy, it will take the efforts and honesty of both political parties. And we Democrats need to acknowledge that most Republicans feel as strongly and sincerely about fair elections as we do. After the 2020 election, hundreds of Republicans were the most important obstacle to Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

“Mike Pence in particular played a heroic role in refusing as Vice President to stop the Electoral College count. He was under enormous pressure from Donald Trump to do so, and he knew that refusing would jeopardize his chances of ever becoming President. But he stood on principle and followed the Constitution. I should thank him more often than I have, and I want to salute him tonight.

“There were also the many lawyers in the White House and Justice Department who refused to go along with the former President’s claims when they saw no evidence for them. Thank you, Bill Barr.

“There were Governors and state election officials who refused to follow Trump’s demand to find votes that didn’t exist. Thank you, Doug Ducey and Mark Brnovich.

“There were the many judges appointed by Donald Trump who examined the evidence and ruled against the fraud claims. Thank you, Mitch McConnell and Federalist Society for supporting those judges.

“Truth be told, some in my own Democratic Party have also contributed to the climate of political mistrust and animus. The ranks of election deniers include Georgia’s Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams, who refused to accept her defeat in 2018. My own press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tweeted in 2020 that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ‘stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.’

“That was wrong, and I’ve asked Karine to apologize at her next press conference. I know she regrets that tweet.

“Worst of all, Hillary Clinton and many others claimed Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was illegitimate and the result of Russian influence. Some in the FBI even lied to a secret surveillance court to spy on a Trump campaign official. That was wrong, and those lies have made it easier for Trump to exploit fears about a politicized ‘deep state,’ as MAGA Republicans call it. I hope that Secretary Clinton will also acknowledge the damage from those versions of the Big Lie.

“Democracy is too important to have a double standard for election denial. And from now on, including next week, I promise to call out members of my own party if they refuse to recognize they have lost an election after all the votes have been counted and confirmed.

“I also can’t absolve myself for sowing doubts about democracy. In my first year as President I referred to election changes being considered in Georgia as ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ and I said the midterm election would be ‘illegitimate’ if laws like that passed.

“Well, the Georgia law did pass, and it looks on the evidence so far that voter turnout in Georgia will set midterm records. I was wrong to use such divisive language, and especially to invoke the shameful era of government racial segregation, to make a partisan point.”

and they conclude:

We’d like to think Mr. Biden meant to include these missing pages in his speech. If they weren’t dropped accidentally, then perhaps he could include them next time. Otherwise his speeches about democracy will be dismissed as cynical and calculating partisanship.

My own take is somewhat different. I think that Democrats and Republicans differ in their definitions of “democracy”. I don’t think that either of them mean the same thing as I do.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but I certainly have. Judging by the various reactions, the assault on Paul Pelosi is practically a Rorschach test.

Some saw it as an example of right-wing extremism. Some saw it as an example of left-wing extremism. Some saw it as being hoist by one’s own petard. Or a security state cover-up. Now there’s apparently an illegal immigration side of it.

As I tried to indicate in my quick take post, I thought that people should be cautious before leaping to too many conclusions.

Stand aside, baseball. Jumping to conclusions is apparently now the national pastime.