This is the Abstract for a fascinating paper, “Highway to Hitler” by Nico Voigtlaender and Hans-Joachim Voth (NBER Working Paper No. 20150, Issued in May 2014)
Democracy is not an absorbing state; transitions to autocratic rule have been frequent throughout history and often followed periods of instability under democratic rule. In this paper, we ask whether autocrats can win support among voters by showcasing their ability to restore order and to “get things done.” We analyze a famous case – the building of the highway network in Nazi Germany. Highway construction began shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, and was one of the regime’s signature projects. Using newly collected data, we show that highway construction was highly effective in boosting popular support, helping to entrench the Nazi dictatorship. These effects are unlikely to reflect direct economic benefits. Instead, highway construction signaled economic “competence” and an end to austerity, so that many Germans credited the Nazi regime for the economic recovery. In line with this interpretation, we show that support for the Nazis increased particularly strongly where highway construction coincided with greater radio availability – a major source of propaganda. The effect of highways was also significantly stronger in politically unstable states of the Weimar Republic. Our results suggest that infrastructure spending can win “hearts” for autocracy when “minds” are led to associate it with visible economic progress and an end to political instability.
To some mental-health professionals, the debate over diagnoses and the Goldwater rule distracts from a larger point. “This issue is not whether Donald Trump is mentally ill but whether he’s dangerous,” James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, told attendees at a recent public meeting at Yale School of Medicine on the topic of Trump’s mental health. “He publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged followers to beat up protesters. He approves of torture. He has boasted of his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault,” Gilligan said.
Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No. 28: Do you often lose your temper?) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Trump would never pass muster,” Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control officer in the Army, told me. “Any of us that had our hands anywhere near nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything.”
It’s long been described as the sharing economy. But, of course, there is little real sharing going on. The gig economy is just another way to pay people to give you a ride or rent you a room or bring you a meal. Even if the sharing economy is really the on-demand economy, does it represent a new, more worker-friendly, more altruistic version of the working life? The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller wonders: Is The Gig Economy Working? “The American workplace is both a seat of national identity and a site of chronic upheaval and shame. The industry that drove America’s rise in the nineteenth century was often inhumane. The twentieth-century corrective—a corporate workplace of rules, hierarchies, collective bargaining, triplicate forms—brought its own unfairnesses. Gigging reflects the endlessly personalizable values of our own era, but its social effects, untried by time, remain uncertain.” In a perfect version of the sharing economy, I would summarize Heller’s findings and deliver them to you in easily digestable, bite-sized chunks. But once you see the rates I charge, I have a feeling you’ll want to try Task Rabbit.
It’s great that Macron won. But it would be unwise to be complacent. If — as I suspect — we are at the beginning of a real seismic shift in our politics, mainly triggered by populist anger at the way the banks were bailed out in 2008 — then it will take more than the election of a technocratic centrist to stem the tide. As Roger Cohen puts it in today’s New York Times:
Now the hard part begins. For the first time in France, the far right took more than a third of the vote, a reflection of the anger in the country at lost jobs, failed immigrant integration and economic stagnation. Macron, who said he was aware of “the anger, the anxiety, the doubts” needs to address this social unease head-on by reviving a sense of possibility in France. Without change, Le Pen will continue to gain support.
Yep. Macron has, as of now, precisely zero MPs in parliament. This may change at the general election, but it would be extraordinary if a pop-up ‘movement’ (which is really what En Marché is) gained a majority in its first election. If he doesn’t succeed in making some significant changes which indicate that ruling elites have finally learned something from the neoliberal nightmare, then I’d bet on Le Pen making a better showing next time.
Last night we went to see Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary about the legendary battle between the journalist, author and activist Jane Jacobs and the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) New York city planner, Robert Moses.
In the scale of his ambition to impose modernist order on the chaos of the city, Moses’s only historical peer is Baron Haussmann, the planner appointed by Napoléon III to transform Paris from the warren of narrow cobbled streets in which radicals could foment revolution, into the city of wide boulevards we know today. (Among the advantages of said boulevards was that they afforded military units a clear line of fire in the event of trouble.)
Behind the film lie two great books, only one of which is mentioned in the script. The first — and obvious one — is Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities, a scarifying attack on the modernist ideology of Le Corbusier and his disciples and a brilliant defence of the organic complexity of urban living, with all its chaos, untidiness and diversity. The other book is Robert Caro’s magnificent biography of Moses — The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. This is a warts-and-all portrayal of a bureaucratic monster, but it also explains how Moses, like many a monster before him, started out as an earnest, idealistic, principled reformer — very much a Progressive.
He was educated at Yale, Oxford (Wadham) and Columbia, where he did a PhD. At Oxford he acquired an admiration for the British civil service, with its political neutrality and meritocratic ethos — but also a rigid distinction between an ‘Administrative’ class (those engaged in policy-making) and the bureaucratic drones (whose role was merely to implement policy). When he returned to the US, Moses found that the political machines of American cities had zero interest in meritocracy, and eventually realised that his path to success lay in hitching his wagon to a machine politician — New York governor Al Smith, a brilliant political operator with an eighth-grade education. Moses started by building public parks, but quickly acquired such a wide range of powers and authority that became was, effectively, the ‘Master Builder’ who remodelled the city of New York.
Because Tyrnauer’s film focusses more on Jacobs, Moses’s Progressive origins are understandably ignored and what comes over is only his monstrous, bullying side — exemplified in his contemptuous aside that “Those who can, build; those who can’t criticize”. In that sense, Moses is very like that other monster, Lyndon Johnson, to whose biography Caro has devoted most of his career.
My interest in Moses was first sparked by something written by a friend, Larry Lessig. In an essay that was a prelude to Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, his first major book, Lessig discussed the role of architecture in regulating behaviour and wrote:
“Robert Moses built highway bridges along the roads to the beaches in Long Island so that busses could not pass under the bridges, thereby assuring that only those with cars (mainly white people) would use certain public beaches, and that those without cars (largely African Americans) would be driven to use other beaches, so that social relations would be properly regulated.”
In later years, this assertion — about the effectiveness of the low underpasses as racial filters — has been challenged, but Lessig’s central proposition (that architecture constrains and determines behaviour) is amply demonstrated in the film. The squalid, slum-like conditions that Moses sought to demolish did indeed enable and determine behaviour: it was the rich, organic, chaotic, vibrant life that Jacobs observed and celebrated. And when those slums were replaced by the ‘projects’ beloved of Moses, le Corbusier et al — high-rise apartment blocks set in rational configurations — they also determined behaviour, mostly by eliminating vibrancy and life and creating urban wastelands of crime, social exclusion and desperation.
A second reflection sparked by the film is its evocation of the way the automobile destroyed cities. Moses believed that what was good for General Motors was good for America and he was determined to make New York automobile-friendly by building expressways that gouged their way through neighbourhoods and rendered them uninhabitable. His first defeat at Jacobs’s hands came when his plan to extend Fifth Avenue by running a road through Washington Square was overturned by inspired campaigning by women he derided as mere “housewives”. But in the end the defeat that really broke him was the failure of his plan to run a motorway through Manhattan.
A third reflection is, in a way, the inverse of that. The film provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which the automobile changed the shape not just of New York but of all American cities (and also positions in intercourse, as some wag once put it; American moralists in the 1920s used to fulminate that cars were “brothels on wheels”) But those vehicles were all driven by humans. If autonomous cars become the norm in urban areas, then the changes they will bring in due course could be equally revolutionary. After all, if mobility is what we really require, then car ownership will decline — as will demand for on- and off-street parking. Pavements (or sidewalks, as they call them in the US) can be made wider, enabling more of the street life that Jacobs so prized.
The final reflection on the film is gloomier. Towards the end, the camera began to pan, zoom and linger on the monstrous cities that are now being built in China, Asia and India — the areas of the world that are going to be more dominant in coming centuries. And as one looks at the resulting forests of high-rise, soulless towers it looks as though the ghosts of Le Corbusier and Moses have come back to earth and are gleefully setting about creating the dysfunctional slums of the future. Which reminds me of a passage in a book I’m currently reading — Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism. “History does not end”, Luce writes. “it is a timeless repetition of human folly and correction”.
On Thursday 16 February, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and supreme leader of Facebook, the world’s most populous virtual country (population 2bn) published an epistle to his 89m disciple-followers. “Building Global Community” was the headline. “On our journey to connect the world,” the supreme leader began, “we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?”
Good question. But wait a minute, who’s the “we” here? It crops up 156 times in the 5,700-word epistle…
Ryan and his sidekick, the House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, pushed through a bill that, if it ever goes into effect, could upend one-sixth of the American economy and result in tens of millions of Americans losing their health coverage. Since the Republicans failed to give the Congressional Budget Office time to “score” the bill before voting on it, we don’t have any official estimates of its likely effects. But the bill that was passed on Thursday was an amended version of a bill that the C.B.O. had previously determined would raise the number of uninsured people by twenty-four million over ten years, and increase premiums for many others, particularly the old and the sick, as well.
The Bill now goes to the Senate. What will happen there?
In Copenhagen on Wednesday evening I had dinner with a group of Continental academics. Overhanging the table, like a large cloud, was the fact that — as we ate — the Macron vs Le Pen TV debate was going on in France. The conversation was gloomy: although everyone present was familiar with the electoral arithmetic and the opinion polling that suggested a Macron victory on Sunday, it was clear that they also had what one diner described as “a bad feeling” about the election. In a way, it was like a superstition — so many ‘unthinkable’ things had happened in the last year, that one more shock was now conceivable.
I feel the same. Two reasons for this. The first is an email from a thoughtful and well-informed friend. He’s a political junkie, speaks excellent French, and he had watched the debate in its entirety. Here’s what he wrote:
Last night I watched the 2 hour ‘presidential debate’ on French TV between Macron and Le Pen. A terrible cacophony, nasty, and in fact a disaster for both. It’s yet unclear what its effect will be in the polls and on next Sunday’s election. I’m no longer confident that Macron will win: I think it is possible that the Clinton/Trump disaster will be copied … (e.g because in large numbers people abstain from voting – which be favourable for Le Pen.)
Secondly, there are several well-informed newspaper reports from France (e.g. in today’s Financial Times) about the many voters who despise Le Pen but who are also so hostile to, or unenthusiastic about, Macron that they will not bother to turn out to vote on Sunday. If that happens, then the nightmare might indeed happen.
As to why French voters might react this way, Paul Krugman has written an interesting NYT column which says in part:
There are, no doubt, multiple reasons, especially cultural anxiety over Islamic immigrants. But it seems clear that votes for Le Pen will in part be votes of protest against what are perceived as the highhanded, out-of-touch officials running the European Union. And that perception unfortunately has an element of truth.
Those of us who watched European institutions deal with the debt crisis that began in Greece and spread across much of Europe were shocked at the combination of callousness and arrogance that prevailed throughout.
Even though Brussels and Berlin were wrong again and again about the economics — even though the austerity they imposed was every bit as economically disastrous as critics warned — they continued to act as if they knew all the answers, that any suffering along the way was, in effect, necessary punishment for past sins.
Politically, Eurocrats got away with this behavior because small nations were easy to bully, too terrified of being cut off from euro financing to stand up to unreasonable demands. But Europe’s elite will be making a terrible mistake if it believes it can behave the same way to bigger players.
Finally, there’s the thought that even if Macron wins, could he govern? At the moment, his embryonic, pop-up party (En Marche) hasn’t a single MP. So France could have a president who might be unable to get any significant legislation through parliament. After seven years of this kind of gridlock, Le Pen might be a shoo-in in 2022.
