Weekly Digest: Lies Cities Tell Themselves

Welcome to my weekly digest for February 24, 2023.

For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by visiting your account page.

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Lies Cities Tell Themselves

My latest column in Governing originated in a tweet in which I listed three common misconceptions held by urban leaders.

For example, it’s said that the suburbs are dependent on the city for their health and prosperity. Or that, at a minimum, the way to grow a region is to invest in the urban core. But it’s equally true the other way. The city is dependent on the suburbs, too. For example, the planning firm Urban3 has become famous for its maps showing the value per acre of properties in urban areas, showing how much more assessed value and tax revenue come from high density vs. low-density development. This is true at some level. But the high values in city centers are not primarily a product of density per se, but of their ability to concentrate activity from a vast catchment area.

That is, the value of high-density areas is dependent on the lower-density ones that surround it. Remove the peripheral catchment area, and their value would plummet. Take Manhattan away from the vast New York region and isolate it, and the values of its buildings would be far lower once it could no longer draw suburban commuters and have access to air connections supported by a huge region.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The Shortage of “Good Men”

A couple of recent articles hit a popular theme in America today.

The Guardian: Why a shortage of Mr Rights means single mothers hold the key to the falling birthrate

NYT: Are Men the Overlooked Reason for the Fertility Decline?

Both of the above articles are new installments in the popular genre of “where have all the good men gone?” in which deficiencies in men are blamed for women’t relationship problems.

It’s certainly true that lots of men today aren’t exactly a great catch and are de facto unmarriageable. But none of these articles ever seem to examine the marriageability of women today. The Times writers notes that women don’t want a man with drug problems. True. But most men aren’t interested in a woman with drug problem either, and lots of women today are hooked on drugs. Similarly, we read lots of stories in the press about the high levels of mental health problems in young women. Let’s be honest, that’s typically a turnoff to men as well. The same is true of any number of other factors.

The truth is that is a significant share of women as well as men today are not great prospects for marriage.

Related: The Institute for Family Studies on the college dating divide - “College-educated women are far more likely than those without a degree to say a partner’s political views, personal habits, and current financial situation are important considerations.”

And: The Hill: Most young men are single. Most young women are not.

Related: IM1776 reviews Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men. You can see my review at the Institute for Family Studies.

Best of the Web

Jonathan Haidt: Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls

NY Mag: Welcoming Cup of Jo’s Divorce Era - “Joanna wields impressive influence over her readers; products routinely sell out within minutes of her recommending them. She laughed it off when I wondered if she might spark a mass exodus of women from their marriages, but I suspect she knows I’m not wrong.”

Tyler VanderWeele/Psychology Today: "For Better, for Worse": Marriage and Flourishing

NYT: ‘Brainwashing a Generation’: British Schools Combat Andrew Tate’s Views - Apparently in the UK, where 80% of teenage boys have watched Andrew Tate content, schools are trying to deprogram them.

NYT: Modern Dads Are Embarrassing. Which Just Might Be Good Politics.

NYT: How Public Money Goes to Support a Hasidic Village’s Private Schools - A look at the Hasidic controlled village of Kiryas Joel. It’s a good example of “owned space.”

The Worthy House: On Entrepreneurial Success

Vanity Fair: Inside the dissident fringe, where the new right meets the far left, and everyone’s bracing for the apocalypse

Food plays an outsize role in the political imagining of the right these days. Last October, Carlson released a documentary titled The End of Men, which features, among other self-proclaimed right-wing bodybuilders, an anonymous farmer who tweets under the name William Wheelwright, one of the better-known figures in the sphere where preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types—many of whom are unapologetically racist—mingle, argue, and plan with each other. The documentary advanced a view that our technologies and agricultural system are physically poisoning us, destroying our connection to our corporeality, leading to a generation of men with declining sperm counts and low testosterone. The globalist “regime,” as Mike Cernovich described it in the documentary, has weakened America on a cellular level. The film called for men to take up weight lifting and a meat-based diet. “Well-ordered, disciplined groups of men bound by friendship are dangerous, precisely because of what they can do,” the masculinist health guru known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” said, over images of the American and Haitian revolutions. “A few hundred men can conquer an entire empire,” Raw Egg Nationalist continued. “That’s why they want you to be sick, depressed, and isolated.”

American Affairs: From Emancipation to Self-Mastery: A Blueprint for Post-Boomer Politics

A new post-boomer politics of mastery would mean not just a reprioritization of issues but a change in the ways politics is conceptualized: no longer beginning with freedom from but with freedom to; moving away from resistance to power and toward the embrace of it; trading in conspiracy theories and persecution complexes—and the states of powerlessness they imply—for concrete plans of action that entail rational coordination between individuals and institutions.

Millennial and Gen Z politics is, after all, at its most promising and telling when young Americans hint at those things which they and their peers yearn to do but are not able to: the freedom to start a family, the freedom to own a home, the freedom to assume the middle-class trappings which their parents had taken for granted, the freedom to reorder society and its ossified institutions according to their generational visions of the good life.

Of course, this is more than a question of semantics: the freedom to own a home could mean freedom from local regulations that artificially limit the supply of new houses, while the anxiety many young people feel about climate change might be rendered as desiring freedom from the threat of environmental collapse or the freedom to do something about it. Either way, what is important is the understanding that these are issues that can only be solved through the conscious, concerted effort of citizens working together to master common problems—whether this means rolling back regulations in one case or introducing new ones in another. The very recognition that a decision can be made between more or less regulation, or whether to utilize the state or the market and in what ways, would already constitute a mark of self-determination and mastery, as well as a leap beyond the reflexive emancipatory idiom.

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New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in this Richard Ostling column.

I was on the Issues, Etc. podcast talking about the three worlds of evangelicalism.

New this week:

• Why Purpose Is No Substitute for Public Respect - In which I agree with much of a recent David French column on the struggles of young men, but highlight some areas he missed.

• My podcast this week is on re-editing old books - I discuss the recent news that Roald Dahl’s children’s classics have been revised by “sensitivity readers.” Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

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Paid subscribers get exclusive content, podcast transcripts, occasional webinars, and access to my Subscriber Knowledge Base. It’s also a great way to support my work, so please subscribe today.