I've only dipped into Robert Bruegmann's new book, Sprawl: A Compact History, but what I've read is terrific. Bob is a thoughtful student of architectural history and urban evolution and a keen observer of the contemporary urban scene. (I quoted him in a column on downtown development.) His work is not just contrarian and provocative but well-documented and persuasive. Don't take my word for it. Witold Rybczynski gives Sprawl an enthusiastic review on Slate.
This fascinating article from Saturday's NYT business section demonstrates two important trends: One, which has been famously documented in C.K. Pralahad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is that smart international companies are figuring out how to serve the vast market of poor but aspiring consumers in developing countries. The other, which has been less noticed, is that information technology is making credit affordable even for tiny loans. That means retailers can now offer credit to people who need it to climb out of poverty, but who used to be too expensive to serve without exorbitant interest rates.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 11--Márcia Regina da Cruz, a 40-year-old janitor and mother of three, decided to splurge.
Ms. da Cruz, who lives in São Vicente, a coastal town an hour's bus ride from São Paulo, made a purchase in September equal to one-fifth of her monthly salary. She bought three irons--one for herself and two as gifts for her mother and sister - for 72 reais, or just over $32.
"It was a big purchase," she said. "I normally couldn't pay for it."
She could, though, because of a new policy at CompreBem, a supermarket chain owned by Grupo Pão de Açúcar, Brazil's biggest retailer. The plan allows her to pay for the purchase in 10 interest-free monthly installments of about $3.20 a month.
Big retailers in Brazil are lowering the bar for what they will sell on credit. Though the country's shops and department stores have long sold big-ticket items on installment plans, Brazilian and multinational retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour of France, have begun offering purchase plans with monthly payments that come to no more than one or two reais--about 45 to 90 cents.
The shift is an effort by retailers here to squeeze more spending from the big, but cash-short, bottom of the consumer base in Brazil, South America's biggest economy. Amid a tepid recovery that has yet to blossom into strong, sustained growth in retail demand, vendors are going to new lengths to help low-income Brazilians pay for everything from their weekly rice and beans to inexpensive items like clothes, radios, blenders and other goods. The installments are interest-free until a payment is missed, and then interest of at least 3 percent a month is charged....
Efficient information technology and credit screening make this trend possible, but they wouldn't work without sound monetary policy. Lenders have to be able to count on tolerable rates of inflation.
Slower inflation enabled stores to introduce payment plans for retail goods that many consumers once strained to finance--from tennis shoes and televisions, to refrigerators and home computers. So successful was retail credit, especially among the middle class, that price tags in many stores now highlight the cost of the monthly installment, with the total price in much smaller print below.
Yet a big portion of the consumer base still struggles with bare necessities. That is why vendors recently began applying their credit plans to low-cost items, too.
"You want to make it easy for even basic purchases," said João Carlos de Oliveira, president of the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets in São Paulo.
The approach was evident one recent Saturday evening at a Wal-Mart in southern Rio. Price tags offer telephones in 12 monthly installments of 3.57 reais. A plug-in electric grill sold for 12 monthly payments of 1.87 reais. Wines, domestic or imported, were offered for three interest-free monthly installments.
Wal-Mart and other big retailers use one central tool for such promotions: internal, or "private label," credit cards.
Because many low-income Brazilians do not have bank accounts, retailers offer their own cards to provide credit to customers unable to meet the conditions for traditional bank cards. With no annual fees and low salary requirements--stores compute card limits using monthly income stub--the cards offer many consumers their first experience with credit. They also give stores a platform to offer special card-only promotions, which foster user loyalty.
While items like irons and electric grills may seem like cheap consumer goods to Americans, they are actually household capital equipment--the sort of goods that represent accumulated wealth over time. This newly available credit thus enables not only short-term consumption but a higher standard of living over the long-term.
Thanks to a welcome push from Michael Martin, who uses TSOS in his Introduction to Design Culture class at Iowa State, I've finally added syllabi to this site's section on TSOS in the Classroom. The courses range from theology school classes to courses on commercial culture. If you've used the book in a course, please let me know.
The Association of Alternative News website features an interview with my friend, Boston civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate about his work as a columnist. Harvey is the co-founder, with Alan Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on whose board I serve. Here's the beginning of the interview:
A lot of professionals are frustrated in their jobs because of what they see as corruption or incompetence in their field. Do you use your column to vent your frustration with your own field of work, the criminal-justice system?
Absolutely, and I'd say that's the main thing that I do with my column. What I find particularly galling is the extent to which reporters are taken in by prosecutors, to which they're taken in by courts. A court writes an extremely dishonest opinion where it mischaracterizes the facts of what happened, and the reporters never go to the record. They simply take the appeals court's word for it or the prosecutor's word for it, and I find that to be extremely aggravating.
When the Supreme Court came down with its Guantanamo "enemy combatant" opinions, in all the newspapers, I didn't read any reports that dissented from the judgment that the Supreme Court had struck down the Bush administration and rebuked it by insisting that it had to hold hearings for these "enemy combatants"; that they couldn't just snatch them off the street and put them away forever without any kind of hearing, trial, charges, nothing. If you read the controlling opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor closely, you saw that the nature of the hearing was a complete illusion and that under the rules that the Supreme Court set for what these hearings were supposed to be, no defendant could ever possibly win, ever.
Harvey's publications archive is on his website here.
Congratulations to my friend Alan Kors, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who received a National Humanities Medal last week. An intellectual historian specializing in Enlightenment thought, Alan is, among many other accomplishments, the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. He's also one of the star teachers whose lectures are featured on The Teaching Company's tapes and DVDs.
Bay Area artist Liz Hickok builds San Francisco cityscapes in molded Jello and records the results in photos or videos. It sounds like a gag, but the results are evocatively beautiful. For all its humorous wiggle factor, Jello is a gorgeous material. (Via Liquid Treat.)
Joanne Jacobs was blogging before blogging was all the rage. Over the past five years, her blog has become one of the best specializing in education. In between posts, Joanne has written a book on a charter school in San Jose so inspiring that its story compelled her to quit her job at the San Jose Mercury News to write full time. Now that book, Our School, is out. Here's Joanne's description:
Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan) tells the story of a San Jose charter school that prepares students who are "failing but not in jail" for four-year colleges.
It really is an inspiring story. The average Downtown College Prep student comes from a Mexican immigrant family and enters ninth grade reading at a fifth grade level; 100 percent of graduates have been accepted at four-year colleges and 97 percent are on track to earn a bachelor's degree. DCP now scores well above the state average on the Academic Performance Index, ranking in the top third compared to all high schools, including affluent suburban schools. DCP follows what I call the work-your-butt-off philosophy of education. Its leaders analyze what's not working, adapt quickly and waste no time on esteem inflation or excuses.
While I discuss the charter school movement as a whole, Our School isn't written for wonks. I think it's a good read, sort of Tracy Kidder meets Up the Down Staircase.
My favorite part of the book is the part I didn't write. The book includes Pedro's rap, essays by Gil and Emilia, Roberto's speech, a discipline report on Hector, a teachers' list of DCP jargon, the principal's e-mail conversations with teachers, a phony field trip permission slip created by a girl who wanted a parent-free weekend, and a copy of the school's budget.
I'm looking forward to reading it. Now if Joanne can only sell the film rights...
Tomorrow, Texans will vote on Proposition 2, a terribly drafted constitutional amendment designed to outlaw gay marriage and anything like it. How badly drafted? As Dallas lawyer and technoblogger John Lanius explains, if read literally it would outlaw all marriage. Courts aren't likely to interpret it that way, of course, but they'll have to give up literal readings to get a reasonable outcome--and "reasonable" almost certainly includes banning any kind of domestic partnership.
Since Texas already defines marriage by statute as the union of one man and one woman, Prop 2 is nothing more than a gratuitous attempt to build Gov. Rick Perry's social-conservative voting base by attacking gays. Supporters say an amendment is necessary to control "activist judges." But the only judges the amendment would bind are Texas state judges. Texas state judges, including the state's Supreme Court, are elected by Texas voters. Texas state judges are quite conservative. They are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely to find a right to same-sex marriage in the state constitution.
This reader email suggests that "Times Select" is costing the NYT more readers than it's supposed to.
Why are you still giving us only links to your NYT columns?
Now that we have to pay for access to the Times on line, most of us do not do so, and can no longer read Times stories or columns.
If you want us to read them, you'll have to post them on another server. If the Times won't let you, then I for one have no reason to read your stuff, anyway.
I know that you get paid for your writing, so my demanding to read it for free can sound churlish. But you were being paid before; the only difference now is the NYT on-line policy.
If the Times had in fact put my columns behind its pay-only wall, that would reduce the value of the column to me and essentially cut my pay. But that hasn't happened. My columns, like the vast, vast majority of NYT articles, are still available for free. And that, apparently, is exactly what they're worth to some people. (With my editor's permission, I do maintain an archive of columns on this site. The Times, however, owns all the reprint rights.)
Thomas Fuller of the International Herald Tribune recently reported on the success of immigrants from the former East Bloc in the three EU countries that admit them without limits: the U.K., Ireland, and Sweden. All three economies are healthy, but is that cause or effect? Or, as I suspect, do both phenomena share an underlying cause? By European standards, all three regulate labor markets and business formation fairly lightly, though Sweden, of course, has famouslyl high taxes. Here's an excerpt from Fuller's article:
It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.
Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.
They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.
But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.
Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.
Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.
"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."
Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members.
With nearly full employment, Ireland's booming economy still needs workers, and immigration is actively encouraged. More than 128,000 East Europeans from the new EU member states registered to work in Ireland from May 2004 to August this year.
Irish society seems to be adjusting to the newcomers, 45,000 of whom come from Poland. A newspaper in Limerick now runs a column in Polish; last summer the national bus company began a daily service from Dublin to Warsaw.
The phenomenon is more subdued in Sweden, where about 16,000 workers from the new EU countries registered with the authorities between May 2004 and early October this year. A substantial majority, about two thirds, were Poles, followed by Lithuanians and Estonians.
Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.
Poles who go to Britain, in contrast, do not need any special permission.
In fact, Britain is so eager to recruit more Poles, by far the largest group of entrants since May last year, that British embassy officials in Warsaw have distributed brochures at Polish unemployment offices "so that if people wanted to go to the United Kingdom they had good information," Thompson said.
My latest NYT column looks at scholarly research suggesting that the wave of immigration in the 1990s did not, in fact, depress overall wages of American-born workers. What both stories share in common is a dynamic perspective. Over time, immigrant workers don't just fill existing job openings. In aggregate, they add to the total resources available for economic growth, making new capital investment more profitable and native-born labor more potentially productive.