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blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years ago

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Anonymous asked: I noticed you did post to acknowledge the death of Uderzo, the co-creator of the Asterix comics. I have to ask Tintin or Asterix? Which one do you prefer?

It’s like asking Stones or Beatles? I love both but for different reasons. I would hate to choose between the two.

Both Tintin and Asterix were the two halves of a comic dyad of my childhood. Whether it was India, China, Hong Kong, Japan, or the Middle East the one thing that threads my childhood experience of living in these countries was finding a quiet place in the home to get lost reading Asterix and Tintin.

Even when I was eventually carted off to boarding school back in England I took as many of my Tintin and Asterix comics books with me as I could. They became like underground black market currency to exchange with other girls for other things like food or chocolates sent by parents and other illicit things like alcohol. Having them and reading them was like having familiar friends close by to make you feel less lonely in new surroundings and survive the bear pit of other girls living together.

If you asked my parents - especially my father - he would say Tintin hands down. He has - and continues to have in his library at home - a huge collection of Tintin comic books in as many different language translations as possible. He’s still collecting translations of each of the Tintin books in the most obscure languages he can find. I have both all the Tintin comic books - but only in English and French translations, and the odd Norwegian one - as well as all the Asterix comic books (only in English and French).

Speaking for myself I would be torn to decide between the two. Each have their virtues and I appreciate them for different reasons.

Tintin was truly about adventure that spoke deeply to me. Tintin was always a good detective story that soon turned to a travel adventure. It has it all: technology, politics, science and history. Of course the art is more simpler, but it is also cleaner and translates the wondrous far-off locations beautifully and with a sense of awe that you don’t see in the Asterix books. Indeed Hergé was into film-noir and thriller movies, and the panels are almost like storyboards for The Maltese Falcon or African Queen.

The plot lines of Tintin are intriguing rather than overly clever but the gallery of characters are much deeper, more flawed and morally ambiguous. Take Captain Haddock I loved his pullover, his strangely large feet, his endless swearing and his inability to pass a bottle without emptying it. He combined bravery and helplessness in a manner I found irresistible.

I’ve read that there is a deeply Freudian reading to the Tintin books. I think there is a good case for it. The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure are both about Captain Haddock's family. Haddock's ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, is the illegitimate son of the French Sun King – and this mirrors what happened in Hergé's family, who liked to believe that his father was the illegitimate son of the Belgian king. This theme played out in so many of the books. In The Castafiore Emerald, the opera singer sings the jewel song from Faust, which is about a lowly woman banged up by a nobleman – and she sings it right in front of Sir Francis Haddock, with the captain blocking his ears. It's like the Finnegans Wake of the cartoon. Nothing happens - but everything happens.

Another great part is that the storylines continue on for several albums, allowing them to be more complex, instead of the more simplistic Asterix plot lines which are always wrapped up nicely at the end of each book.

Overall I felt a great affinity with Tintin - his youthful innocence, wanting to solve problems, always resourceful, optimistic, and brave. Above all Tintin gave me wanderlust. Was there a place he and Milou (Snowy) didn’t go to? When they had covered the four corners of the world Tintin and Milou went to the moon for heaven’s sake!

What I loved about Asterix was the style, specifically Uderzo’s visual style. I liked Hergé’s clean style, the ligne claire of his pen, but Asterix was drawn as caricature: the big noses, the huge bellies, often being prodded by sausage-like fingers. This was more appealing to little children because they were more fun to marvel at.

In particular I liked was the way Uderzo’s style progressed with each comic book. The panels of Asterix the Gaul felt rudimentary compared to the later works and by the time Asterix and Cleopatra, the sixth book to be published, came out, you finally felt that this was what they ought to look like. It was an important lesson for a child to learn: that you could get better at what you did over time. Each book seemed to have its own palette and perhaps Uderzo’s best work is in Asterix in Spain.

I also feel Asterix doesn’t get enough credit for being more complex. Once you peel back the initial layers, Asterix has some great literal depth going on - puns and word play, the English translation names are all extremely clever, there are many hidden details in the superb art to explore that you will quite often miss when you initially read it and in a lot of the truly classic albums they are satirising a real life country/group/person/political system, usually in an incredibly clever and humorous way.

What I found especially appealing was that it was also a brilliant microcosm of many classical studies subjects - ancient Egypt, the Romans and Greek art - and is a good first step for young children wanting to explore that stuff before studying it at school.

What I discovered recently was that Uderzo was colour blind which explains why he much preferred the clear line to any hint of shade, and it was that that enabled his drawings to redefine antiquity so distinctively in his own terms. For decades after the death of René Goscinny in 1977, Uderzo provided a living link to the golden age of the greatest series of comic books ever written: Paul McCartney to Goscinny’s John Lennon. Uderzo, as the Asterix illustrator, was better able to continue the series after Goscinny’s death than Goscinny would have been had Uderzo had died first, and yet the later books were, so almost every fan agrees, not a patch on the originals: very much Wings to the Beatles. What elevated the cartoons, brilliant though they were, to the level of genius was the quality of the scripts that inspired them. Again and again, in illustration after illustration, the visual humour depends for its full force on the accompaniment provided by Goscinny’s jokes.

Here below is a great example:

There’s a lot of genius in this. Uderzo copied Theodore Géricault’s iconic ‘Raft of the Medusa’ 1818 painting in ‘Asterix The Legionary’. The painting is generally regarded as an icon of Romanticism. It depicts an event whose human and political aspects greatly interested Géricault: the wreck of a French frigate, Medusa, off the coast of Senegal in 1816, with over 150 soldiers on board. But Anthea Bell’s translation of Goscinny’s text (including the pictorial and verbal pun ‘we’ve been framed, by Jericho’) is really extraordinary and captures the spirit of the Asterix cartoons perfectly.

This captures perfectly my sense of humour as it acknowledges the seriousness of life but finds humour in them through a sly cleverness and always with a open hearted joy. There is no question that if humour was the measuring yard stick then Asterix and not Tintin would win hands down.

It’s also a mistake to think that the world of Asterix was insular in comparison to the amazing countries Tintin had adventures. Asterix’s world is very much Europe.

Every nationality that Asterix encounters is gently satirised. No other post-war artistic duo offered Europeans a more universally popular portrait of themselves, perhaps, than did Goscinny and Uderzo. The stereotypes with which he made such affectionate play in his cartoons – the haughty Spaniard, the chocolate-loving Belgian, the stiff-upper-lipped Briton – seemed to be just what a continent left prostrate by war and nationalism were secretly craving. Many shrewd commentators believe that during the golden age when Goscinny was still alive to pen the scripts, that it was a fantasy on French resistance during occupation by Nazi Germany. Uderzo lived through the occupation and so there is truth in that. Perhaps this is why the Germans are the exceptions as they are treated unsympathetically in Asterix and the Goths, and why quite a few of the books turn on questions of loyalty and treachery.

Even the British are satirised with an affection that borders on love: the worst of the digs are about our appalling cuisine (everything is boiled, and served with mint sauce, and the beer is warm), but everything points to the Gauls’ and the Britons’ closeness. They have the same social structure, even down to having one village still holding out against the Romans; the crucial and extremely generous difference being that the Britons do not have a magic potion to help them fight. Instead they have tea, introduced to them by Getafix, via Asterix, which gives them so much of a psychological boost that it may as well have been the magic potion.

I re-read ‘Asterix in Britain’ (Astérix chez les Bretons) in the light of the 2016 Brexit referendum result and felt despaired that such a playful and respectful portrayal of this country was not reciprocated. Don’t get me wrong I voted for Brexit but I remain a staunch Europhile. It made me violently irritated to see many historically illiterate pro-Brexit oiks who mistakenly believed the EU and Europe were the same thing. They are not. One was originally a sincere band aid to heal and bring together two of the greatest warring powers in continental Europe that grotesquely grew into an unaccountable bureaucratic manager’s utopian wet dream, and the other is a cradle of Western achievement in culture, sciences and the arts that we are all heirs to.

What I loved about Asterix was that it cut across generations. As a young girl I often retreated into my imaginary world of Asterix where our family home had an imaginary timber fence and a dry moat to keep the world (or the Romans) out. I think this was partly because my parents were so busy as many friends and outsiders made demands on their time and they couldn’t say no or they were throwing lavish parties for their guests. Family time was sacred to us all but I felt especially miffed if our time got eaten away. Then, as I grew up, different levels of reading opened up to me apart from the humour in the names, the plays on words, and the illustrations. There is something about the notion of one tiny little village, where everybody knows each other, trying to hold off the dark forces of the rest of the world. Being the underdog, up against everyone, but with a sense of humour and having fun, really resonated with my child's eye view of the world.

The thing about both Asterix and Tintin books is that they are at heart adventure comics with many layers of detail and themes built into them. For children, Asterix books are the clear winner, as they have much better art and are more fantastical. Most of the bad characters in the books are not truly evil either and no-one ever dies, which appeals hugely to children. For older readers, Tintin has danger, deeper characters with deep political themes, bad guys with truly evil motives, and even deaths. It’s more rooted in the real world, so a young reader can visualise themselves as Tintin, travelling to these real life places and being a hero.

As I get older and re-read Asterix and Tintin from time to time I discover new things.

From Asterix, there is something about the notion of one tiny little village, where everybody knows each other, trying to hold off the dark forces of the rest of the world. Being the underdog, up against everyone, but with a sense of humour and having fun, really resonated with my child's eye view of the world. In my adult world it now makes me appreciate the value of family, friends, and community and even national identity. Even as globalisation and the rise of homogenous consumerism threatens to envelope the unique diversity of our cultures, like Asterix, we can defend to the death the cultural values that define us but not through isolation or by diminishing the respect due to other cultures and their cultural achievements.

From Tintin I got wanderlust. This fierce even urgent need to travel and explore the world was in part due to reading the adventures of Tintin. It was by living in such diverse cultures overseas and trying to get under the skin of those cultures by learning their languages and respecting their customs that I realised how much I valued my own heritage and traditions without diminishing anyone else.

So I’m sorry but I can’t choose one over the other, I need both Asterix and Tintin as a dyad to remind me that the importance of home and heritage is best done through travel and adventure elsewhere.

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #comics #tintin #asterix #personal #arts #culture

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thebewisepodcast · 7 years ago

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How does a movement evolve: can there be a successful bad feminist?

In the age of #metoo and #timesup, I personally wonder just how potent the movement will be in the future if feminists aren't able to agree with one another in the present. Feminism appears split at the seams but these times, where the agents of an agenda are at conflict with how to define themselves, often make for the strongest coalition of unified minds. Forged like a sword at the hands of perfectionist blacksmith, any movement will grow more firm by each side of the schism holding the other to the fire. As a mere man, from the outside, it is not my battle to coach feminism. My job is to be an aid to the movement and to support where I can.

Among the schism, exemplifying its nature, comes this recent piece by Margaret Atwood. In The Globe and Mail, the acclaimed dystopian author penned her own doubts with her version of feminism and how she fits within the fluid structure of it:

"------It seems that I am a "Bad Feminist." I can add that to the other things I've been accused of since 1972, such as climbing to fame up a pyramid of decapitated men's heads (a leftie journal), of being a dominatrix bent on the subjugation of men (a rightie one, complete with an illustration of me in leather boots and a whip) and of being an awful person who can annihilate – with her magic White Witch powers – anyone critical of her at Toronto dinner tables. I'm so scary! And now, it seems, I am conducting a War on Women, like the misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist that I am.

What would a Good Feminist look like, in the eyes of my accusers?

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My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.

Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we're back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.

Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.

So let us suppose that my Good Feminist accusers, and the Bad Feminist that is me, agree on the above points. Where do we diverge? And how did I get into such hot water with the Good Feminists?

In November of 2016, I signed – as a matter of principle, as I have signed many petitions – an Open Letter called UBC Accountable, which calls for holding the University of British Columbia accountable for its failed process in its treatment of one of its former employees, Steven Galloway, the former chair of the department of creative writing, as well as its treatment of those who became ancillary complainants in the case. Specifically, several years ago, the university went public in national media before there was an inquiry, and even before the accused was allowed to know the details of the accusation. Before he could find them out, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn't say anything to defend himself. A barrage of invective followed.

But then, after an inquiry by a judge that went on for months, with multiple witnesses and interviews, the judge said there had been no sexual assault, according to a statement released by Mr. Galloway through his lawyer. The employee got fired anyway. Everyone was surprised, including me. His faculty association launched a grievance, which is continuing, and until it is over, the public still cannot have access to the judge's report or her reasoning from the evidence presented. The not-guilty verdict displeased some people. They continued to attack. It was at this point that details of UBC's flawed process began to circulate, and the UBC Accountable letter came into being.

A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not, because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.

A digression: Witch talk. Another point against me is that I compared the UBC proceedings to the Salem witchcraft trials, in which a person was guilty because accused, since the rules of evidence were such that you could not be found innocent. My Good Feminist accusers take exception to this comparison. They think I was comparing them to the teenaged Salem witchfinders and calling them hysterical little girls. I was alluding instead to the structure in place at the trials themselves.

There are, at present, three kinds of "witch" language. 1) Calling someone a witch, as applied lavishly to Hillary Clinton during the recent election. 2) "Witchhunt," used to imply that someone is looking for something that doesn't exist. 3) The structure of the Salem witchcaft trials, in which you were guilty because accused. I was talking about the third use.

This structure – guilty because accused – has applied in many more episodes in human history than Salem. It tends to kick in during the "Terror and Virtue" phase of revolutions – something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin's purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution. The list is long and Left and Right have both indulged. Before "Terror and Virtue" is over, a great many have fallen by the wayside. Note that I am not saying that there are no traitors or whatever the target group may be; simply that in such times, the usual rules of evidence are bypassed.

Such things are always done in the name of ushering in a better world. Sometimes they do usher one in, for a time anyway. Sometimes they are used as an excuse for new forms of oppression. As for vigilante justice – condemnation without a trial – it begins as a response to a lack of justice – either the system is corrupt, as in prerevolutionary France, or there isn't one, as in the Wild West – so people take things into their own hands. But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained. The Cosa Nostra, for instance, began as a resistance to political tyranny.

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

The UBC Accountable letter is also a symptom – a symptom of the failure of the University of British Columbia and its flawed process. This should have been a matter addressed by Canadian Civil Liberties or B.C. Civil Liberties. Maybe these organizations will now put up their hands. Since the letter has now become a censorship issue – with calls being made to erase the site and the many thoughtful words of its writers – perhaps PEN Canada, PEN International, CJFE and Index on Censorship may also have a view.

The letter said from the beginning that UBC failed accused and complainants both. I would add that it failed the taxpaying public, who fund UBC to the tune of $600-million a year. We would like to know how our money was spent in this instance. Donors to UBC – and it receives billions of dollars in private donations – also have a right to know.

In this whole affair, writers have been set against one another, especially since the letter was distorted by its attackers and vilified as a War on Women. But at this time, I call upon all – both the Good Feminists and the Bad Feminists like me – to drop their unproductive squabbling, join forces and direct the spotlight where it should have been all along – at UBC. Two of the ancillary complainants have now spoken out against UBC's process in this affair. For that, they should be thanked.

Once UBC has begun an independent inquiry into its own actions – such as the one conducted recently at Wilfrid Laurier University – and has pledged to make that inquiry public, the UBC Accountable site will have served its purpose. That purpose was never to squash women. Why have accountability and transparency been framed as antithetical to women's rights?

A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well. This is a very important moment. I hope it will not be squandered.------"

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit

American cities are facing a transportation crisis. There’s terrible traffic. Public transit doesn’t work or go where people need it to. The cities are growing, but newcomers are faced with the prospects of paying high rents for reasonable commutes or lower rents for dreary, frustrating daily treks. Nearly all Americans, including those in cities, face a dire choice: spend thousands of dollars a year owning a car and sitting in traffic, or sacrifice hours every day on ramshackle public transit getting where they need to go. Things are so broken that, increasingly, they do both. Nationwide, three out of every four commuters drive alone. The rate in metro areas is not much different.

“Without an integrated system of transit in our metropolitan areas the great anticipated growth will become a dream that will fail,” predicted Ralph Merritt, general manager of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, “because people cannot move freely, safely, rapidly, and economically from where they live to where they work.”

Although Merritt’s words could just as well apply today, he said them 66 years ago in 1954. This is a crisis facing American cities right now in 2020, but it’s an old crisis. The only thing that has changed is the problem has gotten worse.

Like most crises, there is no single cause. Our cities, and our federal government, have made a lot of mistakes. Some were obvious at the time, others only in hindsight, but most have been a combination of the two. We keep doing things that stopped being good ideas a long time ago.

Many of those mistakes have to do with housing policy, which is inextricably linked to transportation policy. But the most obvious cause of our transportation crisis is a simple one: America sucks at building public transportation.

Why is this? Why does the U.S. suck at building good, useful public transit?

It’s a question that has vexed me for years. Just when I think I’ve figured it out, some other facet I had never previously considered comes to my attention. I have spoken to a dozen transit experts and historians. I have read several histories of American mass transportation policy written by independent scholars as well as government agencies. I've scoured federal archives and interviewed employees of transit agencies planning their own big projects. I’ve analyzed budgets and construction costs and compared them to our international peers. The tangle of American governmental dysfunction is so profound, digging into it can feel like undoing a rubber band ball with your teeth.

But the failure itself is simple and obvious. It’s apparent to anyone who has traveled abroad in the last several decades. Whether it’s traditional subway and commuter rail systems, modern streetcars and light rails, high-speed intercity rail, or even the humble bus with dedicated lanes and train-like stops, the U.S. lags perilously behind. It is a national embarrassment and a major reason our cities are less pleasant, more expensive places to live.

Just to name a few recent accomplishments abroad lacking an American parallel: Paris has the Grand Paris Express, 120 miles and 68 stations of new lines, plus a host of new trams and express bus lines with dedicated lanes. Moscow is building 98 new miles and 79 new stations for its Metro. At two years delayed and three billion pounds over budget, London’s Crossrail qualifies as a scandalous by European standards. But when it opens—perhaps in 2021—it will provide 73 miles of new rapid, frequent trains across greater London, including right through the center of the city. Since the 1990s, Madrid’s Metro has added more than 100 kilometers to its system. There are numerous examples of highly functioning and useful public transit systems in Latin America, which also invented the Bus Rapid Transit, a hybrid system with enclosed stops and dedicated lanes. China, which had basically no rapid transit through 1990, now has 25 cities with comprehensive rail systems, including seven of the world’s 12 largest metro networks by length.

Source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, China’s massive central government means it can build what it wants when and where it wants. But it’s hardly just China and other authoritarian regimes embarrassing the U.S. when it comes to transit construction. Consider, for example, high speed rail, or trains between cities capable of going faster than 120 mph. Over the last 30 years, almost two dozen countries have built true high-speed rail networks, according to transportation expert Yonah Freemark. The U.S. has a grand total of 34 miles of high-speed track.

China is not on this graph because they're literally off the charts (sorry). Data source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

This isn’t to say the U.S. has built nothing in the same time period. Freemark, one of the most thorough chroniclers of American transportation projects, calculated that the U.S. spent more than $47 billion on 1,200 miles of new and expanded transit lines in the decade from 2010 to 2019 (most of that mileage has been on bus routes).

That may sound like a lot, and at first glance it can seem like the U.S. has made some progress. There are now 93 miles of light rail in Dallas, 60 miles in Portland, and 87.5 combined light and commuter rail miles in Denver. Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, San Diego, Sacramento, Phoenix, and others can cite similar improvements. For all their flaws, these are transit systems that didn’t exist 40 years ago.

But these systems, with the possible exception of Portland’s, do have one thing in common: they’re not especially useful because they’re not big enough and don’t go where people need them to. There is no perfect metric to evaluate the usefulness of a transit system, but, the most obvious failure is these systems haven’t changed their cities. Few people rely on them. As a general rule, these light rail systems serve fewer than 30 million passenger trips a year (LA has more, although as a percentage of the metro area population its usage is in line with other new systems). Even in cities of millions of people like Houston and Phoenix, light rail systems serve fewer than half that. Meanwhile, the Grand Paris Express and Crossrail are projecting ridership in the millions per day.

The basic truth is nearly everyone still depends on their cars even in cities with soul-destroying traffic. By any definition, the last half-century of American transportation policy has been a dismal failure.

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken.

But the problem isn’t limited just to new systems with growing pains. Older American cities with legacy systems have barely expanded to meet the growing footprint of their metro areas, as London and Paris are. The subway maps of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia look almost identical as they did in 1950; in some cases, they’ve actually shrunk.

Simply put, the U.S. builds less public transit per urban dweller than its peer countries. Freemark found U.S. cities “added an average of fewer than 2 miles of urban bus improvements per million inhabitants—and fewer than 1 mile of rail improvements.” Meanwhile, France added 10 miles of buses and 3 miles of rail per million inhabitants in that same time period.

There is, of course, no simple answer why our transportation systems are broken, in much the same way there’s no simple answer to why our healthcare system is broken or why our criminal justice system is broken, beyond, as Freemark put it, that our “dysfunctional, irascible political system [is] woefully unprepared to commit to anything particularly significant.”

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken. If we can understand how politics failed American transportation systems, perhaps we can make the solution part of broader reform that must occur if American government is to start addressing the needs of the people in all aspects of life, from health care to criminal justice to housing to employment law to digital privacy to climate change.

It’s more important to understand all those causes now than ever. Building lots of public transit fast is, according to the Department of Transportation, a key front in the fight against climate change, because transportation accounts for about 30 percent of U.S. emissions, most of that from private automobiles. Are we up for the task? Can we, as a nation, build the infrastructure we desperately need to create a more sustainable world?

Do you work for the Federal Transit Administration or a local transit agency? What are the challenges you face in getting public transit projects done? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at [email protected] or [email protected].

The answer to that question depends on understanding why we have failed so miserably up to this point. While researching the question of why our public transit is so bad, I’ve encountered a series of partial but ultimately incomplete explanations. If you don’t feel like descending into the transit nerd tunnel with me, here’s the tl;dr version:

Everything costs too much

We build highways instead

We don't plan well

People don't trust the government to build things so they vote against projects under the assumption they will be executed poorly and waste taxpayer dollars

We don't give transit agencies enough money to run good service which erodes political support to have more of it

There are too many agencies at all levels of government, especially at the local level, and not enough coordination between them

Our newer cities are sprawled out which makes good transit hard, and our older cities are too paralyzed by political dysfunction to expand the systems they have

As a result of generations of privatization efforts by all levels of government, in the rare event we do actually get to build stuff there is not enough expertise within the agencies to do it well

The good news is all of this is fixable. At least, that’s what Freemark believes. “The idea that we can’t build new systems is ridiculous,” he told me in an interview. “We just have to assemble the political interest and excitement to make those things happen.”

“There Was Always A Subsidy Somewhere”

Before we go any further, it’s important to dispel a pernicious myth that has perpetuated in the United States about public transportation. This is the idea that transit ought to pay for itself just like any other business.

This was a popular position in local, state, and federal governments until the mid-20th century. It is also the founding principle of public authorities, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that oversees much of greater New York’s transit, which are legally required to balance their budgets every year. The concept is that well-run public transit ought to be profitable.

The problem—well, just one of the problems—with this philosophy is it’s based on a totally fictitious belief that the New York City subway once was a good business, or that the Boston subway once was a self-sustaining operation.

This was never true. “There was always a subsidy somewhere,” Jeff Davis, senior fellow at the think tank Eno Transportation Center said. Streetcars and early subways were paid for by wealthy financiers, real estate speculators, and electric companies, among others. The speculators bought cheap land on the outskirts of town and then built transportation that went there before selling the land for a tidy profit. Back in the day when lights were the main use of electricity, electric companies faced a huge surge at night. Streetcars were a convenient use of that excess electric capacity during the day when demand was lower. And, as the 19th century became the 20th, financiers (mistakenly) thought rapid transit would be a great investment, typically as part of an arrangement we now commonly refer to as public-private partnerships that required transit companies to keep fares low, usually at five cents.

Then it all slowly fell apart. Inflation jacked up costs, but transit companies were legally obligated to keep fares the same per their agreements with cities. The Great Depression hit. Real estate speculators sold off all their land and no longer cared about the transit connections. The public utility companies were forced to sell off their streetcar stakes by Congress under an antitrust provision. Long-term maintenance and upkeep rendered short-term profits illusory. Although most commuters still used transit through the 1940s, people tended to use private automobiles for recreational trips. Bills for decades of deferred maintenance came due. Streetcars went bankrupt. Local governments picked up the slack, and as part of the transition, closed the electric streetcars and converted those routes to buses. By the 1960s, most every transit system had either closed down or was under the auspices of some level of local government.

“And then that subsidy became an explicit job of the local government to subsidize and take over management,” Davis said. Private subsidies were replaced by public ones, just at the time when government was deeply, fundamentally uninterested in public transit. Because in the mid-20th century, cars were the future.

The Road to More Roads

From 1950 to 2017, the U.S. constructed 871,496 miles of roads, enough to go to the Moon, come back, return to the Moon again, and then get two-thirds of the way back to Earth. The pace has slowed in the last few decades, but barely. Thirty-seven percent of those miles have been built since 1985.

As traffic increased, it was accepted policy to widen a lot of roads under the mistaken belief this would reduce traffic. The Federal Highway Administration only started tracking lane-miles built in 1980, but in the 37 years between then and 2017 we added 881,918 lane-miles to our some four million lane-miles of road, an 11 percent increase. Urban areas in particular added 30,511 new lane-miles to freeways since 1993, an increase of 42 percent, according to the non-profit Transportation for America, which went on to call this program of building more lanes in a misguided attempt to reduce traffic a “congestion con.”

In the meantime, the U.S. barely built any new rail. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics only started tracking rail miles in 1985, but from that year through 2017 the U.S. constructed 6,247 miles of commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail combined. That’s only 195 miles a year on average, compared to 10,017 miles of roads per year during that same time. In fact, the pace of building new transit has been so languid, America’s 20 largest metro areas have the same or even fewer miles of transit service (including bus routes) per capita than they did in 2003.

“It’s all about priorities,” said Jeff Brown, an urban planning professor at Florida State University. “What are the spending priorities that we’ve established?”

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Transportation For America. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, the short term cost of building a mile of road is lower than building a mile of transit, but that can be deceptive. According to Transportation for America, it costs $24,000 per lane-mile per year to maintain a road in good repair, and much more for those in disrepair, as many of America’s roads are. And that’s even before accounting for the strain on public services by encouraging and supporting sprawl where every mile of sewer, water, and power line serves fewer taxpayers.

Nevertheless, we’ve also spent much less money overall on transit compared to roads. These funding mechanisms are extremely confusing and have changed over time, but what has not changed is that roads always get a lot more.

Congress gives states roughly $40 billion a year for roads, according to Transportation For America, which can be spent either on new roads or maintenance at the states' discretion. Meanwhile, public transit agencies have to compete for only $2.3 billion in annual transit funding for big projects such as extending rail lines or building new ones, some $37.7 billion less than what states get for roads (the feds dole out an additional $7.5 billion a year for maintenance and buying new subway cars and buses).

That $40 billion a year in road money is given out to states based on a formula. It’s automatic, and states can spend that money however they wish. Not so with transit money. Transit agencies have to apply for funding for individual projects.

And should the transit agency’s project be deemed worthy of federal funding, the federal government will subsidize a much smaller percentage of the project costs than it will for roads. Transit agencies can get a maximum of 50 percent of the project cost covered by the feds, whereas roads can get up to 80 percent (down from 90 percent during the highway spending spree of the 20th Century).

And this is just at the federal level. The discrepancy between road and transit funding is even wider at the state level, Freemark says, where legislatures are typically dominated by rural interests.

Brown, the Florida State professor, said the numbers don’t lie. “It’s not a sufficient amount of money to support grand project ideas.”

Of course, many people believe it is not the federal government’s role to be paying for mass transportation because it’s a local issue (rarely is a similar argument made about roads). This was very much up for debate when the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now a part of the Federal Transit Administration) was created in 1964. The upshot was that there’s no clear reason why the federal government should be subsidizing road construction, home mortgages, auto fuel, and any number of other things but not mass transportation. Plus, in light of the local and state government failures to pay for transit, if not the federal government, then who? Tellingly, the UMTA was founded under the Welfare Clause of the Constitution, not the Commerce Clause that authorized highway construction, because it is good for cities to have good transportation.

From nearly any vantage point, this road-heavy, transit-lite approach has been a disaster for American cities. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars constructing and maintaining an unsustainable roadway network, and traffic has only gotten worse to boot. In 2015, California’s Department of Transportation, which supervised some of the most fervent highway construction in the nation during the 20th century, came right out and admitted this didn’t work. More roads means more traffic. So, the state is no longer going to keep widening roads to relieve congestion.

Not only is there not enough money to go around, but it has to be shared by all the states. Federal rules require that no single project gets too big a slice.

“You can’t ask for so much money in a single year as to crowd out everyone else,” explained Davis. For example, he said, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) under the Obama administration told Los Angeles that it wouldn’t get all the money it wanted for the Westside Purple Line as one big extension through Beverly Hills and into Westwood. So, LA broke it up into three segments, with construction on Phase I beginning in 2014. Each got its own cost-benefit analysis, planning, and studies, and waited a few years between applications, which drives up costs. In February, LA received its grant for the third and final segment, a $1.3 billion payout that will cover just 36 percent of the cost. It is expected to be completed in 2027, meaning it will take 13 years to build a nine mile extension.

“Usually congressional and even executive branch political realities mean they spread the peanut butter around,” said Sarah Jo Peterson, author of Planning the Home Front, “and, when there isn't much peanut butter, they spread it thinly.”

The Costs Are Too Damn High

Not only does the money get spread too thinly, but once cities do get their money, they waste a lot of it.

“In the cities where rail transit works best,” Davis observed, “costs have just gotten out of control.” This is especially true for megaprojects, huge public works that cost billions of dollars.

I could spend an entire article on this subject alone and not even scratch the surface of just how profoundly screwed American megaproject costs are. Indeed, many writers and researchers have done exactly that, and one researcher in particular, Alon Levy, has more or less made a name for themselves on this subject.

New York City is responsible for the most expensive mile of subway track on Earth, at $3.5 billion per mile, the first segment of the Second Avenue Subway. The second phase is projected to crush that record. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway and commuter rail system, is also some two decades late and $8 billion over budget on the $11 billion East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Railroad trains into Grand Central, a 15 minute walk from Penn Station where Long Island Railroad trains currently go.

What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve.

The problem is hardly limited to New York. California’s high speed rail project has given new definition to the term “boondoggle.” And, as Levy has documented, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and D.C., among others, all build subways and light rail lines at much higher costs than European cities.

“Nearly all American urban rail projects cost much more than their European counterparts do,” Levy wrote in Citylab. “The cheaper ones cost twice as much, and the more expensive ones about seven times as much.” This includes both heavy rail (subways) and light rail. “Only a handful of American [light rail] lines come in cheaper than $100 million per mile, the upper limit for French light rail.”

There are a lot of reasons for this, including:

Over-engineered stations

Arcane labor rules that inhibit productivity such as requiring more employees to work at a machine than is necessary

A lack of cooperation between agencies

But cost overruns are not a new problem for American transit.

“Cost escalation has been going on for some time,” Davis of Eno Center said. The D.C. Metro was initially slated to cost $2.5 billion but ended up with a $10 billion bill. Dating back to the Ford administration, the federal government started changing grant rules so the feds wouldn’t be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns, leaving any eventualities to the transit agency building it and the local government overseeing it.

Do you work for a public transit agency or a contractor and have any experience with how projects end up costing so much? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at [email protected] or [email protected].

Some cost overruns are attributable to unforeseen circumstances, but across the board, we are very bad at estimating how much these projects will cost to begin with. Sometimes, agencies give low estimates in order to make projects more politically palatable, knowing a realistic assessment will get shot down. D.C.’s initial estimate of $2.5 billion, according to George Mason University historian and author of The Great Society Subway: A history of the Washington Metro Zachary Schrag, was “never terribly realistic.”

Depressingly, it seems we gave up on ever building necessary infrastructure for the same price as other countries decades ago. Schrag also quoted Jim Caywood, head of the engineering firm that helped design Metro, as saying “there’s no way in this world that you can build a mammoth public works project such as Metro within a reasonable budget with all the outside influences. They won’t let you do it.”

The Biggest Outside Influence of All

What are those “outside influences” Caywood referenced? The big one is politics.

“Transportation planning is not just a matter of letting the engineers find the best solution to a technical problem,” Schrag wrote, “but a political process in which competing priorities must be resolved by negotiation among interest groups.”

If there’s one point on which all the experts I spoke to agree the most, it is that transportation is politics. A 1988 deep dive into the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system by Portland State University professor Sy Adler found any vague proposal for a transit project, whether it be highway or rail, produces competing coalitions with their own self-interests. Maybe they want to spur development in their own downtown area or make it easy for commuters to live in their suburb. These factions then weaponize the options on the table for their preferred ends. The protracted debates result in entire regions losing focus over why they wanted to build a new transit system in the first place. Over time, it becomes a battle not of which option solves a given problem, but re-defining what the problem is.

Meanwhile, another cohort of interest groups form to stop projects they don’t want. Typically, these are neighborhood associations that don’t want a transit line coming through their block, either out of fear of construction impacts or racist concerns that it’ll disrupt the segregation of their urban area. Sometimes, they are not just neighborhood groups but entire regions.

In the 1970s, in what was later called “referendums on race,” Atlanta’s suburban and overwhelmingly white Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett counties voted out of the region’s MARTA system before it was even built. In 1988, five years after voting in favor of a 200-mile light rail system with local financing, Dallas voters refused to approve bonds to pay for construction, growing skittish on the whole prospect due to the oil crisis which hurt the local economy, according to Indiana University professor George Smerk’s history of the government’s mass transportation policy. Seattle, Detroit, and scores of other cities either voted against major transportation projects or approved watered down versions of original plans thanks to local opposition.

To take just one of scores of possible examples because it affected me personally: back in the 1970s the University of Maryland rejected plans to have the D.C. Metro’s Green Line stop on campus, again for predominantly racist reasons. This forced “a complicated redesign” that “later caused commotion in College Park,” Schrag wrote. Today, anyone looking to take public transportation to the university, with 41,000 students and 14,000 faculty and staff, must either take a shuttle bus from campus or walk at least 20 minutes each way. Repeat these fights dozens of times per project and it’s no longer so difficult to envision how they end up getting relegated to land the public already owns regardless of how useful it is like freeway medians or don’t get built at all.

Meanwhile, a great political shift occurred in the United States that made transit’s prospects even worse. First was the Reagan-era movement away from services provided by the government and towards private enterprise.

Transit was not spared. When Miami’s Metrorail opened, Reagan derided the “$1 billion federal subsidy” that “serves less than 10,000 daily riders” as a prime example of government waste. Better for the government to have bought everyone a limousine, Reagan quipped.

Nevermind that all of those numbers were incorrect and deeply misleading because the project hadn’t even been completed yet, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But factual errors aside, there was a larger ideological one. “Even if Metrorail doesn't turn a profit,” the paper said, “it will be performing a valuable service. Without it, thousands of new commuters would be forced back into their cars, making the roads even more overcrowded.”

Ironically, some of the blame for the wastefulness of federal transit money belongs to Reagan himself. He spent considerable effort trying to kill the main transit grant program, according to Davis, but Congress wouldn’t let him because these projects were often popular.

In order to keep the funding going, Congress had to resort to doling out the money through annual appropriations—in other words, the 435 members of the House of Representatives, with all its byzantine committees and rules, deciding for itself which projects to fund rather than career experts in the Federal Transit Administration—through a process called earmarking. In this way, transit projects became just another horse to trade.

“The nature of earmarking is that since there are 435 House districts and 50 states, and only so much money to go around, things get split more widely than they would if the Administration just got to pick a few.” Davis continued: “Ted Stevens [longtime Alaska Senator and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005] used to put a million dollar grants to little towns all over Alaska. I don't know what the hell they were for.”

Not only did it become fashionable to slash funds for big transit projects, but so too was it the sign of the times to slash agency budgets as well. Expertise then migrated to the private sector, in many cases to the very consultants and engineering firms hired to execute the few projects that got done. As a result, agencies were—and remain—ill-equipped to make big decisions on big projects, who hire those aforementioned consultants, who in turn charge a pretty penny for their services.

Do you work for a local transit agency and struggle with a lack of resources or funding? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at [email protected] or [email protected].

“We often don't have really expert public staff making decisions, making some key decisions at least,” said Eric Eidlin, a former FTA planner. “We've given over that responsibility to consultants that have a profit motive. I don't mean to say that the consultants have this desire to subvert the public interest or anything, it's just not their job, right?”

Karen Trapenberg Frick, an urban planner at UC Berkeley who used to work for the Bay Area’s planning commission, echoed Eidlin’s point and said it had a real impact on what agencies were able to do, only further undermining the public’s willingness to give them money for big projects.

“There are certain cities where when I was a planner a long time ago and now, it's the same complaint: we give the city money but they can't move the project through because they don't have the staff to do it,” she explained. “And we don't have the staff to do it because there's been this whole neoliberal mind shift that the public sector can't do a good job.”

There’s a very sad irony here. The Reagan era cuts were ostensibly designed to make the public sector more efficient by harnessing the power of the market, but instead it made public agencies reliant on for-profit contractors that jack up costs, only making government less efficient and more wasteful.

“When there's no in-house public sector expertise, the ability to deliver projects quickly or efficiently is compromised,” Eidlin said. “And time is money, too.”

Who Decides?

So far, I’ve focused on the federal side of things because it has a lot of money and power. But what level of government is the right one to make decisions about massive transportation projects? Although there is no obvious right answer, it feels like the U.S. has discovered an awful lot of wrong ones.

As a nation, local authority is our founding principle. We fought a revolution to achieve it, wrote a (bad) set of rules to maintain it, scrapped those, then wrote a new set of rules we have been arguing about ever since. Most of those arguments have been about whether the federal or state governments should determine how we live.

But unprecedented depressions and world wars have a funny way of harnessing big government power, and the feds continued to flex those newly-discovered muscles as American cities deteriorated in the years afterward. From New York to Los Angeles and in dozens of cities in between, so-called “urban renewal” programs used federal dollars to quite literally tear down and rebuild massive sections of cities from scratch, sometimes in order to build a highway through the demolished portion. One of the many legacies of this program, which destroyed entire neighborhoods, was a growing distrust in the government to sensitively execute centrally planned projects. The preferred remedy was to have more local control, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This approach has its merits, but for transportation it has serious drawbacks. Whether they be subways, light rail, bus routes, or even the humble bike lane, any transportation worth using is a network that allows people to get from one side of a city to another quickly and efficiently. Giving substantial input or even veto power to individual communities along that network undermines the entire concept.

“Transit is fundamentally regional,” Eidlin said, “And I really feel like our general population and our decision makers don't universally agree with that or even had that epiphany yet.”

Just as too much hyperlocal control can stymie useful transit, putting transit under the auspices of entire states can have downsides, too. Several of the country’s biggest transit systems including New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are controlled not by local authorities but state (or in D.C.’s case, quasi-federal) bodies. This means taxpayers who don’t obviously benefit from the system pay into it, a constant source of political tension. And when proposed projects cross state lines, it opens up a prolonged debate about who pays for what share, a fight that often takes years or decades to resolve.

Put the lack of funds for transit together with our country’s general desire to give local control as close to the individual citizen level as possible, and we’re left with a contradictory system where every limb and appendage fights the others. The lack of funds dedicated to transit means higher and higher levels of government—the ones with more and more money—often have control over transit, either by law or by practice. But those same agencies must seek local consensus for what are not local projects, a time-consuming and expensive proposition at best and a poison pill at worst.

This desire for local control yields bizarre outcomes. For example, Eidlin is working on a transportation hub project in San Jose, CA. Four different public agencies are involved, each for a different jurisdiction that will meet at the hub (this is indicative of the Bay Area, which has 27 transit operators and 151—yes, 151—transit agencies). As a result, Eidlin says much of the project’s work at this stage is not on the project itself, but administrative tasks to keep all the agencies up to speed.

“We value local control so much and we fund so many things locally that we never stop and ask,” Eidlin said, “what's the right level of government at which to be addressing a public issue?”

How To Fix This

As dire as the American transit landscape is, there are specs of hope. Federal funds are no longer given out through earmarks; that stopped in 2010. Now, the FTA grades projects based on merit. And some metro areas have big plans. Los Angeles and Seattle voters have opted to raise their sales taxes slightly to fund tens of billions of dollars in transit upgrades that could significantly improve their region.

But we need much bigger solutions, not only to build transit systems faster and more efficiently, but to run them better, too. In the vicious cycle of transit funding, agencies that are perceived as wasteful or bad at providing services have a harder time getting money from politicians, which then makes it harder to run a good transit service. This cycle must be broken.

Public transit…ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

More money for transit would obviously help. Bernie Sanders has proposed $300 billion for public transit by 2030 and $607 billion for a high speed rail network (Joe Biden, in an excellent distillation of the failures of American transportation policy to date, does not commit any dollar amounts to these issues in his platform, but does commit $50 billion in his first year to repair roads, highways, and bridges). That would be a lot more money where it’s desperately needed, and polling suggests it’s a popular platform with majority support.

The most noteworthy part of Sanders' platform, however, is not the money. It’s the framework under which it is proposed: the Green New Deal.

This, says Florida State University’s Jeff Brown, fits with the history of how big transit projects are proposed. “Transit, in most places, has very much been an afterthought or a reaction to some other perceived crisis,” he said. Traditionally, that crisis has been traffic. For periods in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the oil crises. Sanders, however, clearly puts better public transportation within the framework of the climate crisis.

But the very concept of tying transit construction to a crisis misses the point. Transit does address those issues, but it is more than that. We will never build good transit until we jettison the century-old misconception that it is a business the government happens to run out of necessity. Rather, public transportation is a public good on its own merits, good times and bad. Allowing people to move about their cities cheaply, efficiently, and quickly makes cities more productive and better places to live and has numerous knock-on public health, environmental, social, and economic effects. Public transit funding ought not to be a response to any crisis. It ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

On the other hand, framing transit as a fight against traffic is a losing battle, because it doesn’t take very many cars to create traffic. It is, as transit planner Jarrett Walker argues, a matter of geometry. It will always appear to a certain type of person that money was wasted. But positing that transit is a way for city dwellers to live better, more pleasant lives is a winning platform, as politicians across Europe can attest.

We also have to work out what the right level of government is to make transit decisions. New York, D.C., and San Francisco in particular have complicated and bizarre governance structures for their transit agencies. Most of these structures were created in mid-century when good governance types replicated the corporate boardroom as the ideal of good governance. History has proven this approach hopelessly naive. Transit is politics. It’s time to, as Freemark has argued, put transit squarely within the responsibility of one elected official who is clearly accountable.

None of this solves what may be the biggest impediment to good American public transit: costs. The solutions here are not easy. Hell, as Josh Barro of New York has pointed out, and I've also learned, we don’t even fully understand the problem. At the very least, fixing it requires cultivating long-term expertise on the local level so agencies aren’t reinventing the wheel the rare occasions they’re given enough money to undertake megaprojects. It also might require, as Laura Tolkoff of the San Francisco-based non-profit SPUR suggested, establishing governmental entities with in-house megaproject expertise, weaning the transit world off relying on expensive contractors and consultants and onto agencies looking out for the taxpayers’ interest, not the stock market’s.

These are just a handful of the high-level suggestions I learned while reporting this story. I will keep reporting on this and learning more, and you should contact me if you work in a transit-related industry and know anything I ought to know. But one thing we must always keep in mind is the answers are out there.

“[The U.S.] needs to learn what works in Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Taiwan, Finland, Austria,” Levy wrote. “It needs to learn how to plan around cooperation between different agencies and operators, how to integrate infrastructure and technology, how to use 21st-century engineering.”

To that end, Levy and fellow researcher Eric Goldwyn just received a two-year grant from the John Arnold Foundation via New York University to study why U.S. construction costs are so high. And they’re looking to hire a research associate, preferably one with language skills other than English. “We are particularly looking to extend our coverage outside countries where information is readily available in English,” their job posting for the project says.

“Imitate,” Levy advises. “Don’t innovate.”

Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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lodelcar · 6 years ago

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LIVING IN A DECENTRALISED WORLD AS NEW PERSPECTIVE FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Picture: Swamps created by imported beavers in Chilean Patagonia

I have just returned from an interesting journey through Chile and Argentina, two developed South-American countries. Except for the capitals Santiago and Buenos Aires, my wife and I also visited Patagonia by boat. We saw beautiful nature, with interesting animals and abundant vegetation and had to discover this on zodiacs, since there are not ports and nobody lives there. But we also were confronted with the errors human beings committed in the past, hundred year ago, that still influence the conditions of nature drastically. Settlers alongside the Strait of Magellan considered the land as prosperous for setting out beavers and to hunt them afterwards for their fur. It would be a lucrative business, with a nice profit and not too much work. They start to set out 1 beaver family, consisting of 3 beavers. Nowadays, hundred years later, the area, abandoned by humans because of its harsh climate, counts 300.000 beavers that deviate rivers and create swamps everywhere. They have no natural enemies that are large enough to keep them in balance. Except for the beavers the alien fauna was also composed of bewildered swine and minks. They cause less damage but influence though the natural growth of berries and flowers.

Although an intelligent creature, the human being is often a threat to its environment, be it other humans, animals, plants or nature in general. The motives that drive human beings are different from the rest of nature, driven by the survival of the fittest, and focus on profit and power. In many circumstances a call for power, selfishness and greed lead to ruthlessness, at a level that is unknown by the rest of the living beings. And is moreover accepted and even applauded by the rest of the human beings.

We started this article with this metaphor because we want to consider and describe a trend that shows up and that pleads for a life and an economy with smaller and more decentralised players. And consequently with states and nations that consider a more decentralised way of decision making as a model for the future.

The symptoms and the diagnosis

In Europe we assist for the moment to a lot of social and political trends that are disruptive and scare off people as well as politicians. We are confronted with the phenomenon of the yellow vests movement. Although they originally opposed an increase in fuel taxes, this civil movement has become a forum for a protest of the lower incomes and the rural population against a world that does not take their concerns into account: finding work in their own environment, not constantly to be threatened with new taxes, and especially: being able to identify with the world around them.

On the other hand, we observe the movement of schoolchildren and students who are called climate truants. For the first time in history, school-age youth is taking the lead in a fight to convince politicians to pay more attention to climate change and to develop a strategy that is compelling for all sections of a country: citizens, businesses, institutions, even if this requires a shift in income distribution. In the U.K. this same movement is driven by intellectuals and called “Extinction Rebellion”. Their actions are more violent blockading the city, engaging in civil disobedience, taking direct action. But their aim is the same: to demand decisive action from governments on the environmental crisis.[1]

We also are confronted with the Brexit, through which the oldest democracy on earth shows that its democratic model has reached its limits and that it is unable to solve the problem it has caused because of its inadequate communication. It is a lengthy process that absorbs so much energy that companies can no longer concentrate on their core business: producing and doing business. It is a seemingly bottomless pit in which citizens see their tax money disappear without producing results for themselves.

Politicians have no direct answer to these movements that have emerged from the bottom up and become nervous. Until now, they were accustomed to impose the marching direction of the voters and their pace of the march. In the last years, the politicians arguments more looked for culprits outside their own decision field: the EU is guilty and must therefore be undermined, foreigners are the reason and must therefore be expelled. After all, the attack is the best defence.

Everyone who criticized the major economic paradigms was ridiculed: the market is always right. Globalisation is good for humanity. When companies leave because they can get more margin elsewhere, we can't help it and we just have to become more creative. Industry is something of the twentieth century and is now being concentrated in China. Of course, traditional industrial plants moved away from the expensive Western-European and North-American salaries. For several decades, sectors like financial services, consulting, the entertainment industry, training and tourism have created far more jobs than the traditional industrial sectors. In 2018, the service sector created six times more jobs in the private sector than the industrial sectors. [2] Yet many countries have understood that countries without a real manufacturing industry do not have sufficient independent economic power to grow and create jobs. Hence, movements to re-industrialize are encouraged by the EU,[3] because “finance, research and employment depend largely on the industry sector, which accounts for 80 per cent of Europe’s exports and private innovations, and provides high-skilled jobs for citizens” [4] And: a country is only successful if it can attract large international companies that create a lot of jobs. As compensation, they will receive a tax exemption.

Europe is going through turbulent times in which many are missing a hold. But Europe is based on common values: civil and political freedom, equality before the law, democracy, human truth and a rational world view. Those values are admired by the rest of the world, not by their leaders but by the population. These values must provide guidance for the next steps to be taken.

Last but not least: there is the unavoidable present American president, considered as disruptive, undermining all former certainties in the world. The other inevitable commentator, Nobel Prize winner Economy Joseph Stiglitz, recently warned in one of his remarkable columns that the actual presidency is trying to demolish every pillar of American society. This endangers the prosperity of this society and its ability to function as a democracy. “Americans owe much of their economic success to a wealth of truth-telling, truth-discovering, and truth-verifying institutions. Central to this are freedom of expression and independent media. Like all people, journalists are fallible, but they form a particularly valuable part of a robust system of checks and balances for those in positions of power. Since the days of Smith, it has been demonstrated that the prosperity of a nation depends on the creativity and productivity of the people, which can only flourish by embracing scientific discoveries and technological innovation. And that prosperity also depends on steady improvements to the social, political and economic organization that result from a continuous and open public debate”.[5]

The appreciation for global and big put in question

The collapse of the USSR, in the 80s-90s, globalization, the challenge of state interventionism, etc., accredited the idea of a triumph of the market economy. In his famous article on "The End of History," published in 1989, the American Francis Fukuyama announced the triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy[6]. True or false, this idea did not prevent the development of thought processes aimed at going beyond the classical alternative between spontaneous coordination by the market and coordination by the State. Liberal democracy sought universal recognition of citizenship with inalienable rights. Nowadays Fukuyama takes distance from his optimism of the beginning of the century: more specific forms of identity determination based on religion, cult, race, ethnicity or gender are becoming increasingly popular. These trends are ultimately incompatible with democracy - but the need for identity cannot simply be put aside.[7]

Several new economists criticize freely the existing capitalist macro-economic way of thinking. In her book “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist’, prof. Kate Raworth of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute points out that economics in the 20th century “lost the desire to articulate its goals”. It aspired to be a science of human behaviour: a science based on a deeply flawed portrait of humanity. The dominant model – “rational economic man”, self-interested, isolated, calculating – says more about the nature of economists than it does about other humans. The loss of an explicit objective allowed the discipline to be captured by a proxy goal: endless growth.

The aim of economic activity, she argues, should be “meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet”. Instead of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, we need economies that “make us thrive, whether or not they grow”. This means changing our picture of what the economy is and how it works. So Raworth begins by redrawing the economy. She embeds it in the Earth’s systems and in society, showing how it depends on the flow of materials and energy, and reminding us that we are more than just workers, consumers and owners of capital. The diagram she proposes consists of two rings. The inner ring of the doughnut represents a sufficiency of the resources we need to lead a good life: food, clean water, housing, sanitation, energy, education, healthcare, democracy. Anyone living within that ring, in the hole in the middle of the doughnut, is in a state of deprivation. The outer ring of the doughnut consists of the Earth’s environmental limits, beyond which we inflict dangerous levels of climate change, ozone depletion, water pollution, loss of species and other assaults on the living world. The area between the two rings – the doughnut itself – is the “ecologically safe and socially just space” in which humanity should strive to live. The purpose of economics should be to help us enter that space and stay there. [8]

Recently a second important book appeared, in Dutch: “Gigantism “of Geert Noels.[9] It is a well-founded plea against the desire for economic growth. Companies become so large that they impose their rules to nation states. Gigantic companies pay less and less taxes, are willingly financed by banks at ridiculously low interest rates, “eat” competitors in order to eliminate them as well as smaller companies who invent better solutions or competitors. The gigantism of companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Uber becomes a threat to society and to democracy. The gigantism of the Pharmaceutical companies becomes a threat to healthcare for everyone and to innovation. The gigantism of Food companies becomes a threat to health in general causing obesity and diabetes. The gigantism is the cause of the raise of the yellow jackets in France and Belgium. [10]

Gigantism is not only a threat to the Western world. The Chinese gigantism with the Road and Belt initiative and the new silk routes[11] also raises questions. China generously generates billions of dollars to install new infrastructures by land (belt) or by sea (road) for all countries that request it. These are more specifically loans, which must be paid back rigorously, but which often absorb such a large part of the country's BIP that they end up in financial difficulties. The solution is then to give China a hundred-year lease on the occupied land. [12] This is the historic agreement between the UK and China of 1898 for a ninety-nine-year lease reversed.[13]

Gigantism and its disadvantages are symbolically highlighted by Noels through his example of the Champions League in football. In addition, the developments have led to the fact that in the last ten years the semi-finals and finals have always been played between the same teams, from the same five major countries: Spain, Italy, England and Germany, whereby the prize pool is such that the winning teams become increasingly richer and denying the other teams the opportunity to play a semi-final nor final ever.[14]

Noels wants to reduce gas and return to a smaller economy tailored to people and the planet.[15] He pleads especially for decentralisation, because that keeps politicians and the decision making closer to the citizen. But it also gives opportunities to companies with a decentralised structure to tackle competition and to remain creative. Smaller nations and city-states create the conditions of a globalisation 2.0.

The same gigantism has crept into the high-tech world and is now experiencing considerable headwinds. The usefulness of the race to 5G networks is questioned as superfluous luxury and the added value of which is very debatable.[16] The race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also played differently on both sides of the ocean. The European Commission recently published a report in which the developments of AI on the American side are plainly presented as frightening. They list conditions on making “trustworthy” the AI to be developed. The decisions made by an AI system should not favor or disadvantage groups. And if an AI system is going to make an important decision about you, you have the right to know. A person must always remain responsible and liable. And you must be able to explain the decision afterwards. The latter is actually not possible with the current deep learning systems - they work like a black box. Specialized European journalists therefore call for a ban on Deep Learning Systems in Europe for applications that have a major impact on the population, such as in the banking world or with the police, unless that black box problem is first solved. Because Facebook, Google, Alibaba and Tencent have taken over the development of AI, and they think differently about AI than we do in Europe.[17]

Finally, there is the important topic of the climate change. It is not by coincidence that half of the Nobel Prize for Economics 2018 has been attributed to William Nordhaus. His pioneering work integrating climate change into models of economic growth has provided a roadmap for a future where the world’s economic health is directly linked to its environmental one. Nordhaus was an early advocate of policies that require climate polluters to pay the cost that they impose on all of us. A carbon tax with an appropriate mechanism to ensure pollution reductions can achieve that; so can an emission trading system like the ones underway in Europe and California. When there are no economic downsides to polluting, we all end up paying a higher cost in the form of a warming planet. But when there’s money to be had from cutting carbon, capital will flow into developing and deploying the technologies that will do it cheaper and faster.[18]

Decentralisation in order to reach globalisation 2.0

Globalisation does not have to be written off. Very many countries have left poverty and have been able to build up a middle class. But there are too many people who have been sidelined by this form of globalization and there are too few individuals who have benefited from it. A globalization 2.0 must therefore be pursued. And that goes together with decentralisation and localisation.[19] And with reduction of size of the economic players. [20]

The call for a decentralised coherent approach, including concertation and co-operation is found back in the Recommendations in the framework of the National Elections of the Chamber of Commerce of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.[21] Although they argue for super ministries, the motivation for this is to find coherent solutions to complex problems. They call for the creation of a "front office" for citizens, companies and investors and for avoiding too many admission conditions. Since Luxembourg is a small country with fewer than 600,000 inhabitants on an surface of 2,586 km², this method can actually be equated with the promotion of regional and urban competences.

The call for concertation requires creativity from politicians, who have hid behind the pleasures of parliamentary democracy. Concertation requires to take into account all players on the regional scenery and involve them in regional policy development.

Finally, they argue for cooperation between all members of the population and the authorities. An entrepreneurial (regional or urban) authority places SMEs at the centre. A sustainable authority secures energy supplies at competitive prices, promotes energy efficiency and the promotion of economically viable renewable energies, and promotes the approaches related to urban design, of environment, water, building permits. The open authority advocates openness and defends European fundamental freedoms, supports and promotes foreign trade based on the principles of multilateralism. The social authority restores intergenerational equity by adapting pensions and long-term care insurance to the challenges of the future. The educational authority is the partner of the professional organizations. It supports their offers, conveys the values of entrepreneurship in schools, promotes vocational training at all levels and creates a framework conducive to the acquisition of knowledge and skills. The governmental authority introduces a general evaluation of public policies to increase the efficiency of spending, shows the example by pushing the digitalization of public services.

In many cases, local communities are going to rely on decentralization when national governments are stuck in endless disputes and cannot find short-term solutions to the modern and urgent problems that arise. A decentralised approach is also often cheaper than an national one.

In a recent interview with the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, the CEO of Engie, Isabelle Kocher, refers to Africa, which can skip steps to meet the needs of the 21st century.” As many regions (in Africa) immediately went to mobile telephony, local energy systems are now being developed in areas where large distribution networks have never been installed. On the scale of a village for example. That is the future. It costs much less and it goes faster. 300,000 euros is sufficient to provide everyone with energy. That is nothing compared to the colossal investments in high-voltage lines and power stations. "[22]

In Romania the regionalisation does not go further than the creation of 8 statistical Implementation Units. These can take additional initiatives, but do not receive funds for it from Bucharest. But in Statistical Implementation Unit Nord-East Romania several initiatives have been taken. They created a Regional innovation board in which commodities such as water and energy and waste have been discussed and initiatives taken. A Water cluster has been created, integrating all players for waste, sewages, water and energy. In Iasi Veolia started to treat the waste. They started to take initiatives on circular economy. The region is involved in many European projects, among others on energy autonomous municipalities together with places in Extremadura (E), Andalucía (E) and the Marche (I). Although there is no central policy in Romania, and neither there is a regional nor local policy, there is now a covenant of Mayors trying to reduce CO2 emission per city. They want to turn municipalities in carbon neutral entities. Town mayors are looking for examples of renewable energy. They do not care in this term on the classic electric grid, creating stand-alone alternatives for their city. Projects for public illumination based upon hydro power or solar energy are very popular. Also in terms of circular economy and short value chains (localization) initiatives have taken, e.g. cultivation of henp as biodegradable basic material. [23]

We referred to the Extinction Rebellion movement, started May 2018 and launched end of October 2018. In their Manifesto, [24] they refer to Stated Principles. Their 10th and last principles is: “We are based on autonomy and decentralisation – we collectively create the structures we need to challenge power. “[25] Although the UK has a very centralized administration, this movement is aware that themes such as climate change can only succeed if municipalities, cities and counties draw up an approach that is close to what citizens can and can accept. They can create much better support than parties at the national level who are bogged down in endless ideological discussions. In the US, States, cities and businesses have been significantly decarbonizing the U.S. economy—even in the absence of federal climate action. A new report, Fulfilling America’s Pledge, with analysis from WRI, University of Maryland, Rocky Mountain Institute and others showed that policies already adopted by states, cities and businesses will reduce U.S. emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, approximately two-thirds of the way to the country’s pledge of cutting emissions 26-28 percent by 2025. And they could get even further—by scaling up existing technology and expanding programs and policies, states, businesses and cities could reduce emissions by more than 24 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.[26]

In 2014 Ukraine launched a series of reforms to merge local governments and strengthen decentralization by giving additional power and resources to sub-national authorities. This process, intended to advance regional development and border reform, has seen successful steps taken, but was implemented only in several pilot communities. Certain cities in Ukraine have been given much more autonomy to provide certain economic incentives. We visited companies in the oblasts of Kiev and Lviv that had succeeded in combining cheap EU loans and city grants to renew their machinery and be ready to confront the challenge of newcomers to the Ukrainian market.

However, the principle of decentralisation being only beneficial to a country is not universally correct: the abuses that have taken place in the past in the Spanish regions, where, thanks to the cheap interest rates, many useless investments have been made, which still have to be paid off, are a striking example of how it has not to be done. [27]

The Swiss example

Let us look at the example of a decentralised country admired by the world population: Switzerland. Switzerland has 2,914 municipalities. In addition to its municipalities, the Swiss have 26 cantons, with their own constitution and parliament. And above the cantons there is a federal government, which only has seven ministers and a federal president. Switzerland is a federal republic in which the sovereignty of the constituent states (the cantons) is limited by the enumerated powers delegated to the federal state (the Confederation) through the federal constitution. The greatest power lies therefore with the cantons. the original authority to levy taxes is vested in the individual cantons of Switzerland through their constitutions. Within the bounds of the authority delegated to them by cantonal law, the municipalities may also levy taxes. The extent of that authority varies from canton to canton. While the formal framework of the most important cantonal direct taxes has been harmonised through the 1990 Federal Tax Harmonisation Law, the cantons (and, as the case may be, the municipalities) remain free to set their tax rates or establish new taxes, except on tax objects already taxed under federal law.[28] The cantons arrange their education and justice, and conduct their own socio-economic policy. If one canton wants to place more social accents, then that is possible. There is financial solidarity between the cantons, but the bill of the chosen policy has to be paid for itself. Despite its complex state structure, Switzerland does not spend much.[29] The Swiss Federal budget had a size of 73.6 billion Swiss francs in 2018, which is an equivalent 11.01% of the country's GDP in that year. The expenditure budget shows a surplus of 1.3 bn. CHF; however, the regional (canton) budgets and the budgets of the municipalities are not counted as part of the federal budget and the total rate of government spending is closer to 33.8% of GDP.

Regional achievements in the Low Countries

We also wish to discuss our own region, Flanders, which is one of the regional approach vehicles in Belgium and the numerous examples that can be given of the advantage of a regional approach. Seven years ago, the Belgian professional organization of the industries[30] Agoria decided to set up a project in order to re-industrialise Belgium with the support of the Flemish Government. Since then more and more extremely flexible and high-tech companies are recovering their production from low-wage countries and taking a new approach in our region. The fact that the Belgian manufacturing industry is gradually moving in the right direction can also be seen from the decision of the European Commission to launch the Belgian “Factories of the Future” project now in the rest of Europe. [31] [32]

The Flanders region has also played a pioneering role in the circular economy. Circular economy tries to make raw materials serve as long as possible, and to generate as little waste as possible. The public waste company OVAM encouraged various initiatives by supporting them with know-how and by making them known.[33] The figures of the Socio-economic Council of Flanders show that by 2030 a sustainable economy can create more than 30,000 new jobs in Flanders. If you also know that today 55 to 65% of the global CO2 emission is material related (from the extraction of raw materials, the processing of materials and the making of objects to the possible destruction thereof), it is clear that a circular economy offers quite a bit of opportunities.[34]

The regional approach for the Netherlands lies on the level of the Provinces. The authority of the Dutch provinces covers: regional economics, spatial planning, security, education (municipalities), culture and health (hospitals with municipalities). Additional decentralisation levels are the Dutch municipalities (VNG), the Association for Science Centers and the Association of 4 largest cities (G4: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague). The Association of Dutch Provinces started in 2000 as an issue of the Dutch interprovincial concertation. They represent the 12 Dutch provinces and defend their interests. In addition, there are representatives of 4 cities from the north of the Netherlands (Emmen, Assen, Groningen and Leeuwarden), representatives of the Food Valley (Wageningen), representatives of the circular economy around Venlo-Venray (insect economy) and representatives of 2 knowledge centers (Maastricht University and Leeuwarden knowledge centre). The aim of the Dutch provinces is to stimulate the financing of projects to promote regional economy, with own budgets and if it can with European money. [35] One of the typical examples of the regional development approach in the Netherlands is the Brainport Region Eindhoven in the South of the country. At the end of the nineteenth century manufacturing began to flourish, with Philips and DAF the most influential players. Eindhoven became a real ‘company town’ that shone throughout the region. The character of industrial Eindhoven has changed since 1970. The tobacco and textile industries have disappeared. DAF sold its car division to Volvo but remained successful in the production and development of trucks and coach undercarriages. The bankruptcy of DAF and reorganisation of Philips in the 1990s costed the region 36,000 jobs. The city was on the verge of a disaster. So the governors of the Eindhoven region opted for a new style of cooperation. This initiative taken by the chairman of the local chamber of commerce and the executive chairman of Eindhoven Technical University saw intensive co-operation between government, industry and research in a Triple Helix that attracted investment and brought organisations like TNO[36] to Eindhoven. Out of this Triple Helix co-operation emerged the ‘Brainport’ foundation, with its own ambition and strategy, in 2005.[37] In the past 20 years the Brainport region has gone through a tremendous transition, from a region of shrinking industry and major unemployment to an international high-tech hotspot in a global network. This transition, from manufacturing to a chain of knowledge and trust, characterises the strategic manoeuvrability and mentality of the region. It is a style of working that forms the basis for open innovation and teaches us that sharing knowledge leads to the multiplication of knowledge.[38] Since 2014, Eindhoven has become the Netherlands’ strongest economic region.

An era of change or a change of era?

More and more academics are finding that we are in a thorough transition period that will lead to more stability in a few years but will herald a new era. Jan Rotmans is a professor at the Rotterdam University and an international authority in the field of sustainability and transition. He sees more and more a new social order, a different economic foundation and a change of power appearing with 3 three characteristics: 1. Society tilts from a vertically arranged, centrally controlled top-down society to a horizontal, decentralized, bottom-up society with connections, such as communities, cooperatives and virtual and physical networks, 2. The structure of the economy is tilted and the new economy is decentralized and digital, 3. The power tilts. A change of power is taking shape: the new order from below is slowly but surely forming a new power.[39]

This adjustment of the rules of the game will also have a beneficial effect in other areas. There are fundamental problems such as obesity, bullying, suicide, crime, burn-out, air pollution, greenhouse gases, alienation and the de-humanization of our economy that can have a possible positive evolution. And these are problems that await the young generation and that you want to see solved.[40]

Louis Delcart, board member European Academy of the Regions, www.ear-aer.eu

[1]

https://rebellion.earth/event/uk-rebellion-shut-down-london/

: UK Rebellion – Shut Down London!, from 15-4 till 29-4-2019, retrieved on 23/4/2019

[2] Neil Irwin, Most Americans Produce Services, Not Stuff. Trump Ignores That in Talking About Trade, in The New York Times, 16 March 2018

[3] Patrizia Toia, Reindustrialisation is essential to relaunching EU economy, in The Parliament Magazine, 24 October 2017

[4] Patrizia Toia, Reindustrialisation is essential to relaunching EU economy, in The Parliament Magazine, 24 October 2017. Patrizia Toia (S&D, IT) is a Vice- Chair of EU Parliament’s industry, research and energy committee

[5] Joseph Stiglitz: De waarheid devalueren is gevaarlijk, in De Standaard, 13-14/4/2019 en Joseph Stiglitz, Trump’s Most Worrisome Legacy, on Project Syndicate, The World’s Opinion Page, Apr 9, 2019 in https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-dangerous-anti-enlightenment-legacy-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2019-04

[6] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992. ISBN 0-02-910975-2

[7] Bert De Vroey, Amerikaanse denker Francis Fukuyama: "Het nieuwe identiteitsdenken begon op links" (American thinker Francis Fukuyama: "The new identity thinking started on the left"), in Villa Politica, VRT, 11-3-2019

[8] George Monbiot, Finally, a breakthrough alternative to growth economics – the doughnut, in The Guardian, 12/4/2017

[9] Geert Noels, Gigantisme, Van too big to fail naar trager, kleiner en menselijker, Lannoo-Spectrum, 2019

[10] Louis Delcart: GEORGIAN HIGHSCHOOL PUPILS WORRY ABOUT BULLYING, YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT, AND LEAD POISONING AS HIDDEN KILLER on https://www.tumblr.com/edit/184055911875/?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Flodelcar.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F184055911875%2Fgeorgian-highschool-pupils-worry-about-bullying

[11] “Xi's ambitious initiative for a "New Silk Road" created a project worth 1,000 billion dollars in investments in ports and roads in more than 64 countries throughout Southeast and Central Asia and even to Europe and North Africa new relationships.” In Ivo H. Daalder & James M. Lindsay, The Empty Throne: America's Abdication of Global Leadership, 2018, chapter 10: Win again

[12] « Loans, grants and long-term leases have ensured that a range of ports are directly under Chinese control or heavily owed to government-controlled companies in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Djibouti.” In Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads. The present and future of the World, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, Chapter: The routes to Beijing.

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong

[14] Geert Noels, Gigantism, Lannoo-Spectrum, 2019, pp.84-109

[15] Koen Bauters: Geert Noels en Gigantisme: de groei die we nastreven is onrealistische en onmenselijk, (Geert Noels and Gigantism: the growth we strive for is unrealistic and inhuman) in Humo, 11/3/2019

[16] Dominique Deckmyn, Wie heeft 5G nodig? Ik niet!( Who needs 5G? Not me!) In De Standaard, 9/2/2019

[17] Dominique Deckmyn, Of had u liever onbetrouwbare AI? (Or would you prefer an unreliable AI?), in De Standaard, 13/4/2019

[18] Nathaniel Keohane: The 2018 economics Nobel shows we can’t discuss economics without considering climate change in Quartz 15-10-2018 In https://qz.com/1424769/the-2018-economics-nobel-highlights-the-importance-of-climate-change/

[19] Louis Delcart, LOCALISATION IN A GLOBALISING WORLD, 22-2-2016, in https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/139787275600/localisation-in-a-globalising-world?is_related_post=1

[20] Louis Delcart, THE FUTURE ECONOMIC PLAYERS: SMALL AGAINST ALL COMMON SENSE, 24-10-2017, in https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/166754110755/the-future-economic-players-small-against-all

[21] Chamber of Commerce of Luxembourg : Entreprise Luxembourg 4.0 - Pour une gouvernance publique innovante. Recommandations de la Chambre de Commerce au Gouvernement issu des élections législatives du 14 octobre 2018, Actualité et tendances n°20, 24-10-2018 in http://www.cc.lu/en/news/detail/entreprise-luxembourg-40-pour-une-gouvernance-publique-innovante/

[22] Ine Renson & Pascal Sertyn, Een nieuwe industriële revolutie, Aflevering 5: Isabelle Kocher, topvrouw van energiereus Engie (A new industrial revolution, Episode 5: Isabelle Kocher, top lady of energy giant Engie), in De Standaard, 27/4/2019

[23] Louis Delcart, MEETING REPORTS REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVES IN BRUSSELS JUNE – JULY 2017, Meeting Bogdan Chelariu, Brussels representative of Statistical Implementation Unit Nord-East Romania, internal EAR-AER document

[24] "About Us". Extinction Rebellion. Retrieved 13 April 2019.

[25] "Who We Are | Extinction Rebellion". rebellion.earth. Retrieved 26 November 2018.

[26] Tom Cyrs, James DeWeese and Kevin Kennedy, U.S. States, Cities and Businesses Are Cutting Emissions, and Poised to Do Even More. New Report Does the Math, World resource Institute, September 12, 2018, retrieved 23-4-2019, https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/09/us-states-cities-and-businesses-are-cutting-emissions-and-poised-do-even-more

[27] The Astonishing Abandoned Airports In Spain in https://www.rfae.org/the-astonishing-abandoned-airports-in-spain/

[28] Louis Delcart, Abandon Europe and back to Nation States, 13/11/2015 in https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/133126672445/abandon-europe-and-back-to-nation-states

[29] Pieter Blomme en Jasper D'hoore: Buitenlandse oplossingen voor Belgische problemen (Foreign solutions for Belgian problems), in De Tijd, 27-4-2019, retrieved on 27/4/2019 https://www.tijd.be/dossiers/verkiezingen-2019/Stand-van-het-Land-Buitenlandse-oplossingen-voor-Belgische-problemen/10121379?utm_campaign=WEEKEND&utm_medium=email&utm_source=SIM

[30] Aeronautics, Space, Security & Defence Industries, Building, Contracting & Technical Services Industries, Digital Industries, Manufacturing Industries, Materials Industries, Telecom Industries, in https://www.agoria.be/en/What-is-Agoria

[31] Filip Michiels: Hoogtechnologisch, ultraflexibel én Belgisch, De opmars van de nieuwe maakindustrie (High technology, ultra flexible and Belgian, The advance of the new manufacturing industry), in: De Standaard, 19 May 2018

[32] https://www.effra.eu/factories-future

[33] Louis Delcart, WASTE MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN FLANDERS – BELGIUM, 9-12-2018 in https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/180955829970/waste-management-and-circular-economy-in-flanders?is_related_post=1

[34] Wim Troch, Zij tonen hoe je grondstoffen hergebruikt (They show how to reuse materials) in Visie, April 2019

[35] Louis Delcart, MEETING REPORTS REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVES IN BRUSSELS JUNE – JULY 2017, Meeting Rob Van Eijken, Brussels representative of Dutch Provinces, internal EAR-AER document

[36] Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek = Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research

[37] http://www.brainport.nl/en/about-brainport

[38] http://www.brainport.nl/en/about-brainport

[39] Micha Rotmans, "Het verbaast me dat slechts enkelen vatten dat er een grote maatschappelijke verschuiving aankomt" ("I am surprised that only a few grasp that a major social shift is coming") in Innoveren, 10/1/2017 in https://www.bloovi.be/nieuws/detail/jan-rotmans-we-leven-niet-in-een-tijdperk-van-verandering-maar-in-een-verandering-van-tijdperk

[40] Louis Delcart, GEORGIAN HIGHSCHOOL PUPILS WORRY ABOUT BULLYING, YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT, AND LEAD POISONING AS HIDDEN KILLER, 6-4-2019, in https://lodelcar.tumblr.com/post/184055911875/georgian-highschool-pupils-worry-about-bullying

#regional development #decentralisation #gigantism #circulareconomy

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johnmauldin · 6 years ago

Text

The Problem with Keynesian Economics

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

I think Lord Keynes himself would appreciate the irony that he has become the defunct economist under whose influence the academic and bureaucratic classes now toil, slaves to what has become as much a religious belief system as an economic theory.

Men and women who display appropriate skepticism on other topics indiscriminately funnel facts and data through a Keynesian filter without ever questioning the basic assumptions. Some go on to prescribe government policies that have profound effects upon the citizens of their nations.

And when those policies create the conditions that engender the income inequality they so righteously oppose, they often prescribe more of the same bad medicine. Like 18th-century physicians applying leeches to their patients, they take comfort that all right-minded people will concur with their recommended treatments.

This is an ongoing series of a discussion between Ray Dalio and myself (read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) . Today’s article addresses the philosophical problem he is trying to address: income and wealth inequality.

Last week I dealt with the equally significant problem of growing debt in the United States and the rest of the world. The Keynesian tools much of the economic establishment wants to use are exacerbating the problems. Ray would like to solve it with a blend of monetary and fiscal policy, what he calls Monetary Policy 3.

The Problem with Keynesianism

Let’s start with a classic definition of Keynesianism from Wikipedia, so that we can all be comfortable that I’m not coloring the definition with my own bias (and, yes, I admit I have a bias). (Emphasis mine.)

Keynesian economics (or Keynesianism) is the view that in the short run, especially during recessions, economic output is strongly influenced by aggregate demand (total spending in the economy). In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy; instead, it is influenced by a host of factors and sometimes behaves erratically, affecting production, employment, and inflation.

The theories forming the basis of Keynesian economics were first presented by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 during the Great Depression. Keynes contrasted his approach to the aggregate supply-focused “classical” economics that preceded his book. The interpretations of Keynes that followed are contentious, and several schools of economic thought claim his legacy.

Keynesian economists often argue that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes which require active policy responses by the public sector, in particular, monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government, in order to stabilize output over the business cycle. Keynesian economics advocates a mixed economy—predominantly private sector, but with a role for government intervention during recessions.

Central banks around the world and much of academia have been totally captured by Keynesian thinking. In the current avant-garde world of neo-Keynesianism, consumer demand—consumption—is everything. Federal Reserve policy is clearly driven by the desire to stimulate demand through lower interest rates and easy money.

And Keynesian economists (of all stripes) want fiscal policy (essentially, government budgets) to increase consumer demand. If the consumer can’t do it, the reasoning goes, then the government should step into the breach. This of course requires deficit spending and borrowed money (including from your local central bank).

Essentially, when a central bank lowers interest rates, it is encouraging banks to lend money to businesses and telling consumers to borrow money to spend. Economists like to see fiscal stimulus at the same time, as well. They point to the numerous recessions that have ended after fiscal stimulus and lower rates were applied. They see the ending of recessions as proof that Keynesian doctrine works.

This thinking has several problems.

The Flaws of Keynesian Stimulus

First, using leverage (borrowed money) to stimulate spending today must by definition reduce consumption in the future. Debt is future consumption denied or future consumption brought forward.

Keynesian economists argue that bringing just enough future consumption into the present to stimulate positive growth outweighs the future drag on consumption, as long as there is still positive growth.

Leverage just equalizes the ups and downs. This has a certain logic, of course, which is why it is such a widespread belief.

Keynes argued, however, that money borrowed to alleviate recession should be repaid when growth resumes. My reading of Keynes does not suggest he believed in the unending fiscal stimulus his disciples encourage today.

Secondly, as has been well documented by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, there comes a point at which too much leverage becomes destructive. There is no exact way to know that point.

It arrives when lenders, typically in the private sector, decide that borrowers (whether private or government) might have some difficulty repaying and begin asking for more interest to compensate for their risks.

An overleveraged economy can’t afford the higher rates, and economic contraction ensues. Sometimes the contraction is severe, sometimes it can be absorbed. When accompanied by the popping of an economic bubble, it is particularly disastrous and can take a decade or longer to work itself out, as the developed world is finding out now.

Every major “economic miracle” since the end of World War II has been a result of leverage. Often this leverage has been accompanied by stimulative fiscal and monetary policies. Every single “miracle” has ended in tears, with the exception of the current recent runaway expansion in China, which is still in its early stages.

Insufficient Income Causes Recessions

I would argue (along, I think, with the “Austrian” economist Hayek and other economic schools) that recessions are not the result of insufficient consumption but rather insufficient income.

Fiscal and monetary policy should aim to grow incomes over the entire range of the economy. That is best accomplished by making it easier for entrepreneurs and businesspeople to provide goods and services. When businesses increase production, they hire more workers and incomes go up.

Without income, there are no tax revenues to redistribute. Without income and production, nothing of any economic significance happens. Keynes was correct when he observed that recessions are periods of reduced consumption, but that is a result and not a cause.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to create a product or offer a service in the hope there will be sufficient demand for their work. There are no guarantees, and they risk economic peril with their ventures, whether we’re talking about the local bakery or hairdressing shop or Elon Musk trying to compete with the world’s largest automakers. If government or central bank policies hamper their efforts, the economy stagnates.

The Reason Keynesianism Sticks

Many politicians and academics favor Keynesianism because it offers a theory by which government actions can become decisive in the economy. It lets governments and central banks meddle in the economy and feel justified.

It allows 12 people sitting in a board room in Washington DC to feel they are in charge of setting the most important price in the world, the price of money (interest rates) of the US dollar and that they know more than the entrepreneurs and businesspeople who are actually in the market risking their own capital every day.

This is essentially the Platonic philosopher king conceit: the hubristic notion that a small group of wise elites is capable of directing the economic actions of a country, no matter how educated or successful the populace has been on its own.

And never mind that the world has multiple clear examples of how central controls eventually slow growth and make things worse over time. It is only when free people are allowed to set their own prices of goods and services and, yes, even interest rates, that valid market-clearing prices can be determined. Trying to control them results in one group being favored over another.

In today's world, savers and entrepreneurs are left to eat the crumbs that fall from the plates of the well-connected crony capitalists and live off the income from repressed interest rates. The irony of using “cheap money” to drive consumer demand is that retirees and savers get less money to spend, and that clearly drives their consumption down.

Why is the consumption produced by ballooning debt better than the consumption produced by hard work and savings? This is trickle-down monetary policy, which ironically favors the very large banks and institutions.

If you ask Keynesian central bankers if they want to be seen as helping the rich and connected, they will stand back and forcefully tell you “NO!” But that is what happens when you start down the road of financial repression. Someone benefits. So far it has not been Main Street.

The Great Reset: The Collapse of the Biggest Bubble in History

New York Times best seller and renowned financial expert John Mauldin predicts an unprecedented financial crisis that could be triggered in the next five years. Most investors seem completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now. Learn more here.

#keynesian economics #Keynesianism #john maynard #keynesian economics problem

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whittlebaggett8 · 6 years ago

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Why China Still Isn’t Winning its War on Pollution

Irrespective of some ongoing endeavours, a lot extra work continues to be to be accomplished in order for significant improve to happen.

By Grace Guo for The Diplomat

March 23, 2019

China’s plan-makers absolutely won’t be amused to master that the average focus of PM2.5 increased by 5.2 percent in the year’s first two months, especially in the context of the ambition to see the country achieve pollution-totally free position by 2020. This lofty target was re-affirmed throughout the latest session of the 13th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Meeting and Nationwide People’s Congress, in which Ecology and Setting Minister Li Ganjie insisted that superior-quality economic advancement simply cannot coexist with a desiccated surroundings.

In the wake of the “Two Sessions”, Chinese officers have been rapid to release good news about China’s development towards bluer skies, with Li emphasizing air top quality improvements in Beijing and across other areas of the state. His ministry reported a drop in the typical amount of PM2.5 particles in 338 metropolitan areas by additional than 9 p.c in 2018 in comparison to the 12 months ahead of. Coupled with a joint report launched in early March by the UN Setting Program and the Beijing Municipal Ecology and Atmosphere Bureau (BEE) calling Beijing’s war on pollution a “model for other cities”, China’s trajectory to environmental overall health appears exponential.

Really do not Celebrate Far too Soon

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There’s no doubt that the government’s struggle for bluer skies is laudable. But the combat faces a extensive road in advance and praising it as a product for emulation is all but untimely supplied the present-day situations. At a region-broad PM2.5 common of 35 micrograms, any drop in particle focus everywhere in the nation is very good news, though it is nonetheless significantly over the 10 microgram maximum set by the Planet Wellbeing Organization.

That’s mainly because, in truth, there’s a flip-side to the optimistic headlines, namely that air pollution enhancements are still limited to particular locations and seemingly temporary times in time. Even Beijing Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Ecosystem Deputy Head Yu Jianhua experienced to concede that “heavy pollution episodes continue to manifest through autumn and winter season.” In the country’s Northern provinces pollution levels surged in January and February, growing 16 p.c year-on-yr in 39 major towns amid surging industrial action and freezing temperatures.

Industrial Overcapacity and Financial Imperatives

The worst offender was the coal town of Linfen in Shanxi province, which endured PM2.5 amounts of 174 micrograms, a 23 percent boost in contrast to 2018 degrees. In Shijiazhuang, the money of Hebei province and China’s greatest steelmaking location, emissions rose a whopping 30 % to 144 micrograms. This reveals that China nonetheless isn’t performing plenty of to combat air pollution in a extensive and helpful method.

As a subject of reality, the country would seem to be backsliding on its before endeavours, as shown by the move to revise air pollution targets for the Oct-March time period to 3 percent, down from the 5 p.c reduction asserted in previously designs. The cause powering this is simple: heavy industries like metal and aluminium that run practically exclusively on coal electricity have been allowed to go on jogging for the duration of the winter as the government backtracked on blanket overcapacity cuts. These were being at first created to lower polluting extra creation, precisely in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei belt.

The aluminium capability cuts were instated at the height of China’s smog crisis in 2017 as an oblique way of lowering coal energy technology, but because of to trade tensions with the United States, Beijing felt compelled to keep creation higher. And as China struggles to harmony economic expansion and environmental imperatives amid a national and global slump, the government is not likely to divert from this plan. Getting into the sixth year of the “war on pollution”, Chinese industrial stimuli that only improve the global aluminium and metal glut coming out of China are as well typically prioritized over endeavours to minimize industrial pollution. Without a doubt, in accordance to customs data, China’s aluminium exports in 2018 surged by almost 21 percent to a new history compared to the past calendar year.

No Purpose Model Still

The impression on pollution degrees of this policy change is not producing it simpler for Beijing to accomplish the self-imposed environmental ambitions. Continue to, this hasn’t stopped global commentators from picking up the narrative that China’s air top quality improvements make it a product worthy to be copied throughout the entire world. Although it’s true that the Center Kingdom has been the pollution bogeyman for yrs and that development is currently being produced, the present technique continues to be woefully incomplete and flawed as prolonged as the country’s principal polluters continue on to run unabatedly.

It is thus questionable if metropolitan areas and areas on other continents would be very well-suggested to a adhere to a stylized interpretation of the China product, or to even adopt it. Systematic and far more intense steps are needed if China hopes to make alone “pollution free” in much less than a year’s time. As it stands now, quite a few of China’s metropolitan areas keep on being among the the world’s most polluted, and except if Beijing finds a way to strike the brakes on carbon-intense growth, absolutely nothing considerably will change.

Grace Guo is a Vienna-based mostly researcher and a system affiliate for an NGO focused on Asian politics.

The post Why China Still Isn’t Winning its War on Pollution appeared first on Defence Online.

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#Carbon footprint #China and environmental policy #China and the environment #China carbon footprint

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l-in-c-future · 7 years ago

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The dictator’s propaganda portraits a more ‘civilized’, ‘democratic’, ‘harmonious’ and ‘progressive’ society by leading the global race of artificial intelligence.

But who is a typical ‘model citizen’ in this world?

1. Young people like Fan Dan Dan, whose high income earning career is relying on marketing of the new big data totality surveillance techs while her husband is a typical Communist Party cadre working in the most lucrative department (Justice and Enforcement) to execute any orders after the big brother determines who is ‘socially credible’ or not.

2. Other young people likely the post 80s generation who grow up being indoctrinated by both China and the West tech gurus that high techs convenience ‘smart’ future is the new savior for humanity, especially China.

Who are the most likely ‘socially dishonourable’ people?

1. Investigative journalists who revealed the ugly truths of the illusion, such as one of those being blacklisted under the new social credit system after he was imprisoned for 5 years for ‘defamation’ of the Communist Party simply because he reported a communist party cadre involved in bribery of organized crime groups for which he refused to admit any crime. (In HK, former Chief Executive CY Leung (a well known CCP member) issued solicitor letters to accuse a HK Polytechnic University professor for the same ‘offence’ simply because he said there were triad society groups presented at Leung’s election campaign and to whoever mentioned or tried to inquire his dubious UGL/DTZ transactions.) As a ‘socially discredited’ person, the individual could not buy high speed rail ticket nor buy domestic ticket on internet and being restrained to buy tickets of trains with G seats. His social media accounts (once had nearly 2 millions of followers) all being cancelled and suspended. His investigative journalism reports have nowhere to be published.

2. His old investigative journalists colleagues or friends have either all left the jobs or live in daily fear of possible collective punishment by being blacklisted by the social credit system.

3. Uyghurs, one of the most severely suppressed ethnic minority groups in China. They have zero social credit scores. Their social credit status is classified as socially trustworthy; average; and socially distrusted. Even at the highest rank, they do not have the same civil rights and freedom as the Han Chinese. Being ‘average’ means under the ‘normally tightly watched’ mode while once as enlisted as ‘socially distrusted’, they can be vanished anytime ending up in the concentration camps being forced to study political propaganda 12 hours a day or imprisoned without trials.

A Uyghur man fled to American seeking Asylum status with his wife and children instantly caused his brother and two brothers-in-law uncontactable back home.

China’s social credit system is not just old gimmicks of ancient feudal dictatorship masked in emerging new techs, the experimental technology is full of flaws (as even on first day of operation, thousands of innocent people were found incorrectly blacklisted), it is the fatalism of algorithms dictatorship that eradicate humanity. Once a person is blacklisted for political reason, it is hardly possible for delisting (unless and until the next dictator arises and he may do something else). Life is largely restrained in a wall-less prison, denial of civil existence or the individual has to pay extra high costs to maintain living.

“ It puts under compulsion all people—the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the free and the slaves—that these should be marked on their right hand or on their forehead, 17 and that nobody can buy or sell except a person having the mark, the name of the wild beast or the number of its name. 18 This is where it calls for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the number of the wild beast, for it is a man’s number, and its number is 666.” Book of Revelation 13:16-18.

While Australia media focused on reporting what happens in China, do the Australians and Australian politicians have the acute vigilance that the same autocratic regime has exported THE SAME CCTV cameras flooding streets in Australia? Do the Australian politicians have sufficient alerts that China is supplying communication and data services to some of our state’s metro rails that put Australians in GREAT security threats of being long ranged surveilled? Does the Australian government even admit that this country has already inched by the communists in many ways?

Let those who have insight calculate the number of the wild beast for it is a man’s number and its number is 666. None of what happens in Australia give me the comfort that there are insights being taken because people are fooled by their own blind eyes and hearts, as pointed out in this documentary. These people not only prevail China, they are all over the world who worship the dragon. “Convenience”, being ‘technical savvy’ to catch up the trends in exchange of algorithm fatalism dictatorship.

The apple hanging on the tree is still very hard to resist since Adam’s time. Do you hear the voice of the serpent telling the world that we may not ‘necessarily die’? And we will become as smart as God because our eyes and minds are ‘enlightened’ after taking the fruit.’

#China #big data #big brother watch #surveillance state #censorhip #digital dictatorship #face recognization #social credit system #autocracy #state censorship #digitalism #fatalism #artificial intelligence

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rickymurphyproductions · 7 years ago

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The Failing U.S. Prison System

Since the creation of human law, the preferred method of social punishment is captivity or death. In America, those found guilty in a court of law are locked away to serve their due time in large, crowded, concrete buildings full of other convicted criminals. Correction facilities or more suitably called Prisons are designed to detain mass amounts of individuals who commit crime(s) and are considered too dangerous to live in society; hence imprisonment remains the best way to protect our civilization. American citizens are permitted a great deal of freedom, yet that freedom exists within the restrictions of the constitution and failure to adhere to the guidelines results in custody. Despite Americans assumed freedom, the U.S. actually imprisons the most citizens amongst any other nation in the world. In fact, the country with the second highest incarceration rate, China, detains 600,000 less people. While the penal system is indisputably necessary for a society to effectively enforce the law and protect its public through the isolation of those persons judged unfit for civilization; America’s prisons are overcrowded, unsafe, disturbing and fail to protect the fundamental rights of inmates. If America plans on fixing its failed prison system, laws issuing mandatory minimums to drug offenders will need to be thrown away and inmate support will have to be improved using modern-day technology to ease their return back into society. Although many people believe convicts deserve the lowest quality of life inside a prison, America must reevaluate its approach to the penal system by developing modernized methods of correction to resolve its core issues; overcrowding, rape, violence, exploitation and an overall abuse of inmates.

Prisons are home to the most dangerous, horrific, dark, and ill-intentioned persons in America, their containment has prevented millions of crimes from occurring. For America to effectively govern its people, guidelines need to be established and strictly enforced so as to uphold the general protection of society. Prisons are imperative to separating the individuals judged unsafe or unfit to live amongst us in civilization. While the American government doesn’t particularly favor mass imprisonment, author David Muhlhausen confirms that the primarily purpose of prison is “to keep its citizenry safe” (Friedman 13). Muhlhausen, a senior research expert, states “that 17 crimes are avoided for every person put into prison” (Muhlhausen 17). If his statement is accurate, it would mean that thousands of disturbances are evaded each day as a result of criminal confinement. There is no debate as to whether or not prisons are necessary to society; a lack of enforcement, combined with an absence of consequence would result in the ensuing destruction of our civilization. Issues facing the American prison system are primarily concerned with facilities lack of space. Penitentiaries today are becoming increasingly crowded due to an enhancement of the police force. In addition to this, prisoners are detained long enough for them to substantially contemplate their bad actions to ensure that they will not break the law again. The parole system tries to grant early release to as many inmates as possible to reduce the issue of overcrowding, however they must thoroughly assess each inmate so they do not endanger the safety of society by releasing them too early. By examining specific characteristics of inmates, officers are able to determine a prisoner’s intention. The National Council of State Legislature asserts its approval of the prison system stating:

“Decades of research supports leveraging adult corrections and sentencing policies with prevention efforts aimed at very young children who experience certain risks associated with development of anti-social, aggressive and criminal behaviors” (Przybbiski 2008).

This statement conveys the effectiveness of prison on adult’s correction, however it also reveals the hazardous effects on young children who experience repercussions associated with one of their parents being imprisoned. Although the existence of prisons will always be needed in society, the protection of all Americans fundamental rights, including prisoners, should be the government’s top priority.

In recent years, the American prison system has encountered several internal failures directly concerning its inability to provide a growing number of inmates with fundamental human rights. Correction facilities in the U.S. are structured to handle mass imprisonment. This indicates that the main intention of the prison system is to hold the maximum number of prisoners at a time. The facilities become exceedingly unsafe once their maximum capacity is reached. Nonetheless, in 2014 the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that “18 states exceeded the maximum measure of their prison facilities’ capacity” (Carson 11). The number of overcrowded prisons in America is astonishing because of how hazardous this can be. Serious risks associated with overcrowded prisons include but are not limited to; increased violence, hostility, rape, alienation, and many psychological disorders that regularly lead inmates to insanity or suicide. The treatment inmates receive in overcrowded facilities across America has been deemed “unconstitutional” (Mayeux) for many justifiable reasons. In fact The American Civil Liberties Union issued a lawsuit in 1975 accusing a California penitentiary of violating “inmates’ constitutional rights due to overcrowding and poor confinement conditions. America claims to protect the constitutional rights of all citizens, however inmates are clearly an exception if they are continuously supplied with the minimum amount of resources abandoned and expected to survive amongst the nation’s realist criminals. While mass incarceration may take criminals off the streets, they repeatedly disturb nonviolent offenders enough to make them violent, distressed individuals. Inmates are exposed to the most terrifying kinds of people who may decide to cruelly harass them during their confinement together. On top of having to fight to survive in the frightening environment of prison, inmates receive little support inside as well as outside the facility. This is a crisis that must be solved. In spite of what others may believe, prisoners are human-beings and deserve to be treated with the dignity of one. If the overcrowding of prisons remains to be an issue than "many more prisoners will die or needlessly suffer" (Mayeux).

When an American breaks inexcusable laws they are then required to serve mandatory sentences to assure that dangerous persons are not returned back into society. Mandatory sentences are laws requiring the offender to serve a minimum amount of time for a crime. For example a first time offense for trafficking 1 kilo of heroin results in a mandatory sentence of ten years. A second time offender would receive a twenty year sentence as their failure to grow from the initial penalty is seen as evidence that the person cannot properly function in society. Instead of judging each person’s particular case, legislatures have imposed sentencing policies which seek to “effectively protect the public” (Lawrence and Lyons). They generally apply to repeat delinquents who have had extensive run-ins with the police. They are the policies that allow the justice system to lock away our counties most dangerous individuals; the serial-killers, rapist, terrorists, and gangsters have mandatory minimums that cover their department to put them away for long periods of time. As explained in the NCSL, “Mandatory minimums have been implemented in all types of sentencing schemes” (Lawrence and Lyons) they are claimed to enhance inmate recovery and to effectively prevent criminal behavior.

Mandatory sentencing directly influences the issue of prison overcrowding and is seen as excessive punishment for nonviolent offenders. Minimum penalties mean that a specific case cannot be reviewed and judged by rendering the specific magnitude of the circumstance. Because of these policies, formerly unaggressive individuals typically absorb a violent persona after having experienced the terrors of prison life. Mandatory sentencing laws directly contribute to the overcrowding of prisons since half of America’s prisoners are non-violent lawbreakers who serve a mandatory sentence for their crime without parole. Sadly, laws like this tie the hands of a judge and cause facilities to “now house three times more people with serious mental illness’” (Fellner 34). Psychological problems are a main concern for prisoners, especially those trapped in overcrowded facilities. Inmates often develop anxiety, dementia, stress, insanity and many commit suicide to escape the hell.

The flaws in America’s prison system have only recently been exposed, now that we have determined the source of the problem it is imperative that healthy alternatives to prison are considered and mandatory minimums are eliminated. When prisons are causing more harm than good we must examine their failures and determine what needs to be changed. In the case of America’s prison system mandatory punishments for simple crimes along with over capacitated facilities syndicate to create a series of issues for inmates. Since half the American prison population is comprised of nonviolent drug offenders, it’s clear that certain consequences need to be reduced. Many drug charges can be lessened to fairly discipline them.

#RickyMurphyProductions FailedPrisonSystem U.S.

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