The Starvation of the Cities
Galbraith, John Kenneth
THE STARVATION OF THE CITIES by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH THE LAST quarter century, I venture to think, will be known to historians as the years of the economist. And I have little doubt that...
...it smells of scorched rubber and is dirty...
...The record of planners and zoning authorities when they come in conflict with the profit motive is not encouraging...
...And they will need to have much, much more money...
...In the years following World War II we were afflicted by the atavistic doctrine that government services are wasteful, wicked, a manifestation of individual weakness, and a menace to liberty...
...Liberals have sought to increase production by public spending, deliberate government deficits, and tax reduction...
...One reason is that we cannot go on wasting space, a scarce and important asset, as at present...
...None other has been deemed so important...
...The consensus extends from the Communists to the more thoughtful branches of the John Birch Society...
...One of these has been the preoccupation with production...
...The test is what, in the end, people will enjoy most...
...But even here there is a problem...
...It would, it is said, destroy incentives...
...That, generally speaking, accords the largest private return...
...We should help people to participate in the economy...
...Most of these women should not be working...
...Power lines march across the countryside...
...This means that cities must be run by stronger, more imaginative, and, needless to say, intelligent and strictly honest men...
...He wants the mountain to be a public park...
...Those who call for curtailment in public services should never suppose they are being neutral as between the affluent and the less so...
...So does good urban transportation-as the case of Watts has made clear...
...Three-fifths of the children in families headed by women were so classified...
...Other public services-control of water and air pollution, removal of littermust keep pace if private growth is to be tolerable...
...Highways and streets are not primarily a business opportunity...
...Thus we tax the wages of the welfare recipient at rates of 100 per cent or more...
...We should not imagine that our traditional arrangements for guiding or directing land use will be sufficient for the purposes I have mentioned...
...Both have induced a myopia which has kept us from seeing some very great problems which these concerns have left untouched and which in some respects they have made more acute...
...When people were insufficiently fed and clothed and sheltered, economics rightly enjoyed a high priority in social calculation...
...So wires and poles must go underground, although this costs more, and power and communications, as a result, will cost more...
...That is no longer the test...
...On the contrary, it makes this disadvantage more visible and obscene...
...It is that we have for long assumed that nearly everything must be subordinate to economic growth and that the largest possible number of problems must be left to solution by the market...
...Third: It must be evident from this discussion that the city or metropolis is the key unit in the management of environment...
...they would re gard that as leaving it to chance...
...THE PROGRESSIVE Some public services-transportation, manpower training, postal services, research and statistical facilities-must grow if private growth is to continue...
...This is outrageous...
...Such a system of priorities and such wishful thinking can no longer be afforded...
...Most of them are excuses for not thinking about anything so exceedingly plausible...
...Put briefly it is that, with economic growth and rising incomes, the Federal government, through the income and corporation tax, gets the money...
...And there is no antidote for poverty that is quite so certain in its effects as the provision of income...
...To believe we have been doing well in these last two decades is to believe that we have had an adequate rate of economic growth...
...They do not leave things to the market...
...They must have better and much better paid employes...
...But people must have jobs and the community needs the payroll, and production, accordingly, should be wherever the entrepeneur thinks it will be most efficient...
...Yet we now have a welfare system that could not be better designed to destroy incentives if we wanted it that way...
...sary by a higher level of private consumption...
...We have corporations large enough to embrace the tasks of planning...
...We can easily afford a floor income...
...So does good and well located housing...
...Yet others-health services, welfare services, help to the dependent -must grow if there is not to be an appalling contrast between the twobetween private affluence and public squalor...
...Conservatives have not entirely abandoned their faith in balanced budgets, stern law enforcement, and measures to curb the socialist tendencies of the Supreme Court...
...They are primarily places for tranquil movement-and that means the streets on which one goes to where efficiency of movement is also weighed against charm...
...It would cost about twenty billion dollars to bring everyone up to what the Department of HEW considers a reasonable minimum...
...The city cannot remain in the un planned lacunae of our society...
...I have esthetic claims especially in mind...
...But it is held to bring money into the community...
...Colleges and universities, public parks, good and well-paid police, good health services, good public transportation, even clean streets render their greatest service to the poor and especially to the urban poor...
...Private development was threatening a beautiful mountain -and I gather also his view...
...Air and water and landscape must, of course, be protected from pollution...
...And he was right...
...Industry should be not in the most efficient but in the most agreeable locations...
...In a general reaction to man's ancient experience with penury and in a specific reaction to the miseries of the Thirties, we have made the increased output of goods the prime and in some measure the exclusive goal of domestic policy in the United States...
...Second: Effective management of en vironment will require far more effec tive planning and control of land use...
...Cities must grow...
...If they are ugly, that is the price of progress...
...I venture to think that the time has come to reexamine these good Calvinist tenets which also fit so well with our ideas of what saves money...
...quite a few have come to imagine that no other goal is possible...
...Peter has been asking new arrivals only what they have done to increase the Gross National Product...
...we should help them to help themselves...
...without it no cure for any December, 1966 problem is possible...
...I incline to the belief that for good urban, suburban, and adjacent land use we will need to resort increasingly to public ownership of the strategic land areas...
...Once again economic priority cannot be granted...
...Public services, we need also to bear in mind, are progressive in their effects...
...They already hav: the most important tasks and the least money...
...The successful defense and development of our urban and related living space require progress on three broad fronts...
...My approach, so far, to the problem of poverty is strongly traditional...
...And there is no reason to believe that an unplanned metropolis will have any better chance of beauty than an unmade bed...
...It is not so certain that it can be accommodated to social and esthetic goals...
...This means that city government must be stronger, by far, than in the past...
...And I have little doubt that the crisis of the cities is the consequence of the two great preoccupations of the members of my profession in this period...
...We note with some surprise that we are engaged III planning...
...But mostly this is what a good edu cational system accomplishes...
...And we take away the income if the recipient gets the smallest job...
...Economic growth does not provide the public services which mark our progress toward a more civilized existence and which also are made necesJOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, a former U.S...
...It was also right for the stage in social development that accorded economic priority...
...Highways and roadsides are made hideous by outdoor advertising and vendors of remarkably unattractive merchandise...
...Nor does it take a political genius to see the prospect here for some bloodletting...
...His books include "The Affluent Society," "American Capitalism," "The Scotch," and "The liberal Hour...
...Thus they have no share in improving well-being...
...But we do not want all people with inadequate income to work...
...It is not so much more than we will spend next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam...
...There is no single cure for poverty...
...Idleness we do know to be demoralizing...
...To make matters worse, quite a few people have persuaded themselves that out of the chaos of economic motivation will come some tolerable result-some manifestation of unplanned but functional beauty...
...So does effective action against racial discrimination...
...It should not be claimed that the eventual cost of all this will be less-that it will pay in the long run...
...It is said this woulc;l keep people out 'Herblock in The Washington Post of the labor market...
...Economic growth does not help those who, because of careless choice of birthplace or parents, poor early environment, absence of educational opportunity, poor health, mental retardation, racial discrimination, or old age are unable to participate fully in the economy and in its gains...
...Admittedly these problems grow more acute the farther one gets from home...
...So is our super sonic travel-and it is planned for us whether we want it or not...
...First: We must explicitly assert the claims of the community against those of economics...
...In the years of the farm crisis it did this for agriculture...
...Why is leisure so uniformly bad for the poor and so uniformly beneficent for the moderately well-to-do...
...Increasing national income bene fits only those who participate in the economy and thus establish a claim on the income it produces...
...President John son observed a year ago, "Education will not cure all the problems of a society...
...In fact, the modern city is one of the least planned parts of our economy...
...That is economic progress...
...A community that provides really superior schools from the earliest ages and allows the pupil to go just as far at the public expense as his abilities allow will not have many people that are poor...
...In 1964, of 14.8 million children classified by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as poor, nearly a third were in families headed by a woman...
...So is our automobile production...
...We give the needy income...
...Good public services and sound en vironmental conditions promote such participation...
...The cities, on everything from traffic to air pollution, get the problems...
...So are our weapons systems...
...THE STARVATION OF THE CITIES by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH THE LAST quarter century, I venture to think, will be known to historians as the years of the economist...
...The other has been the preoccupation with the market...
...in Washington, D.C...
...Good health services in crease the number of people who are physically and mentally able to partici pate in the economy...
...Our space voyages are planned...
...Ambassador to India, is Paul M. Warburg professor of economics at Harvard...
...We have, I hope, recovered from this lapse...
...In these years of the urban crisis we want a system that directs funds not by some formula to the country at large but to the points of greatest need...
...So does good law enforcement...
...There has been a difference only on methods...
...This is a third less than the amount by which personal income rose last year...
...The arguments against this solution are numerous...
...I am specifically encouraged by a letter from Barry Goldwater appealing for support for the purchase of some'park land in Arizona...
...This is more acutely the case when the effects of population growth and urbanization are added...
...If the streets are a jungle of poles, that is because people want telephones and should have them as cheaply as possible...
...The problem of the modern city is partly that the age of economics, with its preoccupation with private production, has denied it the public services it needs...
...Other goals are rightly advanced...
...And they exercise measurable influence over suppliers and customers...
...Somewhat exceptionally, and the modern metropolis is such an exception, we find market incentives inadequate...
...But as we move on to lower orders of need-the wants that can be stimulated only by singing commercials--economics loses any natural claim to priority...
...Another failure consists in the people who are left behind by economic ad vance...
...A sizable mi nority cannot or do not so participate...
...The Starvation of the Cities" is adapted from Mr...
...There are few college graduates and not many high school graduates who are in the poverty brackets...
...To transfer income maintenance to the Federal government-to free big city budgets of a large share of their welfare payments-would be an enormous step in exactly the right direction...
...Accordingly, questions of beauty, livability...
...even health have been of secondary importance...
...So are most of the other requisites of an industrial civilization...
...Private land ownership is a natural way of according economic priority...
...The problem of environment is surprisingly simple-and universal...
...This starvation cannot continue...
...In each case economic goals have been accorded an implicit priority...
...The best way would be for the Federal government to assume the cost of providing a mini mum income and thus to free the cities from the present burden of welfare costs...
...If a structure, facility, or design is cheaper, more convenient or more efficient, it is no longer decisively in its favor...
...In recent years we have come to recognize a major defect in the fiscal system of the United States...
...It is our common assumption that, generally speaking, the response to market incentives takes care of our needs...
...Here we must have planning...
...But we should not, in our sophistication, be afraid of the obvious...
...Galbraith's recent keynote address at a conference of Urban America Inc...
...So is our telephone service...
...And it creates massive new ones...
...They assume control of the prices at which they buy and sell...
...Though economic growth is a condition precedent for solving most social problems, there are many it does not solve...
...A factory is not a pleasant or attractive neighbor...
...These are the large cItIes...
...It is partly that the same age, with its mistaken assumption of the rule of the market, has denied it the planning that is commonplace elsewhere in the economy...
...And economic growth, we have learned, does not solve the problems of our environment and especially of our urban environment...
...That is good, whereas merely to help them is bad...
...I do not need to argue the depth of our preoccupation, in these last twentyfive years, with the production of goods...
...Even if planning and con trol lead to deliberation and thus to delay, we should welcome them...
...Various ways have been suggested in these last years for correcting this anomaly-most of them calling for sub ventions by the Federal government to the states and cities...
...If it is ugly or otherwise offensive, it is probable that it should be rejected...
...We must settle on goals-an overall architectural framework, a plan for streets and parks, a plan for land use, specification of needed utilities-which are part of a predetermined design...
...Agreement that the main task is to increase output has united Democrats and Republicans, liberals, conservatives, and ~ven modern conservatives...
...Those who are now calling, so righteously, for shelving the Great Society because of the Vietnam war are asking that the well-to-do taxpayer, whose income is at an all-time high, be protected at the expense of aid to schools in depressed areas, the Job Corps, low income housing, and youth employment...
...What should we do...
...We need now to consider the one prompt and effective solution for poverty, which is to provide everyone with a minimum income...
...On the contrary, it makes these problems infinitely more urgent...
...It is imperative that we maintain a sound balance between the private and public sectors of the economy...
...But people need power, and that too should be cheap, so instead of oldfashioned trees they have new ones of steel...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
