Stiles/Market: Borrowed Time

Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.

We really are nearly done here. I have been thinking about giving up, simply because we are past the point in the book where I expect Mr. Stiles to come up with any arguments that are both good observations and honestly argued. On the other hand, I’ve got this far, and besides I think that Mr. Stiles is representing a certain viewpoint I find interesting in its wrongness. Mostly, he is viewing the market dominance from a socially conservative point of view; I view market dominance from a socially liberal point of view. We are, in a way, bedfellows in this, and if that’s strange, well, then it’s strange.

Anyway, Chapter Six is “Borrowed Time”, which begins with a diatribe about environmentalism. You see, the Market, in its transaction-maximizing greed, is all about short-term thinking, which has led to, oh, you know all this stuff. It’s all true, too, although when it comes to the chart on Global Warming, well, Edward Tufte could eat a handful of fraudulent data and shit a better graph. Look, the projections are through the roof, which proves our point! Pardon me while I throw the book across the room and then go and pick it up. OK, fine. We’re in agreement; the Market is not going to solve problems in the environment. On the other hand, I’m one of them Al Gore technogreens who thinks that massive government-funded academic R&D might just do the trick, and as a side benefit provide jobs and development for even more people, hoorah. Mr. Stiles doesn’t have any faith in that, but then it’s not clear what he does think we can do, other than ignore the Market’s blandishments.

Then, having dispensed with the end of civilization as we know it, he deals with the true threat of the nineties and beyond: Urban Sprawl. Yep, our old enemy urban sprawl, which has blighted the oh for crying out loud I know people were wearing bell-bottom pants last year but it isn’t 1974! Anybody who was writing about city planning and development stopped using the term Urban Sprawl back when Nixon wasn’t a crook. Seriously, there are people who have worked out models of this sort of thing, and Mr. Stiles could have read them and used their vocabulary, if he wanted to be informative. No, thanks. Why not make up your own word: marketecture. I’m getting punchy, aren’t I.

Seriously, this is somebody who thinks that it proves something of some kind that if you walk around the outside perimeter of a shopping mall, there isn’t anything to look at or do. Um, except park. Because he is only talking about the island-in-a-sea-of-cars style of parking lot, and I can’t imagine why he thinks that windows would be at all attractive, or would provide a connection between the shopper and some non-Market-related Nature. Said Nature being, presumably, just the other side of the freeway. Or something.

Look, I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like shopping malls. I don’t like Wal-Mart. OK? I just don’t think that an aesthetic revulsion to either one constitutes social criticism. As it turns out, I think there are plenty of reasons to dislike Wal-Mart without talking about how that shopping experience is disorienting and alienating, because although I am disoriented and alienated in a Wal-Mart, lots of people clearly are not. My own experience ain’t universal, and neither is Mr. Stiles’s. ’s.

So. He says that the myth that the Market is the Will of the People is clearly disproved by sprawl, because “sprawl is not what the people want.” No evidence for this. No survey, no explanation of where he gets this, other than that of course nobody wants to live in sprawl. Perhaps he’s right; I am scarcely a believer in the Market provider theology that says that people only buy what they really want. But I’d warrant that people prefer sprawl to their alternatives which were—what, again?

Second myth exploded by sprawl: The Market Serves the Consumer. At least, Mr. Stiles claims that this is a different myth, and I think it is, to a certain extent. The first is saying that the people aggregate their desires through the Market, and the second is saying that the Market then provides the individuals with what they desire. It’s certainly possible that the compromise that best aggregates the various desires of individuals is the suburb (or the ring, or the exurb) without that compromise actually fulfilling any individual’s complete desire. Mr. Stile’s evidence for the Consumer being failed by the Sprawl market is that “When people go on vacation, they choose to go to national parks and historic districts for a reason: those are places that have been protected from the “free market,” not enabled by it.” And that, Gentle Readers, is why nobody ever goes to Itchy’n’Scratchy land. Or to Boston. That’s why New York is singularly devoid of tourists. People go to Colonial Williamsburg (and Busch Gardens) because they are untouched by market forces. Yep. Again, I’m not really arguing that he’s wrong, just that he doesn’t bother making a sensible argument for his own position.

By the way, in his argument that people could just as well live in nice communities as in Sprawl, he compares a presumably lovely community of forty-nine Wright-styled houses near Columbus, Ohio, which are only another fifty to a hundred thousand dollars more expensive than other nearby homes. And, after all, if you can’t toss in fifty grand to live well, clearly it’s the Market’s fault. And if, you know, you worry that the nice little community might not really accept your lifestyle, well, that’s probably because your degraded lifestyle is part of the problem.

Myth number three: The Individual Pursuit of Economic Self-Interest Leads to Collective Good. This is disproved because, you know, sprawl. And it’s bad, remember? Look, this is a myth, and sprawl is, to a certain extent, a terrific example of how in real life consumers are inevitably fettered by producer choices, and thus accept inferior living conditions than they might otherwise prefer. Or that people think they want one thing, and then get it, and then discover it isn’t what they want; people aren’t really very good at determining their own economic self-interest. In the real world, then, they are as likely to lead to Collective Bafflement as we all wonder what they were thinking, those them that weren’t really us.

Myth four: The Market Liberates the Individual. This is where I think Mr. Stiles has his best point about Sprawl, if he’d only make it. Yes, the Market liberates the individual as compared to some systems, but it’s preposterous to suggest that the individual really has infinite options. Everything is a compromise; the Market constitutes a series of compromises between consumers and producers, and producer-negotiated compromises between consumers and other consumers. If enough people in my town want a Wal-Mart (and they do), I am in no way liberated by that to choose to pay a premium to shop somewhere union-friendly. No, those places are closed. I can’t shop at Caldor, either, or Bradlee’s. I can’t go to the local woodworker in my hometown to get a nice table made, because that fellow works for a national company. And I can’t pick a nice plot of land, in a nice neighborhood of a nice town, and have a house built to my specifications because I can’t afford it. What I might be able to afford is a home built by one of the developers Mr. Stiles excoriates, and frankly I might buy one even if I excoriate them as well. I’m not liberated by that, I’m just living somewhere.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.