A friend sent me this New York Times editorial regarding electoral districts in Alabama. It seems that federal law requires states to figure out where black and white voters live and then draw district lines so that at least some districts will have a majority of black voters. Alabama allegedly didn’t do this in the right way, leading the righteous New Yorkers to weigh in on how the ignorant Southerners should behave:
It is up to the justices to reaffirm the law and, as the election-law scholar Justin Levitt has written, to stop lawmakers from turning “a refined and sophisticated piece of federal legislation into a cartoon.”
I’m not an expert on the facts of this case and hence can’t comment on the merits of either side, but I love the characterization of sorting Americans by skin color as “a refined and sophisticated piece of federal legislation”.
[The reason I had gotten the article was due to a recent trip that I made to Alabama. I posted a happy photo on Facebook of the $2.99/gallon gasoline price there, prompting a righteous New Yorker friend to respond with “We deprive our people of educational funds by not taxing at the pump, and pass the savings directly to you, the consumer!” (he attended New York State’s public schools, perhaps the world’s worst performing per dollar spent (see this NECS report), and therefore did not learn that gasoline taxes are not used to fund schools (except, oddly enough, in Texas and some other southern states (Tax Foundation)).]
Consider a trip to more convenient Rhode Island where you can be similarly pleased by the sub-$3 gas with which we are also blessed.
A “refined and sophisticated piece of Federal Legislation” would mandate the use of an unbiased technocratic approach to drawing district lines, e.g. Shortest Splitline (http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html).
Me, I want to know why we still have geographical electoral districts anyways. It seems awfully 18th century and agrarian. The decision on who we are able to choose from in an election is at least half the battle. (Note that the recent unrest in Hong Kong is because the state wanted to tell them who the allowed candidates would be). I can think of a number of possible of type of relations with groups of people that are more relevant to me than who happens to live next door.
I think it’s pretty ridiculous that all these years later many of Alabama’s school districts are still under federal court order (from Brown vs. Board of Education, I believe). Huntsville got in trouble with the feds a few years ago because its school districts weren’t sufficiently pleasing to the bureaucrats in D.C.
Americans in general are strangely filled with this kind of “we’re the best” dumb but beliefs that are not connected at all to reality. Maybe this stems from the immediate post-WWII period where the US (and in particular northern US cities) stood at the top of the economic and cultural pyramid (Detroit had the highest per capital income in the US and thus the world in 1960). This really hit home for me on returning from a trip to Shanghai, where I rode a magnetic levitation train to the airport. A goddam fo’ real maglev train like in the comic books, that floats in the air above the rails at 270 mph. When I got to Philly, the train was a museum piece from the ’70s (they have since purchased some new cars from Hyundai in Korea – we no longer know how to make rail cars). The air conditioning, although very noisy, was not working and the train traveled at roughly walking speed. At that moment, it dawned on me that the US had really lost it, but in most American heads, Chinese people still ride in rickshaws (very mind rickshaws were Japanese).
Agree with Izzie. I had much the same experience when visiting Singapore and several Chinese cities a couple of years ago, and upon returning to the US.
I get the same feeling as Izzie L. when I return to the US from Brazil. I actually got it returning from Britain in the 1990s, and the UK is almost as bad (but the thing is, not quite as bad) in terms of underinvestment in infrastructure.
However, to defend the US, if you have an old but functional rail system, like the SEPTA trains in Philly, it makes sense to keep it running as long as possible. Countries building their infrastructure from scratch will always have more advanced stuff.
The indictment of the US is that in many cases we don’t even make this stuff. And even allowing for my usual apology, Americans tend to postpone rehabilitating, repair, and replacement too long, spend absurd amounts of money (much of which I’m convinced disappears into graft) doing so, and you still get some strange gaps in the transportation system such as rail between center cities and airports. And its not just the car culture, since the road networks often are strangely planned, under repaired, under lit, and otherwise showing their age.
>However, to defend the US, if you have an old but functional rail system, like the SEPTA trains in Philly, it makes sense to keep it running as long as possible.
The Chinese do not agree. A few years ago when I was over there, I took a sleeper train on the old line from Beijing to Shanghai ( 10 hrs non-stop for 800 miles). The old line was functional – like an older but well maintained European style train (however each sleeper bunk had a small flat screen TV sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. It played subtitled Hollywood movies, not Communist propaganda). The line had only been fully electrified a few years before (and the Chinese started WAY behind us – they were running steam trains on this line as late as the ’70s). If it was in the US we would never have replaced it. But I could see from the windows of the train that they were building their new high speed (200 mph) bullet train line parallel to the old line. Most of the new line was elevated and they built the whole thing start to finish in two years using 130,000 construction workers at a cost of $40 million/mile. In the US in two years they wouldn’t even be done studying the impact of the new line on frog ponds and native burial grounds and an 800 mile long elevated high speed railroad (think NY to Atlanta) is literally inconceivable – it would cost trillions.
So the idea that we already have infrastructure is not an excuse. The infrastructure that we have is long past its useful life. The tunnels under the Hudson are over 100 years old. The people who built these things did not expect that they would have to last for 100+ years. 100 years ago, infrastructure that had been built 40 years before was considered obsolete and was routinely replaced. The builders would be shocked that we are still using their old rusty junk after a century.
So to summarize, in last 40 years the Chinese have gone from steam trains to maglevs and in the last 40 years we have made exactly zero progress (our standard of living has actually fallen).
I was in China last year for 3 months training my co-workers.
I too took the magnetic train, spent each evening in a fancy grant hotel, and visited customers in overbuilt buildings, to name some. I have seen the best-of-the-best starting with the airport the moment I landed in Beijing.
At the same time, I have seen and learned how corrupt their system is: it is easy to get food poisoning, getting care in the hospital is lacking, facing a judge is against your cause, working conditions is terrible, air quality is unbearable, government start projects with little to no consideration to the environment or the people, and I can go on.
Sure China is expanding fast, but so was the US 100 years ago when it was still a “start up” [1]. Give China another 10-20 years and they too will grow-up, and they too will start facing the same challenges the US is facing today.
[1] Many cities, including Boston, had smug problems as little as 80 years ago. Our rivers were poisoned by factories (you could not swim in Boston Charles river as little as 25 years ago). Labor laws were none existing such that a 10 year old would work in a factory for 10 hours a day, etc. But yet, when none-American visited or heard about America, they saw and heard what we see today in China.
Well, in defense of the USA VS other countries … Americans have property rights, and we rightfully make it difficult for the railroads to steal our land.
Also, the bulk of our rail shipping is over rails owned by the Railroads, they are NOT government railroads. And the railroads do a great job of maintaining their lines.
The government does a crappy job of maintenance, because it is more satisfying to legislators to have a new road named after them than to spend money maintaining a road named after some other legislator. West Virginia is my number one example.
Yeah, go to western China and then come tell me how their standard of living is higher. I’ll never understand why the only measure of civilization some people accept is mass transit.
No one said that their standard of living is higher (yet). But I think it’s pretty much undeniable that life has gotten better for the average person in China over the last 40 years (starting from a very low base) while the average American in the last 40 years has seen little or no progress and in some cases (Detroit) marked decline. But we probably still have more billionaires than they do, so there!
>Boston, had smug problems as little as 80 years ago.
I think Boston still has a smug problem. The air is fine though.
It really would seem the best solution would be to rename existing roads after a certain amount of renovation. Then you really just have to make it so roads last long enough to outlast the people that name them originally.
> >Boston, had smug problems as little as 80 years ago.
>
> I think Boston still has a smug problem. The air is fine though.
Beijing: http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/
Boston: http://aqicn.org/city/boston/
This is live data and it is Nov. (things are far worse during the summer). I visited the Great Wall, and even there (being high on a mountain) smog persisted [1] [2].
> No one said that their standard of living is higher (yet). But I think it’s pretty much undeniable that life has gotten better for the average person in China over the last 40 years (starting from a very low base) … …
Yes, it got better, for the top 1% of Chines just like it got better for the top 1% of Americans [3] [4].
You get a whole different perspective if you visit a country as a tourist vs. living their for an income (even for 3 months, like I have). I’m sure a tourist visiting Haiti today will see nothing but greatness.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042537/Pictured-Beijing-loses-battle-smog-Great-Wall-blanketed-pollution-day-Games-begin.html
[2] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-11/yes-you-can-see-chinese-smog-from-space
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jun/07/china-us-how-superpowers-compare-datablog
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-on-the-economic-rise-too-bad-their-quality-of-life-isnt-2011-8
It’s OK to be racist, as long as you are the right kind of racist.
George, Regarding your footnote #4, it links to an article that purports to measure quality of life according to some sort of “life-rating” self evaluation scale. I don’t know what their methodology is, but I think it would be difficult to come up with a scale that could accurately measure and compare “national happiness” between nations and over time. In any case, I don’t see anything in those links about “the 1%”. Wealth in China has penetrated a lot further than the “1%” – for example there are ONE BILLION mobile phone subscribers.
10 years is too short a time frame anyway. You really have to go back 30 or 40 years to understand the vast strides that have been made by the Chinese (greater in the big cities than in the countryside, but even in the countryside there has been a lot of relative progress).
“… gasoline taxes are not used to fund schools …” Well, you can’t say that, really. ALL taxes fund EVERYTHING a state pays for. By allotting certain kinds of taxes to certain “funds” for certain purposes it is just made to look as if taxes had a certain “benign” purpose to shield a particular tax from criticism. This is a piece of clever propaganda and to me you fell for one of these statist righteousness traps as well here. As for sorting people by color this may well foster partisanship and could backfire as you seem to suggest. But in the last analysis this would be better for sociologists and political scientists to first analyze, then decide, then for lawmakers to base election laws on these findings. In as far as this has not happened the legislation may well be “window dressing”.
Izzie,
How much has China advanced on the human rights front? Let’s talk basic rights that we U.S. citizens take for granted every day. Would you care like to renounce your citizenship and become a Chinese citizen??
Comparing China’s “advancements” is like a football team bragging that they went 3-10 instead of 0-13.
I’d rather ride a slower train than be governed by communists.
Strange, I always thought gerrymandering was bad, and gerrymandering by race would be even worse, but this “refined and sophisticated piece of federal legislation”, appears to not only allow it, but forcibly mandate it.
Richard, you are so naive. Modern politics is all about “who-whom” as Lenin said. So it’s ok to do anything, as long as it’s for a good cause.
So gerrymandering, filibusters, discriminating according to race or gender, etc. are not good or bad in themselves – it all depends on who is doing what to whom. If X does Y to Z it is bad, but if Z does Y to X, it might be good, because Z is the right kind of person, perhaps someone who has been the victim of oppression in the past, while X belongs to the oppressor class. Y itself cannot be said to be good or bad until I tell you who is doing Y to whom. Regarding filibusters, for example, there is a long line of New York Times editorials regarding them. It turns out that when Republicans control the Congress, filibusters are essential to preventing the tyranny of the majority and when Democrats control the Senate, filibusters are tools that reactionaries use to thwart the will of the people. It’s like a chef’s knife or a hammer. In the hands of the right person they are tools for creativity but in the hands of the wrong person they are weapons of destruction.