https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

The excellent series on Lyndon Johnson by the same author as The Power Broker

The Three Body Problem series

The Power Broker is also excellent and absolutely worth reading, but in my view not quite as good as the LBJ series.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao is another tremendous account of the excesses of power.

I am currently reading "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro and its awesome so far (~150 pgs in). Just finished Zinn's "A people's history". Next up is "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Power of Babel" by John McWhorter.

This is deeper than partisanship, one party rule, pay for play.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker is one primer for how true power works in our system of government.

I'm still clueless what the remedies are, indeed if there are any.

I actually haven't read his LBJ series yet, and I'm really looking forward to it.

You didn't happen to read Caro's work on LBJ, did you? It's surprising your class would use his work twice, but the guy is pretty fascinated with the sorts of powerful people that this topic of study would focus on as case studies.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

about Robert Moses, another legendary NYC figure who fundamentally changed the shape of the city.

That said, I listened to the Power Broker, and fully recommend it.

Reading currently: "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert Caro. Absolutely loving it.

That, and my usual climbing books.

If you're finding you're learning a lot through that book, I'd also recommend Caro's series on LBJ. It's utterly fascinating and a vivid analysis of political public power.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

The Power Broker, Robert Caro

Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.

At first glance, it's a 1,000-page, detailed biography of a (in)famously effective city planner Robert Moses. At its core, it's a lucid examination of the anatomy of power. It has completely changed how I think about power, where it comes from (whether it's at work or in the greater market/world) and how it is retained and lost.

It's also a great antithesis to junk-food journalism and online reading that we've become addicted to. Caro's research is thorough and his writing is inspiring.

One area that appears to have come under attack is Caro's accusation that Moses deliberately lowered the bridge heights: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...

I found it particularly amusing how Moses—"the best bill drafter in Albany" as Caro dubs him—was able to write bills that gave him far more power than the politicians who passed them expected. Indeed one part where he referenced a niche definition of appropriation in an old 19th century bill felt almost akin to return oriented programming!

Jump to 'The Power Broker' instead. Now that's an interesting read.

Even his detractors [0] call HPMOR a "cracking good read".

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Political_Ord...

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York By Robert Caro

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

Antifragile: This book has informed many decisions I have made recently. It is insightful, entertaining, and in its concern for human choices manages to send a beautiful message about nature and reality.

The Power Broker: I listened to this via audiobook and I highly recommend the experience. It's a large dose of history and a fascinating exploration of city politics and, as its name implies, power. And I learned a lot about New York!

Lonesome Dove: I hadn't read any fictional "westerns" and this came well recommended. I loved it. Listening to it while backpacking and on a road trip was extremely rewarding.

Man's Search For Meaning: Extremely powerful and potentially life changing. It was both cathartic and therapeutic for me, and has affected how I live my life.

The Lathe of Heaven: Incredibly enjoyable dystopian future fiction. It came recommended via the "HN reading list" released some number of months ago, and I liked it a lot.

The Fellowship of the Ring: I had started this book in high school but hadn't finished it for some reason. I picked it up again, and I'm glad I did. It is a gem, and there's good reason that it has become a part of our cultural bedrock. Its exploration of purpose, challenge, and choice is quite moving.

Aaron Swartz' review of the book:

"I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book."

Caro, a Pulitzer winning journalist, is a wiz at writing, so you'll enjoy each page. But more importantly, even though Robert Moses was a bad buy, you don't have to be bad to learn to get what you want, in an organization, by ignoring superficial power structures, and focusing on the real ones.

Plus you'll learn a ton about how NYC was built out in the depression.

>I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2009

Also quoted in this longer article on transparency in government: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk

I finished the Audible recording a few months ago, and it lived up to its reputation as perhaps the great modern biography.

* The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert Caro)

* Options Volatility & Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques (Sheldon Natenberg)

* Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Edwin Burrows & Mike Wallace)

* Egil's Saga (anonymous)

* Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

If you have any interest in the history of New York City at all, or if you're interested in seeing an incredibly well done character study, read "The Power Broker." Probably the best biography I've ever read... Ron Chernow's biographies of J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Hamilton are all great, but Caro's on Robert Moses blew me away.

Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand - for the concepts of deep time and the long now; appreciating a sense of how we experience time and our place in history
[See also: Time and the Art of Living]

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott - creative parable that's very helpful for conceptualizing abstract concepts of topology and higher dimensions

Thinking in Systems, A Primer, by Donella Meadows - great introduction to systems thinking, which is a useful lens for appreciating the complexity of all sorts of complex phenomena

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - great work of urban design, useful framework for looking at design systems and how pieces fit together on different scales
[See also: Death and Life of Great American Cities]

Oulipo - A Primer of Potential Literature - nice introduction to the Oulipo and ideas of constraint as creative / poetic device
[See also: Exercises in Style; Eunoia]

Impro, by Keith Johnstone - great primer on improvisation, really made me appreciate its impacts beyond just the theater, for example the importance of status in social relations

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro - unbeatably rich and compelling look at how power and politics actually work, for better (power gets things done) and for worse (power blinds and corrupts)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard - beautiful, meticulously observed study of the natural world close at hand; made me appreciate the power of looking deeply and persistently

Le Ton beau de Marot, by Douglas Hofstadter - remarkable exploration of language and translation, in all its magic and complexity…both deeply personal and deeply researched, a must-read for lovers of language

The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel - turned me on to the various lenses through which we can conceive of and appreciate libraries; their vast power and potential

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville - for really hammering home the grand, powerful potential of great literature and well-wrought language
[ See also: Don Quixote; Infinite Jest]

It looks too long, the first question that comes to my mind on this sleepy day is whether this is worth it. A lot of these tend to be self wound articles, but I start reading and interest develops slowly but surely. Before you know it I am through reading and starting to wonder, how did I read this as a whole and how great this was. May be this was even small and some more of it wouldn't have hurt.

Thank you for posting this. This article gives great insight into the thought and the narrative behind these great authors. I would be looking forward to reading The Power Broker and the LBJ series. As always, reading about Kurt or his work is always fascinating.

BTW, another great book on urban themes is City: Urbanism and its End, by Doug Rae.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson - the story of how LBJ rigged the 1948 election for Senate and rose to power

Here's an excerpt from an interview with the author of both books:

> During all these years I did come to understand stuff about power that I wanted people to know. You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt. Power can cleanse. When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.

Thanks for the blog recommendation!

The sad thing is the state of affairs can be used by any party that for any reason wants to fight anything it want (with money): just leverage environmental protection laws even when it's intellectually dishonest to do so, and win by miring the process in hundreds of millions of dollars of total waste.

Of course that's just the abuse of law/process side of things. Separately we've seen the loss of expertise in house within governments and the rise of consulting firms required to do everything.

There was a time when cities built their own transit! Now you have to hire expensive Consultants from Europe or Asia because the idea that people could figure this out on their own with their civil engineering degrees and experience in adjascent fields is simply verboten.

If anyone hasn't read The Power Broker about the rise of Robert Moses, it's a great read: You can disagree with much of his methodology/power hunger/abuse of people, and you can certainly disagree with what he built, but what he did demonstrate is that the people with the plans who can execute while everyone else is talking about grand dreams can GET STUFF DONE.

We need more people in government who actually have a plan, that are actually willing to take bets on people, to hire high-quality people, to see hard projects through, not to punt everything off to consulting firms.

Let's be honest, consulting firms never feel ownership. Their deliverable is that beautiful PDF. No PDF ever built any grand infrastructure.

And the Golden Gate Bridge, and the New York subway, never even had the glorious joy of benefiting from either PDF or PowerPoint.

Let's admit it, when it comes to building infrastructure we've completely failed and we need to have a serious wake-up call.

Sadly most people have no idea how bad it has gotten because when they spend a hundred million dollars collectively deciding whether to build a power line in the San Diego desert, they barely notice that they're paying an incremental portion of a penny more for every kilowatt-hour of power.

Practical Primers on Political Power - now I think of EVERYTHING in terms of selectorate theory and cartels

> except in that it often points out that authoritarian governments are free to ignore any feedback, feedback of the kind that incentive schemes are usually designed to generate.

A view of the modern state is made more accurate if one views the state as an entity desirous to ignore feedback from citizens, rather than actively responsive to citizen opinion.

Robert Caro has written amazing books. I'm half-way through this two-hour dialog titled "On Power"[0].

He says he essentially stumbled into writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York[1] after observing how Robert Moses (an unelected bureaucrat) completely controlled huge "democratic" institutions.

I mention the books because they highlight some of the means and ways in which the state encourages it's people to think it is responsive to them, but this responsiveness is a slight of hand, even as plenty of participants in the system (both as citizens and as representatives of the state) earnestly believe that the state is responsive to public input.

[0]: https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Power-Audiobook/B06XNKVH16

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker

I can't help but notice parallels with Moses and Hoover, with the 'politicians' they decry, the ones they seem to celebrate, their sympathy for the masses crossed with personal antipathy toward individuals. I can't help but consider lessons this has for our current crisis, I can't help but think about how Truman relatively successfully navigated the assumption of the presidency from Roosevelt after being frozen out and manages to not totally bungle the end of WWII. I can't help but note how some people are who are completely effective in one time requiring action end up totally screwing up in others.

All that to say, I think we can learn lessons from Hoover, from the past, and apply them to our current situation and the future.

1) Sometimes, the egomaniacl jerk gets great things done. Later, they can use the power to screw up massively.
2) History lets us review responses to crisises and point out how they could have been done better, but we probably won't apply any of those lesssons to our own crisis.
3) Demonstrably compentent people can have demonstrably incompetent responses to crisises - demonstrably incompetent people rarely have compentent ones.

Johnson is...different the books made me uncomfortable, as LBJ is both loathsome and inspired, visionary and corrupt. It’s hard to like someone literally hiring folks to bring suitcases of corrupt money back to his home... but then again he was able to make civil rights a reality, in the face of the racist establishment that controlled the Senate.

Let the travelers decide for themselves how to spend their most precious resource: time.

Read Caro's The Power Broker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

TLDR:

Post WWII, NYC's Robert Moses figured out how to exfiltrate money from the public (subways, buses, rail, autos) and leverage that cash flow to finance his major works projects, thereby funneling capital back to bankers, realtors, developers, contractors. Every other jurisdiction followed his lead. Resulting in today's terrible land use and congestion.

Sure, Moses had help. But he was the criminal mastermind. He orchestrated the wholesale theft of our time, our money, our precious open spaces, our health, our homes, our natural resources.

We have no moral obligation to keep paying for his crimes.

On "The Power Broker," Swartz says:

"I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book."

[0] - https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1

The Power Broker would be my recommended reading.

'Raised on Youtube' might be imperfect on some parameter or another but it's not 'misleading' any more than, I dunno, 'The Power Broker' is a misleading title of a biography. The title it's been replaced with is literalist butchery.

I bought the paper book after reading another one of these threads on HN, but it's so large that it makes my hands sore to hold it (or my neck if I lay it on my lap to read). Since there's no ebook version, I wonder how you all manage to get through a tome like this.

Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World by Rene Girard explores through dialogues his theory of mimesis. Barely have made a dent into it and so am not sure if I’d recommend it yet but it’s had polarizing reviews.

Politics is nasty. Full stop.

My only TIL that I can offer: Everyone should run for office. Any office. At least once.

Once you decide to play the game -- play to win -- every thing makes perfect sense.

Not to excuse it, in any way. It's just that folk theories aren't even wrong. So people get worked up about the wrong stuff. There will always be devils doing bad stuff.

What should we do about them?

(Haven't started Caro's LBJ biographies yet. I've gleaned that LBJ makes Moses look like a middleweight.)

Nobody has ever captured the nature of power on an individual level to the depth and breadth that Caro did on this book. (except perhaps his epic treatment of Lyndon Johnson)

Over something like 1,100 pages you get to track the career of an aspiring reformer as he transitions to skilled and trusted government official, to someone who manages to grow to the point that he is more powerful than the Governor and Mayor of New York during NY's economic peak -- despite never having been elected to anything. Then you get to witness his decline and ultimate fall.

This is probably the best biography ever written. It may take you six months to read, but its time well spent.

After that part, it's about applying her principles to today's issues beyond cities to entrepreneurship versus large corporations and red tape and how to serve people and their lives.

The article didn't apply her principles to the environment, where I find a relevant parallel: people in traffic jams felt, "if only this road had another lane, then I wouldn't have to endure this traffic jam" so we built more lanes and roads. After generations, people learned that empty roads helped only temporarily, eventually leading people to use them and create more traffic than before the expansion.

The parallel is that people see pollution today and think, "if only a new technology reduced this pollution, I wouldn't have to breathe this polluted air / endure sea levels rising / etc" so we develop new technologies. We haven't yet learned the parallel with roads that more technologies help only temporarily, eventually leading people to use them and create more pollution.

I've overstated things to simplify, but there are shades of gray. We need some roads, but more isn't necessarily better and short-term solutions often worsen the situation. Same with technology, as Jevon's paradox, among other effects, illustrates.

In complex systems, if you don't address the leverage point of the beliefs and goals of the system, changing elements in it rarely changes the system, no matter how wonderful the new technology seems, be it LED lighting, nuclear power, carbon sequestration, space travel, and so on. In a system based on beliefs that we can expand out of any problem, they'll make the system expand faster. In a system designed to serve people, new technologies would help serve people better, but we don't live in such a system yet.

We could use an environmental Jane Jacobs.

I tried to read some books on auditing and financial accounting. Way over my head. I need the ELI5 layperson versions.

Am a recovering activist. So much (wasted) effort. I did learn two heuristics.

#1

Talk About Quality

"Fraud" is a convo full stop. Don't talk about fraud, theft, grift.

Mistakes are indistinguishable from fraud. And combatting both has the same remedies.

So only talk about quality, confidence, reducing errors, etc. Nice safe blame-free neutral 90/10 language that gets everyone on board and is less likely to trigger overt opposition. (Covert sabotage will continue, because the grifters won't be fooled by your Aw Schucks demeanor.)

#2

Follow The Money

Per quote from The Wire upthread. I learned from Bev Harris (Black Box Voting) that (mis)appropriations is a huge threat to election integrity. And in many places, that's the sheriff's office. They don't care about machines, voting, elections. For them it's just about the grift.

Twenty years later, I still don't have a clue how to mitigate this. One half-baked notion was to advocate for solutions that both more in line with the public interest and had more potential for grift. Another is, since scandal is evergreen topic, is feed info to opposition. That didn't work at all against Bob Moses (The Power Broker), so probably not a great plan.

Robert Moses built large parts of New York City, including a lot of its roads/infrastructure. When Moses was growing up, cars were very new, and a luxury item. Driving through a scenic route was a very fun experience for most people. Therefore, Moses built the roads to emphasize these scenic routes.

This later became problematic, as he kept doing it well into the age when being in a car was considered a nuisance, rather than an attraction.

Lately I've been reading Foucault and I find that many pieces of The Power Broker are incredible examples of Foucault's post-modern/post-structuralist theory of power: power relations as a sort-of amorphous "lines of force" that move between people through society, occasionally emergent as structural domination/power, rather than as some sort of antagonistic relationship between rulers and ruled. This conception of power makes sense when you consider Moses operating at an intersection between (and attempting to leverage) many different "fields" of powers: government politicians, wealthy private estates, union high-ups, the news media, etc.

I got a response saying that they would love to do an ebook version of TPB, but Robert Caro won't allow them to do that - he even refuses to submit his writing digitally, instead writing everything by hand, then typing it up with a typewriter, which is then retyped by a typist at the publisher into Word.

Another good one that I got recently is Arabia Felix [1], a rather obscure Danish book from 1962 from NYRB. A minor classic.

I'm not a war buff by any stretch, but I can recommend Antony Beevor. Sometimes his books devolve into exhausting, never-ending play-by-plays of tank and troop movements, but both Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin [3] and were fascinating just for his ability to conjure up the time and place. Inside the Third Reich was similarly interesting, even it's known to be a flawed narrative.

I also recently read Bad Blood, about Theranos, which was excellent. Literary-wise not quite on the same level, though.

Got any recommendations?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/06/17/531929925/in-the-refrains-of-...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-B...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Berlin-1945-Antony-Beevor

The biographer Robert Caro paints a maddening picture of how Robert Moses decimated communities in NYC with his highways with effects that live on today. Moses did so with a disregard and even callousness for freeway placement, even when it would have made more sense not to have it run through a vibrant community.

The Power Broker is the best book I read last year. It is enlightening, frustrating, and at times enraging. It is 1344 pages. I recommend the audioboook.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker

However, I think the tweetstorm misses that it is poor and middle class people who are most hurt today by inadequate transit, and one thing that would have an enormous effect is an order of magnitude drop in tunneling costs.

My other post <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225045> links to a look at why the Second Avenue Subway's $2.2 B per km costs are 20x higher than other cities. A technology that drops tunnelling costs will be great for the poor, and thankfully, I do not believe the news media (with all of its flaws) would ever allow someone like Moses (or Musk) to operate the way he did today.

"This summer, as New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s beach towns and parks on the Southern State Parkway, they’ll pass beneath a series of overpass bridges made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."

This article says that the story is not necessarily that straightforward, but this does speak directly to your comment.

He gave a talk out here in Seattle a long time ago and tailored it to the audience with stories about Scoop Jackson, a long time senator. People in the audience loved it. I just wish there were younger people there -- the books do look daunting and the subject matter appears to be dry but they are fascinating.

Find some major problems with the software development and complain about them strongly to upper management and offer a solution.

Learn to communicate with busy people. Use short emails. Lead with the most important point in verbal and written communication. Learn to tailor your communication to your audiance. Gain the trust and respect of everyone you can. People need to look at you and think, "this guy's/gal's got it." Some will like you and others will not. If you haven't been promoted after doing all this, then straight out ask to be a manager. If you don't get it, leave and do it over.

Also, read The Power Broker [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

If it is better, it would be because:

(1) people are 'better' now - probably not true

(2) the preventative measures in place now are better - but we know the lengths that these people will go to perpetuate corruption, so I just assume they've probably found other roundabout ways.

The same goes for elections. LBJ bringing thousands of Mexicans over the border to vote in Texas elections and eventually stealing the his seat in the Senate. Why should we believe that there isn't similar violations happening now? I personally doubt the extent of corruption has changed at all, only that it is more sophisticated. I have no confidence in public elections or the sanctity of government as a result.
I'm completely disillusioned and I have no intention of participating at all.

FWIW, I'm not from the USA, but I believe the same principle holds across the world

Yes, that's where the phenomenon becomes obvious. I note that none of your titles are business books, for example. ;)

[Pertinent side question: How do I know that? I haven't read any of the books. Though I probably should, because your reading list sounds awesome.]

Which is not to say that the titles of all those books weren't chosen primarily to enhance sales. It's just that the target customer was a nonfiction reader, a person who is probably more likely to buy a book if it has a descriptive, serious-sounding, nonfiction-type title. Perhaps the median nonfiction reader is much more likely to pick up The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York than Architect: Robert Moses and his Largely Discredited Ideas, or Robert Moses: A Musical Homage to an Architectural Juggernaut. (Though the last one might turn out to be a great farce!)

Have you noticed that every nonfiction book has a colon in the title? Even my fake book titles have that stupid colon -- it's like a tic, I can't get rid of it! Why is that, do you think? I think it's because the titles are designed for marketing: The initial title is short, and memorable, and evocative like a tiny little poem, kind of like a good domain name should be. The part after the colon tells you what the book is actually about, because the first title is so busy being pretty that it doesn't have time to tell you anything.

- Wikipedia has a good survey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City_(19...

- later chapters of "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro

- Google around about the shift of shipping from Brooklyn/Manhattan to Newark

- Chekc out the Lindsay administration and crippling transit and sanitation strikes

- finance companies fled NYC from the 60s till the 80s. I read a good book in college about the reasons that I'll try to find.

The 1970s were a terrible time for NYC -- over a million people left. If you have ever driven up the Major Deegan expressway in the Bronx towards Yonkers/White Plains, the level of decay was shocking. When I was a kid in the 80s, easily 80% of the buildings were vacant, with broken windows and druggies in plain sight. I watched a car get stripped before my eyes while stopped at a light two blocks from Yankee stadium.

Is it though? I live in Boston, home of the notorious* Big Dig[1]. While particularly egregious, it's far from the only large-scale civil engineering project that's gone off the rails. In fact, I'd argue that until fairly recently, many more public works projects shared the "surprise factor" of software projects. I'd recommend Caro's "The Power Broker"[2] for a fascinating history of NY-area public works (among other things - great book all around), including how much of that process was about adapting the plan to new things the builders were learning along the way ("oh, turns out that soil is completely different than we planned...")

That's not to say that there aren't particular features that make software engineering its own special snowflake - as there are meaningful differences between how civil, structural, mechanical, etc. engineers operate. But spend some time in another engineering organization and you'll find it's different, but not as different as you think it is.

(And FWIW, even civil engineers sometimes follow "agile" concepts - a company I once worked for was contracted to design a highway, and even after the construction started, engineers were "embedded" with the builders to make on-the-fly adjustments based on the environmental factors they discovered throughout the process... I wish I could find their project write-up, but it was a while ago and the company has long since been gobbled up by a bigger company).

* As a (subjective) kicker, I'd add that the Big Dig, over-time and over-budget as it was, was ultimately quite worth it... much like many software projects!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/03947...

> In many cases, these huge, multi-decade redevelopment projects bring new life to part of a city, but sometimes we can't foresee what we're going to lose.

This is disingenuous, and shows how little the author understands about the history of American urban development. In many cases the purpose of redevelopment in US urban environments has been to push out people of color. To say that gentrification was an unforeseen consequence of redevelopment is just wrong. Gentrification is often the entire point of redevelopment by city officials.

They should read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs or read The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

To be completely serious, this article reads like someone had some ideas about urban development, did absolutely no research, and then talked about those ideas like they were some kind of expert. I don't understand why the ACM would publish something like this.

1) The Power Broker - About Robert Moses, the most powerful city planner in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s. Great if you're interested in city planning, how people gain and exercise power, and the real politik of government.

2) The Jungle - Remembered as an exposé of meatpacking, but really more than that. Phenomenal story about early 20th immigrants to Chicago trying to take part in the American Dream but struggling to survive. Surprisingly relevant today.

3) The Big Con - Fascinating look at con artists in the first half of the 20th century.

And yes, Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is definitely a must-read if you're interested in urban areas.

On a similar note, I'd argue that if you read The Power Broker, you get a whole new level of understand of why New York City is the way it is.

Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.

Caro's The Power Broker details how Bob Moses was the agent of the powerful forces behind the automobile.

The only stakeholders not represented, or even consulted, were the average taxpaying citizens. Any dissent was ruthlessly squashed.

Urban planners and normal citizens have been critical since the very beginning. The debate really picked up after WWII, with the resumption of peace time economy.

By the 50s, the experts had enough real world data -- more highways creates more congestion, focus on cars to the exclusion of mass transit physically cannot work -- to invalidate the entire premise.

Eighty years later, here we are still clutching at pearls, trying not to faint. As if there's anything left to debate.

I shouldn't be shocked. But somehow I still am. Or maybe just disappointed.

“Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!'... [...]

Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason.

Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous.

For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.”

Also detailed in this book is destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities by the common policy of appropriating their land for roads and highways. The lasting effects of these practices is plainly obvious in so many US cities and will not go away without active efforts to reverse the damage. In comparison, disabled-friendly infrastructure is frankly more easily solved.

It just occurred to me that my hangup might be fiction vs non-fiction. Fictional readings might bug me in the same way the cartoons of Garfield and Dilbert bug me; their voices don't align with my imagination.

I've powered thru a handful of biographies (eg Robert Caro's The Power Broker) and got a lot out of them. I only cringed when someone affects a different voice for written quotes.

Whereas each time I tried a Mark Twain audio book, I wanted to kick a puppy.

I used to read a lot to my kid (and other relations). But I really didn't like those books on tape. (Maybe because no one ever read to me, sniff.)

Thanks again. I love this (being uncomfortable). Now I'm gonna push myself to finish some fiction audiobooks. See if I can get into the proper frame of mind.

Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management.

For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)?

The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours.

Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around.

(A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare.

(B) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

But non-auto-biographies!! So many history books are the high level "this happened in that year caused by whatever-just-trust-me" while biographies dig into how the world actually worked. Especially if they're set in the last few hundred years and not the last 30, there's a tremendous amount of primary sources to base the writing without over politicizing the topic. What kind of history won't have a survivor bias? Is this an excuse to ignore history entirely?

> I also try to read as many anti-biographies, i.e. people who don’t like the subject

That's introducing it's own bias. But you might as well read The Power Broker if you're going that direction. Fascinating story.

Moses preferred roads over all other transport mechanisms, and was shockingly effective in his ability to basically make everyone do what he wanted (even if it involved clearly terrible ideas). He was, though, responsible for many New York state and city parks, and really got into road building as a method to get people out to the new parks he was creating.

Now, his definition of "park" as a very developed area with landscaping, sports facilities, playgrounds, etc. with all previous plant life getting killed with a bulldozer is another matter that hasn't really held up over time, but I'm digressing at this point. The Power Broker really is a fascinating read.

A lot of my interest in this area comes from a life-long appreciation of (non-pejorative) anarchist philosophical thought. It's a lot harder to build organization from the bottom-up, but top-down organization loses so much implicit knowledge and context that it seems reasonable to investigate the former approach.

I'll check out your newsletter, it seems so interesting, thank you for linking. :)

This is also a great blog that frequently discusses urban planning themes: https://granolashotgun.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/nyregion/robert-caro-arch...

It was very important to him that they be accessible for further research:

Louise Mirrer, the president of the historical society, made a generous offer and said a few magical words that clinched the deal. At a dinner with the Caros a few nights later, she elaborated: The papers would be processed quickly, made part of a permanent, rotating Caro exhibit and be easily available to future scholars in a dedicated study area — a stipulation dear to a man who had been told too often in his research that so-and-so’s papers were unavailable.

I can't begin to imagine how much treasure there is to be found in there. Each of his mini-biographies (readers will know what I'm talking about)* probably have a book each worth of interviews and research behind them. I read once that he lamented the lack of any good books on Robert Moses's mentor, Belle Moskowitz; he might posthumously bring such a work to light. He had to cut his chapter on Jane Jacobs from the Power Broker. If that didn't make it, I can only imagine what else didn't. He's conducted thousands of interviews in his lifetime. There are large swaths of the history of government in 20th-Century America that will be preserved thanks to him.

* For the record, my personal favorite is Al Smith.

Lots of downvotes but this is actually a decent question. Why is the toll so high, and why don't east river bridges have tolls at all?

The answer has to do with the bridge construction process and ownership. The George Washington bridge was built by a "public authority": The Port Authority of NY & NJ.

As explained in Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the concept of a public authority was to allow a public entity to issue bonds for and manage the construction of a particular project, such as a bridge, with intent to turn the project over to the city once paid off. Other bridges were constructed via authorities that are now owned by the city, and the city chooses not to toll them.

Robert Moses, master governmental hacker of New York State, manipulated the concept of the authority by "renewing" bond issues the year before they expire, giving a single authority (in his case, the Triborough Bridge Authority) large amounts of money, which he then used to complete more public works projects, which could issue more bonds, and so on. The result is that this authority never dissolved, the works were never handed over to the city, and the tolls remain high, basically subsidizing the authority's other projects. He effectively created a public body with huge amounts of money that he could spend however he pleased, resulting in travesties like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The Port Authority of NY & NJ, who collects the extortionate $15 toll on the GW Bridge, runs every bridge between NY and NJ, every airport, the PATH train, the airport Airtrains, and One World Trade Center, among other investments.

Effectively, the extremely high GW bridge tolls are subsidizing the PA of NY/NJ's massive losing bet on 1 WTC. And that's why it costs $15.

The reason this is so incredulous is that it used to happen all the time, at least based on Caro's book "The Power Broker" about Robert Moses. Randomly tearing down neighborhoods to build highways, housing projects, etc. In my hometown of Albany, two neighborhoods were entirely torn down in the 70s to build the massive "Rockefeller Plaza."

The only reason planners no longer do this is that the outrage was so immense in the wake of people like Moses. But it's not "unfathomable", it's history.

I care about helping others, but I don't think the vehicle for doing so is a mega-sized bureaucracy that sits on a former marshland a half-continent away from me. The proper place for help others is in your own community.

Jokes aside, NY Times has never been unbiased. Try reading the Power Broker.

Then, when you start work, pour over the source code. Understand it. Ask or research anything you don't understand. Make a list of things that suck about it -- there likely will be a lot of technical debt, but who knows...

If you want to get ahead, combine working harder than anyone else with the concepts you will absorb by reading The Power Broker [2].

[1] I say a book instead of NetFlix or games, because if you read at night, with a red light, you'll become sleepy and get a good night's rest, but watching TV or playing games will keep you up, and you'll go into work tired.

[2] Don't mistake this book for some self help or business genera, it's page-turning biography by one of the best journalists of our time.

I've read all four of the Johnson volumes, and I'm hanging on for the fifth.

For those that are not familiar with Mr Caro's work...

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6442/robert-caro-t...

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a13522/robert-car...

I’m in the middle of reading it, it’s very good. It’s long though. Something like 1400 pages or 66 hours of audio. So you'll need the summer to finish it!

=====

Robert Caro - Lyndon B. Johnson series & The Power Broker

S.C Gwynne - Empire of the Summer Moon

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Black Swan & Antifragile

Graham Hancock - America Before

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Safi Bahcall - Loonshots

Barack Obama read it at 22 and said it was mesmerizing and that it shaped how he thinks about politics.

Several of the bridges he built were done so to alleviate traffic, but traffic was always worse after the bridge opened up. There were two main problems: more people wanted to use the "fast" routes, and the total volume of traffic increased.

I was more thinking about how things worked from say 1500 to 1800 in the US. During that time, a lot of the things that originate with government in simcity would have been done independently. i.e. religious schools would be started by local enclaves (sometimes with organizational help of government, which they controlled due to being dominant in that area, but not originated from it). In the US at least, land use was pretty free for most of that time, no zoning. Look at the institutions within a gold rush town, for example - although there was a government, they couldn't control much, the people came first and built lots of infrastructure before there ever was a sheriff or mayor. Rollicking, fast-developing cities from that era weren't restrained by zoning laws, and they developed in interesting (not always good) ways. It is interesting to realize that most of the current buildings in the US major cities would actually be illegal under the current law for new buildings.

Rather than from libertarianism, my ideas for this came from a couple books about city planning I've read recently, "The Power Broker", and "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". Neither one is really libertarian, but rather look at how government power can be used or misused in cities. The latter one particularly is not at all libertarian, and is a strong advocate of government intervention into neighborhood design - but, lays out a smarter way it should be done, based on the author's understanding of the way cities work.

Simcity seems to be designed by someone influenced by the ideas criticized in "death and life" - i.e. very strong zoning laws, top-down control and predetermination for how things will work in every neighborhood, high value placed on "open space" without consideration of usage patterns etc.

No. Here are two specific examples:

1. The Cross Bronx Expressway, which basically created the South Bronx[1]. "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro is one of HN's most frequently recommended books, and covers this subject (as well as other racially-motivated planning projects by Robert Moses) extensively.

2. I-65 and I-165 in Mobile, AL cut directly through the historic "Africatown" neighborhood[2]. Residents regularly complain about both automotive and nearby industrial pollution, encouraged by ease of access by the highway[3].

Most of these effects are more visible on the East Coast rather than the West Coast, since the East's older and denser cities had fewer "paths of least resistance" when building the Interstate Highway System during the midcentury. But it wouldn't particularly surprise me if the areas that are now expensive in the cities that you mentioned were originally cleared for highways under "slum clearance" or similar laws.

Edit: This is anecdotal, but I figured I'd mention it anyways: I grew up in Manhattan, and virtually everybody I grew up with has (or had) asthma. Some of that is to be expected from other pollution sources (in particular, NYC used to burn very dirty heating oil), but I also went to public schools that were directly alongside major state and interstate highways.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway#Urban_d...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733996699/alabamas-africatown...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...

Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17942038-lobbying-americ...

"Lobbying America" tells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders.

Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the "voice of business" found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape.

Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington, "Lobbying America" shows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system."

https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832

You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't thought-provoking.

Historically, men were the only ones that had the opportunity to write, so any books from older centuries are going to be by men. But that doesn't have to be the case now.

ps. Love Jane Jacobs! After you read that, if you are interested, you may want to check out The Power Broker to see the other side. It is one of my top nonfiction books. (warning, white male author ;)).

Robert Caro gets into this a little bit in his book "The Power Broker" describing Robert Moses' development of highways in NYC: basically, if you build a highway before you build a subway line, the resulting area will be developed in a low-density pattern (regardless of zoning), as the "last mile" of driving is much less difficult than the "last mile" on foot, coming off a train.

If you look at NYC in particular, this happened in eastern Queens -- the highways were built (with poor public transit coverage) and the properties were developed in a low density pattern.

This cannot be fixed by simply building more high-density housing (despite the massive city-wide demand for housing), because no transit exists. But you cannot build new transit because it's a political nightmare: current residents will complain that you're disrupting their neighborhood, and city residents elsewhere will complain that your new transit development doesn't "go anywhere useful."

From what I saw in LA when I visited a few weeks ago, much of the new systems of transit serve (a) large office campuses (I was regularly taking the metro at Universal City) and (b) non-commuter destinations such as Hollywood (for tourism) and the airport. The result, as pointed out to me by an Uber driver, was a huge explosion of development in Downtown LA. The newest line in LA, the Expo Line to Santa Monica, seems more commuter focused -- perhaps it is serving the new residential population moving into DTLA?

Eastern Queens, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of important destinations or office campuses. It's overshadowed by Manhattan in terms of tourism, and Moses built the Long Island-bound highways specifically to prevent the sorts of development that would lead to Long Island becoming a commuter destination rather than a residential community. Thus, Queens is trapped in this residential catch 22, and not even rezoning can fix it. The only solutions I can see involve closing down lanes of highway to obtain right-of-way for transit (the overpasses were intentionally built too low to support bus service, so it'd be a permanent closure), a sure path to political suicide in an area utterly dependent on its highways.

I recently completed a biography[0] and the subject in question lost all his responsibility, in turn it let him suddenly have the time to pay attention to the small details relating to his former work. Now, I’m not interested in loosing my responsibilities, but I do want to give them the attention they deserve.

[0]: The Power Broker, Robert Caro

The same force that made homes cheap: the Federal government, is what created the monster that Moses became in the latter half of his career. Because Moses knew how to get shit done, NYC got most New Deal money. Because Moses could get shit done, NYC got more housing money than anywhere else. Hell, something like 75% of total east coast concrete production went to the NY metro area due to Moses projects.

You really owe it to yourself to read "The Power Broker", because the transition of Robert Moses from a progressive reformer to an unstoppable weilder of power, guided by a modern, engineering driven agenda, bears a lot of resemblance to the Silicon Valley titans today.

The difference is, Moses was crushed by Nelson Rockefeller, who had a bigger ego, equal political instincts and unlimited money and influence. These guys made Larry Ellison look humble. Not sure what will be able to stop the next Robert Moses like figure.

I also hate to admit this: But I half suspect Jobs picked out Isaacson because he'd draw a cartoon sketch instead of doing a serious biography. I'm still not done reading the book yet, but I almost feel that I know less about Jobs than before I started reading the damn thing. And the other thing that drives up the wall is that you get the feeling that Isaacson doesn't have a clue about technology -- so you half wonder how much he missed. And I suspect Jobs wanted it that way -- instead of burning his papers he just picked a lightweight.

By the way if any of you want to read an amazing biographer look at the work of Robert Caro who is a real writer. His first book "the Power Broker" is an amazing study Robert Moses who is a very flawed hero who really made NYC what it was (for both better and worse). He's also written several books on LBJ who also starts out as a progressive and does both amazing and terrible things in his life. I wish someone like that had done this bio...

I read a fascinating book called The Power Broker by Robert Caro, that showed how lawyers conduct a type of ambush warfare with new laws. What they are really gunning for is not apparent until the law goes into effect, it’s too subtle for people to see from the text.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

Book of Proof

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation

Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War (for a friend)

Master and Commander

Educated

Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark

Stretch goal: The Power Broker, as a warm-up for Caro's LBJ series

The Bible (perpetual, I don't get through it every year, but I get through much of it, often)

EDIT: I also hilariously underestimate the number of books I want to read. Here's one more I think is vital for my 2020:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

The only reason I ask, is because I'm almost finished reading, in The Power Broker, how Robert Moses permanently crippled the NYC metro area and Long Island in particular, forcing them into a lower-density, automobile-centric society, when they would have been better served by mass transit, which he let rot on the vine. I imagine most other metro areas that were expanding at the time followed the same path.

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is one of the best political histories of New York, which I recommend if you're interested in exactly why the city's infrastructure (and lack thereof) is the way it is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway

Public authorities are quasi-government entities controlled by the the bond covenants. You have to line-up the interests of the bond holders with whomever controls the authority and is desiring change.

With something as broad in scope and rich as MTA is such a deep well of political capital, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone would give up any control. It's such a large enterprise there probably isn't one roomful of people who actually understand how the organization works. The current situation was created when the whole NYC transit system was completely insolvent back in the bad old days!

Read "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro. It will open your eyes to why things are the way they are.

A large portion of current urban plans date to Robert Moses - he essentially built New York, invented the ring of highways system used in DC and other places, and advised places like LA in constructing their major arteries. Moses was in love with cars, but never experienced traffic as his limo was chauffered with a police escort. He built highways and made them inaccessible to public transportation (see the West Side Highway) so that poor people could not use them. He had no real understanding of capacity utilization/maximization for transport and stopped learning long before he stopped designing. He never updated his understanding of the damages caused by simply adding more highways, but retained the power to keep building them.

The most pernicious impact of Moses's style of urban planning is not, however, gridlock or a lack of walkability. Moses decided that he could put roads wherever he wanted, and used eminent domain to put them right through vibrant communities - which he destroyed. He killed the bronx, parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and almost ran a huge raised highway across 34th street.

In any case, The Power Broker is an amazing book to read if you're curious about these issues and why cities are designed the way they are now.

I read the Power Broker [1] about Robert Moses' obsession of disallowing public transit in the public lands that under his control. That results miserable comutting for New Yorkers nowadays. Bob mastered the political system in a way that he can do obviously irrational things under public eyes, and without any fallout at the time, until the book was published much later after Bob actually has died.

I haven't researched extensively in US public transit, but I am inclined to believe that the public transit were handicapped intentionally through the market operators, in collaboration of the political apparatus.

I could not see any obvious evidence of this particular event being positive or negative. But, I am more sure that the political system in US is crippled to the point that it's not capable of producing long-term positive policy any more.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

He ran the Triborough and build a lot of bridges, parks, parkways etc. Most of those bridges do not have rail decks, because he also believed the future was cars, and rail would compete with his source of revenue, toll fees.

It is hard to overstate the impact that one person had on the NY infrastructure, but this article very much understates his impact.

A passage from 'Working':

And these writers provided more for me than merely the glow of their names. In my memory, no one spoke to me for the first few days I was in the room. Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare. “Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt.

[0] Caro, Robert A.. Working (p. 76). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

- The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

- Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

- Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

- Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

- On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in
War and Society

- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

- The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Each of those titles tells you the contents of the book. The only one that perhaps does not is "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," but it's clearly fiction, and it is in fact about a Jewish policeman.

Maybe what you said applies to bad books.

Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™.

Cite: The Power Broker, Robert Caro

The tax rules associated with large construction projects, plus that fact that large-scale commercial real estate is a cartel in most US markets means that the actual impact in terms of units doesn't equate to the number of units built. That's one reason why you see economic behavior that doesn't make sense on the surface -- prime urban residental property left vacant or rented out as tenament housing and big commercial properties left vacant for years.

Generally speaking, today, new residential construction in urban areas is pushing affordability out to the periphery of the city, or the aging out ring of suburb outside of the city.

Another issue is that location matters, and we tend to stick to desirable places in a limited area. Few people want to uproot their kids from school every few years or move away from their families and social networks. So the fact that a 3 bedroom ranch in Minneapolis costs 60% less than a 1 bedroom apartment in Queens doesn't really matter.

I'd suggest you read the sections in Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" see how these kinds of shifts impacted millions of people in NYC during the 50s and 60s.