Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Have you been to a Strong Towns event yet? In addition to online webcasts and webinars, we also host a number of in-person events. This month, we’re going all the way from Hawaii to British Columbia and Ontario—and then it’s back to the continental U.S. again for October. Check out if we’ll be coming to a place near you over on our events page!
Comment of the Week:
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
John: In the 20th century, the humble pencil was used as a kind of object lesson in free market economics. In 1958, libertarian economist Leonard Read published, “I, Pencil.” The essay is the autobiography of a pencil made by many hands—from loggers and millworkers in the American west to graphite miners in south Asia—and from innumerable materials: Mississippi clay, rape-seed oil, paint and lacquer, and so on. “The lesson I have to teach is this,” says the pencil: “Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson.” Twenty-two years later, economist Milton Friedman held up the pencil (literally held it up) in a 10-part PBS series called Free to Choose. “Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil,” Friedman says. He continues: “There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: The impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.”
If the pencil was the case-in-point we needed last century, to what everyday item can we look for the current economic moment? May I suggest the humble pizza roll? According to The New York Times, General Mills has come up with 25 different ways to make its popular Totino’s pizza rolls. This is how they’ve navigated supply chain issues, high energy prices, higher cost of ingredients (for example, eggs, which got more expensive due to avian flu), the war in Ukraine, and post-COVID consumer behavior that has manufacturers scratching their heads. “Just-in-time deliveries don’t work anymore,” the company’s president said. “We’re adding to inventory, holding more dry ingredients and fats and oils, even though that’s tough, too, right now. We need tanks to store those liquids, and those just aren’t readily available.”
I am something of a pencil enthusiast. I’ve also eaten enough Totino’s in my life that my autobiography could be called, “I, Pizza Roll.” And so I urge your city to heed the lesson of the antifragile snack: plan for resilience. As Spencer Gardner wrote on our site early in the pandemic, “Our world is connected globally at a scale and speed that was unfathomable until the 20th-century. With that connectivity has come increased centralization at all levels and in virtually all facets of life. The result is a system that is extremely efficient for getting you cheap toilet paper, low-cost calories, and fast cars—until it’s not.”
Norm: The Maintainers community email list alerted me to this fascinating article about the impact of this summer’s drought on many older structures in the Netherlands.
“Like most buildings built before 1970 in this marshy country, the Netherlands’ national museum rests on a foundation of wooden poles—about 8,000 of them. But as dry summers caused groundwater levels to plunge, the poles were exposed and fungi began to rot the foundations.”
It never occurred to me that the presence of groundwater would serve as a preservative for wooden poles that are now being attacked by fungi which flourish in the absence of water. The article explains that there are several Dutch engineering firms who are capable of addressing this problem but that the need is far greater than they can handle at the moment. Along with treating the poles with anti-fungal solutions, they are pumping water into the ground to recharge the watery soils that ensure the survival of these buildings. We’ve run several articles on maintenance and protecting what is already built at Strong Towns and I thought those ideas fit well with the challenge that the Dutch are facing head on.
Daniel: An academic research paper isn’t the kind of material I would normally share here in Friday Faves, but this is a fascinating find that I stumbled upon this week via a summary thread on Twitter. (It’s also been reported in the Economist this summer, but that piece is behind a paywall.) The Chinese Communist revolution and subsequent Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong almost fully erased the wealth and status of the pre-revolution Chinese elite, leveling the social hierarchy like very few events in all of human history. And yet, astoundingly, the advantages of pre-revolution elite families have managed to reassert themselves among their grandchildren alive today, who are significantly wealthier than the average Chinese. The study concludes that the transmission of human capital within families—knowledge, ideas, and cultural values—is a key factor.
There are some lazy ways one could interpret this result to support a preferred ideological hobbyhorse, but I don’t think the actual takeaway here is anything about the moral dimensions of inequality or about how an economy should be structured. I think it’s that the forces that structure society are deeply rooted, complex, and not always obvious, and that it’s the height of hubris to assume that our political institutions are capable of overriding those forces, when even one of the most violent and cataclysmic revolutions in history did not do so.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Percy Ackerman, Zack Beach, Jim Bergenn, Alex Carlton, Rosalind Chaundy, David Coyte, Connor Darby, Seth Davis, Mariia Dolgareva, Francis Eshun, Will Fischer, Sandra Frakes, Paul Gessler, Austin Gilchrist, Cade Guerra, Tim Harbert, Zachary Jarjoura, Eliot Johnson, Kenneth Kettler, Matthew Kiefer, Colin Kronholm, John Malone, Edward Miller, Sean Najera, Juliet Parrott-Merrell, Oliver Penny, Karen Riggs, Suhad Saleh, Adam Spontarelli, Ryan Steffl, Robert Thomas, Alec Turne, Robert Wallace, Bryan Wilson, and John Zollers.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!