From the Imperial City to the Outskirts of Empire

“New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”

-- Djuna Barnes, Author (1892-1982)

The Great Library of Alexandria, founded around 300BC, was the locus point of the ancient world for philosophers, mathematicians, and scholars. At its height, the Library held 750,000 scrolls, which flowed into its shelves from the great empires of Greece, Egypt, and Babylon, and burgeoning civilizations as far away as India.

Alexandria, positioned at the crossroads of the developed world, soon became the world's intellectual capital and those who came to study understood that the knowledge amassed there was only as useful as it was widely disseminated—not only to the power centers of the old world, but to the small cities and towns on the periphery.

Two thousand years later, the United States is the closest thing we have to a global empire and the center of that empire is New York City. Just as the learned of Alexandria gravitated to the great political and cultural centers of the ancient world, so today many Americans flock to New York and other metropolises to ply their trade.

There is something deeply inspiring about this continued migration. As E.B. White famously wrote in Here is New York, while many native New Yorkers “take[] the city for granted,” there is another New York—“the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something...that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

And yet for all the romantic greatness of the immigrant/migrant story of New York, there is also an undercurrent of danger in its magnetism: the potential for a growing disconnect between the global power centers and the majority of the world’s population that lives in what a friend once described to me as “the outskirts of empire.”

As Thomas Edsall of the Times wrote last month in a column titled, “Will Liberal Cities Leave the Rest of America Behind?” many of the cities that are now on the leading edge of progressive politics in America have significant built-in advantages not available to most cities and towns on the “outskirts”:

[M]ajor research universities; financial and high-tech corporate centers; substantial and strong artistic and intellectual communities. Pittsburgh, for example, has Carnegie Mellon, metropolitan Boston has Harvard and M.I.T., Seattle has Microsoft and Amazon, and New York has its own varied, almost endless resources…These advantages are the exception, not the rule.

In the end, Edsall is left to ask, “whether the current left-leaning urban agenda is restricted to small elite of well-off municipalities with substantial resources.”

It doesn’t help matters that the media is centered in and around these largely liberal metropolises. Indeed, for generations, the media has helped fuel more than a little navel-gazing in centers of empire; from the “New Yorker’s View of the World” to “Beltway Insiders” to Bostonians—whose very nickname for their City, “The Hub,” offers a glimpse into the psyche of the Gateway to New England.

This narcissistic tendency makes getting out of the bubbles and into the back roads of the empire all the more important. As Deborah Fallows, author of Dreaming in Chinese, wrote this weekend, “America is full of places with stories to tell, where generations had spent their lives building, losing and rebuilding, or where newcomers migrate, like pioneers, to strive toward their dreams.”

Of course, the need to assess the problems of the periphery need not blind us to the problems of the center of empire. Even Manhattan, which includes several of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, does not lack for significant social and economic ills. For all its wealth and power, the centers of the empire, like the outskirts, are not immune from poverty and suffering.

Nevertheless, just like the knowledge amassed and uncovered in Alexandria, New York’s progressive prosperity or Boston’s quest to become the City on a Hill mean little if their lessons are not spread beyond the walls of the metropolis to the rest of the country. For that to happen, people in cities and small towns have to focus more on what they have in common than by what separates them and avoid falling into the trap of believing that the future of American politics rural interests against urban needs.

Transparency and Tyranny of the Majority

“Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind… It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

-- Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960)

In January 1776, a short pamphlet titled Common Sense hit the streets of Boston and other cities and towns throughout the New World, calling on people to take up arms against Britain in a fight for independence. Within months, it became one of the most widely read books in the colonies.

Given that its very content was treasonous, the pamphlet was published anonymously, with knowledge of its true author (the patriot Thomas Paine) remaining a secret into the spring of the year of Independence.

This week, NYC Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-East Side/Roosevelt Island) introduced a bill to create a centralized, public, online freedom of information law (FOIL) system in the City of New York. As reported in the Gotham Gazette, “Requests would be entered electronically and anyone would be able to see who is requesting what information from which agency.” Other cities—from Oakland to Chicago—already make names of FOIL requesters public. And indeed, in New York State, FOIL requests themselves are public documents subject to disclosure without redaction.

Nevertheless, Kallos’ bill is likely to raise questions about the intersection between government transparency and personal privacy. When should citizens be forced to disclose their communications with government? Are there circumstances in which anonymity is needed to avoid unwarranted harassment?

These questions continue to pose challenges, not just with regard to FOIL, but also in the context of campaign finance disclosure—as discussed by Globe columnist Scot Lehigh last week—and lobbying disclosure.

Indeed, New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), which under a 2011 law is responsible for determining whether a particular advocacy organization should receive an exemption from disclosure if their donors faced “harm, threats, harassment, or reprisals” because of their support, has had to grapple with the implications of a subjective regime of anonymity.

Many groups across the political spectrum (from abortion rights groups to the conservative New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms) have sought exemptions, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is typically on the side of transparency (disclosure: NYCLU is a former employer).

While you could be forgiven for thinking that these groups are simply trying to protect their donor base, regardless of the actual threat posed, there are very real reasons to worry about the effects that full and complete disclosure of this kind would have on speech in America.

More than 50 years ago, the Supreme Court first discussed the importance of anonymous speech in Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960), which struck down a Los Angeles ordinance forbidding the distribution of literature without the name and address of the individual(s) who prepared/distributed it. The Court opinion was framed by two major goals—to prevent retaliation against unpopular views and to encourage free and open dialogue. 

More recently, in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995), the Court reiterated the strong interest in anonymous speech:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views…Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority… It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation…at the hand of an intolerant society.

We may well believe that there is no good reason for corporations or deep-pocketed donors to be able to “hide in the shadows” or no good reason why an individual’s request of their government should be protected from public scrutiny, but America has a strong tradition of supporting anonymous speech on matters of public controversy.

As we continue the effort to improve the free flow of information and respond to the flood of money in politics unleashed by Citizens United and McCutcheon, we must not allow our desire to strengthen our democracy to undermine this essential bulwark of free and robust speech.

This Land is Whose Land? From NYCHA Housing to Nevada’s Ranches

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me

A sign was painted said: Private Property,

But on the back side it didn't say nothing —

This land was made for you and me.

-- Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land,” 1940

In the summer of 2000, our family rent-a-car emerged from the Grand Tetons and traveled down National Highway 26 into the town of Jackson, Wyoming. As we sped along (the urgent need for pancakes and flat, clear terrain propelling us forward at speeds that would be reckless at best on the I-95 corridor), I stared out the window and watched the cows chewing their weight in grass on federal property (about half of Wyoming is owned by the U.S. Government—see map, below).

Curious about the agreements that allowed for such private use of public property, I asked our waiter at the local diner who owned the cows and how much he/she paid to have them grave on “federal property.” The waiter, already put off perhaps by a New Englander wearing his ever-present Sox jacket, set his pen and paper on the table, looked at me, and declared simply, “That’s our land.”

I was firmly committed to putting pancakes over politics, so I demurred further argument, certain that whoever the “our” was didn’t include me.

This month, a dispute over federal grazing fees charged to Western ranchers once again erupted, with armed civilians taking up positions against Bureau of Land Management rangers who, pursuant to a court order, attempted to confiscate 500 cattle owned by Cliven Bundy, who has been illegally grazing his herd on public land since 1993.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) responded by calling the armed vigilantes “domestic terrorists”, while Nevada’s junior Senator, Dean Heller (R), called Bundy’s supporters “patriots.”

Not only is there no agreement on what taking up arms against the federal enforcement of a court order should be called, there isn’t even consensus on the facts underlying the case. Washington Post columnist Marc Theissen decried Reid’s “domestic terrorist” comment, stating that “defending your property against a paramilitary force of armed federal agents is not the equivalent of blowing up a federal building or sending letter bombs” (emphasis added).

Indeed, while Bundy’s abhorrent comments on race and his unwillingness to pay below-market grazing fees to the Federal Government have given him 15 minutes in the national spotlight, what his case and the story of the diner in Jackson are really about is the very nature of property rights—not just in the American West, but across the country.

Indeed, I’ve spent the last week pondering Theissen’s remark, trying to come up with an East Coast equivalent to understand the “ownership” Bundy and people like him feel over land whose title is in our collective name. As it turns out, we have a pretty good analog right here in New York City in how we try to grapple with the difficult concept of “home” as it relates to scarce and precious public housing resources.

This month, NYCHA General Manager Cecil House testified before the New York City Council about the Housing Authority’s “rightsizing” plan. As the wait list for public housing continues to grow (in 2012, NYCHA projected that nearly one in three units (55,000) were “underoccuiped”, while the wait list swelled to 160,000 families), NYCHA has sought to optimize apartment usage by “transitioning families to apartments appropriate for their needs.”

As House stated, “Rightsizing does not only improve the quality of life of current NYCHA residents but also provides housing to more New Yorkers on our waiting list.”

The rightsizing issue has been extremely controversial, largely because its very nature necessitates removing people from their homes and placing them in smaller apartments (particularly older residents whose children have moved out). NYCHA is, after all, a public resource and rightsizing is absolutely needed to ensure that new families can take advantage of the opportunities it provides.

However, if our homes are indeed our castles, it is also understandable as to why ranchers or public housing tenants would feel ownership, the deed notwithstanding.

In situations like these, where emotions run hot and mistrust lurks around every corner, there are few good choices. However, our system of government is rooted in the consistent application of the rule of law, rather than the fallible whims of officials.

Indeed, just as the BLM didn’t attack Bundy for who he was, but for what he did (violate the law by refusing to pay a standard fee), so NYCHA’s rightsizing is not directed at individual residents as punishment, but is instead enforced as part of a contractual agreement entered into by tenants with the Housing Authority.

As long as the system itself is fair and people have the opportunity to argue their case before a neutral arbiter, that’s all we can ask in a Republic. Taking up arms against that effort is an affront to a government of laws itself—a government that is fallible, but far better than the alternative.

An Awakening: School Holidays + Political Power

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

-- Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 1967

Last week, the New York Times and the Boston Globe wrote about the hot-button issue of religious equality in school holidays. In Massachusetts, the last state in the Union to dismantle its State-sponsored church (in 1833!), the controversy is over the decision of 17 school districts to open on Good Friday. In New York City, the debate is over whether to add the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to the calendar of the nation’s largest school system.

In the Bay State, districts are responding to demographic shifts, seeking to find a consistent balance in an increasingly secular world.

In New York, the situation is far more interesting. In 2009, the City Council (with only one dissenter) approved a resolution calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to add the two holidays to the school calendar. The dissenter, Councilmember and former Attorney General G. Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx), worried about the potential for a proliferation of holidays, inquired, “Where are we going to end with this?” The answer, as it turns out, is based in no small part on how well different communities are able to organize.

Five years later, with a Mayor in office who campaigned to add the holidays to the calendar, what we’ve witnessed is the culmination of efforts to mobilize an entire population to wield political power—call it a “secular awakening” of sorts. As the Times wrote, the vigor and organization of the effort is “a testament to how the city’s Muslim community is gaining a measure of political confidence.”

The renewed campaign to get holy days on the school calendar comes on the heels of the launch of the City’s first Muslim-American Democratic Club, the aptly named Muslim Democratic Club of New York (MDCNY) in 2013—a club that understands that its mission is to simultaneously inspire and deliver.

As MDCNY states, its mission is to, “mobilize and empower the American Muslim community in NYC by nurturing a culture of civic participation.” That lofty and important aspiration is grounded in a real politik concern as well. “Our goal in establishing a democratic club is to increase the number of American Muslim triple prime Democratic voters” (that is, voters who cast ballots consistently in primary, general, and special elections).

Other organizations, from the Arab-American Family Support Center (founded in 1994), to the Arab American Association of New York (launched in 2001), which worked with NYU to produce a groundbreaking survey of Arab Americans in NYC in 2012, community groups serving NYC’s Arab American community are thriving as the population in the Metro area continues to climb (hard data is notoriously difficult to come by, but the general direction is clear).

It goes without saying, of course, that even within these groups, there is immense diversity. Arab American groups are made up of members of many of the world’s great faiths and the membership of Muslim groups is a cross-section of the City in that it is a mixture of American and foreign-born advocates. In 2009, the Times noted that this very diversity could be an obstacle to effective political organizing and that the community had, at times, “seen its social and political ambitions hamstrung by schisms among competing groups.”

That lesson—of learning to compromise internally in order to project a unified, forceful position externally—is part of how a community learns to transform its economic and demographic clout into political power.

The next step—after celebrating what we hope will be a great victory on school holidays—is to bring that same political energy and passion to bear on issues that affect people beyond the community. Indeed, by the 2017 election, my hope as a New Yorker is that the MDCNY and others are getting calls from candidates and elected officials not only about issues of particular salience to the Muslim community—like school holidays and surveillance—but on a whole host issues, from landmarking and tax policy to economic development and transportation.

It will be at that moment when the awakening of a community will have become cemented into the political fabric of the City, never again to be overlooked and forever more to be valued as a key contributor throughout the five boroughs.

From Romance to Realism: Connecting the Boroughs

“What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.”

--Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, 2008

Yesterday, Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote about the need for a streetcar line to connect the burgeoning neighborhoods along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfronts. While some of these neighborhoods (such as Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City) are well served by transit vis-à-vis the “Manhattan Core,” they lack reliable, efficient options for inter-borough travel (with the notable exception of the ever-maligned but ever-more-popular G train).

In endorsing a streetcar line (nicknamed the “desire line”), Kimmelman admits that buses may provide a “more obvious solution,” but that a bus would lack the “romance” of a streetcar. Kimmelman is nothing if not consistent—his columns on the current and future state of Penn Station often dwell on what was lost in the destruction of the old Penn Station rather than necessarily where the rebuilding of a new “head house” should rank in the pecking order of Midtown Manhattan’s public transportation wish-list.

Now, I’ll admit—as someone who dreams of the California Zephyr and gets excited by National Train Day, more sympathetic to this view, I could not be. 

However, there are bolder, more urgent priorities than the “desire line” that the City and State of New York should be focusing on to improve inter-borough service outside Manhattan. Indeed, the best plan of all—the “X” line—would seize on existing rights of way to stimulate investment in neighborhoods beyond the waterfront that could make up the job corridors of New York’s 21^st century economy.

The Regional Plan Association first proposed the “X” line, which stretches from the Bay Ridge waterfront to the South Bronx in a semicircle route, in its Third Regional Plan in 1996. And since that time, many folks with far more knowledge of NYC transit than yours truly—from Michael Frumin (whose map is shown below) to Ben Kabak to Andrew Lynch have added to the chorus of voices clamoring for this transformative cross-town line.

In short, the “X” line would travel along the old Bay Ridge Line, which makes a broad arc through southern Brooklyn from Bay Ridge to Broadway Junction. It would then use the Canarsie Line (L) until it turns towards Bushwick. It would then run through Ridgewood, Middle Village, Maspeth, Jackson Heights, and Astoria before rising onto the Hell Gate Bridge and terminating in the South Bronx.

In 2012, Kimmelman declared, “We have become a city too cynical about big change, resigned to the impossibility of unraveling bureaucratic entanglements, beholden to private interests, inured to commercialism and compromise.”

I agree with this critique—but it is imperative that our response to it be properly directed to maximize scarce resources and build up communities that have traditionally been underserved by transit and are in need of investment for future growth.

This week, the RPA is hosting its annual Assembly with an eye toward its Fourth Regional Plan. While it is beyond dispute that the waterfront districts have benefitted from zoning changes, reductions in crime, and other public efforts over the past 20 years, they have also been able to attract billions in private investment even without ideal cross-borough transit access (though the East River Ferry has significantly improved this service).

As a result, my hope is that the RPA uses this opportunity to make the “X” line a centerpiece of its vision for regional transportation. More than ever before, connectivity outside the Manhattan Core is central to New York’s continued success and few projects hold the potential to bring communities together in support of mass transit like the “X”.

Transportation Tech: From the Mass Pike to the Friendly Skies

“Last night on the Mass Pike, thought I was losing you. Last night on the Mass Pike, I fell in love with you.”

--“Mass Pike,” The Get Up Kids, 1999

Few things are more frustrating than sitting in traffic at a tollbooth, taxiing for takeoff for hours, or standing on crowded trains directed by century-old switches. But what if I told you that we had technologies at the ready to address each of these problems, only to have failed to adequately seize on their potential?

Last week, the Globe profiled forthcoming changes to the Mass Turnpike in Allston, noting that straightening the turnpike will improve safety, smooth traffic, and free up 60 acres of land, some of which is prime territory a stone’s throw from the shores of the Charles River.

Today, I want to focus on one particular aspect of the plan—the introduction of 100 percent cashless (electronic) tolling on the Pike—as well as several other transportation technologies that will pay long-term dividends if we commit to investing in them today.

As the map below from the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission shows, cashless tolling is being embraced by states across the country as a way to reduce congestion (and the pollution/productivity effects associated with it) and save money on toll collection that can make a small, but meaningful contribution to rebuilding our nation’s roads and bridges. For instance, the Golden Gate Bridge’s new cashless tolling system is expected to save $16 million over eight years (the bridge faces a $66 million budget deficit over the next five years).

This is particularly important in light of the troubles with the national Highway Trust Fund, which is fast approaching insolvency thanks to a gas tax that hasn’t budged in 20 years and the proliferation of more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Cashless tolling should be a requirement for any new federally funded transportation project that includes tolls and the Highway Trust Fund should incentivize states to adopt cashless tolling by providing capital grants for implementation of new systems and cost-sharing arrangements with states.

Another critical transportation technology that has encountered a litany of challenges in recent years is the Federal Aviation Administration’s rollout of Next Generation air traffic control (“NextGen”).

The FAA’s largest-ever procurement, NextGen would replace radar-based ground control with GPS navigation and require airlines to adopt technology that allows pilots and air traffic controllers to have improved access to real time data, allowing planes to fly more direct routes closer together, improving efficiency and productivity in our nation’s skies. When completed, the project is expected to yield a system that can handle three times more air traffic while reducing FAA’s operating costs.

In addition, NextGen is expected to yield the following benefits by 2030:

·       More than $100 billion in net economic benefits

·       27 million hours in flight delays saved

·       Reduce carbon emissions by cutting 4.6 billion gallons of fuel

However, as the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation recently found, the FAA has failed to embrace NextGen’s potential. This includes a failure to rapidly introduce GPS capabilities at many of the nation’s busiest airports, including those in the NYC-metro region that account for nearly half of all flight delays nationwide.

The list of transportation technologies that are underused goes on and on. In New York, Albany continues to stonewall the City’s efforts to expand the speed camera program—a critical part of Mayor de Blasio’s “Vision Zero” initiative (though Governor Cuomo insists that the issue will be taken up after the holiday recess).

Few cities—including New York—have committed to transforming antiquated street parking with technology (like that in use in San Francisco) that promises to reduce congestion, improve safety (with fewer cars circling for spaces/double parking), and more appropriately value public space.

And we continue to rely on mechanical, switch-based subway systems constructed in the early 20^th century instead of using Communication Based Train Controls (CBTC), which offer improved reliability, lower costs, and greater efficiency. Despite the fact that systems around the world have implemented CBTC, only a single NYC subway line (the L) currently has CBTC, with the 7 slated to have it installed by 2017. Worse, under the current MTA capital needs assessment (2015-2034)—a plan funded almost entirely with debt—it will take until the 2030s (or beyond!) for the entire NYC system to have CBTC installed.

Leveraging technology in transportation will pay for itself. But that will only happen if we generate strong, grassroots support by making these esoteric projects “real” to the public. Indeed, Americans have shown time and again that they are willing to fund infrastructure improvements when they understand precisely how they stand to benefit.

Global Gateway Alliance is trying to generate public awareness of airport improvements in NYC, just as the Straphangers Campaign has long advocated for the interests of bus and subway riders. What’s needed next is recognition by elected officials that the benefits of these technologies will flow to constituents in every corner of the city/state/nation.

Big Data and Mass Transit: From Bikes to Buses

“I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”

-- Editor, Prentiss Hall Books, 1957

Last week, the Globe profiled an effort by 23-year-old entrepreneur Matthew George to use data analytics to provide “pop-up” bus service across many underserved routes in the Cambridge-Boston area. This “pop-up” service—called Bridj—is designed to use data about “where people live, work, and play” to predict where non-stop service is needed and adjust schedules based on time of day/day of week, etc.

George’s introduction of disruptive analytics to the metro-Boston transit network is long overdue and I’m anxious to see how his system works (and to try it myself come July 4th weekend). But, as noted by MIT Professor Nigel Wilson, George’s service (which is expected to launch at a cost of $5-8 pre trip) has the potential to siphon riders from the MBTA. Indeed, while the Bridj homepage champions “Better Transit. For All,” it is not yet clear whether the business model can rely solely on routes not directly served by the T.

In a normal setting, competition would be an unquestionable good—with the better product/price/service winning out over time. However, public transit is a unique animal—a deeply subsidized public good that must cater to the needs of very low-income city dwellers (among others).

To his credit, George seems quite cognizant of this fact and has indicated that he hopes to reduce fares to a price approaching a single-ride T-pass ($2-2.50). However, it is ultimately not the job of entrepreneurs like George to worry about how their innovations might affect competitors like the MBTA.

Instead, as I briefly noted last year, what the MBTA and other transit agencies from New York City’s MTA to the smallest regional network in Berkshire County need to do, is to get in the data analytics game themselves. In Boston, this effort should include investing in smaller vans that can operate at lower cost than articulated buses, depending on demand, GPS tracking to allow riders to plan their trips, and demand-responsive transport during late nights and weekends. In the spirit of George’s “pop-up” service, demand responsive transport covers a fixed service area but without fixed routes, allowing it to cater to fluctuations in ridership.

This type of planning should not be limited to buses, but should instead be used to integrate a municipal transit network’s bicycles as well. In NYC, CitiBike recently released a trove of data charting hundreds of thousands of rides and, as shown in the graph below from the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, there is a slight, but meaningful correlation between subway disruptions and use of CitiBike along those routes.

Dubbed “reactionary biking” by the Rudin Center, this pattern should lead to partnerships between the MTA and CitiBike. For instance, when there is a planned service outage—especially a long-term outage, like the 5-week closure of the G train’s Greenpoint Tube planned for this summer—MTA should not only provide replacement bus service, but also work with CitiBike to extend bike share to affected communities. Similarly, the two systems should share data on ridership so that CitiBike can do a better job of balancing stations near transit hubs which, at certain times of the day, are overrun with passengers (most notably on the Lexington Line (456)).

In 2012, Peter Sondergaard of the Gartner Group declared, “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”

If Sondergaard is right, public transit systems cannot sit back in the horse and buggy age while private companies like Bridj act like the Maseratis of the data world. They need to get in the game themselves and use “big data” to increase efficiency and improve service for the millions of Americans who rely on buses, trains, trams, and bike share.

What it Means to be #1: Happiness and Social Policy

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”

-- His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan

Last week, Nicholas Kristof of the Times noted that between 1975 and 2006, “99 percent of the French population actually enjoyed more gains in that period than 99 percent of the American population.” In other words, if you exclude the top 1 percent, the average French citizen did better than the average American.

Nevertheless, on one of the more common metrics used to determine the prosperity and halth of a nation—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the U.S. actually came out on top during the same period, as the American economy significantly outperformed the French.

So who’s “#1”? Before you start chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” (too late?), let’s take a closer look at just what we’re trying to measure.

In recent years, researchers have prodded cities and states to step away from the traditional measures of prosperity and embrace tools to measure overall “happiness”. In December 2013, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report calling on governments to ask citizens a series of questions related to their happiness and to use the results to shape social policy priorities and prescriptions.

This type of survey—which began in the small nation of Bhutan in the early 1970s—has spread to other nations, like the U.K., France, and Canada, all the way down to the local level, as in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Indeed, several U.S. cities are now experimenting with happiness or wellbeing measures. Santa Monica, California, which defines “wellbeing” as, “[p]ersonal satisfaction with life, influenced by social connections, economic stability, personal safety, physical surroundings, fulfilling employment, civic engagement, and health,” recently won a Bloomberg Philanthropies award for its efforts to measure wellbeing and respond accordingly.

In New York, Megan Golden (NYU) and Liana Downey (Liana Downey & Associates) wrote that the de Blasio Administration should pilot a happiness survey to determine “whether some groups are struggling more than others, where problems are concentrated, and what conditions affect New Yorkers’ happiness the most.” This pilot would borrow from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which already surveys Americans every four years about health and life satisfaction, as well as “Measure of America”, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

Of course, measuring happiness is easier said than done. As with any broad survey, getting a representative sample is a challenge, particularly in a City like New York, where many are often wary to respond to formal government surveys (see: New York’s experience with the 2010 Census). Furthermore, since most people filling out the survey have different definitions of happiness, questions that seek to gauge the subjective mindset of any population may be inherently suspect.

An even more fundamental question exists, however. And that is whether happiness, however defined, should be the goal of social policy in the first place. As David Brooks wrote this week, “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course.”

No, Brooks is not advocating for a political system that promotes difficulty and suffering. But he’s also cautioning against viewing certain types of suffering as in need of eradication. To put it in concrete terms, suffering that flows from hunger, disease, violence, or neglect carries no short or long term benefit (much to the contrary), whereas the pangs that come with failure, the loss of a loved one, or can make us fuller people—changed souls, rather than shattered ones.

Ultimately, since that the unique number of paths to happiness is roughly as numerous as the number of people alive, the Framers probably got this one right—namely, that the government’s role is to ensure the foundational elements necessary for the pursuit of happiness (food, shelter, health care, employment), leaving to the individual citizen to decide how to chart his own course toward that seemingly universal goal.

The Limits of Language: Longing for Home and Love

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”

-- Ludwig Wittenstein, 1953

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

--Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh (aka Rumi), 13^th Century Poet

Bay State Brahmin is a blog about politics—a topic that easily lends itself to the written word. However, thanks to a few masterful pieces published over the past week, the limits of language have been weighing on my mind.

The first piece is a column titled “In Search of Home” in which Roger Cohen of the New York Times tries to answer the question, “If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go?”

Cohen references an essay in the London Review of Books in which James Wood asked the same question of Christopher Hitchens before Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He told Wood that he would not stay in America, but would return to Dartmoor, “the landscape of his childhood.”

Wood goes on to write that, “The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home…Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality.”

That may well be true, but Cohen’s description spoke to a sentiment beyond what can be expressed through the language of loss. The landscape of Hitchens childhood, Cohen wrote,

…was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

The second piece was Jessica Rassette’s essay “His Promise Would Not Be Denied,” for the weekly must-read “Modern Love” in the Times.

In describing her then-ex-boyfriend (now husband’s) response to her insistence that their relationship was over, Rassette wrote, “He loved every footprint I left behind. He kept his dreams of us tucked away, hoarded them like those gas-station receipts he jams into the back pocket of his jeans. He loved and longed. He waited.”

The two pieces may be about “home” and “love”, respectively, but they are really about the same thing. They are about a challenge that everyone faces many times in life—of what feels right to one’s soul; of where (and with whom) one’s destiny lies.

Someone once told me—in reference to my love of both New York City and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—that it was imperative that I be honest with where loyalties lie and that to be truly at home in one place or the other required almost every piece of my heart.

I didn’t know how to respond to that idea then, and I must admit that I still don’t today. Language—as it often does—fails to provide a useful instrument. How could I express the tingling of my chest when that distinctive sign comes into view, welcoming home sons from Hatfield to Hamilton?

How could I express the feeling of turning the corner of 43^rd and 5^th Avenue at twilight—the Chrysler Building illuminated above—and walking on air through Grand Central Terminal as the ghosts of generations of my family propel me forward, whispering in my ear that I belong under all those stars?

In Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” But I don’t think that Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were alone in this scourge. Instead, it seems to me that to be human is to be misunderstood, or, perhaps more aptly, that to be human is to lack the tools necessary to be understood—except, that is, for the “tool” of love.

As Rassette notes, “Tom and I might glance at each other with a weary look that means, ‘Do you love me?’ Neither of us ever has to answer.” 

In the end, if “speech is a river,” Rumi wrote—a flowing dialogue of the inner-workings of our mind—then “silence is an ocean”—a seemingly bottom-less repository of secrets out of sight and far from earshot.

Silence—those thoughts unspoken, dreams unrequited, tragedies unseen, sentiments unshared—is the “dark energy/matter” of our world, weighing us down while powering us forward, to an end we know not of.