Economics as if people mattered

Shellagh, I live in a big urban area suffering from a severe shortage of affordable housing, which means, a shortage of housing, since shortages drive up the price.

If we have more fields and less subdivisions, where are we supposed to live?

Susan, I'm not sure fields and affordable housing need to be mutually exclusive rights.

I don't have all of the answers on this. Urban areas are naturally limited by their land area. How efficiently the building space available is used is important. Affordable public transportation. Prudent credit standards for mtgs also help alot. But I don't think all of the fields should be 20 miles outside of the city limits either. Land trusts shouldn't be limited to wealthy suburbanites. I understand Oregon has some great open space within it's city limits.

My thoughts go to a little girl of about 9 who stood up and asked a question to President Clinton who was speaking to a crowd of children at the Manchester Boys and Girls club about getting healthy and getting exercise. All the pols were going on about some cable tv program these kids couldn't ever afford to see and getting outside in the yard to play.

So this little girl raised her hand with a concerned look because she obviously wanted to do as the President said, and asked Mr. C, 'But . . . What if I don't have a yard?'Bill C. was stumped.

They got back to her question later and recommeded she run the stairs of her triple decker. I'm sure you could come up with better. And we all could do more to make sure there are safe open spaces for these kids. And not just a little playground on a dusty gravel lot. But a real place - even here in the overcrowded North Eastern cities.

If we have more fields and less subdivisions, where are we supposed to live?

Build more vertically, of course.

While at the E.F. Schumacher Society web site, anyone for whom discovering unjustly-neglected writers, and browsing deep in the paperback shelves of used bookshops, are familiar exercises, is in for a revelation in bookmarking within its full-run archive (1948-1988) of the humanist weekly MANAS (www.manasjournal.org), one of the best-kept and most charismatic secrets in the history of American periodical publishing (circ. c. 2500); it gave, e.g., Schumacher's famous "Buddhist Economics" (more "Catholic" than Buddhist, actually, as EFS admitted later) its first US hearing. Anonymously edited by a Los Angeles Theosophist (Henry Geiger) without a trace of name-egotism or sectarian axe-grinding, MANAS explored and celebrated undogmatically for over forty years the ideas of some of the most wholesome decentralist thinkers in the West-meets-East interchange: Wendell Berry, the Bhagavad-Gita, William Blake, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, Macneile Dixon, Mohandas Gandhi, Joseph Wood Krutch, Abraham Maslow, Ortega y Gasset, Plato, Michael Polanyi, Socrates, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Simone Weil...and hundreds of others, offering a running critique of modern "scientism" and offering visions in abundance of ways of life more noble than those pre-fobbed by our technocrat masters across the materialist landscape. Amazon lists back copies of the MANAS READER in abundance for a song.

To one who had before only dreamed of such a periodical, this heroic weekly came like Chapman's Homer did to Keats:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.*

*[Or New Canaan - Ed.]

That's great Scott thanks. I love Simone Weil and Blake - being a classic Pilgrim soul type.

Wonder what a Theo-Sophist is? Those Sophists are a tricky lot.

This discussion points directly at the discussion Crunchy Cons SHOULD be having:

while large families are terrific on the micro-level, enabling family members to learn sharing and compassion and mutual help and all those other great crunchy values, on the macro-level, if everybody has large families, we are suddenly faced with the very un-crunchy tradeoff between open space-small schools-walkable communities, and affordable housing. As one of the earlier posters pointed out, places like Great Barrington MA are havens for crunchy liberals--lots of space and natural beauty, but EXPENSIVE. That's what overpopulation does. One of my favorite sci-fi authors has invented a planet about which she doesn't tell us much except that, in the culture of its people, "You have not thought this through" is a deadly insult. I would move there given half the chance.