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One mystery haunts White throughout his book: how clever but not very talented men were able in nineteenth-century America to amass large fortunes and power even as their capitalist enterprises failed and engulfed large numbers of Americans in economic crisis. After reading White’s book, I am haunted by a different mystery: why the popular resistance that took shape during the First Gilded Age has been so absent from the Second. To the extent to which populist fury has surfaced in our own time, it is concentrated on the right, in the Tea Party and allied organizations. The disastrous 2010 BP oil spill generated no lasting anti-corporate sentiment, not even in Louisiana, once the dominion of “Share the Wealth” populist Huey Long. No new Debs or William Jennings Bryan has emerged even now, more than twenty-five years into this Gilded Age. The aversion of historians to reckoning with capitalism turns out to be the ruling idea of our age. No one, it seems, has escaped capitalism’s influence. Perhaps the labor stirrings in Wisconsin, and White’s remarkable attempt to resurrect the spirit of the First Gilded Age, are signs that something new is afoot.
Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.
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On Board Midwest is our opportunity to support a new high-speed rail connection between Saint Paul and Chicago that will improve passenger transportation in the region and invest billions of dollars in Minnesota’s future.
Why are we so reluctant to regulate driving with cell phones or lower speed limits despite clear statistical evidence that the number of deaths caused by these items is significant?
This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 and the trade-offs that manufacturers and consumers face when choosing between fuel economy, weight and engine power characteristics. The results suggest that if weight, horsepower and torque were held at their 1980 levels, fuel economy for both passenger cars and light trucks could have increased by nearly 50 percent from 1980 to 2006; this is in stark contrast to the 15 percent by which fuel economy actually increased.
State governments are shutting down interstate rest-stops because of money woes and competition from KwikMats and McDonalds.
GoLoco is an easy way to share trips with your friends -- and friends of friends. We use a system of alerts to notify you whenever your friends or interest groups are going places you want to go.
Robin Chase, founder ZipCar and GoLoco (for ridsharing).
One example is reducing traffic congestion by eliminating roads. Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases. There is even a mathematical theorem to explain why: “The Braess Paradox” (which sounds rather like a Robert Ludlum title) established that the addition of extra capacity to a road network often results in increased congestion and longer travel times.
The promoters of megaregions and modern rail systems seem to have a winning formula, one that offers a fresh conceptualization of the spatial workings of economic growth and is glamorous and high-tech (not to mention, green). To say the least, this formula is politically convenient, given how well it responds to concerns -- magnified by the recession -- about America's economic future.
The time has come for a closer look.
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Take the original development of the railroads. Sure, they helped local and regional economies grow, created jobs, and cheapened consumer goods. But the railroad economy also enriched land speculators and robber barons on the one hand and spurred ordinary men and women, in picket lines and in their communities, to fight for their due on the other. It is no coincidence that the railroad, and the mills that forged its steel, were the scenes of momentous labor strife in the last decades of the 19th century. Can the automobile represent progress without the 1937 sit-down strikes in Flint? We should also remember that, for all its clover-leafed elegance, the "expressway world" (as Marshall Berman called it in All That Is Solid Melts into Air) of Robert Moses produced plenty of dislocation and conflict. In other words, if the spatial fix imagined by megaregional planners is to bring not only long-term growth but the equity dividend they often claim is in the offing, it will likely take some of the messy give-and-take of political struggle to make it happen.
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A national growth machine may be coalescing around what Mike Davis, in a recent New Left Review analysis of Obama's election, called "Green Keynesianism," and the biggest short-term winner could be Obama himself.
But as Davis suggests, infrastructural investment, however cutting-edge and green, might not be all that effective as stimulus, because "protracted stagnation, not timely tech-led recovery, seems the most realistic scenario." It also remains to be seen how progressive this growth machine will actually be, if it does jump-start the economy. After all, bullet trains aren't magic bullets.
) of Robert Moses produced plenty of dislocation and conflict. In other words, if the spatial fix imagined by megaregional planners is to bring not only long-term growth but the equity dividend they often claim is in the offing, it will likely take some of the messy give-and-take of political struggle to make it happen.The map above shows an estimate of road-traffic congestion in 2010. In most major metro areas, it is steadily worsening. The cost of congestion, including added freight cost and lost productivity for commuters, reached $78 billion in 2005. Half of that occurred in just 10 metro areas.
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