The thing about historic preservation in Rome is that it is one of a very few cities that actually is constrained by archaeology that is worth preserving. Not many cities are both that old and that continuously built upon that there are just endless layers atop each other. The centre of Chinese power moved around too much for one city to build up quite so many layers. Osaka is like Rome, and there's Istanbul. The Greek cities don't have the medieval/Renaissance layers that Rome does. Even in Egypt, Cairo isn't all that crowded with archaeology (Alexandria is, though). Jerusalem is like this, so is Damascus. Baghdad has several thousand years less history. I'm sure I'm missing a couple, but we really are talking about a problem that applies to a single-digit number of cities in the world.
I have heard several stories about archaeologists working in Rome. One of the best was someone studying Roman altars, which you get at by ringing the bell of a stranger's apartment and saying: “Hello! I’m an archaeologist, and according to this list there’s a Roman sacrificial altar here?”. On one occasion, the response was "yes, it's in the basement behind the washing machine. Can you wait until my laundry finishes?". Resulting in the archaeologist having what she later described as one of the best coffees she had ever tasted while chatting with the local waiting for the washing machine to finish.
As far as I know, the construction project worst impacted by archaeology was the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Bosphorus at Istanbul, which was delayed by four years and had to be rerouted because the excavations discovered the Harbour of Eleutherios - the ancient Roman harbor of the city - complete with multiple whole ships in it, including the only complete trireme galley ever found.
"The centre of Chinese power moved around too much for one city to build up quite so many layers."
This is a bit of a stretch; China was one of the few countries with a large enough, urbanized enough population in antiquity that multiple cities beyond the capital were large enough to accumulate this sort of population history.
Xi'an is probably the premier example, but Beijing isn't far off, and Luoyang, Nanjing, and Wuhan all have quite a bit of history lying around.
The key difference is that preservation work isn't nearly as comprehensive outside the major monuments, which are mostly reconstructed anyway.
Yeah, I was going to correct that in relation to Xi'an, which really does have layers of history.
Beijing does not have anywhere near so much underground - it just wasn't all that important or big before the Mongols, and they're not long enough ago for there to be the three or four or more layers of construction above them that you find in, say, Rome or Istanbul.
I was thinking through where else really had that much underground that it would make tunnelling difficult, and the great ancient cities really aren't that often also the great modern cities: Luxor is still a city, but it's hardly the Thebes of the Pharaohs, while Cairo, a giant city by any standards, is barely a thousand years old. Of all the great American cities, only Mexico City has pre-Columbian roots, and even then they are Aztec - medieval - not Mayan. You see this in Europe too: Cartagena was the Carthaginian and Roman capital, Cordoba the Muslim one, but Madrid (medieval) and Barcelona (a small Roman town which became important as the capital of Charlemagne's Spanish March) are the great cities of Spain; of Italy's great cities, Florence and Venice and Genoa were all either small towns or non-existent in the Roman period.
There are certainly plenty of Indian cities that have ancient roots, but a bunch of the current major cities are rather more early modern or late medieval than ancient - Delhi doesn't really get going until 1206, Kolkata was founded under British influence, Mumbai was confined to the islands until the Portuguese and the British got started in the sixteenth century, Bengaluru was founded in 1537, Hyderabad in 1591, Ahmedabad in 1411, Chennai in 1639, Surat was little more than a village until 1297, Jaipur in 1727.
Patna is genuinely ancient (490 BCE, and the capital of both the Mauryan and Gupta empires) - but also only the 19th largest city in India. Of the cities bigger, only Pune, Nagpur, Indore and Visakhapatnam date before 1000 CE, and even those four were not substantial cities before 1000.
To return to the point - there are a handful of big cities where you are going to hit something world-changing wherever you dig: Rome, Istanbul, Alexandria, Xi'an, Osaka, Jerusalem, Damascus, Hanoi, probably a few more that I've missed. But the vast majority of cities have nothing like these sorts of problems with construction and London and New York (in particular) need to get over themselves.
It means that this simple project will take eight years from greenlight to completion, but that's much better than simply brutally plowing through priceless city history.
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing that happens all the time in any of those cities I've listed and happens once a generation in most normal cities.
London found a mass grave from the 1665 Great Plague when digging the Crossrail Tunnel. Which required a fair bit of biosecurity when exhumating and then reburying the bodies. But that's a giant project and that really was the only significant find - and it wasn't the cause of the problems with that project; the tunnel digging was completed to budget and to schedule. The problems were in station construction and signalling.
I think you're exaggerating his position. The pendulum swung to far in one direction in the US but that does *not* mean genuine preservation has no place! There ought to be a *balance* between the needs of the present and the needs of posterity.
I think that you're still understating the case for a number of Chinese cities; Luoyang has had more than a million people for perhaps a third to half of the last two millennia, in fits and starts, which is not far off from Rome's history there.
One of the main reasons that you don't get the same layering in China is that many of the "urban reconstructions" after cities were destroyed or fell from grace were state-sponsored projects and they often *moved* slightly, usually to emphasize political discontinuity. In Europe, rebuilding was less often state-sponsored and therefore relied on salvaged building materials, as in Athens, Rome, and other places.
So, in China, there are a host of large sites outside the major modern cities. In Wuhan, the major urban center shifted from Hanyang to Hankou, then Wuchang developed, and then they were amalgamated. In Xi'an, Fenghao is well to the SW of the Chang'an city center which is the preserved/reconstructed bit of downtown Xi'an. Nanjing has shifted around a lot as well since the days when Jiankang topped 1 million in the 6th and 7th centuries.
My neighborhood isn't the most walkable in the capital, but it's improving (Carrefour just moved in, among others, woohoo!). But there's a potentially swanky-looking shopping center about a 15 minute walk from me that looks completed. Indeed it looked completed when I returned to China in late 2020. But it STILL hasn't opened...grrrr (now rumor has it, by year's end it'll finally be opened. We shall see). Anyway, multiple neighbors have confirmed artifacts were found (Qing? Ming? Yuan? Denisovan?), and the project's been halted by the authorities until a proper excavation can be completed. I just want a damn Uniqlo and maybe a Starbucks.
It was infuriating when the tram extension near me in Manchester was delayed two years because they discovered a graveyard and had to exhume all the bodies and then find a location to rebury them and then reinter them all.
They weren't anonymous. They were in coffins with names on. Some of them had gravestones. The church whose graveyard they were was still there and still had the records; some of the deceased still had living relatives who attended that church.
The graveyard just wasn't where the records (from the 1690s-1830s) said it was in relation to the church. Could be bad records. Could be that the current church isn't where it's supposed to be in relation to the original (it has had to be rebuilt twice after bombings, once by the Luftwaffe, once by the IRA). Could be that the graveyard was moved when the street was originally built over it (in the 1840s). They have done some archaeology.
Ehh. You underestimate good old fashioned American exceptionalism. The environmental review process for placing a box culvert on the site of an existing, failing box culvert tops 2 years in basically every jurisdiction in the US.
They will shut down roads for years instead of short-circuiting that process to replace failed/failing spans.
Egypt is unusual, in that the landscape is crisply divided between "wet Egypt" which is full of life and people and where stuff rots over time, and "dry Egypt" where absolutely everything is preserved indefinitely by the total lack of moisture, and is inhabited by no life except archaeologists and their assistants. The ancient Egyptians figured out very early that wet Egypt was the place to be if you were alive, and dry Egypt was the place to be if you were dead.
>>>It’s maybe a consequence of the country’s architectural legacy lasting for thousands of years that while you do see massive investment in preserving old things, you don’t have hangups about the fact that the buildings across the street from the Colosseum don’t match the “neighborhood context” of the Flavian era.<<<
I never got this about the city design aesthetic in the US. And Matt's probably right: the Italians were building new styles on top of one another for centuries (or actually millennia) long before anybody ever heard of Robert Moses *or* Jane Jacobs. So they just got accustomed to an eclectic mix. It probably never occurred to them this might not be desirable, because that's the way it had always been.
Lack of eclectic mix—sameness—is bland. And yet in the States this blandness is not only tolerated but often *insisted* upon. Crazy.
It's actually kind of the perfect statement of bureaucratic nonsense that historic preservation rules that basically were about Penn station and similar specific buildings end up used to protect incredibly insignificant histories and prevent anyone from doing anything many places.
I always think about how the laws that were put in place because they would have prevented the destruction of Penn Station are likely to have prevented the initial construction of Penn Station had they been around back then. You wouldn't be able to bulldoze a dozen blocks and dig a big pit for a modernist ("beaux arts") monstrosity!
I'm not sure what was the first "historic district", but there are some cases where I can see the historical significance of an area coming more from the combined effect of multiple structures rather than simply individual structures (the French Quarter in New Orleans is a good example). The problem is, once that tool has been put in the regulatory toolbox it is incredibly easy to abuse.
It struck me that it isn't just building a Burger King where we see this. The NYT has an article today on how scientists, Congress, and the Forest Service all agree western forests need thinning, including occasional controlled burns, which was always a natural part of the ecosystem of a healthy forest, but they are blocked in the courts by nimby-type groups who want the forests to remain "untouched."
In defense of the "nimby" types (aka conservationists): historically, when it comes to thinning, logging companies have promised to only cut down the bare minimum of what they're allowed to cut down only to then take advantage of lax oversight and remote locales and cut down anything they can. Once the trees are down, the damage is done.
It's a legitimate concern but taken to its logical conclusion this turns into a "defund the police" style argument. Yes, the Forest Service may screw it up, but doing nothing is a cure worse than the disease. There's no substitute for rolling up our sleeves and trying our best to exercise proper oversight to get the Forest Service to do a better job when they take the actions they need to take.
The same question could be asked about anything that can go wrong. Surgeons screw up sometimes too; does that mean that we should ban surgery? The question isn't simply "Can GROUP X be trusted to execute these safely?" The question is whether the expected value is positive. Does the potential benefit of the surgery outweigh the potential risks?
Controlled burns go wrong sometimes. You used the word "the", but there have been multiple destructive wildfires in NM started by controlled burns. [1] comes to mind, but there have probably been more. Could the forest service (or National Park Service in the case of [1]) do a better job? Probably. But every piece of forest in the west is going to burn sooner or later. Better to try a controlled burn and occasionally fail than to never try a controlled burn and have all burns be uncontrolled instead.
here in new mexico we have 4 and 600 year old churches/missions built at the sites of 800-1000 year old pueblos with more pueblos built around those... but these are preserved in historical parks and don't really seem to change our overall perspective toward building stuff which is pretty much the same as the rest of the world (Santa Fe has an incredible historic town square, surrounded by massively overpriced mid-20th century development surrounded by another ring of massively expensive 80s/90s urban sprawl and of course it is impossible to build anything in any of those areas).
I'm not sure Beijing really does terribly better in terms of having an eclectic mix of architecture, unless you consider communist-era white tile exteriors, 90's-era reflective green glass facades, and post-2000 bland apartment boxes to be an eclectic mix.
Plenty of hutongs exist in city's core. They may in most cases look different from 40 years ago. But in 1908 they probably looked different from how they appeared in 1770. If you want to talk "tragedy" I'd start with the demolition of BJ's city wall. Damn I wish that thing was still standing. Xi'an's is intact (could be it underwent some rebuilding, I'm not really sure). But you can literally walk the entire perimeter. It's like 30 feet wide or something. You can bike it, too. It's quite the experience. Must be several miles in total length.
Wait, am I the first commenter?!? I need to think of something profound to say -- I never thought this day would come! *Ahem* Matt, this was a great piece with a lot of insight on a country that gets very little coverage in mainstream US media (in fact, I think US media coverage of Italy has actually gotten markedly worse over the last 25 years). It would be terrific if you developed this kind of "country profile" as a series similarly covering other less-widely-covered nations (see, e.g. Portugal).
I agree, but I am tired of the Eurocentric reporting. I spend a good part of my time working in South America and it's seriously underrated culturally.
I would certainly be fine with reporting on countries from other geographic regions as well! I just suggested Portugal off the top of my head because it's a country that's virtually never mentioned in US media. Profiles on almost-completely ignored places like Uruguay or Suriname would be great too.
That would be great. The most underreported-on country in U.S. media, though, is Mexico. We hear a lot about Mexican immigrants and a few very newsworthy problem spots, but most Americans know virtually nothing about "normal" Mexican society, Mexican politics, or Mexico City, the biggest metropolis in the hemisphere - even though it's a big country right next door to us that's influenced our own culture in many ways.
I just recently found out about French Guiana. My mind was blown when I realized France *still* directly controls a non-negligible chunk of the Americas!! In fact, technically France's longest land border is with Brazil, and the EU's largest national park is in South America! This is just insane and totally worth a post IMO.
The ignorance of Uruguay, in particular, is wild. I *first* heard about it when reading Paul Halmos' autobiography (_I Want to be a Mathematician_), because Halmos spent a sabbatical year there when he thought MacCarthyism might kick him out of the US. Apparently, it's the only country in South America with a EU-level GDP and similar rule of law? You'd think that would be important enough to be in most South American news, but no.
I know way, way less about Latin America than you do, I'm sure, but based on what little I do know of it I kind of think the US has quite a lot more in common with our neighbors to the south than many people realize. (And not just, like, we like Mexican food.)
Y'all need to read The Economist :P If you skip the UK section you get pretty decently balanced worldwide reporting. I find that reading most major (US) news sites gives far too little broad coverage unless you aggressively do your own digging. They're heavily skewed towards a few big stories and topics.
When I saw there were no comments, I actually wrote, "First!" to try to save the spot (I wasn't 100% sure if editing a comment would cause it to be re-sorted in the chronological listing) and then went back and added substantive material to the comment because I know some sites have an express policy of deleting, "First!" posts and similar sorts of things and didn't want to push my luck with Milan.
Yeah, because no one ever had problems fitting in as a kid, especially in a totally different country, language and culture, if their name was familiar in the area?
That's a rather high octane response to a facetious comment but, for the most part, kids adapt well and learn new languages quickly. I suspect Jose already knows a bit of Spanish
I honeymooned in Portugal. I recall waiting to board a plane to Lisbon at JFK and turning to my wife and saying "why are there so many people on this plane speaking Russian?" After we got there, I realized, nope, it's Portuguese.
I've also been to Brazil, and can confirm that Brazilian Portuguese does not sound like that; it sounds much more like Spanish. (I was actually able to make myself understood in Brazil by lapsing into my pidgin Spanish. This definitely did not work in Portugal.)
In general I am a big fan of the Iberian peninsula: fascinating history; diverse, beautiful landscapes; equally beautiful cities; great food and wine; friendly people. If I were given the choice of another country to live in, I'd probably pick Spain or Portugal.
I speak Spanish fluently and Portuguese proficiently (not a native in either) and to my ear this is definitely true of European Portuguese. Not so much Brazilian Portuguese.
I could have claimed stake to the first comment, indeed a rarity for where we are, but I didn't have anything profound to say--just read and listened and learned more about a place I don't know a lot of details about.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that one of the US' major issues is adversarial legalism where it isn't appropriate. It's definitely appropriate in lots of cases like business contract enforcement, as Matt notes! But just as even economists are willing to admit 'market failures' that should be carved out from laissez-faire rules, I think we should admit 'adversarial legalism failures' where the system doesn't work:
• We should join all the other developed countries in having 'loser pays legal fees' being normal, to discourage vexatious litigation where it's cheaper to settle than to fight. (I always think it's funny how people recommend doing that for patent & defamation lawsuits- two high-profile areas of legal abuse- but don't note that every other 1st world countries does this for *every* lawsuit)
• Prevent an individual federal judge from issuing nationwide injunctions. They can issue an injunction in their little county or whatever, sure. An appeals court can do a nationwide injunction. But not a random judge stopping the entire country from doing x based on a Fox News-level legal analysis. There are almost 1800 judges nationally, right now any one can literally commandeer the entire federal government on any topic if they want!
• Strip any party that regularly abuses vexatious litigation of its ability to do so (NIMBY homeowners being the most prominent example here). Zoning decisions should be left up a zoning board and not the court system
"Loser pays" has its advantages in some instances but I assure you that it is by no means clear that it creates a net advantage in terms of societal structure. SLAPP lawsuits are already such a problem that we have specific legislation against them. Now imagine that you're being fighting a suit against a large and well-resourced entity in which your risk isn't just losing the suit, but paying for their team of high-powered lawyers. You've just handed the country to big business on a platter.
Rather than "loser pays", it should be "the party who is the plaintiff must pay all the legal fees of the defendant if the plaintiff loses". So, asymmetrical loser pays favoring defense.
Certainly one of the great mysteries of life is, if the American justice system is rigged in favor of the rich (as I am so often told on-line), why is it that there are a whole bunch of fee-shifting statutes (federal and state) that *only* operate in favor of plaintiffs? (Most immediately the Clayton Act for federal antitrust claims comes to mind, as do many consumer protection laws.) I'm aware of no "one way" fee-shifting statutes that favor defendants, even though when, one thinks about it, it's by definition the defendant who has the cost of litigation imposed on it, whereas filing suit for the plaintiff is optional in most situations.
Aren't anti-SLAPP laws just making defamation lawsuits 'loser pays'? That was my (non-attorney) understanding of them, I could be totally wrong. 1st Amendment types are always advocating for more anti-SLAPP legislation
The exact implementation of anti-SLAPP varies and isn’t my area of expertise, a quick review suggests that there’s often some form of punitive sanction against the filer. But it’s important to recognize that defamation is also a uniquely disfavored tort in American jurisprudence and thus unusually susceptible to early dismissal—it may have been a bad example to bring up due to to its wrinkles but the basic point was “well-resourced large entity who is in the wrong nevertheless forces smaller claimant with meritorious claim to forgo vindication due to resource asymmetry” is very much a real and existent pathology of American law even without loser pays. In many / most instances the large entity will be the defendant (eg Largeco stiffs a contractor or supplier) and “loser pays” makes it that much less attractive to represent even meritorious plaintiffs, whereas largeco can just eat the occasional loss of they fail to win through a combination of delay, intimidation and general resource advantages (eg near-spurious motion filings).
The current system definitely can create some unfairness to defendants but loser pays creates a kind of systematic bias against plaintiffs by making bringing suit so risky, and big business is a lot more often on the defendant side (for good or ill) than the plaintiff side.
According to Wikipedia 'nearly every Western democracy other than the United States' has loser pays rules. Are large and well-resourced entities running around not paying their bills, stiffing their suppliers etc., in all of the other developed countries? I find this a bit difficult to believe
Yes, please prevent district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. We are now getting to the point where the Biden and Trump administrations are letting district judges issue injunctions against regulations they don't like and don't want to take the time to repeal, and then they just don't appeal the ruling, even though that is the administration's job. Congress should do this, and if they don't, the Supreme Court should. Justice Thomas has been wanting to ban district court nationwide injunctions for years.
As a commercial litigator, I want federal judges to have nationwide injunction power because if my client is suing someone for trade secret misappropriation or something like that it would be ridiculous to require us to have to file separate lawsuits in every federal judicial district (94!) in the country to be able to fully prevent the defendant from using the trade secret.
Nationwide injunctions are problematic, but there are situations where they are sort of a natural and logical result of the type of case you have. Like every successful administrative rule challenge in the D.C. federal courts has an outcome that's essentially the same thing as a "nationwide injunction" (since those rules have nationwide impacts), but that's just normal. It just so happens that when the rules at issue are, say, border patrol policies, the venue for the case often ends up being in a federal court in Arizona or wherever instead of in D.C.
I wish Matt would give up on the "tripling the US population would be great" hobby horse. In particular, the argument that we'd just be getting the density of France, and France is great, is getting tedious. Huge tracts of the US are basically prairie. Most people don't want to live there, and even if they did, there's not enough water.
The rest of the article was great - and props for the closer: "If Italy needs to learn how to make better courts, we need to learn how to carve out more space for democratic decision-making rather than post hoc litigation."
>>France is great, is getting tedious. Huge tracts of the US are basically prairie. Most people don't want to live there<<
France also has large tracts where people don't want to live (similar to Spain in that regard). Rural depopulation is a well-known phenomenon in France.
America can accommodate a much large population mainly by growing its existing cities. We don't need to pave over the wheat fields of Kansas, nor build a bunch of new Phonexises and Salt Lake Cities in the desert.
Even lots of already big metros could grew much bigger without additional land use if we made it legal to build multi unit structures. And I'm not talking only about 20 story apartment buildings. Simple row house/town house dwellings, duplexes and small (say, 3-6 story) apartment buildings can house a lot of people in comfort, if we but allowed the builders to build them for folks willing to buy them.
I live in the Chicago south burbs and take commuter train to downtown through some really distressed neighborhoods in the burbs and the city's south side. There is SOOO much empty land and abandoned houses that even a SFH-centric development plan could create a lot of additional housing, although I totally agree with laxer zoning rules as well for more multi-family development.
Tokyo has ~14 megapeople. Thus 1 gigaperson is about 71 Tokyos. The 71st biggest city in the US is Lincoln, NE. Turning Lincoln into another Tokyo would surely require paving over some wheat fields.
Now, not all of the US lives in cities, only about 80%. But it's probably not a terrible approximation to assume that said ratio stays constant even in times of population growth; there's some evidence that city/town sizes in a country grow in lockstep, because relative city sizes are have a log-normal distribution (Bettencourt, "Urban growth and the emergent statistics of cities", _Science Advances_ 6:34, doi 10.1126/sciadv.aat8812). But that only takes down to city #56, Honolulu, and implies that we *will* need to build a bunch of (say) Moab, Utahs in the desert.
To triple the population, we need to triple the size of Lincoln from 300K to 1M. We don’t need to turn it into a city of 14M. Even better, we live in three dimensions, so we only need to build 44% taller, 44% wider east/west, and 44% wider north/south.
Not really quite sure what you're claiming here. But, for the record, the main "greenlighting growth" policies I want to see are 1) abolition of the NIMBY veto and 2) more immigration.
Within that context there are things you could do to protect farmland, if that's a concern. There's a difference between A) "clear and rational rules that shape growth patterns and allow much more housing to be built while protecting vital countryside for future generations" and, B) allowing rich people in Palo Alto or Alexandria to shout down a four story apartment building.
"A" above is consistent with a strong "shall issue" law with respect to building permits.
Matt literally wrote a book on tripling the population of the US. The subject is not a hobby horse - it is a major driving force of his entire policy project.
There’s no rule that says you have to agree with him, of course - a number of subscribers here seem mostly to come for the anti-woke content and stay for the opportunity to troll Matt’s more progressive readers - but if you are sick of reading about why the US would benefit from massive population growth, you probably should consider spending less time reading Slow Boring.
I know Matt's book, of course. My point is that I think by now *all* his readers know his views on this subject, so mentioning it less frequently would be beneficial. By now, you either agree or you don't. (As for me personally, I'm willing to believe a 50% or 100% increase would be good. 200%? Probably not. On top of that, very careful immigration policies would have to be designed for even a 50-100% increase to be successful, and I kinda think the US is too dysfunctional at this point to attempt any radical makeovers of society.
glad some is finally brave enough ti admit the truth about Italian pizza. Who the hell wants cheese on a third of the pizza thst kinda sorta has a sauce
Obviously, someone has never had the zucchini flower and anchovy pizza you order by the length in random Roman delis. Which you then take with a small single serving of wine and eat by a fountain in a random piazza. Just, trust me.
Pizza is regional in Italy, it's only really Roman and Neapolitan; the rest of Italy only cooks it because the tourists expect it, and some of the worst pizza I have ever had was in Venice. Roman pizza is different from any of the American styles - thin, crispy, crusty and lighter on the sauce. But it does generally use grated cheese spread right across the base, not the big globs of mozzarella that the Neapolitans go in for.
Rome is a great city for tourists; it's big enough to soak up a huge number of tourists without the sense that it only exists for them. The best bit of tourist advice I got when going to Rome is to have a good look at a map when planning where to visit, as the major sites are in groups that are quite distant from each other, and Rome is built on hills, so walking significant distances is quite challenging. You can use the metro and the trams, but it still makes much more sense to visit the Colosseum and the Forum on one day and the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museum on a different day - those two groups are well over two miles apart in a straight line (and no road in Rome is straight).
Also, unless you're familiar with driving in a busy European city with tight streets and small, agile cars, don't drive in Rome.
There are also all kinds of pizza-like bread+tomato (sauce)+cheese(or not) combinations that are amazing and differ by region.
In the village in Puglia that my grandfather is from, they have a giant marble oven (that looks to be many centuries old) that supplies the village with baked goods. Each household has a stamp that the baker uses to mark them so, for example, in the morning we just walked through and grabbed whatever had our mark on it. One of the most delicious items is focaccia bread with the ingredients of pizza baked into it. And you eat it at breakfast or lunch, not dinner. But they have no tourists, hence no pizzerias.
I actually *loved* walking around Rome; it was probably my single favorite part of the 6-day trip I took there in 2011. And I walked pretty long distances, too. One of my favorite memories is the walk from Piazza del Poppolo to where I was staying nearish to San Giovanni, I randomly happened upon Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon, and walked past the Colosseum at night. Another time I walked from where I was staying to the Baths of Caracalla.
While I had no problems with all that walking, it is worth nothing that I was 26 at the time. Pretty sure I could handle it today, still; but someone who is older or mobility impaired probably would have some issues with it. Rome's metro, while useful, is kinda undersized (more so when I was there - Line C hadn't been built yet).
+1 for Roman pizza. That stuff is great. We went to a place in NYC that had Roman-style pizza once, but it wasn't the same.
I would have loved the walking the first time I went, in that I was 19 at the time, except that it was a July heatwave in Rome, and walking any significant distance in 40C (104F) heat is unpleasant however young and fit you are.
1) I’ve spent most of my time in Italy in the Naples region where my dad is from.
2) Opinions about food are subjective and cannot be wrong.
That being said: wow, you are so very wrong about American pizza being better than Italian pizza.
I enjoy good pizza in the States, and I’ve had very good pizza here. But I’ve probably had 30 pizzas in Italy, and every single one has been better than 95%+ of the pizzas I’ve had in the US.
There are no wrong opinions, but this is a wrong opinion.
China takes bad pizza to unimaginably fantastic levels. Drurian. Blueberries and yogurt. Sweetened cheese with nary a hint of red sauce to be found. Absolutely crazy shit.
I was waiting for Matt to point out that one line on the Naples metro goes in a loop: it crosses itself! When I was there I tried to think of some theoretical reason that could be efficient, but mainly I wondered which mafia personality got the contract for the line.
I'm sorry that I can't resist bringing everything back to Afghanistan but it's worth pointing out that during the occupation, different NATO countries were assigned responsibility for different aspects of public sector reform. The Afghan judicial system went to Italy, and I'd like to know whose idea that was. If they'd been given public transportation instead, maybe there would be some.
Lol really? This is very similar to the old joke about how in heaven the bankers are Swiss, the lovers are Italian, the chefs are French, and the police are British, while in hell the lovers are Swiss, the bankers are Italian, the police are French, and the chefs are British.
The Green Line in the Oslo Metro doesn't just go in a loop - it covers one part of that loop *twice*, so that if you're waiting for a train in that direction on that line, you have to check whether this train is continuing on the loop or is on its second go and will go off on a radius:
In practice, this is no more confusing than Chicago's loop, where you have to check which color train you're getting on if you're going more than a couple stops, but most of them work for short trips on the loop.
"If Italy needs to learn how to make better courts, we need to learn how to carve out more space for democratic decision-making...."
This struck me as a major non sequitur.
You did not show us that Italy's successes stem from democratic decision-making. Instead, you showed us that its successes stem from nepotism and clientelism. Of course you're not going to tell us to adopt nepotism and clientelism. But why think that democratic decision-making will do for us what nepotism and clientelism does for Italy?
I'm familiar with -- and agree with -- your longstanding animus against excessive legal reviews that slow down public works projects. But aren't democratic processes just as much to blame? Neighborhood councils, elected aldermen, advocacy groups, pressure groups -- these are all democratic, and all slow down development.
The cheerleading for democracy in the last line just seems non-responsive to what came before.
(And I like democracy! But I like coherent arguments, too.)
>>>But aren't democratic processes just as much to blame? Neighborhood councils, elected aldermen, advocacy groups, pressure groups -- these are all democratic, and all slow down development.<<<
I dunno. I wonder if anyone has made a study of it. My sense is taking projects to court (or merely *threatening* legal action) is a bigger impediment to getting transport and housing projects done than the actions of lawmakers. But my "sense" could definitely be wrong.
You cite Italy's high debt service costs, noting that this is largely a function of poor economic growth. Which is true, but the real problem is that the country has operated under a regime of fiscal austerity, imposed by the technocrats of Brussels (of which Draghi is a handmaiden), which has crushed the economy. The result? Years of subpar growth, which has exacerbated the debt problem and now, outright stagflation
The latest European Commission macroeconomic forecast predicted that Italy will experience the slowest economic growth in the bloc next year, at just 0.9%, owing to a decline in consumer spending due to rising prices and lower business investment — a result of rising borrowing and energy costs, as well as disruptions in the supply of Russian gas.
Italy is also experiencing one of the fastest-growing inflation rates in Europe — which is currently at 8.6%, the highest level in more than three decades. Interest rates on Italian government bonds have also been steadily climbing ever since Draghi came to power, rising four-fold under his watch; today they stand at the highest level in almost a decade.
And this “polycrisis” has taken its toll on Italian society: 5.6 million Italians — almost 10% of the population, including 1.4 million minors — currently live in absolute poverty, the highest level on record. Many of these are in work, and that number is bound to increase as real wages in Italy continue to fall at the highest pace in the bloc. Meanwhile, almost 100,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are at risk of insolvency — a 2% increase compared to last year.
Multiple crises and Draghi has played a key role in creating this state if affairs. I fully expect yet another Euro crisis in the months ahead.
It's amazing how the Euro has evolved, from a German perspective, into the exact mirror image of the exchange rate system Germany intended to impose on Europe after winning WWII.
Instead of a system with the Reichsmark pegged artificially high relative to other Continental economies, ensuring an endless supply of cheap French wine, Italian cheese, Maltese holidays, and Spanish woolens to the workers and housewives of Greater Germany, they've built a system whereby the Deutschmark was brought in at an artificially low rate, which has persisted in the form of wage differentials. All this, even as German productivity and export prices dictate that the "German Euro" should really be valued at 2X the current Euro exchange rate.
Yes, by bringing in the DM at an artificially low rate, the Germans basically managed to destroy their main industrial competitor, Italy, which has not grown since it adopted the euro at the turn of this century. In that time its debt-to-GDP ratio has exploded from just over 100% to over 160% of GDP . A study published in early 2019 by the Centre for European Policy think tank, titled 20 Years of the Euro: Winners and Losers: An Empirical Study, found that out of eight Euro Area economies examined (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Greece) only two — Germany and the Netherlands — actually benefited from the introduction of the euro. Italy lost out most:
"Without the euro, Italian GDP would have been higher by €530 billion, which corresponds to € 8,756 per capita. In France, too, the euro has led to significant losses of prosperity of € 374 billion overall, which corresponds to € 5,570 per capita."
I'd be curious to understand how the impact of devaluation would play into this. Italy joining the Euro stopped them from historical trend of devaluing their currency in order to more competitive. This allowed them to have MUCH lower interest rates so while the debt to GDP ratio has increased, their cost for servicing the debt is probably lower than it otherwise would have. Similarly, this allowed them to have a higher level of imports and likely a resultant higher standard of living as euro was worth considerably more than the lira would have been had they not joined.
The challenge of course is that inflating their currency value increased their immediate buying power, but left them significantly uncompetitive relative to their productivity. Which has been the real problem - they have made almost no productivity gains in the last 20 years.
This is absolutely wild. Do you know if there's a consensus estimate on what the benefits of the monetary union are? I would assume these all cash out to some variety of "vastly reduced need to account for currency fluctuation risk" and "smoother international trade with fewer exchange fees skimmed off the top" but I haven't generally seen that number quantified (not that I can claim to have looked too hard).
Probably an early selling point for monetary union, but if they had quantified the benefits, I'm sure the numbers would have just been pulled out of their collective proverbial behinds. Just like the debt levels that were assigned as part of the Stability and Growth Pact. There was no economic justification behind them at all.
"It's amazing how the Euro has evolved, from a German perspective, into the exact mirror image of the exchange rate system Germany intended to impose on Europe after winning WWII."
To be fair, the vision of a German-dominated "Mitteleuropa" economic region dates back even before WW I.
I'm speaking simply from anecdotal evidence, but I get the impression that the treatment of women in Italy is a bigger deal than you let on. Seems like Italian cultural norms are somewhat similar to Japan in terms of women working and women's place in the family, and that has (partially) led to low population growth. I don't have any actual research or links on this at my fingertips though, so I'm happy to be refuted here (or supported!).
Italy’s ability to build transit at a decent cost is even more impressive if you take into account the fact that the country is an earthquake zone so it has to be engineered to survive decent sized earthquakes. Yet another reason the transit agencies here on the east coast should hire out their experts.
I think the North/South divide is a bigger deal than the economic data suggest. I mean, Italy hasn't even really been a country for all that long (in absolute and relative terms) and I think that may be more deeply ingrained in the culture than Americans appreciate. Like, we have regional accents in the US, but the Southern dialect my family speaks is borderline unintelligible in Rome—at least no one there seemed to understand my relatives (I don't speak any kind of Italian). And traveling North-South in Italy feels more like going between countries than going from one end of France to the other. (Or East-West in Sicily, where even the architecture changes dramatically.)
Throw all those disparate people in a parliament together and you end up with a weird grab-bag of parties, petty regional issues snowballing (what what is, a trash incinerator that catalysed Draghi's resignation?) and regular ousting of the leadership. I quite often hear that Italian politics is like looking into America's future. It's not hard to see how a country in which geographical regions are indifferent toward or even disdainful of each other can become sufficiently dysfunctional that it stops growing.
Spain and France would have this issue too, since Catalan and Occitan/Provencal are all closer to each other than to Spanish/Portuguese or to standard French. But in the 19th century, France managed to mostly eliminate Occitan/Provencal.
Should cities start using in-house talent to save money on street redesign?
A major street redesign is happening in our neighborhood. Being on the community council, I was invited to a “Brainstorm Workshop” yesterday which had 6-8 consultants (including 1-2 from a boutique place-making consultancy).
They had fancy table mock-ups, where we could mix and match Lego-like pieces to play with different street designs. All very slick, but it felt like a waste of money unless it was purely to make locals feel engaged. This project is $12-13m and the city transpo dept has 10-12 Transportation Planners and Transportation Engineers. Should they bring design in house instead of hiring consultants for every project?
Lack of state capacity, individual litigiousness and a permissive approach thereto, and the batshit environmental review process collectively explain the entirety of American transportation project failure.
Next to these three, our other shortcomings are basically nonentities, orders of magnitude smaller.
The thing about historic preservation in Rome is that it is one of a very few cities that actually is constrained by archaeology that is worth preserving. Not many cities are both that old and that continuously built upon that there are just endless layers atop each other. The centre of Chinese power moved around too much for one city to build up quite so many layers. Osaka is like Rome, and there's Istanbul. The Greek cities don't have the medieval/Renaissance layers that Rome does. Even in Egypt, Cairo isn't all that crowded with archaeology (Alexandria is, though). Jerusalem is like this, so is Damascus. Baghdad has several thousand years less history. I'm sure I'm missing a couple, but we really are talking about a problem that applies to a single-digit number of cities in the world.
I have heard several stories about archaeologists working in Rome. One of the best was someone studying Roman altars, which you get at by ringing the bell of a stranger's apartment and saying: “Hello! I’m an archaeologist, and according to this list there’s a Roman sacrificial altar here?”. On one occasion, the response was "yes, it's in the basement behind the washing machine. Can you wait until my laundry finishes?". Resulting in the archaeologist having what she later described as one of the best coffees she had ever tasted while chatting with the local waiting for the washing machine to finish.
As far as I know, the construction project worst impacted by archaeology was the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Bosphorus at Istanbul, which was delayed by four years and had to be rerouted because the excavations discovered the Harbour of Eleutherios - the ancient Roman harbor of the city - complete with multiple whole ships in it, including the only complete trireme galley ever found.
"The centre of Chinese power moved around too much for one city to build up quite so many layers."
This is a bit of a stretch; China was one of the few countries with a large enough, urbanized enough population in antiquity that multiple cities beyond the capital were large enough to accumulate this sort of population history.
Xi'an is probably the premier example, but Beijing isn't far off, and Luoyang, Nanjing, and Wuhan all have quite a bit of history lying around.
The key difference is that preservation work isn't nearly as comprehensive outside the major monuments, which are mostly reconstructed anyway.
Yeah, I was going to correct that in relation to Xi'an, which really does have layers of history.
Beijing does not have anywhere near so much underground - it just wasn't all that important or big before the Mongols, and they're not long enough ago for there to be the three or four or more layers of construction above them that you find in, say, Rome or Istanbul.
I was thinking through where else really had that much underground that it would make tunnelling difficult, and the great ancient cities really aren't that often also the great modern cities: Luxor is still a city, but it's hardly the Thebes of the Pharaohs, while Cairo, a giant city by any standards, is barely a thousand years old. Of all the great American cities, only Mexico City has pre-Columbian roots, and even then they are Aztec - medieval - not Mayan. You see this in Europe too: Cartagena was the Carthaginian and Roman capital, Cordoba the Muslim one, but Madrid (medieval) and Barcelona (a small Roman town which became important as the capital of Charlemagne's Spanish March) are the great cities of Spain; of Italy's great cities, Florence and Venice and Genoa were all either small towns or non-existent in the Roman period.
There are certainly plenty of Indian cities that have ancient roots, but a bunch of the current major cities are rather more early modern or late medieval than ancient - Delhi doesn't really get going until 1206, Kolkata was founded under British influence, Mumbai was confined to the islands until the Portuguese and the British got started in the sixteenth century, Bengaluru was founded in 1537, Hyderabad in 1591, Ahmedabad in 1411, Chennai in 1639, Surat was little more than a village until 1297, Jaipur in 1727.
Patna is genuinely ancient (490 BCE, and the capital of both the Mauryan and Gupta empires) - but also only the 19th largest city in India. Of the cities bigger, only Pune, Nagpur, Indore and Visakhapatnam date before 1000 CE, and even those four were not substantial cities before 1000.
To return to the point - there are a handful of big cities where you are going to hit something world-changing wherever you dig: Rome, Istanbul, Alexandria, Xi'an, Osaka, Jerusalem, Damascus, Hanoi, probably a few more that I've missed. But the vast majority of cities have nothing like these sorts of problems with construction and London and New York (in particular) need to get over themselves.
To wit, a couple days ago this story about a simple elevator being built for improved access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and look what they found while doing the digging: https://www.timesofisrael.com/western-wall-elevator-project-unearths-archaeological-trove-of-villa-artifacts/
It means that this simple project will take eight years from greenlight to completion, but that's much better than simply brutally plowing through priceless city history.
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing that happens all the time in any of those cities I've listed and happens once a generation in most normal cities.
London found a mass grave from the 1665 Great Plague when digging the Crossrail Tunnel. Which required a fair bit of biosecurity when exhumating and then reburying the bodies. But that's a giant project and that really was the only significant find - and it wasn't the cause of the problems with that project; the tunnel digging was completed to budget and to schedule. The problems were in station construction and signalling.
I wonder if Matt would agree. He doesn’t have much time for historic preservation.
I think you're exaggerating his position. The pendulum swung to far in one direction in the US but that does *not* mean genuine preservation has no place! There ought to be a *balance* between the needs of the present and the needs of posterity.
I'm sure he would; he pretty much did in today's post.
I think that you're still understating the case for a number of Chinese cities; Luoyang has had more than a million people for perhaps a third to half of the last two millennia, in fits and starts, which is not far off from Rome's history there.
One of the main reasons that you don't get the same layering in China is that many of the "urban reconstructions" after cities were destroyed or fell from grace were state-sponsored projects and they often *moved* slightly, usually to emphasize political discontinuity. In Europe, rebuilding was less often state-sponsored and therefore relied on salvaged building materials, as in Athens, Rome, and other places.
So, in China, there are a host of large sites outside the major modern cities. In Wuhan, the major urban center shifted from Hanyang to Hankou, then Wuchang developed, and then they were amalgamated. In Xi'an, Fenghao is well to the SW of the Chang'an city center which is the preserved/reconstructed bit of downtown Xi'an. Nanjing has shifted around a lot as well since the days when Jiankang topped 1 million in the 6th and 7th centuries.
I think Seville is probably the oldest city in Spain that still a major center?
Probably. Cartagena is older, but not really major any more.
My neighborhood isn't the most walkable in the capital, but it's improving (Carrefour just moved in, among others, woohoo!). But there's a potentially swanky-looking shopping center about a 15 minute walk from me that looks completed. Indeed it looked completed when I returned to China in late 2020. But it STILL hasn't opened...grrrr (now rumor has it, by year's end it'll finally be opened. We shall see). Anyway, multiple neighbors have confirmed artifacts were found (Qing? Ming? Yuan? Denisovan?), and the project's been halted by the authorities until a proper excavation can be completed. I just want a damn Uniqlo and maybe a Starbucks.
It was infuriating when the tram extension near me in Manchester was delayed two years because they discovered a graveyard and had to exhume all the bodies and then find a location to rebury them and then reinter them all.
Why should we care about what happens to anonymous dead bodies? Do they care?
They weren't anonymous. They were in coffins with names on. Some of them had gravestones. The church whose graveyard they were was still there and still had the records; some of the deceased still had living relatives who attended that church.
The graveyard just wasn't where the records (from the 1690s-1830s) said it was in relation to the church. Could be bad records. Could be that the current church isn't where it's supposed to be in relation to the original (it has had to be rebuilt twice after bombings, once by the Luftwaffe, once by the IRA). Could be that the graveyard was moved when the street was originally built over it (in the 1840s). They have done some archaeology.
Two years? That's crazy.
US-level crazy.
Ehh. You underestimate good old fashioned American exceptionalism. The environmental review process for placing a box culvert on the site of an existing, failing box culvert tops 2 years in basically every jurisdiction in the US.
They will shut down roads for years instead of short-circuiting that process to replace failed/failing spans.
Here's the local paper when it was only seven months late - but they were still digging up bodies.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/metrolink-cross-street-270-bodies-9670347
Egypt is unusual, in that the landscape is crisply divided between "wet Egypt" which is full of life and people and where stuff rots over time, and "dry Egypt" where absolutely everything is preserved indefinitely by the total lack of moisture, and is inhabited by no life except archaeologists and their assistants. The ancient Egyptians figured out very early that wet Egypt was the place to be if you were alive, and dry Egypt was the place to be if you were dead.
>>>It’s maybe a consequence of the country’s architectural legacy lasting for thousands of years that while you do see massive investment in preserving old things, you don’t have hangups about the fact that the buildings across the street from the Colosseum don’t match the “neighborhood context” of the Flavian era.<<<
I never got this about the city design aesthetic in the US. And Matt's probably right: the Italians were building new styles on top of one another for centuries (or actually millennia) long before anybody ever heard of Robert Moses *or* Jane Jacobs. So they just got accustomed to an eclectic mix. It probably never occurred to them this might not be desirable, because that's the way it had always been.
Lack of eclectic mix—sameness—is bland. And yet in the States this blandness is not only tolerated but often *insisted* upon. Crazy.
It's actually kind of the perfect statement of bureaucratic nonsense that historic preservation rules that basically were about Penn station and similar specific buildings end up used to protect incredibly insignificant histories and prevent anyone from doing anything many places.
Yes exactly. The flip from "preserve specific noteworthy structures" to "nothing should look new" is wild.
I always think about how the laws that were put in place because they would have prevented the destruction of Penn Station are likely to have prevented the initial construction of Penn Station had they been around back then. You wouldn't be able to bulldoze a dozen blocks and dig a big pit for a modernist ("beaux arts") monstrosity!
I'm not sure what was the first "historic district", but there are some cases where I can see the historical significance of an area coming more from the combined effect of multiple structures rather than simply individual structures (the French Quarter in New Orleans is a good example). The problem is, once that tool has been put in the regulatory toolbox it is incredibly easy to abuse.
It struck me that it isn't just building a Burger King where we see this. The NYT has an article today on how scientists, Congress, and the Forest Service all agree western forests need thinning, including occasional controlled burns, which was always a natural part of the ecosystem of a healthy forest, but they are blocked in the courts by nimby-type groups who want the forests to remain "untouched."
In defense of the "nimby" types (aka conservationists): historically, when it comes to thinning, logging companies have promised to only cut down the bare minimum of what they're allowed to cut down only to then take advantage of lax oversight and remote locales and cut down anything they can. Once the trees are down, the damage is done.
The huge and destructive New Mexico wildfire was set off by prescribed burns. Can the forest service be trusted to execute these safely?
It's a legitimate concern but taken to its logical conclusion this turns into a "defund the police" style argument. Yes, the Forest Service may screw it up, but doing nothing is a cure worse than the disease. There's no substitute for rolling up our sleeves and trying our best to exercise proper oversight to get the Forest Service to do a better job when they take the actions they need to take.
The same question could be asked about anything that can go wrong. Surgeons screw up sometimes too; does that mean that we should ban surgery? The question isn't simply "Can GROUP X be trusted to execute these safely?" The question is whether the expected value is positive. Does the potential benefit of the surgery outweigh the potential risks?
Controlled burns go wrong sometimes. You used the word "the", but there have been multiple destructive wildfires in NM started by controlled burns. [1] comes to mind, but there have probably been more. Could the forest service (or National Park Service in the case of [1]) do a better job? Probably. But every piece of forest in the west is going to burn sooner or later. Better to try a controlled burn and occasionally fail than to never try a controlled burn and have all burns be uncontrolled instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Grande_Fire
They do it well enough in Florida.
I assume this is a joke, as Florida is soaking wet.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wildfires-california-is-learning-from-florida
Someone doesn't have a kid who is obsessed with the "great swamp search" episode of the Octonauts.
Octonauts is infinitely better than Paw Patrol!
here in new mexico we have 4 and 600 year old churches/missions built at the sites of 800-1000 year old pueblos with more pueblos built around those... but these are preserved in historical parks and don't really seem to change our overall perspective toward building stuff which is pretty much the same as the rest of the world (Santa Fe has an incredible historic town square, surrounded by massively overpriced mid-20th century development surrounded by another ring of massively expensive 80s/90s urban sprawl and of course it is impossible to build anything in any of those areas).
I'm not sure Beijing really does terribly better in terms of having an eclectic mix of architecture, unless you consider communist-era white tile exteriors, 90's-era reflective green glass facades, and post-2000 bland apartment boxes to be an eclectic mix.
:p
Without a doubt Beijing's has committed its share of crimes against urban design like few other cities.
Plenty of hutongs exist in city's core. They may in most cases look different from 40 years ago. But in 1908 they probably looked different from how they appeared in 1770. If you want to talk "tragedy" I'd start with the demolition of BJ's city wall. Damn I wish that thing was still standing. Xi'an's is intact (could be it underwent some rebuilding, I'm not really sure). But you can literally walk the entire perimeter. It's like 30 feet wide or something. You can bike it, too. It's quite the experience. Must be several miles in total length.
As Jasper will attest to, “almost all” is a massive exaggeration, and those places were, in the main, slums.
Great numbers of them have now been transformed into tourist traps and upscale restaurants, and smaller numbers into boutique residences and hotels.
Wait, am I the first commenter?!? I need to think of something profound to say -- I never thought this day would come! *Ahem* Matt, this was a great piece with a lot of insight on a country that gets very little coverage in mainstream US media (in fact, I think US media coverage of Italy has actually gotten markedly worse over the last 25 years). It would be terrific if you developed this kind of "country profile" as a series similarly covering other less-widely-covered nations (see, e.g. Portugal).
I agree, but I am tired of the Eurocentric reporting. I spend a good part of my time working in South America and it's seriously underrated culturally.
"...South America and it's seriously underrated culturally."
Sure, but how are you going to persuade our host of that? He has no cultural connections to Latin America.
lol... I had to think about that one.
I would certainly be fine with reporting on countries from other geographic regions as well! I just suggested Portugal off the top of my head because it's a country that's virtually never mentioned in US media. Profiles on almost-completely ignored places like Uruguay or Suriname would be great too.
That would be great. The most underreported-on country in U.S. media, though, is Mexico. We hear a lot about Mexican immigrants and a few very newsworthy problem spots, but most Americans know virtually nothing about "normal" Mexican society, Mexican politics, or Mexico City, the biggest metropolis in the hemisphere - even though it's a big country right next door to us that's influenced our own culture in many ways.
Matt, go on a trip to (central) Mexico!
Yeah, the under-coverage of Mexico and Central America is wild.
I just recently found out about French Guiana. My mind was blown when I realized France *still* directly controls a non-negligible chunk of the Americas!! In fact, technically France's longest land border is with Brazil, and the EU's largest national park is in South America! This is just insane and totally worth a post IMO.
The ignorance of Uruguay, in particular, is wild. I *first* heard about it when reading Paul Halmos' autobiography (_I Want to be a Mathematician_), because Halmos spent a sabbatical year there when he thought MacCarthyism might kick him out of the US. Apparently, it's the only country in South America with a EU-level GDP and similar rule of law? You'd think that would be important enough to be in most South American news, but no.
I know way, way less about Latin America than you do, I'm sure, but based on what little I do know of it I kind of think the US has quite a lot more in common with our neighbors to the south than many people realize. (And not just, like, we like Mexican food.)
Y'all need to read The Economist :P If you skip the UK section you get pretty decently balanced worldwide reporting. I find that reading most major (US) news sites gives far too little broad coverage unless you aggressively do your own digging. They're heavily skewed towards a few big stories and topics.
Let's have a thread where we just make itineraries to assign to him.
Did Matt pay you to post this so he can write off future vacations as business expenses?
Totally blew the chance to say “First”
When I saw there were no comments, I actually wrote, "First!" to try to save the spot (I wasn't 100% sure if editing a comment would cause it to be re-sorted in the chronological listing) and then went back and added substantive material to the comment because I know some sites have an express policy of deleting, "First!" posts and similar sorts of things and didn't want to push my luck with Milan.
I enjoyed the Aughts-era comment thread vibes, tho.
All men want to say they were first, but we usually arent.
Yes, this piece is excellent. It's nice that Matt has a remote job and could consider doing a country tour, although maybe his wife doesn't?
I believe his wife is the editor of Slow Boring
Hard to pull off with kiddo in school.
Yeah, if Matt moved to Latin America, a kid with a name like Jose Yglesias would have a tough time fitting in.
Yeah, because no one ever had problems fitting in as a kid, especially in a totally different country, language and culture, if their name was familiar in the area?
That's a rather high octane response to a facetious comment but, for the most part, kids adapt well and learn new languages quickly. I suspect Jose already knows a bit of Spanish
I am visiting Portugal right now! It’s a really interesting country and a piece by Matt on it would be great!
Would you agree that Portuguese sounds like Spanish with a Russian accent?*
*no offense meant to the speakers of any of the three languages - all beautiful and producers of amazing literatures btw!
I honeymooned in Portugal. I recall waiting to board a plane to Lisbon at JFK and turning to my wife and saying "why are there so many people on this plane speaking Russian?" After we got there, I realized, nope, it's Portuguese.
I've also been to Brazil, and can confirm that Brazilian Portuguese does not sound like that; it sounds much more like Spanish. (I was actually able to make myself understood in Brazil by lapsing into my pidgin Spanish. This definitely did not work in Portugal.)
In general I am a big fan of the Iberian peninsula: fascinating history; diverse, beautiful landscapes; equally beautiful cities; great food and wine; friendly people. If I were given the choice of another country to live in, I'd probably pick Spain or Portugal.
I speak Spanish fluently and Portuguese proficiently (not a native in either) and to my ear this is definitely true of European Portuguese. Not so much Brazilian Portuguese.
Interesting ! My impression was based from time in Portugal so makes sense!
Haha well, it certainly does sound like a weird form of Spanish. Lots of extra mouth movements. I can definitely see the comparison to Russian.
I could have claimed stake to the first comment, indeed a rarity for where we are, but I didn't have anything profound to say--just read and listened and learned more about a place I don't know a lot of details about.
Agreed. Really enjoyed this post and think it would be great if it were to become a series over time.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that one of the US' major issues is adversarial legalism where it isn't appropriate. It's definitely appropriate in lots of cases like business contract enforcement, as Matt notes! But just as even economists are willing to admit 'market failures' that should be carved out from laissez-faire rules, I think we should admit 'adversarial legalism failures' where the system doesn't work:
• We should join all the other developed countries in having 'loser pays legal fees' being normal, to discourage vexatious litigation where it's cheaper to settle than to fight. (I always think it's funny how people recommend doing that for patent & defamation lawsuits- two high-profile areas of legal abuse- but don't note that every other 1st world countries does this for *every* lawsuit)
• Prevent an individual federal judge from issuing nationwide injunctions. They can issue an injunction in their little county or whatever, sure. An appeals court can do a nationwide injunction. But not a random judge stopping the entire country from doing x based on a Fox News-level legal analysis. There are almost 1800 judges nationally, right now any one can literally commandeer the entire federal government on any topic if they want!
• Strip any party that regularly abuses vexatious litigation of its ability to do so (NIMBY homeowners being the most prominent example here). Zoning decisions should be left up a zoning board and not the court system
"Loser pays" has its advantages in some instances but I assure you that it is by no means clear that it creates a net advantage in terms of societal structure. SLAPP lawsuits are already such a problem that we have specific legislation against them. Now imagine that you're being fighting a suit against a large and well-resourced entity in which your risk isn't just losing the suit, but paying for their team of high-powered lawyers. You've just handed the country to big business on a platter.
Rather than "loser pays", it should be "the party who is the plaintiff must pay all the legal fees of the defendant if the plaintiff loses". So, asymmetrical loser pays favoring defense.
Certainly one of the great mysteries of life is, if the American justice system is rigged in favor of the rich (as I am so often told on-line), why is it that there are a whole bunch of fee-shifting statutes (federal and state) that *only* operate in favor of plaintiffs? (Most immediately the Clayton Act for federal antitrust claims comes to mind, as do many consumer protection laws.) I'm aware of no "one way" fee-shifting statutes that favor defendants, even though when, one thinks about it, it's by definition the defendant who has the cost of litigation imposed on it, whereas filing suit for the plaintiff is optional in most situations.
Arbitration agreements already make it hard enough to sue a corporation. Why would you want to make it harder?
Because I think that downside is worth the upsides in other areas.
This seems like a great way to prevent both meritorious and nuisance plaintiff's suits, though.
Aren't anti-SLAPP laws just making defamation lawsuits 'loser pays'? That was my (non-attorney) understanding of them, I could be totally wrong. 1st Amendment types are always advocating for more anti-SLAPP legislation
The exact implementation of anti-SLAPP varies and isn’t my area of expertise, a quick review suggests that there’s often some form of punitive sanction against the filer. But it’s important to recognize that defamation is also a uniquely disfavored tort in American jurisprudence and thus unusually susceptible to early dismissal—it may have been a bad example to bring up due to to its wrinkles but the basic point was “well-resourced large entity who is in the wrong nevertheless forces smaller claimant with meritorious claim to forgo vindication due to resource asymmetry” is very much a real and existent pathology of American law even without loser pays. In many / most instances the large entity will be the defendant (eg Largeco stiffs a contractor or supplier) and “loser pays” makes it that much less attractive to represent even meritorious plaintiffs, whereas largeco can just eat the occasional loss of they fail to win through a combination of delay, intimidation and general resource advantages (eg near-spurious motion filings).
The current system definitely can create some unfairness to defendants but loser pays creates a kind of systematic bias against plaintiffs by making bringing suit so risky, and big business is a lot more often on the defendant side (for good or ill) than the plaintiff side.
According to Wikipedia 'nearly every Western democracy other than the United States' has loser pays rules. Are large and well-resourced entities running around not paying their bills, stiffing their suppliers etc., in all of the other developed countries? I find this a bit difficult to believe
Yes, please prevent district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. We are now getting to the point where the Biden and Trump administrations are letting district judges issue injunctions against regulations they don't like and don't want to take the time to repeal, and then they just don't appeal the ruling, even though that is the administration's job. Congress should do this, and if they don't, the Supreme Court should. Justice Thomas has been wanting to ban district court nationwide injunctions for years.
As a commercial litigator, I want federal judges to have nationwide injunction power because if my client is suing someone for trade secret misappropriation or something like that it would be ridiculous to require us to have to file separate lawsuits in every federal judicial district (94!) in the country to be able to fully prevent the defendant from using the trade secret.
Nationwide injunctions are problematic, but there are situations where they are sort of a natural and logical result of the type of case you have. Like every successful administrative rule challenge in the D.C. federal courts has an outcome that's essentially the same thing as a "nationwide injunction" (since those rules have nationwide impacts), but that's just normal. It just so happens that when the rules at issue are, say, border patrol policies, the venue for the case often ends up being in a federal court in Arizona or wherever instead of in D.C.
I wish Matt would give up on the "tripling the US population would be great" hobby horse. In particular, the argument that we'd just be getting the density of France, and France is great, is getting tedious. Huge tracts of the US are basically prairie. Most people don't want to live there, and even if they did, there's not enough water.
The rest of the article was great - and props for the closer: "If Italy needs to learn how to make better courts, we need to learn how to carve out more space for democratic decision-making rather than post hoc litigation."
>>France is great, is getting tedious. Huge tracts of the US are basically prairie. Most people don't want to live there<<
France also has large tracts where people don't want to live (similar to Spain in that regard). Rural depopulation is a well-known phenomenon in France.
America can accommodate a much large population mainly by growing its existing cities. We don't need to pave over the wheat fields of Kansas, nor build a bunch of new Phonexises and Salt Lake Cities in the desert.
Yep, lots of medium-sized midwest cities that have lost population could be re-populated without much additional land use.
Even lots of already big metros could grew much bigger without additional land use if we made it legal to build multi unit structures. And I'm not talking only about 20 story apartment buildings. Simple row house/town house dwellings, duplexes and small (say, 3-6 story) apartment buildings can house a lot of people in comfort, if we but allowed the builders to build them for folks willing to buy them.
I live in the Chicago south burbs and take commuter train to downtown through some really distressed neighborhoods in the burbs and the city's south side. There is SOOO much empty land and abandoned houses that even a SFH-centric development plan could create a lot of additional housing, although I totally agree with laxer zoning rules as well for more multi-family development.
Heck, we just had an article on that topic!
I just ran some numbers, and...I'm not sure.
Tokyo has ~14 megapeople. Thus 1 gigaperson is about 71 Tokyos. The 71st biggest city in the US is Lincoln, NE. Turning Lincoln into another Tokyo would surely require paving over some wheat fields.
Now, not all of the US lives in cities, only about 80%. But it's probably not a terrible approximation to assume that said ratio stays constant even in times of population growth; there's some evidence that city/town sizes in a country grow in lockstep, because relative city sizes are have a log-normal distribution (Bettencourt, "Urban growth and the emergent statistics of cities", _Science Advances_ 6:34, doi 10.1126/sciadv.aat8812). But that only takes down to city #56, Honolulu, and implies that we *will* need to build a bunch of (say) Moab, Utahs in the desert.
To triple the population, we need to triple the size of Lincoln from 300K to 1M. We don’t need to turn it into a city of 14M. Even better, we live in three dimensions, so we only need to build 44% taller, 44% wider east/west, and 44% wider north/south.
Not really quite sure what you're claiming here. But, for the record, the main "greenlighting growth" policies I want to see are 1) abolition of the NIMBY veto and 2) more immigration.
Within that context there are things you could do to protect farmland, if that's a concern. There's a difference between A) "clear and rational rules that shape growth patterns and allow much more housing to be built while protecting vital countryside for future generations" and, B) allowing rich people in Palo Alto or Alexandria to shout down a four story apartment building.
"A" above is consistent with a strong "shall issue" law with respect to building permits.
Where would the new Phoenixes and Salt Lake Cities get their drinking water from?
Matt literally wrote a book on tripling the population of the US. The subject is not a hobby horse - it is a major driving force of his entire policy project.
There’s no rule that says you have to agree with him, of course - a number of subscribers here seem mostly to come for the anti-woke content and stay for the opportunity to troll Matt’s more progressive readers - but if you are sick of reading about why the US would benefit from massive population growth, you probably should consider spending less time reading Slow Boring.
I know Matt's book, of course. My point is that I think by now *all* his readers know his views on this subject, so mentioning it less frequently would be beneficial. By now, you either agree or you don't. (As for me personally, I'm willing to believe a 50% or 100% increase would be good. 200%? Probably not. On top of that, very careful immigration policies would have to be designed for even a 50-100% increase to be successful, and I kinda think the US is too dysfunctional at this point to attempt any radical makeovers of society.
Huge tracts of France are just uninhabited forests you know.
I got to live in Italy for a few months, so I have few additional points to add.
Things Wrong with Italy
1. pizza (US improved it significantly)
2. trying to find lunch in the middle of the day when everything is shut
3. roads
Things right with Italy
1. pasta
2. tomato's
3. hot women
4. beer (I like Italian beer)
Also, does anyone notice that one of the photos appears to show a leaning apartment!!!
I'm in Chile right now, and it reminds me of Italy even more than Argentina, though the Argentinians have a bigger Italian diaspora.
Also... I am jealous of the concept of Italians just shutting down business for a month or two in the summer to go on Holiday.
I've never been Rome however, and am planning on taking the wife there next year. Heard its awesome.
glad some is finally brave enough ti admit the truth about Italian pizza. Who the hell wants cheese on a third of the pizza thst kinda sorta has a sauce
I would like to acknowledge that yglasias liked my comment despite a large fraction of the words having typos
He's recognising a fellow typo enthusiast no doubt.
Obviously, someone has never had the zucchini flower and anchovy pizza you order by the length in random Roman delis. Which you then take with a small single serving of wine and eat by a fountain in a random piazza. Just, trust me.
I actually kinda love it. Then again, I'm very lactose intolerant so that might be relevant.
Pizza is regional in Italy, it's only really Roman and Neapolitan; the rest of Italy only cooks it because the tourists expect it, and some of the worst pizza I have ever had was in Venice. Roman pizza is different from any of the American styles - thin, crispy, crusty and lighter on the sauce. But it does generally use grated cheese spread right across the base, not the big globs of mozzarella that the Neapolitans go in for.
Rome is a great city for tourists; it's big enough to soak up a huge number of tourists without the sense that it only exists for them. The best bit of tourist advice I got when going to Rome is to have a good look at a map when planning where to visit, as the major sites are in groups that are quite distant from each other, and Rome is built on hills, so walking significant distances is quite challenging. You can use the metro and the trams, but it still makes much more sense to visit the Colosseum and the Forum on one day and the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museum on a different day - those two groups are well over two miles apart in a straight line (and no road in Rome is straight).
Also, unless you're familiar with driving in a busy European city with tight streets and small, agile cars, don't drive in Rome.
There are also all kinds of pizza-like bread+tomato (sauce)+cheese(or not) combinations that are amazing and differ by region.
In the village in Puglia that my grandfather is from, they have a giant marble oven (that looks to be many centuries old) that supplies the village with baked goods. Each household has a stamp that the baker uses to mark them so, for example, in the morning we just walked through and grabbed whatever had our mark on it. One of the most delicious items is focaccia bread with the ingredients of pizza baked into it. And you eat it at breakfast or lunch, not dinner. But they have no tourists, hence no pizzerias.
I actually *loved* walking around Rome; it was probably my single favorite part of the 6-day trip I took there in 2011. And I walked pretty long distances, too. One of my favorite memories is the walk from Piazza del Poppolo to where I was staying nearish to San Giovanni, I randomly happened upon Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon, and walked past the Colosseum at night. Another time I walked from where I was staying to the Baths of Caracalla.
While I had no problems with all that walking, it is worth nothing that I was 26 at the time. Pretty sure I could handle it today, still; but someone who is older or mobility impaired probably would have some issues with it. Rome's metro, while useful, is kinda undersized (more so when I was there - Line C hadn't been built yet).
+1 for Roman pizza. That stuff is great. We went to a place in NYC that had Roman-style pizza once, but it wasn't the same.
I would have loved the walking the first time I went, in that I was 19 at the time, except that it was a July heatwave in Rome, and walking any significant distance in 40C (104F) heat is unpleasant however young and fit you are.
Very true. I probably should have mentioned that I was there in March, so the weather was ideal for walking.
Is driving in a Chinese city with big streets that get small due to suicidal drivers and parking everyone a sufficient proxy experience?
:P
Throat clearing:
1) I’ve spent most of my time in Italy in the Naples region where my dad is from.
2) Opinions about food are subjective and cannot be wrong.
That being said: wow, you are so very wrong about American pizza being better than Italian pizza.
I enjoy good pizza in the States, and I’ve had very good pizza here. But I’ve probably had 30 pizzas in Italy, and every single one has been better than 95%+ of the pizzas I’ve had in the US.
There are no wrong opinions, but this is a wrong opinion.
I appreciate you admitting that your opinion is wrong. I’m assuming your last sentence was referring to your own post!
I mean, the pizza is good if u don’t like sauce. Or thick crust.
Oh no, are you a deep dish fan?
China takes bad pizza to unimaginably fantastic levels. Drurian. Blueberries and yogurt. Sweetened cheese with nary a hint of red sauce to be found. Absolutely crazy shit.
1) I prefer US pizza to Italian pizza
2) I'm fatter than the average Italian
3) #2 may follow from #1
I was waiting for Matt to point out that one line on the Naples metro goes in a loop: it crosses itself! When I was there I tried to think of some theoretical reason that could be efficient, but mainly I wondered which mafia personality got the contract for the line.
I'm sorry that I can't resist bringing everything back to Afghanistan but it's worth pointing out that during the occupation, different NATO countries were assigned responsibility for different aspects of public sector reform. The Afghan judicial system went to Italy, and I'd like to know whose idea that was. If they'd been given public transportation instead, maybe there would be some.
Lol really? This is very similar to the old joke about how in heaven the bankers are Swiss, the lovers are Italian, the chefs are French, and the police are British, while in hell the lovers are Swiss, the bankers are Italian, the police are French, and the chefs are British.
The Green Line in the Oslo Metro doesn't just go in a loop - it covers one part of that loop *twice*, so that if you're waiting for a train in that direction on that line, you have to check whether this train is continuing on the loop or is on its second go and will go off on a radius:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Metro#/media/File:Oslo_Metro_Map.svg
In practice, this is no more confusing than Chicago's loop, where you have to check which color train you're getting on if you're going more than a couple stops, but most of them work for short trips on the loop.
Apparently all the loopy lines have to be yellow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_line_(London_Underground)
I remember running across some carabinieri in Baghdad too. Training Iraqi police.
"If Italy needs to learn how to make better courts, we need to learn how to carve out more space for democratic decision-making...."
This struck me as a major non sequitur.
You did not show us that Italy's successes stem from democratic decision-making. Instead, you showed us that its successes stem from nepotism and clientelism. Of course you're not going to tell us to adopt nepotism and clientelism. But why think that democratic decision-making will do for us what nepotism and clientelism does for Italy?
I'm familiar with -- and agree with -- your longstanding animus against excessive legal reviews that slow down public works projects. But aren't democratic processes just as much to blame? Neighborhood councils, elected aldermen, advocacy groups, pressure groups -- these are all democratic, and all slow down development.
The cheerleading for democracy in the last line just seems non-responsive to what came before.
(And I like democracy! But I like coherent arguments, too.)
>>>But aren't democratic processes just as much to blame? Neighborhood councils, elected aldermen, advocacy groups, pressure groups -- these are all democratic, and all slow down development.<<<
I dunno. I wonder if anyone has made a study of it. My sense is taking projects to court (or merely *threatening* legal action) is a bigger impediment to getting transport and housing projects done than the actions of lawmakers. But my "sense" could definitely be wrong.
Is Matt able to write off some of the costs of this trip now? He was reporting!
using S-corp to deduct his family vacation. The rich using the tax code to their advantage
You cite Italy's high debt service costs, noting that this is largely a function of poor economic growth. Which is true, but the real problem is that the country has operated under a regime of fiscal austerity, imposed by the technocrats of Brussels (of which Draghi is a handmaiden), which has crushed the economy. The result? Years of subpar growth, which has exacerbated the debt problem and now, outright stagflation
The latest European Commission macroeconomic forecast predicted that Italy will experience the slowest economic growth in the bloc next year, at just 0.9%, owing to a decline in consumer spending due to rising prices and lower business investment — a result of rising borrowing and energy costs, as well as disruptions in the supply of Russian gas.
Italy is also experiencing one of the fastest-growing inflation rates in Europe — which is currently at 8.6%, the highest level in more than three decades. Interest rates on Italian government bonds have also been steadily climbing ever since Draghi came to power, rising four-fold under his watch; today they stand at the highest level in almost a decade.
And this “polycrisis” has taken its toll on Italian society: 5.6 million Italians — almost 10% of the population, including 1.4 million minors — currently live in absolute poverty, the highest level on record. Many of these are in work, and that number is bound to increase as real wages in Italy continue to fall at the highest pace in the bloc. Meanwhile, almost 100,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are at risk of insolvency — a 2% increase compared to last year.
Multiple crises and Draghi has played a key role in creating this state if affairs. I fully expect yet another Euro crisis in the months ahead.
It's amazing how the Euro has evolved, from a German perspective, into the exact mirror image of the exchange rate system Germany intended to impose on Europe after winning WWII.
Instead of a system with the Reichsmark pegged artificially high relative to other Continental economies, ensuring an endless supply of cheap French wine, Italian cheese, Maltese holidays, and Spanish woolens to the workers and housewives of Greater Germany, they've built a system whereby the Deutschmark was brought in at an artificially low rate, which has persisted in the form of wage differentials. All this, even as German productivity and export prices dictate that the "German Euro" should really be valued at 2X the current Euro exchange rate.
History is a screwy thing.
Yes, by bringing in the DM at an artificially low rate, the Germans basically managed to destroy their main industrial competitor, Italy, which has not grown since it adopted the euro at the turn of this century. In that time its debt-to-GDP ratio has exploded from just over 100% to over 160% of GDP . A study published in early 2019 by the Centre for European Policy think tank, titled 20 Years of the Euro: Winners and Losers: An Empirical Study, found that out of eight Euro Area economies examined (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Greece) only two — Germany and the Netherlands — actually benefited from the introduction of the euro. Italy lost out most:
"Without the euro, Italian GDP would have been higher by €530 billion, which corresponds to € 8,756 per capita. In France, too, the euro has led to significant losses of prosperity of € 374 billion overall, which corresponds to € 5,570 per capita."
I'd be curious to understand how the impact of devaluation would play into this. Italy joining the Euro stopped them from historical trend of devaluing their currency in order to more competitive. This allowed them to have MUCH lower interest rates so while the debt to GDP ratio has increased, their cost for servicing the debt is probably lower than it otherwise would have. Similarly, this allowed them to have a higher level of imports and likely a resultant higher standard of living as euro was worth considerably more than the lira would have been had they not joined.
The challenge of course is that inflating their currency value increased their immediate buying power, but left them significantly uncompetitive relative to their productivity. Which has been the real problem - they have made almost no productivity gains in the last 20 years.
This is absolutely wild. Do you know if there's a consensus estimate on what the benefits of the monetary union are? I would assume these all cash out to some variety of "vastly reduced need to account for currency fluctuation risk" and "smoother international trade with fewer exchange fees skimmed off the top" but I haven't generally seen that number quantified (not that I can claim to have looked too hard).
Probably an early selling point for monetary union, but if they had quantified the benefits, I'm sure the numbers would have just been pulled out of their collective proverbial behinds. Just like the debt levels that were assigned as part of the Stability and Growth Pact. There was no economic justification behind them at all.
"It's amazing how the Euro has evolved, from a German perspective, into the exact mirror image of the exchange rate system Germany intended to impose on Europe after winning WWII."
To be fair, the vision of a German-dominated "Mitteleuropa" economic region dates back even before WW I.
How much poverty does Italy have? How does poverty manifest itself there? What kinds of programs combat poverty and how effective are they?
I'm speaking simply from anecdotal evidence, but I get the impression that the treatment of women in Italy is a bigger deal than you let on. Seems like Italian cultural norms are somewhat similar to Japan in terms of women working and women's place in the family, and that has (partially) led to low population growth. I don't have any actual research or links on this at my fingertips though, so I'm happy to be refuted here (or supported!).
Italy’s ability to build transit at a decent cost is even more impressive if you take into account the fact that the country is an earthquake zone so it has to be engineered to survive decent sized earthquakes. Yet another reason the transit agencies here on the east coast should hire out their experts.
Not critical but are the changes in the post timing temporary? I preferred the early posting more I have to say.
Thanks a lot
I prefer later posting.
I think the North/South divide is a bigger deal than the economic data suggest. I mean, Italy hasn't even really been a country for all that long (in absolute and relative terms) and I think that may be more deeply ingrained in the culture than Americans appreciate. Like, we have regional accents in the US, but the Southern dialect my family speaks is borderline unintelligible in Rome—at least no one there seemed to understand my relatives (I don't speak any kind of Italian). And traveling North-South in Italy feels more like going between countries than going from one end of France to the other. (Or East-West in Sicily, where even the architecture changes dramatically.)
Throw all those disparate people in a parliament together and you end up with a weird grab-bag of parties, petty regional issues snowballing (what what is, a trash incinerator that catalysed Draghi's resignation?) and regular ousting of the leadership. I quite often hear that Italian politics is like looking into America's future. It's not hard to see how a country in which geographical regions are indifferent toward or even disdainful of each other can become sufficiently dysfunctional that it stops growing.
On this point - one of the major divisions linguists recognize in the Romance language family actually splits the northern Italian dialects from the southern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia%E2%80%93Rimini_Line
Spain and France would have this issue too, since Catalan and Occitan/Provencal are all closer to each other than to Spanish/Portuguese or to standard French. But in the 19th century, France managed to mostly eliminate Occitan/Provencal.
Should cities start using in-house talent to save money on street redesign?
A major street redesign is happening in our neighborhood. Being on the community council, I was invited to a “Brainstorm Workshop” yesterday which had 6-8 consultants (including 1-2 from a boutique place-making consultancy).
They had fancy table mock-ups, where we could mix and match Lego-like pieces to play with different street designs. All very slick, but it felt like a waste of money unless it was purely to make locals feel engaged. This project is $12-13m and the city transpo dept has 10-12 Transportation Planners and Transportation Engineers. Should they bring design in house instead of hiring consultants for every project?
Yes anything cities envision doing repeatedly they should try to build capacity to manage in-house.
Lack of state capacity, individual litigiousness and a permissive approach thereto, and the batshit environmental review process collectively explain the entirety of American transportation project failure.
Next to these three, our other shortcomings are basically nonentities, orders of magnitude smaller.