Paul Graham offers valuable thoughts on productive procrastination:
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.
That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.
That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes--anything that might be called an errand.
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
Read the whole thing (via Marginal Revolution).
Graham's point cuts against the zeitgeist. In today's NYT, David Brooks argues that, at least for those not blessed with a Y chromosome, errands are what matters most. His paean to domesticity as the highest and best use of women's time, and maybe even men's, does not conclude with an announcement that he's quitting the Times and PBS to spend more time with driving the kids around. (For those who hate Times Select, the column is on p. 8 of Week in Review.)
Taken together, these arguments address several old questions: Why, as Sir Francis Bacon asked, is it that the most important contributors to human progress have often been childless? Why did the rise of the 18th-century city, with its coffeehouses and abundance of servants, promote science, philosophy, and literature? And, of course, why have relatively few women made enduring contributions to fields that require single-minded devotion?
Quite simply: Somebody's got to do the errands of life. You can either do them yourself, hire someone to do them, or get a wife. Historically, the last has been the most common option.
Let me be clear: I do not believe there is One Best Way to live. I do not believe that the gracious life created by attending to small chores (including, but not only, those necessary to raise children) is inferior to one devoted to more focused pursuits. What I believe, and what you'll almost never see suggested by an establishment pundit, is that different people are suited to different sorts of lives and that both strategies have their downsides and their risks. (I wrote about one aspect of this topic--the politicization of parenthood--here.)
My New Year's resolution: Fewer errands, less sleep (I sleep a lot), more reading, more writing. Still to be determined: Is blogging an errand? For me at least, I suspect so. But perhaps I can find a way to manage it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 01, 2006 • Comments
I wish you all a wonderful 2006.
To help you keep those resolutions, take a look at my latest NYT column, which applies to New Year's resolutions some insights from Thomas Schelling's fascinating and important work on "self-command." I highly recommend his book Choice and Consequence
. (Amazon is offering a discount for buying C&C along with Schelling's better-known The Strategy of Conflict.)
Back in 1992, Professor Postrel and his colleague Dick Rumelt published an article arguing that the problem of self-command helps explain why people voluntarily submit themselves to organizational hierarchy (even when capital investment is not an issue) rather than simply trading in markets. The full article isn't online, but a shorter version is here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 01, 2006 • Comments
At Blogs for Industry, Jim Hu does the math on dragées..
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 21, 2005 • Comments
As expected, some readers had trouble believing the statement below that "the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles." Guillaume Lessard's reaction was typical:
By what measure such a result be obtained? It may be possible to find a certain way to make it beat NYC, but that's because NYC ends fairly suddenly, and LA hardly does. If you look at strict city limits, then LA is 3 times as sparse as NYC. If you look at the county level, then the whole of LA County (a very large county) is only 20% more populated than NYC (a land area 12 times smaller). The metropolitan area of LA is less populated than the metropolitan area of NYC, and which area is larger? Well, LA, of course. At first blush, the only way I can see to make the above statement be true is to exclude NYC from the USA. The number mentioned in the article you cite matches the data I can find (~7600 per square mile); it's just that the number I can find for the density of NYC is ~26000 per square mile.
As a social, economic, and cultural unit, New York does not "end suddenly." To the contrary, the local area stretches well into New Jersey and Connecticut. Yes, those places are psychologically and politically different from NYC proper (and even more different from Manhattan), but Manhattan Beach and Pasadena aren't part of L.A., either. And the San Fernando Valley, while politically part of the city, has long been psychologically separate; even the mailing addresses say Tarzana or Van Nuys, not Los Angeles.
In response to my query about the numbers, Bob Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History, wrote:
The only good measure of urban densities is the census bureau's "urbanized areas." These include central cities and all of the adjacent land over 1000 people per square mile (which is roughly the limit of the regularly developed suburbs and the exurbs and rural areas beyond). Using this measure the LA urbanized area had a density of over 7,000 people per square mile in 2000 making it at least the densest large urbanized area in the US. In fact, I think it is the densest urbanized area in North America (Toronto comes in at 6800 according to the Canadian census which has a similar definition of urbanized area) but I would want to do some further checking before swearing to that latter.
The problem with every other measure is that it relies on artificial political boundaries. So cities that happen to have large boundaries will appear to be very lightly populated and cities whose boundaries are tightly drawn can appear to have very high densities when, in fact, these figures have very little relationship to the actual densities at the center, at the edge or at any other given point. The same is true for "metropolitan areas" which are based on the arbitrarily drawn county lines. These are particularly useless in California where a county like San Bernardino or Riverside is counted as "urban" by the census because a little piece of it is urbanized whereas the vast majority of the county, stretching all the way to the Nevada border, is almost unpopulated desert.
There is an extremely useful compilation of statistics for urbanized areas and their densities on Wendell Cox's demographia.com.
Most of the problems people attribute to L.A.'s sprawl--notably traffic and long travel times--are actually caused by its density. The same is true in New York, however defined. Forget driving to New Jersey or Connecticut. It can take 45 minutes to travel the roughly five miles from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, even if you take the subway. When you pack a lot of people close together, the place tends to get crowded. That's great for culture and commerce, but it ratchets up social stress and makes getting places harder.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 19, 2005 • Comments
In his books, legal commentator Walter Olson has argued that litigation often creates policies that no legislature (or, in the case of employment law, union bargaining) would adopt. Writing in the LAT Sunday magazine, Andy Meisler gives an example:
Mark Pollock is a Napa-based environmental lawyer, a former Bay Area student radical and lover of fine food. Gloria Alvarez is a resident of Culver City who, for the last 33 years, has owned and operated Gloria's Cake & Candy Supplies, a tiny Westside culinary landmark jammed into a former American Legion Hall near the intersection of Sawtelle and Venice. Pollock and the seventysomething Alvarez have more than a little in common.
To be precise, on April 23, 2003, Pollock and his lone associate, Evangeline James, sued Alvarez and a who's who of names from the bakery world: "Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.; Dean & Deluca Inc.; Chefshop.com Inc.; Pfeil & Holing Inc.; Kitchen Etc.; Q.A. Products Inc.; Confectionary House; Beryl's Cake Decorating & Pastry Supplies; American Cake Supply; Albert Uster Imports Inc.; Do It With Icing; Cooking.com Inc.; Candyland Crafts Inc.; Favors by Lisa; Sugarbakers Cake, Candy and Wedding Supplies Inc.; Kitchen Conservatory Inc.; American Gourmet Foods Inc.; Annerose Hess d.b.a. Ohess; Pastry Wiz; Barry Farm Enterprises; GM Cake and Candy Supplies d.b.a. Cybercakes; Babykakes; and Does 1 through 100 inclusive."
Pollock's lawsuit swept through the close-knit world of American cake decorating like a hot knife through icing. Despite no law specifically outlawing dragées, private citizen Pollock took it upon himself to rid every last supermarket shelf, specialty food store and mail-order purveyor in California of those tiny silver-covered sugar balls you've been licking or flicking off the top of your cupcakes since you were a tyke.
Pollock is a fanatic who's determined to stamp out other people's small pleasures in pursuit of his own version of righteous living (and collect lots of money along the way). He succeeds because it costs him almost nothing to sue. His victims settle rather than spend more, in time and money, to fight his claims. Any litigation system that encourages--indeed, rewards--this petty tyranny needs serious reform.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 19, 2005 • Comments
The new Carnival of Tomorrow is up, with an amusing King Kong theme running through the entries.
Speaking of Kong, we saw the movie Saturday night and enjoyed it very much. It's definitely Big Screen material. You don't want to wait for the DVD.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 19, 2005 • Comments
By overwhelming margins, the Michigan legislature has passed a constitutional amendment that substantially restricts the power of local governments to seize private property for economic redevelopment. Voters still have to approve the amendment.
Here's a press release from the Institute for Justice. Here's a news article in Crain's Detroit Business.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 14, 2005 • Comments
The DMN reports that the price of domestic sugar is skyrocketing, thanks to hurricane damage.
On Aug. 19, before Hurricane Katrina pounded the sugar-rich gulf region, large users could buy refined beet and cane sugar for up to 28 cents a pound, according to Milling & Baking News. By Dec. 2, that price had climbed to 42 cents a pound--the largest midyear jump since at least 1982, according to Ron Sterk, assistant editor of the trade publication.
Some large buyers locked in the lower prices with long-term contracts earlier in the year. Others were forced to pay spot prices that peaked at 72 cents a pound....
The U.S. scarfs down about 10 million tons of sugar a year among retail, food service and manufacturing uses, according to Jack Roney, director of economics with the American Sugar Alliance in Arlington, Va.
Typically, more than 80 percent of that need — up to 8.5 million tons — is homegrown. Some 40 percent of that comes from Louisiana and Florida, with a smaller amount from Texas. All those states were hit hard by the 2005 hurricanes.
"There's no question that they hit the Louisiana farmers and the Florida farmers pretty hard," Mr. Roney said. "It knocked the cane over and inundated it with water."
He said farmers are still trying to "figure out how to save that crop."
In addition, one of the nation's largest refineries, Domino Foods' plant near New Orleans, sustained heavy damage from Katrina's floods. It is slated to reopen today.
Given the storms and a lower-than-expected yield from Midwest sugar beets, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that sugar production this year will be down to 7.5 million tons. Imports will help pick up the slack.
Unfortunately, that's all DMN reporter Karen Robinson-Jacobs has to say about imports. Sugar is in fact one of the country's most subsidized and protected industries. Here's an earlier post on the topic, with links to previous ones. And here's an old-but-seasonal article by Cato's Dan Griswold on the cost of sugar quotas. Maybe there's a post-Katrina opportunity for a buyout in exchange for phasing out quotas and subsidies.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 14, 2005 • Comments
The LAT's Scott Timberg profiles architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, author of the provocative new book Sprawl: A Compact History. I've long been a fan of Bruegmann's dynamist approach to cities. His emphasis on evolution and adaptation comes in part from his background in art history, rather than urban planning or architecture. From Timberg's profile:
Bruegmann has always been interested in the built environment and urban change. "When I went to study this," he says by phone from Chicago, "I went to a department of art history, because that's where people talked about architecture. It probably wasn't the most logical place for me to go, because when I got there I had to learn about Nativity scenes and the Madonnas of 15th century Florence.
"However, it gave me something that I think is invaluable: a broad panorama of what people have thought about aesthetics over the last couple of thousand years. And because a lot of social scientists don't have that, they're often very puzzled by arguments that truly are aesthetic and metaphysical in nature but are disguised as being pragmatic and about objective things."
He's a historian of the beautiful, documenting something often taken as the height of ugliness. And the issue, he says, really is aesthetic at base. "And aesthetic judgments are not very susceptible to explanation or argument. That's why it's so hard to talk about."
Part of what's startling about the book is its defiance of the idea that sprawl was birthed in the postwar U.S.: Sprawl is not just bad but "American bad," architecture critic Witold Rybczynski writes in a recent Slate review, blaming it, with tongue in cheek, for everything from McMansions to the disappearance of countryside to an oil-driven Gulf War. "Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as an example of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation."
But Bruegmann's book is grounded in a history lesson--one that finds the roots of present-day Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles in Augustan Rome or Restoration London. People of means, he writes, have always tried to get some distance from urban centers, often inhabiting villas outside city walls.
"I'm sure you would have found it in the very first city ever established," he says. "Living in cities has almost always been unpleasant and unhealthy--not something most people wanted. If you were in imperial Rome, crowded into dark, dingy, polluted apartment buildings, it would have been a nightmare. Most cities I looked at had just crushing density until about the 18th century."
Timberg's profile also makes the never-repeated-too-often point that the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles. Just because the city goes on and on and on doesn't mean you can't find just about anything you want, not to mention thousands and thousands of people, within a short walk.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 10, 2005 • Comments
In Dallas, the political and journalistic establishment seems to believe that airport competition is bad, especially since no on can tell you exactly how it will turn out. But that's exactly the reason you need it. If we knew in advance what travelers really valued--and, of course, if we could somehow contain interest-group politics--competition wouldn't be so important. From The Future and Its Enemies:
Competition provides not only useful criticism but a continuous source of experiments. It gives people...the ideas with which to create still more progress and encourages them, too, to come up with incremental improvements. By picking winners, stasist protectionism eliminates this learning process, which includes learning what does not work.
"Premature choice," warns the physicist Freeman Dyson, "means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame." Protecting established interests from new challengers is one form of premature choice. But technocratic planners also sometimes kill existing alternatives to force their new ideas to "succeed." To protect the space shuttle, NASA not only blocked competition from private space launch companies, it also eliminated its own expendable launchers. Such pre-emptive verdicts often mark public works projects. Planners pick an all-purpose winner, squeeze out alternatives, and eliminate any real chance of experiment and learning.
Consider the infamous Denver International Airport. Aviation officials touted the $4.9 billion project as essential to keep up with the region's growth. They promised it would be a vast improvement over the old Stapleton Airport, which was often socked in by bad weather. But its sponsors foisted DIA on unwilling customers. The airport is 25 miles outside Denver, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, while Stapleton was just 15 minutes from downtown. To make matters worse, there are no hotels near DIA. And the new airport's cost per passenger is somewhere between $11.75 and $18.14, depending on how you count--substantially more than either the $4.59 at Stapleton or the $9.91 promised by former Mayor Federico Pena. Frequent travelers resent the inconvenience and the generally higher ticket prices. "I liked Stapleton better," one told The Denver Post. "You could literally leave about 45 minutes before your plane departed. With DIA, you have to leave an hour and a half before." A flight attendant expressed a common sentiment: "It's a beautiful airport. But we hate it."
On the airport's first anniversary, journalists had trouble reaching a simple verdict on DIA. There were complaints all right--lots of them. But some passengers liked the spiffy new airport, with its marble floors and inviting shops. And flight delays had in fact dropped dramatically. The first-anniversary stories were confused, lacking a central theme.
The reporters had missed the main problem: The city had eliminated the most obvious source of feedback--competition from the old airport. It had made DIA a protected monopoly rather than an experiment subject to competitive trial. By shutting down Stapleton, DIA's political sponsors had made it impossible to rule the new airport a definite error. No matter how many complaints passengers lodge, officials can always point to other advantages. At the same time, however, DIA's monopoly keeps it from becoming an accepted success. Without a genuine trial, we simply have no way to tell whether travelers (or airlines) would rather trade a convenient location for fewer weather-related delays. One airport must fit all: Love it or hate it, if you're flying from Denver you don't have a choice.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 07, 2005 • Comments