Claiming Hollywood: Boosters, the Film Industry, and Metropolitan Los Angeles

From the abstract:

In 1937, the Culver City Chamber of Commerce proposed that the city change its name to Hollywood to capitalize on its status as the leading center of film production. Once the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce learned of its counterpart’s intentions, a war of words ensued between the boosters in the local and national press. The dispute ended when the City of Los Angeles passed an ordinance establishing official boundaries for Hollywood; to this day, Hollywood is the only district within the city with such a designation. Filling a void in the literature about the industrial, place-based aspects of the film industry, this story illuminates the role of film studios in the intrametropolitan conflict in and urban development of Los Angeles, the significance of boosters in shaping places, and the complications of the decentralization of the film production economy from a cultural economy centered in Hollywood.

The Atlantic Cities did a nice writeup of the research, which can be seen here.

Way to go, Stephanie!

Economist Gordon Hanson has a piece in this issue of The Cato Journal. His argument comes down to the idea that immigrant employment is an externality that employers could be made to internalize.

Now, there’s a point where Pigou-based arguments run into moral hazard, and I would think that Cato folks in particular would be sensitive to using labor-wage labor as an exemplar of an externalities. Libertarians tend to be fond of dismissing externality arguments–and for good reason–because externality arguments are a simple and convincing argument for market failure, which provides a rationale to those who would have government intervene. Playing the externality card should not be allowed with mere annoyances, given the potential hazards of government intervention. It’s hard for me to wrap myself around a libertarian argument where low-wage labor market outcomes have external costs in any real way, or if they do, counterbalance much more compelling libertarian principles such as self-ownership.

I need to re-read the paper, and re-read the whole issue, to get a better sense of what is going on. In the end, Hanson is looking for a sweet spot in policy where immigration can occur and native populations can feel compensated for it, so it’s not a mean-spirited portrayal or policy prescription at all.

Adam Ozimek over at Modeled Behavior takes up the paper at length:

Immigrants as negative externalities « Modeled Behavior:

Gordon Hanson is just trying to find ways to make immigration more acceptable to Americans so that there can be more of it, so I don’t begrudge him for proposing an unpalatable solution. After all, most pragmatic solutions to convincing Americans to tolerate more immigration seem to have some unpalatable aspect to them. But I think accepting that the fiscal burden of low-skilled immigration represents a real externality generated by employers is both untrue and an unproductive framing of the problem.

(Via modeledbehavior.com)

From Emily Rapp’s fine essay, Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship

Recently I overheard a man say at a yoga class, “Yeah, well, you get two women together and it’s like bitch central.” I could have told him he only needed one, in fact, and that would be me, but it also made me realize how much people diminish and poo-poo the real power and strength of female friendship, especially between women, which is either supposed to descend into some kind of male lesbian love scene porn fantasy or be dismissed as meaningless or be re-written as a story of competition. Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have both male and female mentors, and all have been wonderful. But it’s very, very hard to be supportive of other people when you are constantly told you are nothing, and where your supportiveness is both expected (because of your gender) and unappreciated (because of your gender).

The essay also contains a wonderful riff on being an older, single woman:

The Wrinklies weren’t spinsters or old maids and they were not “failures” in any way. They were free. It was I who failed to see them, until later, for who they really were: educated, hugely intelligent, fascinating, financially independent. Women who led rich lives full of meaningful work, deep and lasting friendship, sex when they wanted it, time with the beloved children of their family and friends, conversations about politics and art and literature, culture, travel to remarkable destinations where they did not journey as unconscious tourists but as guests in people’s homes and hearts. Despite these full lives they owned their own time, they owned their days. I did not. I was too busy trying to find someone who would spend the days with me, as if this would validate my presence in the world.

Go read.

H/T to Dorothea Herreiner

Thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into, though, because public is the place where we’re supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one’s intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache. This is particularly a problem for academics, who are, after all, professional thinkers; we have a culture of making it look easy, and of concealing as much as possible “the raw material of poetry in all its rawness.”

My own problems have been that it’s too easy to make an argument on the Interwebs and have nobody challenge you, which means you can fall in love with your own argument even when it’s wrong–and worse, you can fall in love with your own idea of yourself as authority. The second problem is enough of a temptation in the academy. I prefer to exist in a space where 1) yes, my years of working and studying and thinking in a field do mean that my informed commentary isn’t worthless the way some people seem to think if they see a PhD by your name *and* 2) I’m still not right all the time.

Alternatively, people do challenge you, with differing level of adroitness (but that’s ok), but not all that often. It’s pretty quiet over here in this part of the Interwebs.

Nonetheless, I think she has a point when she writes:

In blogging, I’ve come around to the idea that academics need to do a lot more thinking in public if we want said public to have a clue as to what it is that we actually do. It really only seems fair.

When I discussed shutting down the blog, Richard Green referred to the blog as a “service, especially for students.” At first I was dubious, but I’ve come around to thinking of it as a service and not just a vehicle for self-promotion or a place to forge new writing.

It’s a struggle, though. I’ve always needed privacy to really write and really work. There’s part of me that thinks that private universe of thinking and struggling with ideas is happening parallel to the blog. There’s another part of me that thinks the blog saps energy from that.

Blogs and academic research: A timely story in Digitopoly:

So it took some time, and if you have read to the end of this lengthy post, even longer, but an initial blog post did lead to a deeper understanding of at least this phenomenon. What this demonstrates, however, is that blogging and the usual academic functions are not substitutes but complements.

(Via www.digitopoly.org)

Take a longer look at what he describes, as those of you interested in carbon offsets and trading will find it interesting.

Why it’s China’s turn to worry about manufacturing:

America has been extremely worried about the loss of manufacturing to China. Seduced by subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, American industry has made a beeline to China.

But the tide may soon turn.

New technologies will likely cause the same hollowing out of China’s manufacturing industry over the next two decades that the U.S experienced over the past twenty years. That’s right. America is destined to once again gain its supremacy in manufacturing, and it will soon be China’s turn to worry.

China’s largest hi-tech product manufacturer Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, made waves last August when it announced plans … More >

(Via The Berkeley Blog)

I’m pretty excited about our robot overlords coming soon…

No, it wouldn’t.

“While some of the recommendations in the Peer Review Group report merit consideration, by and large this report is deeply flawed, in some areas misleading and its conclusions are unfounded. …Although some high-speed rail experience exists among Peer Review Panel members, this report suffers from a lack of appreciation of how high-speed rail systems have been constructed throughout the world, makes unrealistic and unsubstantiated assumptions about private sector involvement in such systems and ignores or misconstrues the legal requirements that govern construction of the high speed rail program in California.”

Or, as my four year-old neighbor girl who is Never Seen Without Tiara says: neener neener.

Yesterday, I covered the logical fallacy known as “slippery slope” arguments. Today, we’ll cover the logical fallacies known as “Argument From Authority” and “Ad Hominem.” The first is the chest-beating: “we are the experts in high speed rail, so we’re right” (argument from authority) and “those other people, blesstheirhearts, ain’t as smart as we is” (ad hominem).

Ever since the Peer Review Group came out with their report, I’ve had to hear one person after another explain about how HSR makes money “all over the world.” Great. You know what? Restaurants all over the world make money, too. But other restaurants go bankrupt, too. The fact that we haven’t seen HSR bankruptcies around the world during a pretty bad downturn makes me suspect that their profits come from creative accounting with lots of hidden subsidies thrown in because intercity transport markets of other kinds have bankruptcies, consolidations, and service suspensions rather routinely because of financial problems.

Nobody–not even the CHSRA–thinks the Central Valley links are going to generate an operating surplus. You need the large market areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco to do that, and I’m not convinced that even then we’d get surpluses–but it’s not impossible or laughable that we would, particularly if taxpayers eat all the costs of construction.

The bottom line is always in the financing, if you know where to look:

General obligation bonds encumber California taxpayers with the debt service for the bonds. Revenue bonds encumber the project itself: these are paid off with the revenues from the project.

If you always make money with HSR–that is, if your service actually generates an operating surplus— why did Prop 1A to fund high speed rail in California specify general obligation bonds rather than revenue bonds?

Why? Either:

a) you think the project can make money, and you want to give a gift to your concessionaire buddies by having taxpayers eat the capital investment costs; or
b) you know full well your project will never generate a surplus that can pay off the bonds.

Either way, troubling.

These lines are particularly moving:

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

We have a MLK Day parade here in Los Angeles: The parade will begin at 11 a.m. at Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard and Western Avenue. From there it rolls west along King Boulevard until it takes a left turn south onto Crenshaw Boulevard. It then marches down Crenshaw to Vernon Avenue, where the parade takes a final turn and ends with a gospel festival at Leimert Park. There will also be lots of food booths and fun things to do throughout the afternoon and evening at the park.

Or if, like me, you social phobias keep you inside, ABC will be live-casting it here.

“Reason says that if you think it’s okay for two, then you have to differentiate with me as to why it’s not okay for three.” **

Reason says no such thing. It’s hard to tell if Santorum believes he is engaging in reductio ad absurdum, or whether this just sounded good to him.

The dimension being argued in this slippery slope argument is the number of people. So if two people are all right, but not three, we still haven’t addressed the issue of what equipment the two people have/what roles the two people have or why he’s worried about either issue, or why the rest of us should care why he’s worried. And, according to Rick’s reasoning, a marriage of two people is better than a marriage of three people (or more!), so that a marriage of one person must be more valid than a marriage of two people. Not the outcome he would favor, probably: i.e., the slope that started us sliding was recognizing marriage in the first place: if we legally recognize a man and a woman in a relationship favored by tax, inheritance, and family laws, then other types of couples will want that arrangement, as well.

He’d be better off simply standing by the communitarian argument based on tradition: “a marriage has always been between one man and one woman in this country, that’s what it should remain because tradition matters to community cohesion and identity.”

**BTW, I could care less if three people want to get married, so his analogy to polygamy doesn’t work, either. Polygamy has a long status in the history of mankind, and it’s still practiced where tradition and economics allow. Marriage in the US, legally, is mostly a property contract; the things that give marriage social meaning are much more complex. I’ve yet to see any research showing that kids in two-parent families do better than kids in four-parent families, or whatever. I’m not saying that research doesn’t exist; I’ve just not yet seen anybody produce it.