For a scholarly discipline that has produced some pretty amazing students of globalization (John Friedmann, for one), my discipline rather rigorously puts its head down and refuses to be pay attention to macro changes. For instance, American planners are still obviously focussed on sprawl even though it has, as an issue, lost tremendous salience. Yes, Americans still drive too much and suburbs are still bad, blah blah blah, but the markets that many planners have insisted don’t work properly eventually came around to discipline fringe and housing over-investment. The driving forces prompted planners and architects to become self-appointed sprawl tamers—and what made planning relevant to people who wanted their regions to stop growing during the housing expansion—are mostly gone, and don’t appear to be coming back any time soon.

Ben Bernake’s cautionary speech last week went largely unnoticed, and it shouldn’t have. Because his remarks carry all the hints about of a “recovery” that means major problems for the US, planning, and cities.

There are four reasons why we should be worried:

1) A growing share of US growth will continue to come from overseas, despite Obama’s export plan, at the expense of US employee income growth. That means continued globalization of US companies, and greater competition for US workers who aren’t served very well by their own education system.

2) The pendulum of power in the US has swung sharply from public to corporate, and that power means that problem #1 is not a problem for the people who are driving policy. Profits at the expense of income growth is just fine in that power balance because democratic discontent means little.

3) The emergence of two-tiered workforce means that while the US is adding jobs, it is doing so in such a way that median income will fall. (Not unlike the last “jobless recovery” we got to enjoy.)

So you know all that screaming about adjuncts in the academy and how wrong it is? Sure, it’s wrong, but it’s also par for the course in industries around the US where young workers are typically getting much, much lower starting wages and benefit packages than older workers were hired at.

4) Our balkanized politics offers us no way out soon

To wit; corporate profits have been soaring happily throughout most of the downtown while the US only just added enough jobs to keep people like me from tossing ourselves in front of buses.

Corporations are not people, as Mitt Romney pointed out in his chronic inability to not give a counter-productive sound bite (are he and Larry Summers twins and I’m not aware of it?). Corporations are institutions that already enjoyed extreme legal privilege prior the bailout precedent. They may employ people, but there is no reason to believe that what benefits capital also benefits labor in the distributive function of those organizations.

Planners should care about deepening inequality and a hollower state because they’re employed by the public sector both in public agencies and the consulting firms that cater to those agencies. So there’s the self-interest. The general case is: what does it mean for your profession when the rich don’t need you, or the amenities you advocate for (they can get their own, without public finance), and the poor can’t afford you?

I don’t usually get two days out of any given Op-Ed, which goes to show you how much is going on in Romer’s essay from the NYT.

Another point she raises here:

Government spending on things like basic scientific research, education and infrastructure, on the other hand, helps increase future productivity. This type of spending often produces high social returns, but the private sector is unlikely to step up if the government pulls back. Case studies described in a recent survey found that less than half of the returns from research-and-development spending were captured by the private investor, so corporations shy away from such endeavors. Cutting federal funds for R.& D. would leave a void and could have significant long-run effects on growth.

Now, there are a bunch of things we can question here. The first is whether the private sector wouldn’t do more research if it had to, without having government sponsored universities and its research programs bearing some of those costs.

But the basic point is a good one as we sit back and watch Google and Volkswagen roll out their automated cars. The news stories make me want to rip out my hair: Oh, how clever are these companies?! Look at how they came up with automated cars all by themselves!

Google and Volkswagen–and the rest of us–are benefiting from more than a century of academic research on computing. There’s no Google at all without Alan Turing. We are always standing on the shoulders of giants—even the giants among us.

It’s unlikely we’d be at the point of automating cars without the space program or the army. Sure, there are plenty of roads to the same destination, and I’ve never been one to think that any one contribution is the be-all hero’s journey story that storytellers like to make of them.

But we have to give government-sponsored R & D some due: the investments in research often look arsy varsy and wasteful at the time. Who could have seen where we are today when Turing was fiddling about with algorithms while he was supported by the British government? What else might have he produced if he had done less applied work on the governments’ immediate problems? All those combinatorial math guys, foodling about. Where would traffic signals be without them?

Between Law & Order and the recent critiques of higher ed found *everywhere* produced mostly by people within the academy who hate it and their colleagues, it’s tempting to think that all academics get paid to sit around and molest their grad students. But reality is, as usual, different from stereotypes—the selected bad behaviors among some that are strategically emphasized to misrepresent the whole.

So how much R & D is too much? It’s a worthy question when social programs are getting cut, and hard to answer when you don’t know when the right idea is going to come along or when its application will suddenly become clear.

I have long sat through arguments from welfare rights advocates about how wasteful the space program is. It’s hard to disagree: when families are in need, don’t they have a greater claim to the resources? My response is that a wealthy country like the US can afford both to support poor families and innovation, but I don’t know that I believe my own response, and I’m not sure, if I had chose, which way I’d go.

Why?

If anything is likely to curb the bloodbath and loss of human life that are car crashes, it’s automated cars, the direct descendent of robotics and guided systems that were improved via space and aviation research. Automated driving is the potentially revolutionary marriage of government and market–research and implementation–that Google’s cars now represent. If defense and space research helped us get there, then the benefits to both rich and poor would be staggering in the retention of human capital.