The first time I really felt like a dad was when Esmé was riding face out in her Baby Björn and had the cutest tiniest sneeze you’ve ever heard. There was just something about her making the same sound an adult makes, but a very very tiny version. I couldn’t see her face but only her miniature noggin jouncing forward and then back. She didn’t think anything of it, but her dad sure did.
Wasn’t feeling all that Christmas-y yesterday, but Mykala pointed out that it was not going to be that warm for a long time and maybe we should get the tree so Ess can see the trees outside in their natural habit. Wouldn’t want to raise someone who thinks Christmas trees come from asphalt lots in strip malls.
So, off we went. My worries didn’t leave my mind(1) away as we drove to Krueger’s Christmas Trees in Lake Elmo, but the adult worries preoccupying my mind started to look different, as though they would always be there and perhaps it was best to try to set them aside rather than dwell on them always. If I’d been entirely successful, this is where I would share how I did it. But I wasn’t.
It was a warm day, and Ess was bundled in her pink and white striped fleece suit. She looked like this:
She got into the Baby Björn with Mykala and Ess just thought the trees were amazing. Her little nose turned pink, and she reached for the trees when we stepped near to them. “Green, see Essie. The trees are green!” She seemed to think that was a good name for the color.
So I thought about student loans and our finances less while we were out there with the trees. I guess my brain seems to think that it is somehow irresponsible to take a break from worrying, like focusing on the worry gives it the importance it deserves or something unproductive like that. But for a while, I was far more concerned about Essie’s temperature (good) and if we’d found the right tree (we had, a soft, long-needled white pine).
So later that night, with me carrying Essie facing out in the Björn, I was amazed by how much love I felt when I saw her gazing (literally gazing, slack-jawed) up at the string of Christmas lights being de-tangled above her head. Then, I was in the moment… whoah, wait a minute, I’m crazy bonkers lucky. My wife, our child, me, in our little living room surrounded by Christmas decorations, with the same music(2) we played when were decorating when I was growing up playing on the stereo, with the hot chocolate my wife made for me. You don’t get that many of these evenings, self. So I cried, a little bit for me and my difficulty celebrating, and mostly for joy for you Essie; seeing the world through your child’s eyes is actually seeing the world through their eyes sometimes.
(1) The typical tumbledry post would be this transformation as we drove, where every turn of the wheels of the car underneath the bright sun of the perfect day melted away the ice of my worries, etc., etc. I’ll save the flowery language for when something like that actually happens. In the meantime, in the pursuit of a life lens with less rosy distortion, I’ll try to recount things as they happened, not as I wished they happened.
(2) Christmas with Johnny Mathis should always be the first album.
Hey there Ess,
You found your feet a few days ago. One day you had no idea they were there, and the next, there they were! When we change your diaper, you grab hold of them with a very satisfied look on your face. You also now prefer to take your leisure time in a standing position rather than a lying one. You’ve got a contraption for that: a fabric seat that your legs poke through allowing your feet to push against a sprung board. The entire thing is supported by three legs and a sort of table top strewn with your toys. We call it your circle desk. It’s where you get your work done.
Oh, you face out in the Baby Björn now, too. That is adorable. We walk up to a mirror and you immediately break out in a grin. You are stingy with your laughs, but you smile pretty readily now. I guess you just have a sophisticated sense of humor.
You are creeping up on 15 pounds, and you are getting nice and sturdy. It puts your first-time mom and dad at ease, seeing how well you hold your neck up now.
Love you,
Dad
Hey Ess,
It was your first snow today. You aren’t really at that point where you can go outside and romp in it, but your mom told you all about it. I think you sense the way the light bounces around outside is different these days, and I think it means something to your growing consciousness.
We miss you when you nap, and linger over your every coo when you are awake. When you are sad, so are we, and when you laugh, we laugh along, with tears mixed in.
Sorry I had to go to work today; sometimes moms and dads have to be gone, but it is never for long and it is never without a good reason. We’ll always be there.
Love,
Dad
I’ve been reading a bit about zoning lately, this article is a neat summation of one of my concerns about suburbs in the United States: stupid zoning laws. Author “simval84” writes a blog called “Urban kchoze”, here’s a post about Japanese zoning:
Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning.
With the kind of zoning we have here, when new homes are built, there will never be a neighborhood pizza place. You’ll never be able to walk from the ball field to an ice cream parlor. During a snowstorm, you won’t be able to trudge through the drifts to the local café, chat with your neighbors about the storm, warm up, and have a cup of coffee. When you are retired and can no longer drive, you won’t be able to meet your friends for brunch on a Tuesday in the summer. Why?
Because everything is specifically zoned to be too damn far away from everything else!
Even simply lacing the borders of housing developments with mixed use properties would be an improvement, but the closest I’ve seen is strip malls on the outskirts of developments at the intersections of huge roads. Anyhow, more from simval84 at his comments page on The Guardian.
Update: here’s more, pulling it all together in a big picture:
…minimum lot sizes mean that each lot would be very big, so there is little advantage of building a smaller house as you can’t leverage the smaller size of buildings to increase density. House building costs are also not proportional to square feet, the cost of a marginal square foot is much lower than the average cost per square foot.
As to highways and land prices, I think you must consider the impact of car-oriented “urbanism” and very high highway coverage. Let’s suppose a city with a strong center with jobs and stores located there. People who want to go live in the city will tolerate living maybe 15-20 minutes from downtown. Now, if you only have residential streets, as cars travel on average about 20-25 mph on them (including stops and lights), that would mean that the lands available for development would be lands located within 5 or 6 miles of the downtown area, so maybe 80-100 square miles.
Now add 60 mph highways through the area. Suddenly, the land situated at 6 miles from downtown is not at 15-20 minutes from downtown, but at 6 minutes from it. People will tolerate living much farther away, up to 15-20 miles away from downtown. That’s 700 to 1200 square miles of lands close enough to downtown for people to settle on. Proximity is measured in minutes, not in miles.
The result of that is that land prices collapse because there’s so much land that is at an acceptable distance from downtown. Since land is cheap, there is no pressure to build smaller houses. People can build spatially inefficient houses that are cheap to build as they are mostly empty spaces.
If you go see Europe on the other hand, most highways circumvent urban areas, they do not penetrate them. So the distance people are willing to live away from downtown is much shorter. People tend to concentrate closer to the main cities. For instance, most Paris suburbs just stop 20 miles away from the city center (they have highways, they just stop a few miles from downtown). The city of Newman, an Atlanta suburb, is 40 miles away from downtown Atlanta.
It means that land prices will be much more expensive, creating an incentive to use less land per housing unit, ie more density.
So in the US, where highways cover most of metropolitan areas, land will be very cheap, and thus it allows for people to build bigger houses for the same price.
Finally, the low-density car-oriented public realm will likely be extremely poor. Therefore, most people will spend almost their entire lives inside their homes, as there is little point to going outside. So you need an expansive and rich private realm in order to compensate and to avoid cabin fever.
Hi Essie,
Most of yesterday and into last night you were uncomfortable. We could tell that you wanted to be your smiley, playful, charming self but something was going on in your stomach-region that was hurting. You’d start to smile and play and then suddenly it was clear that something inside was interrupting your agenda. During one of the sunny spots where you were smiling a big wide-open grin that you’ve figured out just in the last few days, your mom was making raspberry sounds with her tongue at you, and then: you laughed! It was unmistakable, so lovely, and we both teared up.
You still aren’t feeling very well, and your mom is taking care of you at home, but that little ray of sunshine helped us all through.
Love,
Dad
Today, I was sitting in the corner of our kitchen on top of the countertops, nestled into the area where the toaster oven is, while Mykala made apple-and-cheese sandwiches at the stove. I looked at the results of painting and decorating this home over the past six months, the way the early fall light warmed the walls, and the breeze of a perfectly clear 61° day cooled off the space. Esmé slept peacefully in her carrier, tired after a three mile walk with her mom and dad. There were no television or radio noises, just the gentle rush of breezes through screens and the staccato sounds of kids playing down the street. It was a perfect moment, the closeness of family, the esthetics of the surroundings, and the peace of a respite from the exigencies of daily, young-professional, indebted life.
An extraordinary, above-average moment such as this is, by definition, out of the ordinary. Moments like it are connected by the rest of life, and I remain frustrated that I have trouble finding peace during those “rest of life” times. “Life is what happens when you’re making plans” popped into my head as I sat in my perch in the corner of the kitchen.
My good friend Nils’ father Garry passed away this past March 3rd, and I think of Garry all the time. It may be because this new home of ours is less than a mile from where he lived and Nils grew up, but I think it is because the potency of my feelings about Garry’s death surprised me. I guess my life has pivoted. Behind me are memories: where funerals were always grandparents two generations away, folks who had lived very long lives and seen multiple generations grow and live and love. Before me is the future, a new stage of life, one where the generation of my parents, sometimes of my peers, passes away too soon. Funerals where you think not of what the recently passed saw, but rather what they missed. It is disheartening that meditating on loss and death is the quickest way to perspective on one’s current moment, the quickest way to convince one’s short-sighted poorly-prioritzing brain to ENJOY WHAT IS IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU MORON.
Garry would have loved today.
I’m sure that you too, dear reader, know of someone who passed away too soon. Might I suggest that our task is to remember mortality and loss in a useful way: to let this perspective color our attitude, guide our way, without darkening the days of our journey.
“Let’s talk about margins” by Craig Mod:
On the other hand, cheap, rough paper with a beautifully set textblock hanging just so on the page makes those in the know, smile (and those who don’t, feel welcome). It says: We may not have had the money to print on better paper, but man, we give a shit. Giving a shit does not require capital, simply attention and humility and diligence. Giving a shit is the best feeling you can imbue craft with.
Via Gruber.
I’ve taken 14,086 pictures with my camera since I purchased it nine years ago, and I’ve found something wrong with every single one. I do not have the brain that goes “oooh I love that one that I took… let’s blow it up!” I have the brain that goes “I wish the light had been from the right instead of the left” or “I wish I had shot higher resolution” or “the dust on the sensor is really noticeable there” or “that flower is past its prime”. This type of analysis is exhausting and difficult to shut off. Take that brain and have it paint a room and you produce a very dissatisfied person at the end of the project: seeing only the flaws and, for whatever reason, lamenting the inexpert hand that produced them. I do not know why I expect perfection when I am beginning to learn these things.
So then there’s my job: there I want and expect myself to be perfect. All the time. And by definition, that can’t always happen. That’s really difficult, because my sense of accomplishment and progress gets tied up with work, so I take it really personally when things don’t turn out perfect. Mykala reminds me that I have only been at this for a little over two years, and it takes a long time to get these things right. I had lunch with an area orthodontist and he said something quite helpful: “After a few decades, you get better because you’ve made all the mistakes there are to make and learned how to avoid them.”
I am reading the conclusions in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (It is rather unreasonable to try to wade through the 300 pages separating my progress in the book and the conclusions, given our two week old! So, I skipped to the end…). Here are some interesting quotes:
Social mobility:
Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. (p.484)
Education:
In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access. (p.485)
To be sure, university fees are much lower in Europe if one leaves Britain aside. In other countries, including Sweden and other Nordic countries, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, tuition fees are relatively low (less than 500 euros). (p.485)
Stepping out of my quotation parade here—that means undergraduate educations are 12 times more expense on average in the United States than in Europe.
Social programs:
Finally, income support outlays (i.e. welfare) are even smaller (less than 1 percent of national income), almost insignificant when measured against total government spending.
…
Welfare benefits are questioned not only in Europe but also in the United States (where the unemployed black single mother is often singled out for criticism by opponents of the US “welfare state”). In both cases, the sums involved are in fact only a very small part of state social spending. (p.479)
Income inequality:
Tax revenues in rich countries:
Taxes:
[In the US] In 1942 the Victory Tax Act raised the top rate to 88 percent, and in 1944 it went up again to 94 percent, due to various surtaxes. The top rate then stabilized at around 90 percent until the mid-1960s, but then it fell to 70 percent in the early 1980s. All told, over the period from 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.
It is important to note that no continental European country has ever imposed such high rates (except in exceptional circumstances, for a few years at most, and never for as long as half a century).
Particularly fascinating is that it is not theoretical that government created the middle class in the United States after World War II (see the income inequality chart above):
Concretely, the two phenomena are perfectly correlated: the countries with the largest decreases in their top tax rates are also the countries where the top earners’ share of national income has increased the most (especially when it comes to the remuneration of executives of large firms). (p.509)
As Piketty points out, the above is not explained by the theory of marginal productivity:
A more realistic explanation is that lower top income tax rates, especially in the United States and Britain, where top rates fell dramatically, totally transformed the way executive salaries are determined. (p.509)
And lets throw out trickle down theory while we are at it:
… there is no statistically significant relationship between the decrease in top marginal tax rates and the rate of productivity growth in the developed countries since 1980. (p.510)
Loving this:
According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80 percent.
…
The evidence suggests that a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.
…
A rate of 80 percent applied to incomes above $500,000 or $1 million a year would not bring the government much in the way of revenue, because it would quickly fulfill its objective: to drastically reduce remuneration at this level but without reducing the productivity of the US economy, so that pay would rise at lower levels. In order for the government to obtain the revenues it sorely need to develop the meager US social state and invest more in health and education (while reducing the federal deficit), taxes would also have to be raised on incomes lower in the distribution (for example, by imposing rates of 50 or 60 percent on incomes above $200,000). Such a social and fiscal policy is well within reach of the United States. (p.513)
But Piketty’s definitive solution is not based on marginal tax rates but rather on a “global tax on capital.” He spends the book explaining, illustrating, and providing evidence to show that r > g where r is return on capital and g is growth of income and output. That is “Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.” (p.571).
Not “a” solution but the solution:
The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 of 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 4 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. (p.572)
Extraordinarily illuminating. I look forward to revisiting it in the future, when I’ve more time to ponder details and better understand what Piketty is saying.
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