A final thought on the privilege of privileges, a recap of the week ... plus, toasters!
If your political theories don't account for people acting in their own self-interest, don't be surprised if you keep losing
A Belgian toaster, 1930. Photo Credit: Cfrederico, released to public domain under Creative Commons 1.0 licence.
I should open this week's recap newsletter with a warning but also a promise: this recap will again touch on matters relating to my history with moving and real estate, but that's not going to be a regular thing. I don't want you all to think this is just something I am constantly obsessing over. But it's relevant to our topic today. Trust me.Â
For new readers here at Code 47, I'm referring to a column I wrote here just a few days ago. The topic is where we live and why we choose to live there.
Privilege has been a big theme for me this week. The column I wrote at Code 47 last week in place of the Sunday recap was all about it. Nominally it was about people with oodles of privilege — mostly but not exclusively meaning money — putting their kids either into private school or even private tutoring pods to ride out the pandemic. But it was really about NIMBYism, and the palpable awkwardness some self-identified progressives are feeling these days when they overtly use their privilege to put the welfare of their children ahead of the welfare of society at large, in ways that entrench that privilege still further. Whatever their publicly professed politics may be, it's not surviving first contact with a real threat to their family's health and prosperity.
The column did well. Code 47 is brand new but it still hauled in a respectable number of readers — nothing earth-shattering by newspaper standards, but nearly a thousand people read it. Not bad! And it also got some attention on social media and even in a legit, excellent podcast (I'll recap that below.) So I ended up spending quite a bit of time talking about it last week. Which is probably why I was attuned to the connection to another random conversation I found myself in.
It was on social media, but I'm not going to link to it, for the simple reason that the person I was chatting with was entirely pleasant and polite and I don't want to put any kind of social media target on their back. But the conversation was about real estate, particularly in the context of neighbourhoods. My correspondent made a sweeping comment about how homeowners that lean into NIMBYism and make their neighbourhoods impossible to change and densify are acting in an ultimately self-defeating fashion. The neighbourhood will gradually lose its vitality and grey out, they asserted, which will not only impact the quality of life for the people living there, but also eventually impact their land values. Maybe it won't actually lower them, but other more dynamic areas will grow faster.
There's two big problems with this.
The first is that I don't buy the concept. More to the point, what my correspondent was critiquing as a bug might actually be more of a feature. If you're of the mindset that your neighbourhood is perfect the way it is, how much of that dynamism are you really going to miss? Further, if you're a long-hauler, planning to be carried out of your house at the end of your days, you're never going to reap the financial gains of a booming market. Maybe your inheritors will be annoyed with your retrograde views on the apparent joys of gentrification, but I suspect there's people in all of North America's major cities who are perfectly happy to live out their final years and die in homes that are exactly the way they've been for decades — just as the homeowner wants them.
The second is that it ignores the fact that for people who intend to live in a place for a long time, but not forever, a hard NIMBY attitude on development and gentrification actually makes extremely good sense. You'll avoid all the headaches and hassles of heavy construction (as a guy who lives a stone's throw from the soon-to-be-completed Eglinton Line 5, I can confirm it's a headache and hassle). You'll protect (even increase) the value of your home. And when you're done living there ... you move on.
A home for sale. Photo Credit: Geoff Peters, under Creative Commons 2. licence.
My correspondent didn't think think much of these folk, but this is an entirely rational approach.Â
In my afore-mentioned real estate column, I described how I've lived full-time in four different homes in Greater Toronto. We've been in our current home for five-and-a-half years. I love it. Love the neighbourhood, too. But one day we'll leave. I'm not in a hurry to leave. What we like most about our neighbourhood is that it's a great (virtually perfect) place to raise a family. But one day, God willing, said family will be raised. The kids will move on and move out. And then my wife and I (again, God willing) will be in a house that's too big and worth a fortune and in need of ever-increasing payments to keep in proper trim. When this happens, we'll sell the house, pocket the cash and live somewhere else for a lot less.
Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll stay in Toronto, at least part of the time. I could see us getting a condo (of which there are thousands to choose from starting like all of two miles from where I type these words) and spending part of the time there. The details don't matter, but the big picture does: we'll sell the house, leave the old neighbourhood and content ourselves with being a quick Future-Uber from our old haunts and digs.Â
And this is ... pretty routine?
It's hard to say how routine; Canadian data on why people move exists, but it's kinda blunt — you can't really draw conclusions from the data beyond what it literally reports. Suffice it to say that Canadians move, fairly often, for a lot of different reasons. And for those people planning to move, maximizing the value of any property they own, whether over a short or long timeframe, is natural.Â
But my correspondent disagreed. They rather tautologically dismissed the pursuit of individual benefits as self-interested (umm, yeah?). The correspondent stressed that they understood that people did behave this way, but seemed baffled by the choice.
And that's where we come back full circle. Like I said in my column about tutoring pods, privileged people enjoy their privileges. They also make full use of them. Some feel the need to performatively hum and haw before doing so, others (raises hand) just view it as routine to act in their family's best self-interest.Â
This isn't an embrace of some purely Darwinian pursuit of maximum self-interest at all times and at any cost. There are certainly factors that restrain such pursuits, including moral and ethical views, and even just as something as simple and profound as the "campsite rule": try to leave things better than you found them. Most of the time, doing this, and also pursuing self-interest, isn't just possible, it's mutually supportive. It's in happily fairly rare circumstances, like deciding to make that final home sale before you expect to die, or pondering how to keep your kids safe during a pandemic, that the choices between personal interest and community interest can become really stark.
But when they do, the smart money has got to be on self-interest prevailing. My correspondent, though, can't seem to fathom that. They aren't alone. Many people seem genuinely baffled when people, even those who talk a good progressive game, suddenly get decidedly non-prog about getting their kid into a pod, keeping the homeless out of their neighbourhood or maximizing the value of their home. I would humbly suggest that until such people get over their surprise and start adjusting their plans to better reflect human nature, they shall know a life of disappointment.
But perhaps solid home-value gains.
What else did I get up to this week? Well ...
In the National Post, I had to scramble at deadline to fire something together after WE Charity announced it was shutting down all its Canadian operations. It's very possible that WE Charity was screwed anyway, a victim of its own financial problems and management struggles, which left it in a weakened state when the double-whammy of the pandemic and the scandal's brand damage came along. If so, blaming the scandal for the fall could be the Kielburgers' way of explaining away what might really be a fairly mundane corporate failure with what I described as soothing self-righteousness.
But if the scandal really did kill WE, I wrote, the fault of that lies squarely with the federal government's incompetence, including mostly especially Bill Morneau and Justin Trudeau's. "[The] now-outgoing staff of WE Charity’s Canadian operations have to conclude that, all things being equal, the scandal sure didn’t help," I wrote. "And it must be particularly galling for them because, as has been oft-noted, this isn’t exactly the prime minister’s first such offence. This is, indeed, the third time he’s run at flank speed into similar ethical shoals. The first two times have been apparently lacking as learning experiences: he went and did it again. ... We’ll see if it hurts him. The polls seem to show that yes, it clipped his wings, but by how much and for how long remains to be seen. So all we can say with any reasonable certainty is that a bunch of charitable employees will pay the sharpest and most immediate price for Trudeau and Morneau’s lapses in judgment."
I also did an interview with CKNW's excellent Lynda Steele, chatting with the good people of Vancouver, about the WE Charity closure.
Also in the Post was the sole column I intended to publish that day, before the WE story came along at the last possible moment. There's a pretty horrifying story coming out of the nation's capital, and the fact that it's occurring against the backdrop of debates all across North America about police accountability and reform can't be ignored. A constable on the Ottawa police force pleaded guilty in court to absolutely appalling conduct committed while off duty, including explicitly threatening to murder a man and also to kidnap his child unless the man paid off a debt he owed the officer. It's the kind of behaviour that would get you or I tossed into prison, and if we dared try it on a cop, well, prison would be a blessing. But the bad Ottawa cop — who has fully admitted his guilt — was given an absolute discharged by the courts and then the force meted out an internal sanction of ... a one-year demotion.Â
Oh, and he's a repeat offender, too.
As long as this man remains on patrol, with a pistol on his hip, the public can't have faith in the Ottawa police. I don't know how we can fix this problem within the system we've built. But we'd better figure it out.
At TVO.org, I wrote a column that's admittedly a placeholder. Ontario, right now, lives in a state of unknown. Our COVID-19 case numbers are moving fairly steadily in the wrong direction. It's very possible that this will not trigger a major surge in deaths, especially since we know better now the urgent need to protect our elderly, particularly the nursing and retirement homes. But these numbers are lagging indicators, as are hospitalizations and deaths. The cases we're seeing today reflect what was happening in mid-to-late August, and we haven't even opened the schools across all the province yet. This is creating not just a medical crisis and an economic crisis, I wrote, but also a crisis in our calendars. I know what I'm doing in three days. I'm reasonably confident with plans three weeks out from now. Three months? Nope. No clue. In the era of COVID, all plans are tentative.
As mentioned above, my Code 47 column about privilege got some attention beyond you fine folk right here. Jordan Heath-Rawlings of The Big Story podcast had me on for a good chat. He was pretty open about how my comments about people who identify as progressive having to maybe admit they're not, at least when it comes to their own family's wellbeing, struck a chord with him. If you have the time, it's worth a listen.
And last but not least, my only bit here exclusively at Code 47 this week — a nerdy historical musing about how far back in time you could do and still enjoy many of the little creature comforts we've come to take for granted in North America. Do you like toast? Well, good news. You’re clear back as far as the 1930s!
And yes, this is what I think about in my spare time.Â
Until next time. Thanks, as always, for reading. Please share and sign up if you haven't already.Â
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