Henry Watson > Recent Status Updates

Some of the points raised regarding regulation in Chapter 5 are, unfortunately, just not quite right, such as how Litman characterizes economically significant rules as an invention of the conservative Court, rather than an Executive Order from the Clinton administration.

Litman expresses a fairly coherent thesis on page 130: that some political decisionmaking is necessary on the Court, but the current state of affairs “differs, at least in degree, from what was happening before”. This isn’t explored in enough depth, and clashes with Litman’s frequent criticism of historical courts such as during the outset of the Great Depression.

I think part of my struggle with Litman’s argument is that the Court’s use of “vibes” to decide cases is endogenous to the outcomes. Would “vibes”-based decisionmaking be okay if they benefitted marginalized groups instead of harming them?

Impressions after chapter 1:

- Designed for a narrow audience, presumably Strict Scrutiny podcast listeners. Won’t persuade a conservative, and assumes too much knowledge to be accessible.

- The thesis that Court decisions are purely political is valid (although not new) but this book is more about being outraged about that than proving the point with evidence.

- Very conversational, short shelf-life

Reached the dramatic scene of a young planner discovering that all of Moses’ bridges were built too low for buses to use the parkways. But there’s no reason (aside from drama) that the reader should wait 951 pages to see this; Moses’ highways were always indefensible, but aren’t critiqued until late in the book. In a book this long, structural choices like that matter!

As a note on Caro’s over-mythologizing of Robert Moses, on page 829, he semi-seriously predicts that Moses’ Shea Stadium would stand for 2,000 years, as long as the roads of Rome. Shea Stadium opened in 1964, “The Power Broker” was published in 1974. By 2006, construction was underway on a replacement stadium, and Shea was demolished in 2009 to make room for more parking. Hardly a legacy comparable to Rome.

Caro finally (belatedly) starts to turn on his subject in Part VI: The Lust for Power. In a way, Caro’s portrayal of Moses follows that of the reformers, chronologically, who only realized how evil Moses was during the epic Battery Bridge fight. But it wasn’t that Moses fell from grace in any real way. Power didn’t corrupt him; anyone could see he was always this way from his youth.

There was an interesting, frustrating, passage I just read where Caro attempts to ascribe the low quality of many of Moses’ inner-city projects to a “lack of time.” This is frustrating because it glosses over what, in hindsight, is the much more obvious explanation: Moses was a racist, classist, bigot who didn’t care about the poor, and only cared about NYC as a set of LEGOs for him to rearrange.

A major flaw of this book, so far, is that Caro seems to have at least partially bought into the myth of Robert Moses, and fully bought into Moses’ “dream”. By almost exclusively interviewing people in Moses’ orbit, Caro undersells how tremendously misguided and harmful Moses’ singleminded focus on highways and motorists really was.