Entries for December 14, 2005

Robert Bruegmann's book Sprawl: A Compact History has inspired some interesting reviews. One is by the witty architect and architectural critic Witold Rybczynski, who has written many fine books himself. Another is by Joel Kotkin, author of the recent The City: A Global History. Rybczynski and Kotkin reach similar conclusions.

Rybczynski: "It appears that all cities–at least all cities in the industrialized western world–have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal. Why is this significant? 'Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax,' Bruegmann writes. 'It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy.'"

Ken Auletta has a long piece in this week's New Yorker on New York Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. "Young Arthur," as Auletta tells us he is often called, had had a bad few past years–the Jayson Blair scandal and the firing of top editor Howell Raines, the backing and then abandonment of reporter Judith Miller, the ham-handed and financially unrewarding takeover of the International Herald Tribune. The company's stock price fell 33 percent between December 2004 and October 2005. Not a very good performance for a man who has the job because his family owns a controlling share of the company. Perhaps the best summary of Auletta's piece comes in a quote. "Gay Talese, who, in the '60s, wrote the definitive history of the Times, 'The Kingdom and the Power,' says, 'You get a bad king every once in a while.'"

One issue Auletta does not address here is whether the increasing (in my view) left-wing bias of the Times is a problem. Young Arthur has made no secret of his own ideological leanings and, Auletta tells us, started off with a determination that no one would exert the control over the newsroom that longtime top editor A.M. Rosenthal did. Rosenthal also worked hard to keep the newsroom's left-wing bias from getting into the paper, with at least some success. Raines certainly did not do so, and the current top editor, Bill Keller, for whose reporting and writing I have the highest regard, doesn't seem to be turning things around. What I think we're seeing at the Times is the self-destruction of a great national institution.

Over the years, I've moved from left to right on most issues. But there are still some issues on which I'm with the left. One of them is executive pay. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that, as the subhead put it, "Compensation Rises Again as CEOs Get Lavish Packages for Coming, Going or Staying" (sorry, subscription required). Here's the bottom line:

Total compensation for CEOs at 1,522 big U.S. companies rose a median of 30% last year to $2.4 million, double the 15% increase for 2003, according to researchers at The Corporate Library in Portland, Maine. The figure includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, gains from exercising options and payouts from long-term incentive plans.