In November, Barack Obama bewildered education reformers by tapping Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor who had advised his campaign, to oversee the transition's education policy team. Their verdict was swift and harsh. "Worst case scenario," wrote Mike Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, the day after The Wall Street Journal leaked the news. "This is a sign that the president-elect isn't a bona fide reformer," he later told me. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, confirmed, "The reform community is scared to death."

The "reform community" is an aggressive group of education advocates who argue that the certification programs which produce teachers, and the unions that represent them once they're in the classroom, have had too tight a grip on progressive priorities in the field for too long. Instead, they want to shake up the system through programs that bring in new blood and hold teachers accountable. They place their hopes in nervy, pioneering leaders like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, the chancellors of the D.C. and New York City public schools, respectively. In Darling-Hammond--an academic, union favorite, and vocal critic of Teach for America and No Child Left Behind--they see the opposite: an ideological enemy representative of a sluggish status quo.

Reformers are right to be nervous. During the campaign, Obama deftly appeased all sides of the policy debate. While appealing to the unions, which have long been bastions of Democratic support, he also gave great hope to reformers inside and outside the party by supporting merit pay and pledging to increase funding for charter schools. In asking Darling-Hammond to helm the transition--a precursor, some worry, to her appointment as secretary of education--Obama has suggested that he wasn't entirely serious about change, at least when it comes to education. It's a misstep that threatens to derail his quest for post-partisanship--and ruin a critical opportunity to revolutionize America's lagging schools.

Darling-Hammond first roiled the reform community--largely a young, fervent crowd--in the early 1990s, when she emerged as the toughest critic of Teach for America (TFA), a program started by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp to draw some of the nation's top college students into teaching. Darling-Hammond, a former public school teacher, is a staunch advocate of bolstering teacher-certification programs. TFA teachers, by contrast, aren't required to have a teaching degree before they serve two-year stints in some of the country's poorest school districts. "TFA is bad policy and bad education," Darling-Hammond wrote in a 1994 article.

Today, TFA is one of the reform movement's prized accomplishments. It boasts 20,000 current teachers and alums, many of whom, like Michelle Rhee, have gone on to become leaders in the field. Darling-Hammond has softened her criticism, but, in an education debate this fall, she told a McCain adviser that TFA isn't a program that "builds your profession." She's also published studies showing that teacher certification is critical to improving students' performance, even as other research showed the opposite. "She's either dishonest or the sloppiest person in education research I've ever seen," says Vanderbilt education professor Dale Ballou, who co-wrote a 2000 report criticizing a teacher-certification study spearheaded by Darling-Hammond. (She fired back at the time, saying Ballou's report "ignores and misconstrues" the evidence.) And, in January 2007, she proposed a "Marshall Plan for Teaching," a $3 billion agenda for improving training and certification programs and diminishing the "parade of underprepared and inexperienced teachers" in public schools.

Darling-Hammond has also gone after No Child Left Behind (nclb), which reformers see as a flawed but important bipartisan law that calls for raising accountability standards, enhancing student testing requirements, and closing the achievement gap among students of differing racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. In a May 2007 article in The Nation, she wrote that the country needs "something much more than [nclb] and much different." Last fall, she penned an op-ed criticizing high-stakes testing, a measure many reformers support. It didn't help that, during the campaign, she signed an education manifesto at odds with a rival, tough-minded reform agenda. (Both documents were circulated and hotly debated at the Democratic convention this year.) "The ideas associated with Darling-Hammond are ones that educators love because they're warm and fuzzy," says Petrilli of the Fordham Institute. "They're not tough, not admitting that sometimes adults aren't doing their jobs."

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On the trail, Obama managed to win over both camps. He satisfied the unions by working with Darling-Hammond, yet drew boos at one union meeting by praising merit pay. At an American Enterprise Institute forum in early October, Obama education adviser Michael Johnston, a former TFA teacher, assured a nervous crowd that Darling-Hammond's opinion was just one among many in the campaign and pointed to a speech in which Obama proposed doubling federal spending on charter schools as emblematic of his real views. And, just before the election, Obama publicly praised Rhee, who is at war with the D.C. teachers' union over tenure. "Obama was careful during the campaign to assure both sides he was with them, with a wink, wink and a nod, nod," says Petrilli.

The winking and nodding paid off. Despite nagging misgivings, the reform community threw its support to Obama. But reformers grew worried when he selected Darling-Hammond for the transition. "What's disappointing is the fact that Darling-Hammond is a staunch opponent of TFA and other alternative programs," Rhee says. "We get many of our best teachers through those routes. Somebody who's coming into this with thoughts about shutting those down is extremely problematic." They became even more nervous when Darling-Hammond appeared on short lists for education secretary, along with more reform-friendly types like Joel Klein and Arne Duncan of Chicago Public Schools. "Since Darling-Hammond surfaced as officially on the policy team, there have been a lot of people e-mailing asking, 'What should we do, should we be talking more about our reservations?' " says Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. TFA declined to comment on Darling-Hammond's appointment, but, in late November, it sent an e-mail to alumni encouraging them to "stay on top of about [sic] what is happening and not happening regarding education reform" and directing them to the website of its political arm, where photos of Darling-Hammond and Joel Klein are captioned with a reminder that the Democratic factional debate is "spilling over into a battle over Secretary of Education."

Reformers are quick to say that, while they disagree strongly with her methods, they don't doubt that Darling-Hammond wants to improve schools. And she does have significant support within the education establishment. "Her approach works," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's largest teachers' unions. "She's been involved in education reform since before a lot of these newcomers." Ash Vasudeva, who works with Darling-Hammond at Stanford, says she's "a passionate advocate of the teaching profession." More than 2,500 people have signed an online petition pushing for her Cabinet appointment.

Darling-Hammond also insisted, in a lengthy e-mail, that her positions promote reform. "I don't care who is for and who is against an idea, what matters is whether the idea will improve education for children," she wrote. She said that her opinions are "really not an issue" because the transition team is charged with "figur[ing] out how to implement the policy platform already developed by the Obama campaign."

That may be, but, with Darling-Hammond as the point person on deciding how to implement the most important pieces of an undoubtedly evolving platform, it's easy to imagine reform-backed proposals falling by the wayside. That's why, even if she does not secure a position in the Obama administration, the symbolism and influence she has in this preliminary stage are troubling. Vexing education's boldest change agents won't help Obama substantiate his still-murky education reform credentials and forge bipartisan policies. And, if Obama does elevate her to his Cabinet, the appointment would leave lasting wounds, both among reformers and in the nation's schools. "Hopes would be dashed . . . if [the secretary of education] isn't reformed-minded," Williams says.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that "ideological battles [in education] . . . are as outdated as they are predictable." Too bad he's just started another one.

Seyward Darby is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

General Motors has come to Washington, begging for a $25 billion bailout to keep it and its ailing Detroit counterparts going next year. But nobody seems too thrilled about the prospect. Liberals dwell on the companies’ gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. Conservatives obsess over all the well-paid union members with gold-plated benefits. And people of all ideological backgrounds remember how they used to buy domestic cars, years ago, but stopped because the cars were so damn lousy. "The downfall of the American auto industry is indeed a tragedy," the Washington Post editorial board sermonized recently, "but the automakers and the United Auto Workers have only themselves to blame for much of it." And, if they have only themselves to blame, the argument goes, why do they deserve taxpayer help? Let them fail and file for bankruptcy. In the long run, the economy will be stronger and the workers better off. It’d be worth?the short-term pain, which might not even be so severe.

In normal times, with another company, that might be correct. But these are not normal times, just as GM is not any old company. Nor is the simple economic morality tale everybody repeats about the auto industry accurate. Detroit has come a long way since the days of wide lapels and disco. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are taking precisely the sorts of steps everybody says are necessary--or, at least, they were taking those steps until an unexpected trifecta of high gas prices, vanishing credit, and a deep recession hit. Rescuing the auto industry is not, as so many people suppose, a question of giving Detroit one extra shot at transformation. It’s a question of giving Detroit a chance to finish a transformation that was already underway.

One reason for the casual support for letting GM fail is the assumption that bankruptcy would be no big deal: As USA Today editorialized recently, "Bankruptcy need not mean that the company disappears." But, while it’s worked out that way for the airlines, among others, it’s unlikely a GM business failure would play out in the same fashion. In order to seek so-called Chapter 11 status, a distressed company must find some way to operate while the bankruptcy court keeps creditors at bay. But GM can’t build cars without parts, and it can’t get parts without credit. Chapter 11 companies typically get that sort of credit from something called Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) loans. But the same Wall Street meltdown that has dragged down the economy and GM sales has also dried up the DIP money GM would need to operate.

That’s why many analysts and scholars believe GM would likely end up in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would entail total liquidation. The company would close its doors, immediately throwing more than 100,000 people out of work. And, according to experts, the damage would spread quickly. Automobile parts suppliers in the United States rely disproportionately on GM’s business to stay afloat. If GM shut down, many if not all of the suppliers would soon follow. Without parts, Chrysler, Ford, and eventually foreign-owned factories in the United States would have to cease operations. From Toledo to Tuscaloosa, the nation’s?assembly lines could go silent, sending a chill through their local economies as the idled workers stopped spending money.

Restaurants, gas stations, hospitals, and then cities, counties, and states--all of them would feel pressure on their bottom lines. A study just published by the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research (CAR) predicted that three million people would lose their jobs in the first year after such a Big Three meltdown, swelling the ranks of the unemployed by nearly one-third nationally and leading to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost income. The Midwest would feel the effects disproportionately, but the effect would reach into every community with a parts supplier or factory--and, to a lesser extent, into every town and city with a dealership. In short, virtually every community in the country would be touched.

This is, admittedly, a worst-case scenario--the sort of dire projection you’d expect from a Michigan-based think tank that receives a small amount of industry money. (And, as a Michigan resident, I should disclose my own small conflict: My wife, an?engineering professor, once directed a research project funded by Ford.) But the economists and industry analysts I tracked down this week vouched for CAR’s integrity and suggested the group’s estimate was in the right ballpark. Susan Helper, an economist at Case Western University and a specialist on the automobile industry, told me her rough calculations suggest the most optimistic outcome would be "just" half a million jobs lost--and that’s only if the failures are contained to GM. But she expects much worse, given the likely spillover effects: Her best estimate is that between 1.5 and two million jobs would be lost. The price of addressing such human misery with unemployment benefits, Medicaid, and other services would be huge, making a $25 billion loan seem like a bargain—particularly if the companies pay it back, just as Chrysler did after its bailout in the 1980s.

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Still, not everybody finds such arithmetic compelling. Critics of a bailout note, rightly, that bankruptcy isn’t simply about giving distressed companies financial protection to get through rough patches. It’s also about letting the free market do its work--about forcing inefficient companies to reorganize or, failing that, to make way for others. If the government spares Detroit from failure, the government might end up supporting obsolete companies while rewarding both management and labor for their oafish behavior.

Make no mistake: The Big Three deserve some scorn. For decades, they were complacent about foreign competition and the need to make more fuel-efficient cars; then they responded by seeking government protection in the form of trade barriers and lax mileage standards. The United Auto Workers (UAW) were willing accomplices to these acts, insisting upon rigid work rules defining who could do what job and under what conditions. That, plus their fierce protection of jobs even at unprofitable plants, made it difficult for the Big Three to adapt as consumer desires changed. Detroit steadily lost business to companies like Honda and Toyota that managed to make cars more efficiently--and figured out, early on, that rising gas prices would increase?demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

But what’s missing in the tsk-tsk editorials is any recognition that the culture of Detroit has been changing, however belatedly, starting with its labor relations. Ford led the way years ago by reaching site-specific "competitive operating agreements" with locals at different plants, rather than sticking to one national agreement, thereby enabling it loosen work rules and engage in the sort of collaborative quality management on which industry leader Toyota made its reputation. Then, last year, the UAW reached a breakthrough agreement in which it granted the companies similar flexibility, agreed to a two-tier wage structure for new hires, and set up a separate trust fund to finance future retiree health benefits. The companies would provide the initial money for this trust, but, henceforth, the unions would manage it--thereby taking off the companies’ books a tremendous burden that had, on its own, accounted for about half the gap in compensation between unionized workers for the Big Three and non-unionized workers for foreign-owned automakers. "I think they’ve shown unprecedented ability to change and transform the union," says Kristin Dziczek, who directs CAR’s Automotive Labor and Education program. "They understand what is at stake."

So far, the results are promising. According to the most recent Harbour Report, the benchmark guide for manufacturing prowess, Chrysler’s factories now match Toyota’s for the most productive, while both Ford’s and GM’s are improving. (A Toledo Jeep factory was actually named the nation’s most efficient.) Consumer Reports now says Ford’s reliability is approaching that of perennial leaders Honda and Toyota, whose ratings actually slipped last year. In late 2010, GM will introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that can go 40 miles without gas, and the Chevrolet Cruze, a compact that relies solely on gas but that gets 45 miles to the gallon. The Volt would represent a rare leap ahead of the Japanese, who never embraced plug-in technology with the same enthusiasm. It’s also typical of the better cars that observers say Detroit has in store. "There’s a lot of accumulated negativity about these companies out there," says Wharton’s John Paul MacDuffie, who directs the International Motor Vehicle Program. "U.S. consumers gave the Big Three the benefit of the doubt for a long time before turning away from them, and now their reputation is worse than their actual performance and progress toward needed reforms."

MacDuffie would be the first to say the progress is incomplete. As proof that Detroit still has a lot to learn, he points to recent strategic mistakes like its overreliance on deep sticker-price discounts and large rebates, which dilute brand reputation and resale value. But Chapter 11 seems like a particularly poor way to fix these sorts of lingering problems. Bankruptcy is a messy, expensive process that would likely do more for lawyers than for the automaker, which has already taken the most obvious steps toward efficiency. "With the airlines, it was to get out of their labor contracts and to get out from under the underfunded pension positions they created," says Mark Oline, a highly regarded automotive analyst with Fitch Ratings. "But, in the case of GM and Ford, they have done a very good job with the UAW to address those problems of wages and benefits."

If anything, Chapter 11 might reinforce some of Detroit’s worst habits--starting with its tendency to seek the lowest prices from parts suppliers, even if that means switching companies frequently and paying relatively little attention to part quality. Toyota is famous for taking the opposite approach: It eschews easy savings in order to maintain long-term relationships with suppliers; these relationships, in turn, allow Toyota and its suppliers to collaborate on design and quality. It’s precisely the sort of production technique that the Big Three should be adopting. But, in a Chapter 11 filing, under pressure to improve the bottom line as fast as possible, they’d be unlikely to do that.

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And that’s assuming they even make it to Chapter 11. In the more likely event that GM had to shut down altogether under Chapter 7, as most experts I consulted predict, the company’s institutional knowledge would end up on the proverbial shop floor. Among the casualties could be the Volt--and any near-term hopes of a marketable plug-in for the domestic auto industry. "Maybe those engineers get rehired, maybe not," says Case Western’s Susan Helper. "But you lose those working relationships; you lose all the time invested. ... [People] don’t really have a sense of the things that have to get put in motion, when you have ten-year planning horizons for new engines. When you disrupt that, it’s very costly."

Those are among the reasons most analysts and economists, however reluctantly, have concluded that a better solution would be another government bailout--albeit one with lots of conditions attached. Those conditions would include limits on executive compensation, as in the Wall Street rescue, but also more specific requirements designed to push the Big Three toward greater innovation and fuel efficiency. The bailout might also require more concessions from the unions, perhaps over the relatively generous health benefits UAW workers enjoy. And it would?probably mean cleaning house in GM’s executive suites. (Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, a notorious skeptic of climate-change theory, should be the first to go.)

It appears as if President-elect Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are thinking along those lines already (although it’ll be surprising if they demand concessions from unions that just played such a big role in electing them). But, if the government demands that the Big Three and its workers live up to more obligations, the government--which is to say, the taxpaying public--must live up to some obligations of its own. Companies like Honda operate out of countries that made health and retirement benefits a national responsibility. And the perennially high price of gasoline, a product of high gas taxes in virtually all other highly developed countries, has ensured a steady market for their smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. There’s no reason not to treat U.S. car companies, and car owners, the same way.

For now, that would mean government would assume some health and pension obligations (which it would have to do in a bankruptcy anyway, though its Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) while subsidizing the purchase of fuel-efficient cars (something it is already planning to do, thanks to recent tax changes). But the debate over a Detroit bailout should begin a larger political conversation, one that sprawls beyond the Midwest and the intellectual confines of lean production techniques and workers’ legacy costs. Whatever mistakes the Big Three and the UAW have made, their struggles are a pretty good indicator of why the government--not employers--should be responsible for providing health insurance and why, without broader action to fight climate change, improving fuel efficiency will be a struggle. Naturally, the Big Three should enthusiastically promote these reforms, something they haven’t done in the past.

Nothing can stop the revolution in auto-making and drivetrain technology; even under the best of circumstances, the Big Three need to become smaller, more efficient, and more environmentally conscious. But if the government manages that change and uses it as a springboard for discussion of broader economic reforms, everybody can benefit.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic.

If you've been following the auto industry's crisis, then you've probably read or heard a lot about overpaid American autoworkers--in particular, the fact that the average hourly employee of the Big Three makes $70 per hour.

That's an awful lot of money. Seventy dollars an hour in wages works out to almost $150,000 a year in gross income, if you assume a forty-hour work week. Is it any wonder the Big Three are in trouble? And with auto workers making so much, why should taxpayers--many of whom make far less--finance a plan to bail them out?

Well, here's one reason: The figure is wildly misleading. 

Let's start with the fact that it's not $70 per hour in wages. According to Kristin Dziczek of the Center for Automative Research--who was my primary source for the figures you are about to read--average wages for workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were just $28 per hour as of 2007. That works out to a little less than $60,000 a year in gross income--hardly outrageous, particularly when you consider the physical demands of automobile assembly work and the skills most workers must acquire over the course of their careers.

More important, and contrary to what you may have heard, the wages aren't that much bigger than what Honda, Toyota, and other foreign manufacturers pay employees in their U.S. factories. While we can't be sure precisely how much those workers make, because the companies don't make the information public, the best estimates suggests the corresponding 2007 figure for these "transplants"--as the foreign-owned factories are known--was somewhere between $20 and $26 per hour, and most likely around $24 or $25. That would put average worker's annual salary at $52,000 a year.

So the "wage gap," per se, has been a lot smaller than you've heard. And this is no accident. If the transplants paid their employees far less than what the Big Three pay their unionized workers, the United Auto Workers would have a much better shot of organizing the transplants' factories. Those factories remain non-unionized and management very much wants to keep it that way.

But then what's the source of that $70 hourly figure? It didn't come out of thin air. Analysts came up with it by including the cost of all employer-provided benefits--namely, health insurance and pensions--and then dividing by the number of workers. The result, they found, was that benefits for Big Three cost about $42 per hour, per employee. Add that to the wages--again, $28 per hour--and you get the $70 figure. Voila.

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Except ... notice something weird about this calculation? It's not as if each active worker is getting health benefits and pensions worth $42 per hour. That would come to nearly twice his or her wages. (Talk about gold-plated coverage!) Instead, each active worker is getting benefits equal only to a fraction of that--probably around $10 per hour, according to estimates from the International Motor Vehicle Program. The number only gets to $70 an hour if you include the cost of benefits for retirees--in other words, the cost of benefits for other people. One of the few people to grasp this was Portfolio.com's Felix Salmon. As he noted yesterday, the claim that workers are getting $70 an hour in compensation is just "not true."

Of course, the cost of benefits for those retirees--you may have heard people refer to them as "legacy costs"--do represent an extra cost burden that only the Big Three shoulder. And, yes, it makes it difficult for the Big Three to compete with foreign-owned automakers that don't have to pay the same costs. But don't forget why those costs are so high. While the transplants don't offer the same kind of benefits that the Big Three do, the main reason for their present cost advantage is that they just don't have many retirees.

The first foreign-owned plants didn't start up here until the 1980s; many of the existing ones came well after that. As of a year ago, Toyota's entire U.S. operation had less than 1,000 retirees. Compare that to a company like General Motors, which has been around for more than a century and which supports literally hundreds of thousands of former workers and spouses. As you might expect, many of these have the sorts of advanced medical problems you expect from people to develop in old age. And, it should go without saying, those conditions cost a ton of money to treat.

To be sure, we've known about these demographics for a while. Management and labor in Detroit should have figured out a solution it long ago. But while the Big Three were late in addressing this problem, they did address it eventually

Notice how, in this article, I've constantly referred to 2007 figures? There's a good reason. In 2007, the Big Three signed a breakthrough contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW) designed, once and for all, to eliminate the compensation gap between domestic and foreign automakers in the U.S.

The agreement sought to do so, first, by creating a private trust for financing future retiree benefits--effectively removing that burden from the companies' books. The auto companies agreed to deposit start-up money in the fund; after that, however, it would be up to the unions to manage the money. And it was widely understood that, given the realities of investment returns and health care economics, over time retiree health benefits would likely become less generous.

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In addition, management and labor agreed to change health benefits for all workers, active or retired, so that the coverage looked more like the policies most people have today, complete with co-payments and deductibles. The new UAW agreement also changed the salary structure, by creating a two-tiered wage system. Under this new arrangement, the salary scale for newly hired workers would be lower than the salary scale for existing workers.

One can debate the propriety and wisdom of these steps; two-tiered wage structures, in particular, raise various ethical concerns. But one thing is certain: It was a radical change that promised to make Detroit far more competitive. If carried out as planned, by 2010--the final year of this existing contract--total compensation for the average UAW worker would actually be less than total compensation for the average non-unionized worker at a transplant factory. The only problem is that it will be several years before these gains show up on the bottom line--years the industry probably won't have if it doesn't get financial assistance from the government.

Make no mistake: The argument over a proposed rescue package is complicated, in no small part because over the years both management and labor made some truly awful decisions while postponing the inevitable reckoning with economic reality. And even if the government does provide money, it's a tough call whether restructuring should proceed with or without a formal bankruptcy filing. Either way, yet more downsizing is inevitable.

But the next time you hear somebody say the unions have to make serious salary and benefit concessions, keep in mind that they already have--enough to keep the companies competitive, if only they can survive this crisis.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic.

Wasilla, Alaska, is currently the most famous small town in America, thanks to its former mayor Sarah Palin. A healthy part of her appeal is that she seems to embody small-town values, nurtured in Wasilla and America's other hamlets and burgs. As she said in her firecracker acceptance speech, small-town people live lives of "honesty, sincerity, and dignity" and "do some of the hardest work in America."

Palin was tapping into a widespread belief that small-town America represents the country at large. In April 2008, as the Democratic primary contest ground through Pennsylvania, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal declared that "Rural and small-town voters are the best indicators of whether a candidate is connecting with the values of Middle America. 'They are America,' says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. ... 'If you can speak to [them], then you relate to the rest of America.'"

But the idea that we are a nation of small towns is fundamentally incorrect. The real America isn't found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or "metros" that bring all these places into economic and social union. Palin's positioning may appeal to a certain nostalgia that Americans have about small-town life, but the Manichean dichotomy of city versus small town (not to mention "urban" candidate versus "rural" one) no longer describes the radically connected and interdependent way Americans live and work.

America's small-town romance has a long, distinguished history, which perhaps explains why it has outlived its accuracy by at least 100 years. Thomas Jefferson was our nation's most influential exponent of the idea that cities are un-American. "I view the great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man," he said.

But the 1910 census was the last one in which rural Americans represented a majority of the population; these days, we've become a thoroughly metropolitan nation. Two-thirds of our population lives in the top 100 metropolitan areas, and 84 percent of Americans live in all 363 metros. Being in a metro means being tied to someplace else; the Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas as a city of 50,000 or more, plus the adjacent counties that have close social and economic ties to the urban core.

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In metros, unlike mythical small towns, no place is self-contained or splendidly independent. Metros are tied together by highways and rail lines, and people cross local boundaries and state lines every day to shop, go to a doctor's office or a museum, and especially to go to work. The suburbs as a whole have more jobs than cities: Just under half of all commutes within metropolitan areas are from suburb to suburb, and only 19 percent are old- fashioned suburb-to-central-city trips. If you track commuting flows in the 14-county Chicago metropolitan region (as Brookings has done), the result looks like macaroni dumped on the map.

In fact, even the "small town" of Wasilla, Alaska is fast becoming a satellite of the state's largest city. Wasilla is nestled in the Matanuska-Susitna, or Mat-Su, borough (boroughs are Alaska's equivalent of counties), and the borough is part of the Anchorage metropolitan area. Around one-third of the workers in the borough make the 50-minute commute to Anchorage to earn their living. When she's not in Juneau during the Alaska legislative session, Sarah Palin is one of those workers.

More and more small towns like Wasilla are becoming part of the metro orbit. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, half of all "rural" residents live within the boundaries of a metropolitan area. (The classification of an area as "urban" or "rural" is based on population density, not the extent of economic ties to other places.) The census doesn't use the terms "exurb," or "suburb," so it's hard to know how best to describe low-density places within metros, beyond saying that these places are tied to the urban core, however much residents might object to the fact.

Thinking of the United States as a nation of small towns fundamentally misunderstands our economy, which is disproportionately driven by metros. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, one of the world's foremost gurus on economic competitiveness, has suggested that there is no such thing as the U.S. economy, but rather a network of interlinked metropolitan economies. The top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 68 percent of America's jobs and are the origin of 75 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

Metros are economic powerhouses precisely because of the way they differ from the idealized small town. Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market" and that larger markets (like those currently found in metros) enable workers to specialize and work more efficiently. The easy flow of ideas that drives economic growth also tends to happen in metros. The largest metropolitan areas house 76 percent of "knowledge economy" jobs (such as software developers), 81 percent of R&D employment, and 67 percent of major U.S. research universities. Just six metros accounted for 64 percent of the nation's venture capital funding. It turns out that the genuine interaction of people in the same physical space is not replaceable by the Internet, telecommuting, or video conferencing.

A politician who ignores this economic and demographic reality risks making serious policy mistakes, such as misdirecting the public investments that we need to survive in an era of intense global competition. For example, self-sufficient small towns don't need mass transit and high-speed rail networks, but interconnected metros do. Germany and France have already constructed fast rail connections between their major metropolitan areas, radically altering the movement of people and the facilitation of business. China is building the most sophisticated network of ports and freight hubs in the world. A nation of small towns doesn't recognize the need for these kinds of investments.

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People's longing for small towns is an understandable fantasy. Small towns seem like slower, saner havens in an overly connected, frenetic world, places where a blackberry is an ingredient in jam. But metros, not small towns, are where our economy is, where our population is, and where our country's future is.

They may even be where our values are. Early twentieth-century sociologists wrote essay upon essay warning against the anomie and isolation of urban life when our metropolitan areas were new, loud, dirty, and frightening. But a few decades later, Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans described the interdependence and solidarity of people in Greenwich Village and Levittown. Metros have increasingly come to symbolize connectedness--and connectedness, also expressed as a sense of community, is a powerful American value. The real lesson of metro culture is that values (like people) can't be constricted by municipal borders or labels on a map. Americans take our values with us, in high-rises, duplexes, McMansions, trailer parks, and tract home developments across the country. America is much bigger than its small towns.

Jennifer Bradley is a senior research associate with, and Bruce Katz is the founding director of, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

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By Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz

Thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January of 1979 dumped some 20 inches on the ground, causing, among other problems, a curtailment of transit service. The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. African Americans and Hispanics blamed this on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane Byrne a few weeks later.

Today, this could never happen. Not because of climate change, or because the Chicago Transit Authority now runs flawlessly. It couldn't happen because the trains would fill up with minorities and immigrants on the outskirts of the city, and the passengers left stranded at the inner-city stations would be members of the affluent professional class.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.

Atlanta, for example, is shifting from an overwhelmingly black to what is likely to soon be a minority-black city. This is happening in part because the white middle class is moving inside the city borders, but more so because blacks are moving out. Between 1990 and 2006, according to research by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, the white population of Atlanta has increased from roughly 30 percent to 35 percent while the black population has declined from 67 percent to 55 percent. In this decade alone, two of Atlanta's huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, have acquired substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign countries are settling primarily there or in similar outlying areas, not within the city itself. The numbers for Washington, D.C. are similar.

Race is not always the critical issue, or even especially relevant, in this demographic shift. Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.

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If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.

No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few are moving in this direction. Demographic inversions of one sort or another are occurring in urban pockets scattered all across America, many of them in seemingly unlikely places. Charlotte, North Carolina, is in the midst of a downtown building boom dominated by new mixed-use high-rise buildings, with office space on the bottom and condos or rental units above. Even at a moment of economic weakness, the condos are still selling briskly.

We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

Why has demographic inversion begun? For one thing, the deindustrialization of the central city, for all the tragic human dislocations it caused, has eliminated many of the things that made affluent people want to move away from it. Nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), and that means that the noise and grime that prevailed for most of the twentieth century have gone away. Manhattan may seem like a loud and gritty place now, but it is nothing like the city of tenement manufacturing, rumbling elevated trains, and horses and coal dust in the streets that confronted inhabitants in the early 1900s. Third-floor factory lofts, whether in Soho or in St. Louis, can be marketed as attractive and stylish places to live. The urban historian Robert Bruegmann goes so far as to claim that deindustrialization has, on the whole, been good for downtowns because it has permitted so many opportunities for creative reuse of the buildings. I wouldn't go quite that far, and, given the massive job losses of recent years, I doubt most of the residents of Detroit would, either. But it is true that the environmental factors that made middle-class people leave the central city for streetcar suburbs in the 1900s and for station-wagon suburbs in the 1950s do not apply any more.

Nor, in general, does the scourge of urban life in the 1970s and '80s: random street violence. True, the murder rates in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland have climbed in the last few years, but this increase has been propelled in large part by gang- and drug-related violence. For the most part, middle-class people of all colors began to feel safe on the streets of urban America in the 1990s, and they still feel that way. The paralyzing fear that anyone of middle age can still recall vividly from the 1970s--that the shadowy figure passing by on a dark city street at night stands a good chance of being a mugger--is rare these days, and almost nonexistent among young people. Walk around the neighborhood of 14th and U streets in Washington, D.C. on a Saturday night, and you will find it perhaps the liveliest part of the city, at least for those under 25. This is a neighborhood where the riots of 1968 left physical scars that still have not disappeared, and where outsiders were afraid to venture for more than 30 years.

The young newcomers who have rejuvenated 14th and U believe that this recovering slum is the sort of place where they want to spend time and, increasingly, where they want to live. This is the generation that grew up watching "Seinfeld," "Friends," and "Sex and the City," mostly from the comfort of suburban sofas. We have gone from a sitcom world defined by "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" to one that offers a whole range of urban experiences and enticements. I do not claim that a handful of TV shows has somehow produced a new urbanist generation, but it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this generation, particularly among its elite. In recent years, teaching undergraduates at the University of Richmond, the majority of them from affluent suburban backgrounds, I made a point of asking where they would prefer to live in 15 years--in a suburb or in a neighborhood close to the center of the city. Few ever voted for suburban life.

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I can't say that they had necessarily devoted a great deal of thought to the question: When I asked them whether they would want to live in an urban neighborhood without a car, many seemed puzzled and said no. Clearly, we are a long way from producing a generation for whom urban life and automobile ownership are mutually exclusive. In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat. But my guess is that, except in Manhattan, the carless life has yet to achieve any significant traction in the affluent new enclaves of urban America.

Not that cars and the demographic inversion aren't closely related; they are. In Atlanta, where the middle-class return to the city is occurring with more suddenness than perhaps anywhere in the United States, the most frequently cited reason is traffic. People who did not object to a 20-mile commute from the suburbs a decade ago are objecting to it now in part because the same commute takes quite a bit longer. To this, we can add the prospect of $5-per-gallon gasoline. It's impossible at this point to say with any certainty just what energy costs will do to American living patterns over the next decade. Urbanists predicted a return to the city during previous spikes in the cost of gasoline, notably during shortages in the 1970s. They were wrong. Gas prices came down, and the suburbs expanded dramatically. But today's prices at the pump are not the result of political pressures by angry sheiks in the Persian Gulf. They are the result of increased worldwide demand that is only going to continue to increase. Some suburbanites will simply stay where they are and accept the cost. But many will decide to stop paying $100 every few days for a tank of gasoline that will allow them to commute 40 or 50 miles a day, round-trip.

Ultimately, though, the current inversion is less the result of middle-aged people changing their minds than of young adults expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents. The demographic changes that have taken place in America over the past generation--the increased propensity to remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the much later age at first marriage for those who do marry, the smaller size of families for those who have children, and, at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their sixties, seventies, and eighties--have combined virtually all of the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely. We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings can live wherever they want, and many will choose central cities over distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in less desirable places--now defined as those further from the center of the metropolis. And, as this happens, suburbs that never dreamed of being entry points for immigrants will have to cope with new realities. It should come as no surprise that the most intense arguments about hiring and educating the undocumented have occurred in the relatively distant reaches of American suburbia, such as Prince William County, Virginia.

The reality of demographic inversion strikes me every time I return to Chicago, the city in which I was born and grew up. My grandfather arrived there in 1889, found his way to the Near West Side, and opened a tailor shop that remained in business for 50 years. During that time, the neighborhood was a compact and somewhat culturally isolated enclave of Jewish and Italian families. (It was also the location of Hull House and the original home of the Chicago Cubs.) The building that housed my grandfather's store was torn down in the 1960s when the University of Illinois built its Chicago campus in the neighborhood. The street corner where the store stood now houses part of the university science complex.

The UIC campus is, to my eyes, one of the ugliest in America. But I have made my peace with that. What interests me is what is going on all around that neighborhood, now called University Village. For a while after the school was built, its environs were a sort of residential no-man's-land, dangerous at night and unattractive to the young academics who taught there. Today, assistant professors at UIC generally don't live there either, but for a different reason: They can't afford it. Demand for the townhouses and condominiums on the Near West Side has priced junior faculty out of the market. One can walk a couple of blocks down the street from where my grandfather's shop once stood and order a steak for $24.

You might respond that there is nothing especially noteworthy in this. A college setting, liberal academics, houses close to the city's cultural attractions: That's garden-variety gentrification. What else would you expect?

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If you feel that way, you might want to ride an elevated train going northwest, to the lesser-known Logan Square, a few miles beyond the Loop. Whatever Logan Square might be, it is not downtown chic. It is a moderately close-in nineteenth-century neighborhood with a history fairly typical for a city that A.J. Liebling once called "an endless succession of factory-town main streets." Logan Square was developed primarily by Scandinavian manufacturers, who lived on the tree-lined boulevards while their workers, many of them Polish, rented the cottages on the side streets. By the 1970s, nearly all the Poles had decamped for suburbia, and they were replaced by an influx of Puerto Ricans. The area became a haven for gangs and gang violence, and most of the retail shopping that held the community together disappeared.

Logan Square is still not the safest neighborhood in Chicago. There are armed robberies and some killings on its western fringe, and, even on the quiet residential streets, mothers tell their children to be home before dark. But that hasn't prevented Logan Square from changing dramatically again--not over the past generation, or the past decade, but in the past five years. The big stone houses built by the factory owners on Logan Boulevard are selling for nearly $1 million, despite the housing recession. The restaurant that sits on the square itself sells goat cheese quesadillas and fettuccine with octopus, and attracts long lines of customers who drive in from the suburbs on weekend evenings. To describe what has happened virtually overnight in Logan Square as gentrification is to miss the point. Chicago, like much of America, is rearranging itself, and the result is an entire metropolitan area that looks considerably different from what it looked like when this decade started.

Of course, demographic inversion cannot be a one-way street. If some people are coming inside, some people have to be going out. And so they are--in Chicago as in much of the rest of the country. During the past ten years, with relatively little fanfare and surprisingly little press attention, the great high-rise public housing projects that defined squalor in urban America for half a century have essentially disappeared. In Chicago, the infamous Robert Taylor Homes are gone, and the equally infamous Cabrini-Green is all but gone. This has meant the removal of tens of thousands of people, who have taken their Section 8 federal housing subsidies and moved to struggling African American neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. Some have moved to the city's southern suburbs--small suburbs such as Dixmoor, Robbins, and Harvey, which have been among the poorest communities in metropolitan Chicago. At the same time, tens of thousands of immigrants are coming to Chicago every year, mostly from various parts of Latin America. Where are they settling? Not in University Village. Some in Logan Square, but fewer every year. They are living in suburban or exurban territory that, until a decade ago, was almost exclusively English-speaking, middle-class, and white.

There are responsible critics who look at all this and see a lot being made out of very little. They argue that, in absolute numbers, the return to the urban center remains a minor demographic event. They have a point. In most metropolitan areas, in the first few years of the twenty-first century, many more people have moved to the suburbs than have moved downtown. A city of half a million that can report a downtown residential population of 25,000--5 percent of the total--can claim that it is doing relatively well. Charlotte, for all the local excitement it has generated about upscale in-town living, still has no more than about 12,000 residents downtown. Moreover, these 12,000 are not representative of the area's populace; there are few families with school-age children. Downtown Charlotte is mostly attracting the familiar gentrification cohort: singles, couples, older people whose children have left home. The bulk of the married-with-children middle-class has not only been living in the suburbs, it has been moving to the suburbs. Joel Kotkin, perhaps the most prominent of the downtown debunkers, declares flatly that, until families begin turning up in significant numbers on downtown streets, we are talking about a blip rather than a major cultural phenomenon.

But it's not just a blip. The evidence from most American cities--carefully presented by Christopher Leinberger, the real estate developer and University of Michigan urban planning professor, in his recent book, The Option of Urbanism--suggests that the number of downtown residents these days depends more on supply than demand. Few in Charlotte dispute that, if there were 30,000 upscale residential units in the center of that city, there would be 30,000 people living in them before long. The residential population of lower Manhattan has not just increased substantially since 2001; it has all but exploded in the last 18 months. And the strollers have reached Wall Street. Take a walk down there some Saturday morning, and you will see for yourself.

But, even if the critics are mostly right--even if the vast majority of cities never see a downtown residential boom of massive proportions--there is no doubt that a demographic inversion, in which the rich are moving inside and the poor are moving outside, is taking place. The crucial issue is not the number of people living downtown, although that matters. The crucial issue is who they are, and the ways in which urban life is changing as a result.

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What would a post-inversion American city look like? In the most extreme scenario, it would look like many of the European capitals of the 1890s. Take Vienna, for example. In the mid-nineteenth century, the medieval wall that had surrounded the city's central core for hundreds of years was torn down. In its place there appeared the Ringstrasse, the circle of fashionable boulevards where opera was sung and plays performed, where rich merchants and minor noblemen lived in spacious apartments, where gentlemen and ladies promenaded in the evening under the gaslights, where Freud, Mahler, and their friends held long conversations about death over coffee and pastry in sidewalk cafes. By contrast, if you were part of the servant class, odds were you lived far beyond the center, in a neighborhood called Ottakring, a concentration of more than 30, 000 cramped one- and two-bedroom apartments, whose residents--largely immigrant Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes--endured a long horse-car ride to get to work in the heart of the city.

Paris was a different story. It had always had a substantial inner-city working class, the breeding ground for political unrest and violence over and over again in French history. But the narrow streets that housed the Parisian poor were largely obliterated in the urban redesign dictated by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The Paris that Haussmann created was the city of fashionable inner-ring boulevards that remains largely intact a century and a half later. The poor and the newly arrived were essentially banished to the suburbs--where they remain today, though they are now mostly Muslims from North Africa rather than peasants from the south of France.

Nobody in his right mind would hold up the present-day arrangement of metropolitan Paris, with its thousands of unemployed immigrants seething in shoddily built suburban high-rise housing projects, as a model for what twenty-first-century urbanism ought to look like. Indeed, in the worst case, demographic inversion would result in the poor living out of sight and largely forgotten in some new kind of high-rise projects beyond the city border, with the wealthy huddled in gated enclaves in the center. But I think this is an unlikely scenario. The people who are moving to the downtowns of American cities today are doing so in part to escape the real or virtual "gated-ness" of suburban life. The condos that house them in the coming years may feature elaborate security systems, but the inhabitants will not be walled off from the street. They want to be in contact with the street. Nor do we have to worry about the return of the idea of warehousing the poor in vertical Corbusian ghettoes. That is one beast we have managed to slay.

Less dystopian are the prophecies of Leinberger, who believes that a dramatic increase in middle-class central-city population will in fact take place, and that one consequence will be the deterioration of today's car-dependent, suburban tract homes into the slums of 2030. I don't think this will happen either, at least not in such extreme form. There simply are not enough lofts and town-houses to double or triple the number of people living in the center of a mid-sized American city. As the central-city population continues to grow, so will the demand for skyscrapers--something cities are sure initially to resist. Nor does it seem likely that exurbia will turn into a wasteland. The price of the houses will go down and render them more attractive for newcomers trying to rise in the U.S. economy and society. Urbanists have complained for years that immigrants and poor people in the inner city have a hard time commuting to the service jobs that are available to them in the suburbs. If they live in the suburbs, they will be closer to the jobs. Transportation will remain a problem, but not one that can't be solved.

Somewhere in between, there lies the vision of Jane Jacobs, who idealized the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and the casual everyday relationships that made living there comfortable, stimulating, and safe. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them. Not only that, but much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to urbanize itself to some extent. That reinvention is already taking place: Look at all the car-created suburbs built in the 1970s and '80s that have created "town centers" in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts look much like a real city. But they are a clue to the direction in which we are heading.

In the 1990s, a flurry of academics and journalists (me among them) wrote books lamenting the decline of community and predicting that it would reappear in some fashion in the new century. I think that is beginning to happen now in the downtowns of America, and I believe, for all its imperfections and inequalities, that the demographic inversion ultimately will do more good than harm. We will never return--nor would most of us want to return--to the close-knit but frequently constricting form of community life that prevailed 50 years ago. But, as we rearrange ourselves in and around many of our big cities, we are groping toward the new communities of the twenty-first century.

Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing Magazine and author of The United States of Ambition and The Lost City.

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By Alan Ehrenhalt

Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, doesn't come up in the news very often. And why would it? There's no war or ethnic strife. The city is poor, but not outlandishly so--in fact, thanks to a stable government and a lucrative mining industry, Botswana is one of Africa's rare economic success stories. All the same, Gaborone has a problem: What was once a town of 17,000 people in the 1970s has ballooned into a city of 186,000 today, and is expected to swell to 500,000 by 2020--a staggering increase by any measure.

By way of prologue to a deep, sociological explanation of why my wife and I have decided to leave New York City and take up residence in Washington, D.C. (no one seems to credit the more obvious reasons; two children and three grandchildren), here are a couple of quotations. The first is from an editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

Washington, D.C, is a city in the gutter, wallowing in hypocrisy. It has become a bizarre sinkhole of character assassination and smirking self-righteousness. It will eagerly cast not only the first stone, but any other rocks it can lay its hands on.

The second quotation is from The New Republic's own Fred Barnes (writing elsewhere):

Washington is increasingly insular, arrogant, elitist, power mad, addicted to luxury and mindless political combat, and, worst of all, downright hostile to the non-Washington masses.

Quite right. One might add Washington's propensity for human sacrifice, in the form of legalized lynchings by Congress of actual or prospective members of the executive or the judiciary. It is a bloodthirsty city, to a degree unknown elsewhere in the United States. Fven for a cynical New Yorker, it is shocking.

In New York the ruling passion is the pursuit of money, whereas in Washington it is the pursuit of power. Now, the pursuit of power is a zerosum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

More civil—but so much less interesting! A financial city is always less interesting than a political city. In New York the ladies come and go, talking of private schools or the ballet. In Washington it is political gossip that enchants—often amazing gossip. though generally false. New York cocktail parties are more likely to be boring, Washington cocktail parties disorienting. But, again, more interesting.

It didn't used to be this way. New York was generally agreed to be the only true cosmopolitan city in the United States, while Washington was a national version of Albany. That was because New York was an intellectual center as well as a financial center, importing ideas from Europe and retailing them nationwide. An intellectual center is a place where "literary intellectuals" congregate. It is a place where a dinner party can become acrimonious over such issues as Freudian analysis, progressive education, abstract expressionism, or the relation of religion to morality. I made this point recently in conversation--and then brought myself up short, as I realized that it had been a long time since I had witnessed any such dinner party. New York is not what it was.

Mind you. New York is still the national center for the arts—painting, dance, music, theater. That is why thousands of young people still flock to the city, braving squalid housing at incredible rents, omnipresent crime, and public transportation that is a daily trauma. Moreover, it will probably remain such a national center for a long while yet, because that is where the money is, and all these arts need generous subsidies as well as affluent consumers. When I say "money," I mean real money as measured by the standards of the financial community. In New York to be classified as a mere millionaire, you need $20 million. To be "rich" you need at least twice that amount. To be "wealthy" you need $100 million. It is astonishing how many New Yorkers fall into these categories.

Moreover, New York remains the nation's media center, where magazines and books are edited and published, and where the TV networks are headquartered. It is considerably more doubtful, however, that this supremacy is secure. Madison Avenue is the linchpin of New York as a media center, and there are powerful centrifugal forces under way in the advertising industry. No one ought to be surprised if, ten years from now, the networks have left New York for a divided existence in Washington (news) and Hollywood (entertainment). Time and Newsweek probably would be in Washington already if they did not have such large, fixed investments in New York. Sooner or later, they will make the move.

So New York will remain a great city, but a much diminished one. It will still be the financial center, since the interlocking structure of Wall Street finance. Wall Street law, and even Wall Street printing services will be hard to duplicate elsewhere. And, as noted, where money is, the arts will follow.

But one thing New York will not be: the nation's intellectual center, where "literary intellectuals" live and write and excoriate one another. It ceased being that about 20 years ago. The writers who contribute to the New York Review of Books, Commentary, even the New York Times's Sunday magazine and book review sections live elsewhere for the most part. Established novelists are published in New York but also live elsewhere, as do our best known poets and literary critics. Columbia and New York University are still respectable schools, but they have very few famous "intellectuals" on their faculties. That generation is without heirs. There are some survivors. But they do not constitute a community; in fact, they frequently are not on speaking terms with one another.

The reasons for the decline of New York as an intellectual center are well known. The most important reason, as Russell Jacoby points out in The Last Intellectuals (Basic Books), is the national expansion and extraordinary transformation of American universities since 1945. People who would once have gravitated toward the "intellectual community" of New York now pursue graduate degrees and academic tenure. There are jobs and careers available, which did not used to be the case. Indeed, even if you decide not to climb the academic ladder, but succeed in becoming what Jacoby calls a "public intellectual," you will find colleges and universities ready to co-opt you. Irving Howe, Michael Harrington, and I all became professors, rather to our surprise, and without ever having had that intention.

If you want an animated discussion of "large ideas" about God, human destiny. Western civilization, modern art, the future of democracy, etc., you are better served in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Chicago's Hyde Park than in New York. Greenwich Village today is populated by itinerant consumers of such ideas, and New York's magazines are staffed by upwardly mobile men and women who purvey such ideas- But very few are grappling seriously with those ideas. As the city with the most consumers and the most purveyors. New York retains a semblance of an intellectual center. But the reality is not there.

And Washington? It's certainly not here either, and never has been. To a considerable degree this is because Washington does not have a first-rate university, a sine qua non these days for being an intellectual center. The reasons for this lack are something of a mystery to me. I surmise that it is simply a failure of academic leadership, which has permitted Washington to shape its universities into ancillary institutions. It is hard to think of any other reason. Washington is so handsome a city, so nicely located, that first-rate professors and students should be delighted to come.

Nor can such quasi-academic institutions as the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian play a major, active intellectual role by being host to visiting scholars. Just as you cannot revitalize a city center unless you can get middle-class types to live there, as against simply shopping there, so you cannot create an intellectual center out of a floating population of scholars, or even "intellectuals."

But there is one area in which Washington is an intellectual center, and that is public policy: economic policy, social policy, foreign policy, today even educational policy. This area now is dominated by a wide assortment of social scientists. Precisely because Washington is, for most professional persons most of the time, so attractive and livable a city, every administration leaves behind a geological stratum of such people. By now they constitute an intellectual community that, though limited in its horizons, is active, influential, and (most important) interesting to its members. It is also a community with a high level of civility, in contrast to "political" Washington.

Many such members move out of government into law firms or consulting, waiting for the wheel of fortune to return them to office and power once again. But many of the best and brightest congregate in that extraordinary Washington institution, the "think tank."

The think tank explosion has occurred in the last two decades. The Brookings Institution, the granddaddy of them all, goes back over a half century, but it is only relatively recently that it finds itself one of a crowd. Behind the explosion ties the increasing sophistication of a handful of conservative foundations that, seeing academia and the media addicted to liberalism and worse, decided to establish new citadels in the "war of ideas." They have had such success--with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, especially--that liberal (and left-of liberal) foundations have begun to emulate this strategy.

Today Washington seems to give birth to a new think tank every other month or so. And they are no longer staffed exclusively by former officials, but are busy recruiting from academia, the media, and the surviving remnant of New York's once-thriving intellectual community. It is as a recruit from that remnant that I have arrived in Washington from New York, bringing with me the 23-year-old magazine The Public Interest, of which I am coeditor. I am not the first, and will not be the last, to come. In the years ahead, I predict, the Council on Foreign Relations (dragging Foreign Affairs along) will arrive. Now that American foreign policy and the State Department no longer have such strong ties with the high-minded "internationalist" element on Wall Street, there is little reason for the council to remain in New York. Wall Street's "old guard," in any case, is a generation that is riding into the sunset, with families that have inherited wealth and social position being replaced by people who are in too hot pursuit of both to bother with foreign policy.

Active controversy over public policy does tend to shade into ideological controversy, which is what animates an intellectual community of the traditional kind. I have attended meetings in Washington that focused on the ideological background and significance of policy issues, meetings that would not have occurred here five or ten years ago. If Washington fails to develop an "intellectual community" in which such forms of discourse are common--and the odds are still against--I shall miss it. On the other hand, I have missed it in New York for quite a while now.

"Political Washington" is indeed capable of being nasty and brutish. But "political Washington" is not the whole of Washington, any more than "Wall Street" is New York. There is in Washington a public policy community of thinkers and writers that is engaging and even influential. All of us, of course, still read the New York Times and most of us read the Wall Street Journal. New York may not be what it used to be, but we understand that Washington is not yet what it might be.