In the meantime, I try to delete them as quickly as possible. I also added a couple of terms to the blacklist, so we’ll see if that helps at all.

(By the way, the Jacobs video contains good ideas, but there are two problems there. First, Jacobs claims that rich preserves turn boring and often decay, unless they are very small. In fact, the opposite is true: rich areas, such as the Upper East Side of Manhattan, can remain rich even as all other neighborhoods around them decay. Second, her emphasis on home ownership is ill-conceived, and even includes the wrong statement that the US has the highest home ownership in the world.)

I believe improving the social mobility of immigrants is easy and it is something cities can consciously choose to do better than any other agency, if they can come up with ways to circumvent their own bureaucratic hurdles and allow immigrants to implement the untapped benefits of their cultural intelligence. In her Scully Prize acceptance speech, Jane Jacobs touched on this possibility for cities: http://tcstreetsforpeople.org/node/1025

Full disclosure: I linked to the CAP study on my blog, more than 3 years ago, before I realized just how shoddy CAP is. You can find a compendium of the peer-reviewed studies here along with links – no need for filtering through ideologically motivated thinktanks.

One of the interesting facts stated in the link above is a comparison of immigrant children’s performance in the US, a low-mobility country, and Australia, a high-mobility country. Even controlling for parental education levels, it claims, US immigrant-born children lag behind their counterparts in Australia.

To my mind, “entrepreneurial energy” is a means to an end: “social mobility”, and if you look at “social mobility”, the German model seems to work better than the U.S. model. (see Link)

Which shouldn’t surprise; there might be more entrepreneurial energy in the U.S., but the risks are higher, and that translates into a lower success rate for social mobility.

Urbanophile is one of the best urbanist sites on the Web.

My primary quibble with sustainability is the feedback problem. Humans, when they find a good or process that is sustainable, become dependent on sustainability.

All natural resources are finite. What happens when there is a disruption to or exhaustion of those resources? A crisis occurs, and it’s coupled with the problem of humans’ economic and social position tied to the leverage of those resources. Laborers don’t want to be obsolete, and elites have sunk capital that can’t be recovered.

Humans are hard-wired to gravitate to stasis, despite our assertions to the contrary. When we seek sustainability, we tend to expect it. That’s the problem.

Another person who addresses this is Nassim Taleb in \The Black Swan.\ It deals with mathematical improbability and randomness, but Taleb’s applications are far-reaching into most physical and social sciences.

So we don’t just have to worry about natural resources. Even more complex societies deal with the sustainability dilemma. Look at the sciences, as well. The scientific method is premised that nothing is certain and all theories must be open to be falsified in the future. Yet vanguard theories often produce schisms within their fields.