Sunday, June 2 Caro's The Power Broker

[soid]

 I was reading Caro’s “The Power Broker” pretty much all Sunday morning. Moses’ time at Yale, then Oxford, then grad work at Columbia School of Political Science, then he went to a newly founded research institute for government employees in NY. 

In NYC he was a smart young man from a wealthy family, but at Yale – he was shocked – he was a jew in everyone's eye. So at Yale, he became an advocate of merit-based selection in clubs, sports, etc (rather than class or family-based as at that time). Then, Oxford – that was the time of colonial Britain – and Oxford was the center of British conservatism; the argument was something like this: other nations are young and not grown up yet, so colonial Britain had to lead them on the path to civilization. So Moses picked up those views and brought them to the context of the American government. Only well-educated people should be governing, he argued, not even all Ivy League – only Princeton, Harvard, and Yale graduates should be selected for important government positions. Being discriminated against as a jew made him a meritocratic idealist, but, somehow, that didn't contradict his elitism in education. People who started working, built themselves, and finished evening classes were fundamentally broken, he argued in his Oxford theses.

By the 1910s the city didn’t even have a budget; employees received raises without accounting for how much money the city had. Slowly, the newly developed accounting techniques were picked up by the government from businesses. It was an era of idealism, a belief in efficiency and the use of science to improve everything; Ford’s ideas of automating conveyors led the way for demand for government efficiency. So, Moses came up with this idea of everyone's efficiency as a single number, and then paying according to that. That was a huge failure, of course.

Can't wait to read the next thousand pages about how Moses was screwing up New York.