I really like your blog post because it says all the things I could not articulate. Thank you for being my voice.

 

I agree with everything you wrote specifically that it seems almost impossible to detect any ulterior motives from the text of the Regional Plan itself, and that its not surprising that the planners did have ulterior motives in mind. Moreover, I agree with your point that any macro-level decisions are very intricate and that any course of action creates an entirely unique set of problems.

 

Would not you agree that if we had read the entire plan as proposed by Yaro and Hiss that perhaps we would have done the almost impossible and been able to see that there were ulterior motives that were factored into the plan? I read an article by Elliot Sclar and Tony Schumann titled New York: Race Class & Space: A Historical Comparison of the Three Regional Plans for New York in which they point out that within the extended text of the plan we can see that they do not directly address a solution for the social issues that the previous plans have created, but do propose extensive solutions for growing the economy. They argue that this is because of politics, as most decisions are influenced by politics in some way or another. Specifically, the men in charge of the RPA had economic interests that took precedence over the social issues. Ultimately, the authors of the aforementioned essay say that Yaro and Hiss may have been empathetic to the social needs of the era but were limited by the political forces. Now, that may be giving Yaro and Hiss too much credit insofar as how much they really care for the economically disadvantaged, but Shumann and Sclar emphasize that in the text of the Regional Plan is a heavy acknowledgment that these people are essential to creating a sustainable economy. That being said, it is odd that they did not offer concrete solutions and only offered moral exhortations; what good does that do? So either they don’t really care, in which case, why would they include any mention of the economically disadvantaged in a report that will probably only be read by their super wealthy and fiscally biased bosses who would not likely be swayed, or they were being careful not to agitate their employers, following the advice of Dale Carnegie, and trying to win their bosses to their way of thinking; or something else?

 

You got me thinking more about what professor Larson says about creating a narrative of threat in order to accomplish political goals. I think that the way the readings were presented created a “narrative threat “of sorts for Yaro and Hiss and not just the guys above them who ultimately made the decisions for the region. (Admittedly, no one would have read the entire plan). Yaro and Hiss did not have any wicked ulterior motives; their plan was for the betterment of the economy, only as long as it lead to the betterment of as many lives as possible in their quality of living. This is a very utilitarian approach. The moral action is the one that will bring pleasure to the most people and pain to the least people after all things are accounted. The article I mentioned makes the higher ups the ones who ignored the social issues, and renders Yaro and Hiss as helpless pieces of the larger political dynamic, not villains themselves. The point I’m trying to make is that not everyone who makes public decisions is a villain. The most we should ever do is just realize that there are problems; we should not place blame but look for solutions. And these solutions seem to come down to entirely restructuring the sociopolitical structure from the ground up, a daunting and seemingly initially catastrophic series of events. This may even be worse for the long-term sociopolitical and/or socioeconomic structure because the ideal can rarely become reality when it comes to socio-political-economics.