By John Tierney

The New York Times, January 4, 1999

NEW YORK -- Before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani or Gov. George Pataki gives another rousing speech about New York's bright prospects for the 21st century, he might take a look at a new book by a journalist who lives in Los Angeles, Virginia Postrel. The book is titled "The Future and Its Enemies," and New York clearly belongs with the enemies.

Ms. Postrel is one of those people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and she's not satisfied with the liberal-conservative dichotomy.

Liberals are supposed to be the ones who welcome change, but they're often just as reactionary as conservatives in opposing innovation, whether it involves a new technology (like genetic engineering) or a real-estate development. The Upper West Side of Manhattan calls itself progressive but can't abide the prospect of a new building.

Ms. Postrel proposes another dichotomy: stasis vs. dynamism. Stasists, as she defines the term, believe that the future must be managed. Some are nostalgists generally opposed to change, while other stasists are technocrats determined to make any change conform to their vision and regulations.

Dynamists prefer to let changes proceed by trial and error, with little central guidance. It's a philosophy that sounds a lot like libertarianism -- not surprising, since Ms. Postrel is the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason -- although she says it's shared by nonlibertarians on both the left and the right.

It's the evolutionary approach, guided by lots of independent "feedback loops," that's popular in Silicon Valley and on the Internet, and that once flourished in New York.

"New York will be a great city when it's finished," Will Rogers said in the 1920s, and back then everyone in America got the joke. New York was the symbol of perpetual change, the urban evil despised by agrarians who extolled the timeless virtues of farms and small towns.

Manhattan's skyline appalled the stasist elite in cities like Philadelphia, where tradition forbade any new buildings taller than the statue atop its City Hall. New York was much less orderly. Its famous skyscrapers and neighborhoods were built by countless developers and homeowners who gradually learned from one another's successes and failures.

But eventually New York fell under the control of master planners like Robert Moses, whom Ms. Postrel presents as the ultimate stasist technocrat. He casually razed entire neighborhoods to make way for his grand vision of the future, which did not allow for any feedback from the nonexperts who only happened to live there.

The results were so disastrous that the next generation of technocrats became obsessed with neighborhood preservation, and their myriad regulations have made it difficult to build anything at all. In their own stasist way, they have all but eliminated the experimentation that once created New York's neighborhoods.

Giuliani took office vowing to shake the city out of its lethargy, and he's succeeded in some ways. He has simplified some of the regulations on housing and businesses, and his war on crime has been a triumph of the dynamist method. The police in each precinct, instead of following fixed rules imposed by central headquarters, have learned what works by studying crime statistics each week and tailoring their strategy to local conditions.

But Giuliani is not at heart a dynamist. Like his role model, former Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he is a moralistic technocrat fond of controlling everything, from crosswalks and the schools to the economy. He practices a stasist economic policy, giving special subsidies and dispensations to old established corporations while small new firms are left to fend with the country's most onerous taxes and regulations.

"New York's one saving grace," Ms. Postrel said Sunday, "is that it still attracts newcomers who provide an infusion of dynamism. But New York's central planning mentality makes it harder and harder for these creative people to build lives there -- to find a place to live, open a business, educate their children. The risk is that those people are going to head for more dynamic cultures."

Like Los Angeles? "I don't like to make comparisons," Ms. Postrel replied tactfully. "We have our own stasist problems in California with regulations and growth controls. But I will say that when I go to New York, I don't feel like I'm seeing the future. It's still a city that is largely living off its past."

© 1999 The New York Times. Reprinted with permission of the author.