While blogging is light, here are three pieces pretty much guaranteed to provoke a discussion:

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Roger Cohen:

Capitalism Eating Its Children

Mark Carney, the Canadian governor of the Bank of England, lays into unfettered capitalism. “Just as any revolution eats its children,” he says, “unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.” ..,

“Prosperity requires not just investment in economic capital, but investment in social capital,” Carney argues, having defined social capital as “the links, shared values and beliefs in a society which encourage individuals not only to take responsibility for themselves and their families but also to trust each other and work collaboratively to support each other.”   ….

Above all, understand that, “The answers start from recognizing that financial capitalism is not an end in itself, but a means to promote investment, innovation, growth and prosperity. Banking is fundamentally about intermediation — connecting borrowers and savers in the real economy. In the run-up to the crisis, banking became about banks not businesses; transactions not relations; counterparties not clients.”

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Paul Krugman

Cutting Back on Carbon

Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy.

Just ask the United States Chamber of Commerce.

O.K., that’s not the message the Chamber of Commerce was trying to deliver in the report it put out Wednesday. It clearly meant to convey the impression that the E.P.A.’s new rules would wreak havoc. But if you focus on the report’s content rather than its rhetoric, you discover that despite the chamber’s best efforts to spin things — as I’ll explain later, the report almost surely overstates the real cost of climate protection — the numbers are remarkably small….

Remember, we have a $17 trillion economy right now, and it’s going to grow over time. So what the Chamber of Commerce is actually saying is that we can take dramatic steps on climate — steps that would transform international negotiations, setting the stage for global action — while reducing our incomes by only one-fifth of 1 percent. That’s cheap!

Alternatively, consider the chamber’s estimate of costs per household: $200 per year. Since the average American household has an income of more than $70,000 a year, and that’s going to rise over time, we’re again looking at costs that amount to no more than a small fraction of 1 percent.

One more useful comparison: The Pentagon has warned that global warming and its consequences pose a significant threat to national security. (Republicans in the House responded with a legislative amendment that would forbid the military from even thinking about the issue.) Currently,we’re spending $600 billion a year on defense. Is it really extravagant to spend another 8 percent of that budget to reduce a serious threat?

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Michael Kimmelman

Urban Renewal, No Bulldozer

San Francisco Repurposes Old for the Future

It has gone widely unremarked, maybe because it’s so obvious to people here, that tech firms in San Francisco have not (yet) been moving into new buildings; they’ve been taking over old ones. …

This new wave is also opportunistic. But in a much hotter real estate market with lower start-up costs, it’s driven as well by a taste for “authenticity,” “character” and other buzzwords today’s tech firms love. At the same time, constructing anything new here is a major headache. The city is crippled by an obstructionist set of city planning rules — the consequence of local activism and a Talmudic bureaucracy. Legislation from the mid-’80s caps the total amount of new office space that can be built here. All this contributes to why adaptive reuse has taken hold. …

… this is the Nimby capital of America. There’s a long history of environmental, preservation and social justice movements fighting private developments that displaced countless thousands of poor, black, Asian and Latino households. A great deal of the city’s rental stock is rent controlled, while state laws like the Ellis Act empower landlords to evict tenants. What this means is an even more entrenched culture of obstruction and conflict. …

Yet San Francisco adds only a paltry 1,500 units of housing per year. Some 28,500 new residents arrived between 2000 and 2010, another 32,000 between 2010 and 2013. Growth has strained an aging and woefully inadequate transit system, which badly serves some of the city’s biggest residential areas.  …

“We have pretended we could avoid change and somehow make the city affordable … as if by jumping up and down and holding our breath, rents will come down.” …

What’s happening in other gentrifying neighborhoods like the Mission threatens a social ecosystem that, for decades, has sustained some of the most vulnerable San Franciscans. Skeptical residents, unhappy with all new development, push for more barriers, which only adds to the housing crisis that has made the city unaffordable. It’s a vicious cycle. …

Reusing old buildings preserves critical architecture and should pay the city back for generations. But the businesses that occupy those sites will depend on a beefed-up mass transit system and healthy, diverse neighborhoods, all of which require more than just an aggressive culture of adaptive reuse. …

San Francisco is already running out of worthy old buildings.