Michael Alexander passes along this quote from the New York Times conservative columnist, David Brooks:
Suburbia isn’t working. During the baby boom, the suburbs gave families safe places to raise their kids. But now we are in an era of an aging population, telecommuting workers and single-person households.
The culture and geography of suburbia are failing to nurture webs of mutual dependence.
We are animals who can’t flourish unless we can’t get along without one another. Yet one finds too many people thrust into lives of semi-independence.
These are not the victims of postindustrial blight I’m talking about; they are successful people who worked hard and built good lives but who are left nonetheless strangely isolated, in attenuated communities, and who are left radiating the residual sadness of the lonely heart.
Irrelevant article from a region 4000 kms away, in a different country, on the eve of a dysfunction national election. This is what happens when we arm people with mouses.
Proof? Scroll below to watch the first squirrel who squeaks “Fraser Institute!”
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Middle class not doing badly, according to new study Sept 28, 2016
Middle class families in Canada are earning 50% more income than they did 40 years ago, a new study shows. The average worker’s standard of living has improved since 1976, thanks to shorter working hours and more affordable consumer goods. For example, a TV cost the equivalent of 113 hours of work in 1976 and in 2011, just 12 hours work.
Author of the study conducted by The Fraser Institute, Charles Lammam, says middle class Canadians are far from falling behind. “What’s really critical is for us to cut through the rhetoric. Despite what politicians might say, despite all the doom and gloom that we hear, the reality is middle class Canadians are doing better today than they did several decades ago. Incomes are up and their purchasing power is higher than it ever has been.”
The gratuitous little slam of suburbia in the final sentences wasn’t really the point (as the headline here suggests) or even well supported or connected to the rest of the article.