Tag: urbanization

India, Urbanization and Poverty

“Mumbai is the wealthiest city in India. It contributes over 6% of India’s economy, 30% of its income tax, 40% of its trade, and 60% of its customs duties. Its per capita GDP in 2015 stood at $5,328, more than 3.3 times that of the country as a whole. And yet, half of the population lives packed into just 12% of the city’s available land.”

That is from a data rich (and yet pleasant to read) essay about Mumbai and it’s mad policies regarding real estate. Those mad policies are nothing new, some of them are more than a hundred years old, and they have been covered extensively in lots of different places. Not getting urbanization right is a sport that all countries play well – although you’ll certainly get a sympathetic nod from me if you argue that we in India play it better than most. Why, I come from Pune, and you need to come visit our city one of these days to understand just how good (bad is what I mean, but you knew that already) we have become in the last four to five years alone.

Please go ahead and read the whole essay, it is full of delightful little nuggets and not-so-little laments. Did you know, for example, that urban planners planned to limit Mumbai’s population to a maximum of 3.4 million by 1980? This is like I planning to limit my weight gain to two hundred grams around the last week of the year, and I have the same success as Mumbai’s urban planners back in the day – we’re at about 25 million for the Mumbai metropolitan area now.*

And here’s another face-palm worthy statistic:

“The 1999 act is a marginal improvement over the original, but still doesn’t provide adequate incentive for investment. The annual 4% rental increase is below Indian inflation since 1999, below current Indian treasury yields, and far below the increase in demand or the increase in per capita GDP. At the allowable annual increase, the value of rent diminishes sharply over time. If the average Indian landlord received 30% of their income in rent in 1999, and received 4% annual nominal rent increases, they would be making only 8% of their income from rent on those units by 2021. Even more starkly, the act does not address the lag in rents from 1940 to 1999. A unit rented out under the 1947 rent act would have its rent pegged to 1940 prices until 1999, at which point a one-time 5% increase would be allowed, and a 4% annual increase thereafter”

But I wanted to focus on one particular thing in today’s post, and it is this excerpt:

However, the greatest beneficiaries of housing liberalization may be those who are least visible — those newly able to move into the city. One estimate found that migrants who move to cities in the Global South report increases in income as high as 30%. A separate RCT conducted in Kenya, meanwhile, estimated that households with family members who moved to Nairobi experienced an over 150% increase in income.

That is, the idiocy of our urbanization policies keeps people in poverty, and has done so since independence. How? By making it more difficult to migrate into India’s cities, that’s how. An unseen consequence of failed urbanization are the unseen poor, and that is an unseen tragedy.

Urbanization is, and remains, an underrated idea in India, and this has deep implications for our ability to overcome our challenges when it comes to eradicating poverty.

*Questions about my weight gain in the last week of the year will be deemed an invasion of my privacy, and will therefore be ignored. Go away.

Home, Expensive Home

The chart of the day comes from the excellent Vivek Kaul:

https://www.livemint.com/industry/buying-homes-why-tax-policies-need-a-tweak-11705234900028.html

What this shows us is that over the last sixteen years or so, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of home loans that have been given to the non-priority sector – that’s the blue line. These were at about 30% in 2007, and are at about 70% today. Obviously, the red line shows us that priority home loans have taken the journey in the opposite direction, falling from about 70% of all loans disbursed in 2007, to about 30% today.

What is a priority home loan, and what is a non-priority home loan?

Priority home loans are loans amounting up to Rs 35 lakhs in metropolitan centers, and up to Rs 25 lakhs in other parts of the country. There’s fine print, but for our purposes, this is a simple and good enough definition. Non-priority home loans, of course, are loans above these amounts.

Long story short, rich people are taking loans to buy homes, while poor folks, not quite as much. But why should this be so? Part of the reason, Vivek Kaul says, is incentives:

Tax policy in India incentivizes buying homes as an investment. Income earned from the salary or business income of an individual is taxed at the marginal rate of tax. The highest marginal rate of tax, even without taking the different kinds of surcharges for higher income into account, is 30%. At the same time, long-term capital gains made from selling residential real estate is taxed at 20% with indexation benefits being available. Indexation allows the consideration of inflation while calculating the price of buying a house as well as improvements made on it over the years, in order to calculate capital gains. Long-term capital gains on selling a home come into the picture if the period of holding between the buy date and the sell date is more than 24 months. This effectively means that the tax on capital gains (a form of income) made from buying and selling of homes, is significantly less than even 20% (it can be even lower than 10%). Plus, the holding period of two years is way too low

https://www.livemint.com/industry/buying-homes-why-tax-policies-need-a-tweak-11705234900028.html

When you buy a house and sell it, say ten years down the line, the gains you make on selling the house at a higher price are taxed at 20%, not 30%, as your highest income would be. Second, your gains aren’t taxed – your gains net of inflation are taxed. And so buying a house and selling it can be plenty darn profitable – a house isn’t necessarily a place to stay. It is, instead, an investment. Take away this incentive, Vivek Kaul says, and you might see the “demand” for housing come down.

Speaking of incentives, he also has an idea for increasing the supply of homes available in cities for renting:

At the same time, the government needs to encourage those who own homes, to not keep them locked and rent them out. On the tax front, this can be achieved by taxing rental income from homes at a lower tax rate. This will also discourage those landlords who insist that tenants pay them in cash (at least in part).

Of course, this will only be a very small step in making residential real estate in cities across India a little more affordable, given that the sector is too complicated and too convoluted to be set right only through incentives and tax policy.

https://www.livemint.com/industry/buying-homes-why-tax-policies-need-a-tweak-11705234900028.html

Incentives matter, and our current policy mix incentivizes the construction of, and the purchase of, unnecessarily expensive homes, but not for the purpose of staying in them. Vivek Kaul says that taking away the incentive of capital gains tax on housing, and introducing a lower tax rate on rental income could go a long way in terms of maki housing for affordable in India’s cities.

Now, homework:

Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Who will benefit by this, and who will be harmed by this? Who will support this idea, and who will protest such an idea? Which group is likely to be politically more active? What are the risks of implementing Vivek Kaul’s ideas? Try adding at least a couple more questions to this list, and then answering them. Some of these questions (and their answers) are already there in Vivek Kaul’s column, see if you can spot them!

“Conviviality is an economic actor”

The reason the title of today’s blogpost is in quotation marks is because, well, it is a quote. How I wish it had been my coinage, this phrase. It is, instead, a quote by Patrick Bernard. Who is Patrick Bernard? A person behind the idea of Hyper Voisins, or Super Neighbors.

I was re-reading Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize lecture to prepare for yesterday’s post, this paragraph came up:

“Evidence pointed out three mechanisms that increase productivity in polycentric metropolitan areas: (1)
small- to medium-sized cities are more effective than large cities in monitoring performance of their citizens and relevant costs, (2) citizens who are dissatisfied with service provision can “vote with their feet” and move to jurisdictions that come closer to their preferred mix and costs of public services, and (3) local incorporated communities can contract with larger producers and change contracts if not satisfied with the services provided, while neighborhoods inside a large city have no voice.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pdf (pp 411)

Patrick Bernard’s idea is to challenge this notion by creating many small to medium sized cities within large cities. Actually, he will likely (and correctly) disagree – the idea is to have many small to medium sized communities within large cities.

More than 1,200 of these so-called Super Neighbors communicate via 40 WhatsApp groups dedicated to queries like finding a cat sitter or seeking help to fix broken appliances. They hold weekly brunches, post-work drinks and community gatherings at which older residents share memories with younger generations. To much fanfare, the group also hosts an annual banquet — La Table d’Aude — for the residents on a table 400 meters long, about 440 yards, running through the middle of a street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/realestate/paris-cities-neighbors.html

Why does this matter? Because (some) urbanists have long pushed the idea of mixed-use neighborhoods, and it is a truly powerful idea. The modern, arguably cooler way of referring to this is to talk about 15-minute cities.

If you are an Indian living in a major Indian city reading this, you might think ah, Zepto. Or Swiggy Instamart, or BlinkIt, or something similar. But nope, that’s only half the puzzle. Or if you prefer, that’s only the hardware aspect of a 15 minute city. It is, in fact, less than half the puzzle, because 15 minute deliveries may actually make things worse. How could the convenience of fifteen minute delivery possibly make things worse?

A more astute reading of the culture would have paid attention to the longing for connection in American life, a condition the pandemic has only deepened. Isolation, as sociologists remind us over and over, is rampant. It was hard not to notice that restaurants in New York City were packed once they were brought to life again in the summer of 2020. Part of the pleasure of shopping in a neighborhood grocery store or a farmers’ market or going to the gym is the prospect of human contact — catching up as a matter of improvisation, serendipity remaining a singular and animating force of metropolitan life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/nyregion/instant-delivery-services.html

In other words, cities are as much about software as they are about hardware – in fact, they’re more about the software than they are about the hardware. It is people that define a city, not its infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, infrastructure matters. I stay in Pune, boss, and we can go on for hours about our (for lack of a better word) infrastructure. But the infrastructure matters for the people who stay in a city, and a city is made a city by the interactions of people who stay within it. So called dark stores prioritize convenience, by paying the opportunity cost of a feeling of isolation.

Patrick Bernard wants to fight this feeling of isolation, because isolation is the lack of a sense of belonging to a community. And any sociologist will tell you that the sense of not belonging to a community is very much Not A Good Thing.

The challenge, as with everything else in economics, is scalability. A neighborhood successfully implementing a solution such as this, while a wonderful thing in and of itself, isn’t a scalable solution. How should one think about scalability? They’re thinking about it already:

Looking further afield, the group is exploring ways in which its vision of cities carved in the image of, and powered by the bonds between, their inhabitants can be replicated and scaled up. It believes the answer is the creation of trained and paid roles — so-called Friends of the Neighborhood — to coordinate each district.
“People have begun to listen,” Mr. Bernard said. “Everyone wants their neighborhood to be like ours. Now we need to find out how to make our approach more systemic and to adapt it to the different challenges and contexts that every city in the world has.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/realestate/paris-cities-neighbors.html

Five other links related to this topic that you might enjoy reading:

  1. The Global Observatory of Sustainable Proximities
  2. Placemaking Europe
  3. Coverage by Pop-up City
  4. Coverage by the Guardian
  5. The OG, Jane Jacobs

Why Linear Cities Won’t Work

A Column, A Rebuttal, And What Are Census Towns Anyway?

The Efficient Market Hypothesis is alive and well, I am glad to report. At least when it comes to writing rebuttals. I will not get into the controversy at all in this post, but I do need to establish the context for what I will be writing about today.

Shamika Ravi wrote a column about what are, in her opinion, problematic national surveys in our country:

Using projected population estimates, we find that nearly all major surveys in India that were conducted post-2011 and used the Census 2011 for the sampling frame have overestimated the proportion of the rural population significantly. This is one of the several problems with data quality, but it is a critical concern — and appropriately highlights the problem at hand.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/shamika-ravi-writes-our-national-surveys-are-based-on-faulty-sampling-8799300/

I am but one of many who happen to disagree with many of the points raised in this column. But that’s not what I want to write about in today’s post. Pronab Sen wrote a column in response, and this post is about a particular point in his column. But first, a key excerpt from Sen’s column:

The Census measures urban population in two categories — (a) statutory towns/cities; and (b) Census towns. Statutory towns/cities are entities which are legally recognised as urban areas by the concerned state governments and are governed by municipalities/nagar palikas. Census towns, on the other hand, are legally rural areas, that is, coming under panchayats, which exhibit characteristics of urban agglomerates on three counts — size of the population, population density and proportion of the male workforce not engaged in agriculture. It so happens that in Census 2011, a major part of the rapid urbanisation that Ravi talks about occurred in Census towns and not in the statutory urban areas.
The surveys, on the other hand, follow only the statutory definition while classifying rural and urban areas. Thus, although all surveys use the Census as the sampling frame, Census towns are treated as a part of the rural sector and are included in the rural sample. Therefore, practically all the discrepancy that Ravi makes so much of is simply the outcome of differences in the definition of urban areas in the Census and the surveys.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/criticism-of-sample-surveys-is-misplaced-their-data-differ-from-census-count-because-definitions-are-different-8822347/

Read both essays in their entirety to get a sense of what the debate is about, but for the purpose of today’s post let’s focus on census towns. As Pronab Sen mentions, census towns are “legally rural areas” – but they “exhibit characteristics of urban agglomerates”. What characteristics? Three, per Sen: size of the population, population density and proportion of the male workforce not engaged in agriculture.

Well ok, you might say, but what values do these variables need to have for an urban agglomeration to be considered a “census town”?

The Census definition identifies urban settlements as either areas already governed by ULBs or areas having a population greater than 5,000, a density over 400 people per square kilometre, and 75% of the male working population employed in non-agricultural activities. By this definition, India is 31% urban.
Areas that satisfy these criteria but are not already governed by ULBs are known as Census Towns (CTs).

https://www.idfcinstitute.org/site/assets/files/15116/reforming_urban_india_idfc_institute.pdf

When was this definition framed? In, er, 1961. And nope, it hasn’t been updated since. But defining what is an “urban agglomeration” and what isn’t is quite tricky. Consider this chart, for example:

https://www.livemint.com/Politics/4UjtdRPRikhpo8vAE0V4hK/How-much-of-India-is-actually-urban.html

As the article from which I sourced this chart says, “while experts may disagree on the precise definition of ‘urban’, they all agree that it makes sense to view the entire spectrum of settlements—from small villages to large urban agglomerations—as a continuum rather than in terms of the rural/urban binary”

And by the way, the same definition of urban agglomeration will apply to the 2021 Census. In, in fact, you read the PDF, all rural units having a population of 4000 or more at the preceding census (2011) will be examined, as they will almost certainly have crossed the 5000 mark in 2021. This, of course, is the point that Pronab Sen is making in his report. Since these will likely be the best performing parts of hitherto “rural” India, classifying them as urban here on in will make rural India look far worse.

OK, but why does all of this matter all that much, eh? Census towns, in particular – what’s the big deal? Well, here’s why it matters:

Census Towns continue to be governed by panchayats despite having the density of urban areas. Rural Local Bodies (RLBs) and ULBs were designed to cater to the varying governance needs of rural and urban areas. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts specify different powers and functions for the
two bodies. For instance, as seen in Figure 2, ULBs are mandated to provide water for residential, industrial, and commercial purposes, while RLBs are mandated to provide only safe drinking water. This means that industrial or commercial units in de facto urban areas may find it harder to access adequate water compared to those in areas governed by ULBs. Panchayats are not required to provide many of the other basic services required of dense urban living, for example, sewerage lines, fire services, and building code regulations. Therefore Census Towns remain grossly underserved. As of the 2011 Census, 55 million people – the population of South Africa – lived in them.

https://www.idfcinstitute.org/site/assets/files/15116/reforming_urban_india_idfc_institute.pdf (pg. 14)

Here’s Fig.2 from that same report:

Defining urbanization is a tricky endeavor at the best of times in any country. Doing so for India comes with its own unique set of challenges. But when the definition may have an impact on the answer to the question of how well India has done in the recent past, well, that’s a whole other problem, and it’s not only restricted to economics.

But hey, now you know what a census town is. There’s that.

Where Are All the Skyscrapers in India?

Lebenskunst

I was part of a small but fascinating discussion at The Fat Labrador Cafe yesterday (about which more in tomorrow’s post). The idea was to speak about under-rated/counter-intuitive ideas in economics, and a session that was supposed to last for an hour ended up starting at a little after nine pm, and going on well past eleven pm!

One of the ideas that I thought would be under-rated and counter-intuitive was that cities are magical places. Not only, it turns out, was this not under-rated and counter-intuitive where the audience was concerned, but it was almost quotidian. Huh, but also yay!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: cities are awesome, fantastic and brilliant, and we need many more of ’em on our planet.

Lebenskunst, The Economist magazine tells us, is the art of living well. Wiktionary has an even better translation, calling it the art of life. But whatever the definition, The Economist’s ranking of the world’s most liveable cities places Vienna at the top.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/06/22/the-worlds-most-liveable-cities

It is, after all, an index, and that means that you can choose to argue endlessly about which metrics are included and which aren’t, what weights have been given and what should have been the weighting instead, about how liveability isn’t all that measurable and especially comparable, and on and on and on.

The index rates cities along thirty different factors, bucketed into five different categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Note that the article we’re talking about is from June, but that doesn’t really matter for us today. The good news, for the most part, is that “global activity is only around one-sixth lower than before the virus emerged. This is reflected in the global average liveability score, which has bounced back to something approaching normality.”

Of course, parts of the world have done worse compared to the pre-pandemic era. Almost all Chinese cities are worse off, although that is not at all surprising. Re: India, the bad news is that not a single Indian city comes in the top ten, and the good news is that not a single Indian city comes in the bottom ten! A summary of the report is available to read here, once you share your email address with the EIU. No Indian city makes the list of the cities that moved up the most in the rankings, nor does any Indian city make the list of cities that dropped down the most.

The full report costs an insane amount of money, and there’s no way I am paying for it, but you might want to just take a look at a Wikipedia article, as I did, for more information. I wasn’t aware of Numbeo, and obvious concerns about quality of data aside, it is a very interesting project.

Take a look at India’s data, it is fascinating. Pune comes in at number 2, which fills me with pride, and also with worry about what is up with the rest of India’s cities. If we’re at number 2…

Barcelona’s Superblocks

And if you’re curious about how it all turned out, considering this video is six years old…

A Walk Down Abhimanashri Lane

Or Abhimanashree, whichever version you prefer.

But however you choose to spell it, join me, won’t you, as I saunter down this leafy little lane on a wintry Sunday morning?

Abhimanashri Lane is today a bit of a misnomer. But as a true-blue Puneri, I remember a time when it really and truly was a lane, and a very quiet one. Today, it forms the base of a very useful triangle, connecting Baner Road and Pashan Road, with the apex of the triangle being Pune University signal. Why this is a very useful triangle is a long story that will bring much angst to every Punekar reading this, so we will move on for the moment.

Accompanying us on this jaunt is my nine-year old daughter, whose ability to ask endless questions is matched only by her ability to ask questions about what we’re going to eat next. As a gourmand who pretends to teach economics for a living, I thoroughly approve of both of these qualities.

And so down Abhimanashri Lane we go, appreciating the quietness of the Sunday morning, pausing every now and then to meet a new canine friend, and breathing in the soft yet crisp wintry air that Pune still affords us in the absence of traffic.

Until we reach a nice little bakery on the left hand side, with a cute sitting-out area, and what looks from without to be a promising array of baked treats lying in wait inside. The daughter deploys the most beseeching look she can muster, but she needn’t have. I am chomping at the bit myself, so in we go to take a look. There’s croissants, there’s breads, there’s pastries and there’s coffee. Heaven, to be precise. Having suitably nourished ourselves, we resume our walk.

But then the economist in me starts to wonder.

We had gone there at around nine in the morning, and we were the only cutomers in the cafe. There was one delivery order that was picked up, but that apart, there was no one else who walked in. The food was very good without being truly outstanding, but that is not (at all) a knock against the place. In fact, if anything, I would have expected more customers.

So why, the economist in me wondered, was it empty?

  1. Abhimanashri is a truly lovely place to walk around in, but it is a low density neighborhood. Most people might wonder if I could have phrased that sentence better – wouldn’t it be the case that it is a lovely place to walk around in precisely because it is a low density neighborhood? Well, yes, but also no. Read on.
  2. It is not just a low density neighborhood, but it is also almost entirely residential. There’s a misal join towards the end of the lane, and a couple of shops and offices, and one upmarket salon. But it is safe to say that it is overwhemingly residential in terms of character.
  3. It is also a no-parking zone, for reasons that we refused to go into earlier, but now we must. Read this article to get a sense of why it is a no parking zone.
  4. So, low density neighborhood, not enough offices, plus a no parking zone along its entire length. Not enough folks in the vicinity, whether residents or otherwise, and the inability to park along its entire length. Nor, if memory serves me right, is there a bus-stop along the entire length of the lane.
  5. So walk-in customers are unlikely. Plus, the inconvenience of having to park a ways away and then walking down might disincentivize other customers.
  6. I’d much rather sit at home and order from there using Zomato or Swiggy or some such, rather than actually try and reach the place.
  7. And so while I thoroughly enjoyed my visit there and wouldn’t mind going there again, the inconvenience of it all makes it rather unlikely that I will.
  8. Which is why you should read up about mixed-use neighborhoods, and urban planning more generally. I have a couple of videos on the subject, or you might want to read more about it by searching on Google, or you might want to read this lovely thread on Twitter.
  9. But the next time you take a walk down one of your favorites streets in your favorite city, you might want to ask what makes that street your favorite, and what were the opportunity costs of that street being the way it is. Ask yourself in what ways that street could become better, and how your city might go about planning for it to be so. Get into the habit of doing this all the time, because why wouldn’t you want to think about how your city could be better.
  10. And then, suitably incentivized, learn more about urban planning, because it is a fascinating subject that every budding economist should know more about.
  11. Past EFE posts on urbanization, if you’re interested, are here.

When Cars Were The Intruders

The MIT Press Reader has a fascinating extract from a book called “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.”, by Peter Norton. The piece is about the early 1920’s in America, and focuses on how Americans struggled to get used to the idea that cars were going to be around in ever increasing numbers:

City people saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets. “The pedestrian,” explained a Brooklyn man, “as an American citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.”  Custom and the Anglo-American legal tradition confirmed pedestrians’ inalienable right to the street. In Chicago in 1926, as in most cities, “nothing” in the law “prohibits a pedestrian from using any part of the roadway of any street or highway, at any time or at any place as he may desire.” So noted the author of a traffic survey commissioned by the Chicago Association of Commerce.  According to Connecticut’s first Motor Vehicle Commissioner, Robbins Stoeckel, the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians’ rights was that “All travelers have equal rights on the highway.” 

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-as-dangerous-intruders/

Even more amazingly, at least to my twenty-first century ears:

In New York City’s traffic court in 1923, a judge explained that “Nobody has any inherent right to run an automobile at all.” Rather, “the courts have held that the right to operate a motor vehicle is a privilege given by the state, not a right, and that privilege may be hedged about with whatever limitations the state feels to be necessary, or it may be withdrawn entirely.”  The law would not deprive pedestrians of their customary rights so that motorists could roam at will in cities.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-as-dangerous-intruders/

We’ve come a very long way since! I and a good friend of mine, Binoy Mascarenhas, have had quite a few arguments about the redevelopment of many streets in Pune city in terms of the widening of footpaths, and whether it makes sense or not. My contention has been that this (the redevelopment) definitely makes sense eventually, but the current high priority problem for Pune city is better public transport. Widening footpaths (and thereby narrowing streets) ought to be done only if we can increase the percentage of people traveling by public transport. Once that is done, we should absolutely make our cities more pedestrian friendly. Binoy is going to be in Pune this weekend, and I look forward to continuing the debate.

But I found it amazing to note that there was a time when the cultural adoption of a car as an inevitability on our streets was a new phenomenon. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious – the car, and the mental model of it as being top dog on the streets – required a change in how folks would have viewed the streets back then. But even so, the idea that, for example, some passages in the excerpt made me sit up:

Some even defended children’s right to the roadway. Instead of urging parents to keep their children out of the streets, a Philadelphia judge attacked motorists for usurping children’s rights to them. He lectured drivers in his courtroom. “It won’t be long before children won’t have any rights at all in the streets,” he complained. As the usurper, the motorist, not the child, should be restricted: “Something drastic must be done to end this menace to pedestrians and to children in particular.” 

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-as-dangerous-intruders/

Maybe I’m far too much of a modern day individual, but I genuinely struggle to see how we could adopt our cities today to a pedestrian first framework. The volume of traffic seems far too high, and we seem far too dependent on our vehicles for us to even try and imagine what something like this might look like at a city scale.

But there was, it would seem, a time when this was not just possible, but was actually reality. At what costs, and with what benefits – and should we aspire to return back to those presumably idyllic times, is a question I look forward to debating about this weekend.

And, of course, one more book has been added to the pile. So it goes.