Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

"I first discovered Eric Klinenberg’s work through a book he wrote about a Heat Wave in Chicago. He looked at what are called ‘excess death rates’—the extent to which the death rate is above normal—and how they differed in different parts of the city during a very severe heat wave and how different social structures in Hispanic and African-American families helped explain the difference. It’s a really impressive piece of work. This is about what social scientists call ‘social capital’, so the social assets or strengths that any community has to draw on in delivering economic improvements or quality of life etc. It’s about libraries in particular, but also other social infrastructure that enables people to meet and understand each other and have safe and inviting ways to help each other. He talks about how these are being eroded through things like library closures or parks not being maintained, or just the design of public spaces in modern cities. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think this book is really powerful, because in economics we talk all the time about social assets as important drivers of economic outcomes. So in economic development, it’s about economic institutions, in corporate finance it’s about the value of the brand and reputation. We know that these social dimensions are important, but we don’t think about them enough. This book makes a fantastic case for provision of this kind of social infrastructure. It’s got to be embedded in particular places. The design of the building matters and how you get there, whether you can get on public transport. It all matters. Generally, I suppose I am. We’ve got to the point where there’s very widespread questioning of the ways we’ve been doing things and how things have turned out. That’s pretty evident. I don’t think we have got to the point of consensus about what to do about it, but at least people are talking about all these kinds of issues. We really have got away from, ‘We’ll just leave it to market forces to sort out.’ That really is dead in the water now. Both of the above. It’s billed as a textbook and it’s built on a course that I developed myself and have been teaching for some years. But it’s not technical and I hope is well enough written that anybody could enjoy reading it. So students for sure—undergraduates or MPP students—but also anybody working in public policy or in politics. What I try to do is demonstrate that there are some problems and some circumstances in which there isn’t a single right answer about how you do things, and there are choices and trade-offs to be made. Sometimes state ownership is the right way to go. Sometimes you want a market structure. Sometimes you want neither of those and you want to leave it to some kind of community structure or other sort of organization. We have loads of those: firms themselves, but also unions and mutual societies and playgroups and so on. There are a lot of self-organized entities. “A lot of the problems of the Rust Belt in the US and in the north of England…are a result of the fact that we didn’t handle those job losses particularly well” The book is trying to think through how you analyze the kinds of policy challenges that you face, to try to understand what to do about them. That might change at different periods of history or it might be different in different countries—or different sets of voters will just have different priorities. So it tries to be a very rounded book about how to select and implement public policies, while being really rooted in economic analysis. There was nothing that I could use to teach from. There’s the traditional approach to public economics, which does some macroeconomic stabilization policy, so tax and spend and monetary policy, and then does a lot about tax design and tax structures. What I wanted to think about was how you organize production and distribution and there wasn’t a book that answered that. The mission our original donor has set us is researching ways to address inequality and sustainability. So that’s our focus, but it’s a similar research-oriented, challenge-focused, interdisciplinary policy institute. As important civic institutions, universities need to start addressing big societal problems across disciplinary boundaries and engaging with the public and policymakers."

"It is, but one of the key aspects of Eric’s book is this idea that libraries—and he’s really talking about public libraries—are social infrastructure. He talks very eloquently about the New York Public Library system, and particularly about the branch libraries, how they are places where public education can take place, where the patrons are not judged by how much money they have, but are treated equally, no matter what segment of society they come from. They are open long hours, sometimes they’re there simply to provide a warm place for people to gather. Sometimes they’re the only place that young people can go for quiet study if they have an assignment to do for their school, because their home is too noisy or disruptive. Sometimes they are places where people go to find bits of information for practical reasons, like they’re starting a small business, and they don’t have the resources to get information in other ways. In the 19th century, libraries began to be established as a legal requirement by public authorities. I think the public library is evolving from being simply a place for self-service, to being a place which is much more proactive in communities. So, during lockdown, lots of public libraries in the UK and in the US would know their elderly clientele and they had a rota to telephone them. If they knew that there was an elderly person living on their own who would normally come into the library, they would call them up and just talk to them. Now, this isn’t what you get taught to do in library school, or at least it wasn’t when I was there, but it’s part of that sense that libraries are community places. You see that also in local history collections, or in exhibits that local libraries put on to commemorate elements of their local community, whether it’s in New York, for example, perhaps celebrating the history of different waves of immigration, the ethnic makeup of the boroughs, and their contribution to those communities. What I also like about the book is that Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist. He’s not someone you would immediately expect to write about libraries. He’s coming at it with the perspective of someone who’s written about inequality, about the impact of the heatwave in Chicago and climate change. It’s fantastic to have somebody looking at libraries in this way and drawing attention to them. He wrote a very powerful essay in the New York Times as an op-ed, just before the book came out, which was very influential, and widely read in America. It’s a book that identifies the library in our moment in history and what it can do for society. I don’t think that’s true, partly because not everybody has access to the internet. If you look at the figures in the UK, the digitally disenfranchised are an extraordinary segment of the population and that’s also where public libraries are very valuable. Not only to provide the technology, the hardware and the internet access but, much more importantly, librarians who are supportive and will help you without judging you, will guide you through the complex interfaces of a public or government digital system that you have to navigate in order to get public benefits, for example. A library might be somewhere where you can meet other people and form a community group. A local society might meet in a room that the library provides in order to, say, learn a language. There are all sorts of things that could be distilled into an app, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be an improvement. I hear that perspective a lot. I hear it from some senior administrators in universities. I would argue that libraries have always been physical places to work. Perhaps in the past they would have been more of a curated space, if you like, conducive to quiet study and deep concentration, where some of the materials that you use for your writing may indeed be provided by that library in hardcopy form. However, libraries today rely less on analogue materials, and more on digital materials. Those digital materials can indeed be consulted anywhere that you have internet access and the ability to access them through some form of authentication. We are developing the concept of ‘Space as a Service’ which sums up this issue, I think. Yes, that’s what authentication means here, that you are authenticating yourself as somebody who is encompassed by the rights that the library negotiates on your behalf. So perhaps there is a slight moving away from the ‘you can only access this by coming into the library’ and therefore that’s why you come into the library. But I don’t think that’s necessarily ever been solely the case, that the only people who came into the library 40 years ago were coming to look at books. There were plenty of people who were coming in there simply to write and think. Bruce Chatwin came into the Bodleian, and I don’t think he looked at books in the Bodleian much. That wasn’t mostly why he was going in there. He was going in there as a place to think and to write after he came back from Patagonia or Australia. That’s what he did, he wrote those books up in the Bod."