The Substance of Style, Part IV

A final observation on Postrel's 2003 book on the aesthetic age.

Here we get to the politics of it. On the municipal level, she gets to score some points at the expense of the busybodies of building and planning codes and the busier bodies who live and breath to enforce them, and who make up their own additional rules in the process.

She takes as a case study here the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, of which she writes:

"Mount Pleasant does have lots of explicit design rules -- no neon, for instance -- but the board's critique is open-ended. If members don't like glass block or ceramic tile, they say so, even if the city has no law against either material. An architect who wants his plans approved will bend his client's budget, tastes, and aesthetic  identity to  suit the board. all the more so if he expects to submit future plans to the same board."

With the result, she says, that the various streets of Mount Pleasant all end up looking the same, and the expense of living in or even moving through the town is a mite less Pleasant than the name seems to promise.

And yes, Postrel is aware that the push to conformity is not unique to the public sector. Private condo boards can be as dogmatic, their critiques as ad hoc and open-ended, as those of which she complains above.  But that arises a consequence of the operation of freedom of contract and is subject to natural market checks. The Mount Pleasant planning board is a greater offense, both politically and to her mind aesthetically.

A final point:   the conventional statistics by which the United States measures its economic success are more pessimistic than facts justify. We can see this once we put on the goggles of the aesthetic age.

"Although government statisticians make some adjustments for easily measurable improvements like computer memory or car features, they would treat this season's designer pair of $70 embroidered women's dress shoes as the equivalent of last season's $70 pair of plain women's dress shoes....If you're toting up national income or measuring consumer price increases, a $20 steak dinner at a beautifully designed restaurant is just like a $20 steak dinner in a warehouse environment."

And with that I conclude, leaving my reader to his/her own reflections.