Jane Brody’s Uninformed Attack on Cars and Suburbia

by Marc Scribner on October 30, 2013  

While at a conference where participants discussed the wannabe social engineers cum urbanists’ war on automobility and housing affordability, Jane Brody’s broadside against Americans’ “dependence on automobiles” and suburban living was published by the New York Times. Brody, unlike her Times colleague Michael Pollan, isn’t a complete and total kook when it comes to agricultural biotechnology, and she is one of the more thoughtful nutrition writers in America. Unfortunately, Brody has fallen for one of the popular but incorrect urban elitist tropes about cars and the suburbs.

Long commutes are killing us! Urban cores are healthier than the suburbs! Low-density living is just fattening us up for self-slaughter!

Scary stuff, just in time for Halloween! But the “evidence” supporting such fear mongering ranges from flimsy to nonexistent…..To Read More…..

My Take - In the course of my 67 years I have watched coffee go from terrible to wonderful and back again.  Most of every scare or outrage you read about is claptrap.  Here is the definitive answer.  In 1946 the world's population was approximately 2 billion people, and it took thousands of years to get to that number.  In less than 75 years the world's population has soared to 7 billion, and more of those people are living longer than ever in history.