The Fisher Variations: June 24, 2010

A skid-row hotel that in Reagan's re-election year hosted high-school students on field trips and delegations from impoverished western Indian tribes in $21-a-night rooms has long since been charging 10 to 15 times that rate. .... Yet in her last book, Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs complained. She restated her ancient gripe about traffic engineers, whose antipathy to the scientific method she'd decried back in the fights over traffic-calming in Manhattan in the early 1960s. ...