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Today, many people understandably dislike the word “ghetto” for its associations with stigmatizing and harmful stereotypes—especially of African Americans. In Ghettonation: A Journey into the Land of the Bling and the Home of the Shameless, Cora Daniels writes that “ghetto” today refers to “gold teeth, … Pepsi-filled baby bottles, and baby mamas.” One New York City councilwoman went so far as to try to ban its “negative usage” in New York City’s official government documents. Even a figure as prominent as Mario Luis Small, the first black dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago—the very university where the ghetto was established as a social scientific idea almost a century ago—has written a nuanced essay explaining his reasons for abandoning the idea.

In this book, I hope to show that the ghetto remains a useful concept—provided we recall its rich historical background and stop divorcing it from its past. The word derives from the name of a Venetian island that once housed a copper foundry, or geto. Five hundred years ago, in 1516, the Venetian authorities required the city’s Jews to live on that island, in an area enclosed by walls. Venice was thus the first place to have a ghetto with today’s connotation of restriction in space. In 1555, Pope Paul IV forced Rome’s Jews into a similarly enclosed quarter, which, a few years later, came to be called by the Venetian name “ghetto.” The term then gradually spread to other European cities where Jews were similarly segregated from the larger population. In all these places, they simultaneously suffered and flourished.

Although the ghettos were demolished in the 19th century, in tandem with a gradually swelling wave of Jewish emancipation, the term “ghetto” was increasingly used from the late 19th century on, first to refer to dense Jewish quarters in Europe and America and then occasionally in reference to black urban neighborhoods. The word was given even greater prominence when it was reappropriated by the Nazis as they confined the Jews of Eastern Europe behind barbed wire in the late 1930s. A few years later, the idea of the ghetto took on new significance in the United States. During World War II, as black Americans served in the military (usually in arduous roles of logistical support) and witnessed the liberation of the Jews, blacks at home saw parallels between the ghettos established by the Nazis and their own segregated neighborhoods, between the Caucasian purity that whites were seeking to preserve in the United States and the Aryan purity that Hitler was trying to impose on Europe. As they had during World War I, they found themselves asking, in effect, “Have we been fighting once again for everybody else’s freedom except our own?”

For many of the undergraduate students who take my seminar on the idea of the ghetto, it comes as news that Jews, not blacks, were the original ghettoized people. This is a first clue to a motivation behind this book: ghettos can get lost. Had my course been offered earlier in Princeton’s history, before the mid-1940s, it would have had nothing to do with blacks and no one would have expected it might. Instead, an instructor would have focused exclusively on Jews. The link between blacks and the ghetto has been around for less than 10 percent of the term’s 500-year history.

It is not just the Jewish ghettos that have been forgotten by certain younger cohorts. It has become harder and harder to recall the black ghettos of previous generations—ghettos that were quite different from those we know now. And as the word “ghetto” has itself become less meaningful in many quarters, so too have we largely forgotten the way the word was understood in discussions of race, poverty, and place by social scientists, activists, politicians, journalists, and other intellectuals. It’s little recognized that the term embodies some of the most brilliant work in the history of the social sciences, much of which was contributed by black scholars such as those presented in these pages.

I have tried to recover that particular history by focusing selectively on a series of figures: Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, whose account of the Chicago “ghetto” in the Nazi era underlined the importance of restrictive housing covenants and other coercive measures—and served as an alternative to the famous portrait of the black situation in An American Dilemma by the Swedish economist and later Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal; Kenneth Clark, who revived the ghetto as an explanatory concept during the civil rights movement to show how segregation was damaging Northern blacks even without Jim Crow; and William Julius Wilson, who showed how the successes of the civil rights movement facilitated the departure of the black middle class from the ghetto, leaving behind a destitute population with a paucity of economic opportunities. In an era when the spotlight was no longer on the problems of poor blacks, he argued that the only way to interest whites in joblessness among black adults or even poverty among black children was to focus on programs that would also help whites. But working around the racism (and classism) of advantaged whites was not in itself enough to build the kind of support he had hoped for.

So we’re back to individual ghettos that are left to their own devices, as well as the activists and reformers who desperately try to achieve miracles on the ground. One particular effort garnered recent attention, support, and celebrity for its guiding founder: Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone. He advances the idea that whereas single-focus efforts to improve the lot of the black poor do not succeed, a full-court press will. His initiative also presumes that private philanthropy can sometimes be a substitute for public policy, and at best an integral part of it. Although President Barack Obama tried to make Canada’s ideas the centerpiece of a national urban policy, Obama found it impossible to get meaningful support from Congress. Thus far, Canada’s success hinges on his own charismatic efforts and on the generosity of a few highly committed white billionaires.

We are left with the remains of an age-old system of exclusion—and no straightforward remedy. Worse yet, we are only now emerging from what has arguably been the largest and most consequential of all recent interventions in the lives of poor blacks: a War on Drugs based, ultimately, on its own misguided fantasy of a solution. The tactic emerged gradually, only after deindustrialization rendered poor urban blacks increasingly superfluous. The black ghetto became a hyperpoliced and monitored zone. Today, most men in the ghetto, subject as they are to paramilitary-style policing such as stop-and-frisk operations, will spend some time in prison. The ghetto can no longer be simply defined as a segregated area in which most blacks live. It is better understood as a space for the intrusive social control of poor blacks. As such, many of the ideas about the ghetto that emerged at the time of World War II may be more relevant than ever.

In this book, I seek a sense of historical awareness that is increasingly missing from our understanding. So much has been lost that needs to be remembered, if only because the ghetto’s troubled legacy has not gone away.

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Camus is not a sociologist, of course. With The Stranger, he wanted to write a novel about a person who believes in nothing. The novel is a thought experiment, a philosophical exercise. Meursault, the protagonist, is deliberately pared down to a man who believes in nothing more than his senses.

Camus based his descriptions of Meursault on real experience. He had spent several years as a newspaper reporter, covering the crime news and court trials in an Algerian city and he used real incidents he had covered as the basis for his book. One in particular: A tough guy Camus knew told him about a friend who took him along when he tracked down a man who had knifed him over a dispute. The friend brought a revolver. But in reality, no shot was fired—the confrontation wound down. Most such incidents do.

What makes the difference in those cases where violence, especially deadly violence, breaks out? This is the province of micro-sociology, which studies how people affect each other and set off new patterns that emerge in the interaction. From studies of violent situations, we have learned that face-to-face conflict raises bodily tension. At high levels of tension, opponents become clumsy and inaccurate. They experience sudden increases in levels of adrenaline and cortisol, which is the stress hormone triggered by the primitive fight-or-flight center of the lower brain, an undifferentiated arousal for rapid action that can go either way.

French writer Albert Caumus, after he was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, with the French actor Madeleine Renaud, in Paris on Oct. 17, 1957. Photo by Godot/Associate Press.

Without being a social scientist, Camus shows us how this happens. He is an excellent observer of the small details of how people interact in particular situations, especially what consciousness feels or looks like at each moment in one’s body. After agreeing to get involved in the conflict, Meursault stands alone in the hallway, unthinking but hearing “nothing but the blood throbbing in my ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it.” Another character tells a police officer that, “when I see you standing there looking at me, I can’t help trembling. That’s only natural.” The blood pounding in his ears, and the trembling, are the result of increased adrenaline.

The effect is easily measured. Ordinary resting heart rate is about 60 BPM (beats per minute) in adults and about 100 BPM in moderate exercise. During athletic performance, the heart rate goes up to about 115-145 as big muscle groups are energized. The heart rate also goes up when adrenaline is activated. The effect of emotional tension and fear are stronger than vigorous exercise alone. And at higher BPM levels, fine muscle coordination is progressively lost. Try writing with a pen when your exercise machine says your heart rate is 145 or more. At levels around 150-175 BPM, perceptual distortions start to happen. Time becomes distorted—it seems sped up, or slowed down to a dreamlike, walking-under-water pace. Vision becomes blurred, surroundings are lost, tunnel vision narrows in. Hearing tends to shut down, a cocoon-like experience in which one can’t hear the sounds of one’s own gun or the voices of people around you.

These effects are particularly important in understanding police shootings—a tragic, and unreasonably common, example of unnecessary violence. Virtually all controversial police shootings show signs of these perceptual distortions. In the Tulsa, Oklahoma shooting of Terence Crutcher in September 2016, the officer said she temporarily lost her hearing just before she fired—even though there were sounds of sirens and a police helicopter overhead. In the cocoon of high tension, voices disappear. The more persons who are present—cops, suspects, friends and family, bystanders—the more likely sounds blur into a babble of raised voices. Clear communications break down. And having more police on the scene increases the chances of uncontrolled shooting. Tension is contagious. Cops who are tense tend to make officers around them tense.

One clear sign that a shooting is caused by out-of-control adrenaline is overkill: when an officer fires many more shots than necessary to disable the apparently threatening suspect. Which brings us back to Camus and the mystery of why Meursault fires those four extra shots. Before the shooting, Meursault shows all the acute symptoms of perceptual distortion. “For two hours,” Camus tells us, “the sun seemed to have made no progress.” Meursault’s heart beat is pulsing in his forehead, although he attributes it to the sun; he feels “the whole beach pulsing with heat” and “cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull.” Camus reports on the phenomenology of losing control in a violent confrontation, what I have described as a “forward panic.” Hence those four superfluous shots. Camus took a little-noticed reality of violence, and built a shocking climax out of it.

Camus’s book uses this climax to suggest the absurdity of the universe, the lack of goodness or divinity. He implies that the act is random and could not be avoided or predicted. As a sociologist I see it differently: It’s an example of a phenomenon I’ve studied in real life. With understanding of what causes such unnecessarily violent actions, we can use that knowledge to prevent them.

This is especially important because of the racism that runs through Camus’s story and much contemporary police violence. These findings can leave us in despair—felled not by existentialism or nihilism, but by the magnitude of biases that run through our society and the seeming impossibility of fixing them all. As a society we need to address racism and political gridlock. But the physiology of violence reveals that we can take other direct steps to decrease police shootings.

We should focus our efforts on heart rate. U.S. Army psychologist Dave Grossman has developed a four-part exercise to reduce heart rate via breathing in slowly, holding one’s breath, then breathing out slowly and holding—and repeating as necessary. Cops should practice this or a similar protocol. They should also wear a monitor, which would tell them when it’s necessary. This practice does not require deep introspection on the part of an officer, or evaluation of one’s motives—it’s a purely physiological assessment. But it would allow cops and others in tense situations to check their biological responses before perceptions become distorted and unnecessary violence happens. Thus a key tool might be a heart rate monitor in addition to a body camera. And rather than relying on the threat of criminal prosecution to deter police shootings, we offer proactive training to bring down heart rates and adrenaline levels.

Certainly, some confrontations develop so quickly that the people involved might not have the chance to breathe deeply. But such situations do not arise very often. Many instances of police shootings—and especially those which turn out to be based on misperceptions—take time to develop. Sometimes officers speed up the situation unnecessarily; in Cleveland in November 2014, the officer who shot a black adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground raced to the scene and fired within two seconds after jumping from his car.

Better trained officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone of perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear view of the situation. Research by sociologists Geoffrey Alpert and Roger Dunham on escalated police encounters found that cops who handle situations better have a better sense of timing. More experienced cops are less likely to scuffle with resisting suspects, and spend more time attempting to control the situation by talking them down and presenting a strong demeanor; when they do use their weapons, they are more decisive.

What about Meursault; would such awareness have saved him? Perhaps. Which would, of course, have ruined Camus’s drama, as well as its symbolic resonance. It might have robbed us of great literature. But great literature is great, in part, because it builds on acute observations of real life. Those observations have a lot to teach us.

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Q: What did your research on creativity show about the conditions that are necessary for big sticky ideas?

A: I started working on networks of philosophers and mathematicians because those are the intellectual types that go furthest back into world history. Over 25 years, I charted the networks of around 3,000 philosophers and mathematicians in China, India, and ancient Greece as well as modern societies. I traced who was connected to whom and who were rivals in disputes. Also, I ranked them by how eminent they were in the literature.

My main finding was that creativity tends to cluster. The more eminent the thinker, the more eminent people are clustered together. Someone who has a really enormous impact tends to have a lot of important people upstream, as well as having important downstream followers.

What does all this mean? The most important thing people learn from their mentors or teachers is how to ask new questions. Creative thinkers are those who move to an entirely new way of conceiving a question. The questions are more important than the answers. Once a question is posed, new answers become possible.

Q: Did the time that this was happening have any bearing on the eminence of their philosophy?

A: In general, there’s no such thing as a golden age of civilization. An important century for cultural creativity is not necessarily one when your army is conquering other countries or even if it’s a time of prosperity.

What is important is change in the organizational base intellectuals live in. Take Kant and his network—there were half a dozen major philosophers in Germany at that time. This was when universities were reformed from being dominated by theology, to making the philosophical faculty the main field for advanced degrees, and requiring professors to carry out new research. Out of this faculty, most modern research fields developed. Intellectually, the 19th century is the German century. Why? Because they invented the research university. The first generation were philosophical idealists but materialist positions developed in an academic fight to split off a natural science faculty from the philosophical faculty. Internal fights—over creating a new organizational base—open up possibilities and energize people to create new things.

Q: Today we’re electronically networked in every way. Does it follow then that the pace of innovation will speed up, or do you think that the noise of all of the connections gets in the way?

A: It’s more the latter than the former. Ancient philosophers and mathematicians had to meet face to face. You had to be there in Athens or wherever in order to have that network connection. But as printing came in, the network patterns didn’t change. Jean Paul Sartre could have dealt with people in South America by mail, but meetings in cafes were still at the core. The networks around Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still face to face networks. Even when long-distance media exist, the advantage is in dealing with key people face to face. It is faster as well more intuitive and emotional.

Creative people put a lot of emotional force into their ideas. [Steve] Jobs is a terrific example of that. Einstein and other intellectual heroes tend to be emotionally overpowering and you can’t get that just by reading their writing.

I’ll add one other element: creativity is a competitive process. I coined the term “law of small numbers” for the pattern of famous philosophers and mathematicians. You never get one isolated great thinker at a time; there tend to be two or three as rivals of one another. If the number goes above six or seven, nobody pays attention to the people who come into the network beyond that. It’s as if we can only pay attention to about half a dozen positions at once. Creativity is a struggle to build on the network but to make your own position distinctive so that it attracts followers.

Q: Did a network pick up your idea and run with it?

A: Yes, although in ways that I’ve found a bit surprising. The people who like it the most are network researchers and evolutionary biologists. The people who like it the least are philosophers. (Laughing).

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For example: Let’s say someone thinks her boss is a suck-up to her supervisor and not especially helpful to those she supervises. The employee describes the boss as a “kiss up, kick down” kind of manager. This statement is full of implicit philosophy: Assumptions about how we ought to relate to those above and below us in status, expectations about workplace behavior, as well as models of what a good person is and how this particular manager doesn’t live up to it. Social life contains philosophical assumptions about what it means to be a good person and what the good life entails, and we are always tapping into those deep connections even when we don’t realize it. Charles Taylor calls these underlying assumptions our “social imaginaries.” This concept is key to my work.

I study religion and schools. My first book, which is forthcoming, is an analysis of the year and a half I spent observing four high schools in the New York City area: two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. My second book project looks at how school reform and old-fashioned American individualism shape how public schools think about “success.” I spent time observing six public high schools across the country, two each in San Diego, New York City, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Taylor’s work helps me make the case that my two books are not as different as they appear. Both public schools and religious schools talk about what it means to be a good person, what it means to be a success, and what it means to be responsible to someone other than yourself. While secular and religious visions of the good person might vary, Taylor’s way of analyzing them based on their underlying philosophical assumptions (social imaginaries) helps me to explore how they’re ultimately united by the kinds of questions they ask. Everyone wants to know what it means to be a good person, and most people have a pretty good sense of who such a person might be, rooting their answer in a narrative about a community of people. That community could be the global network of Muslims, or North American conservative Christians, or liberal secularists committed to the necessity of reason. The content changes, but the form’s the same.

Part of the reason I study schools and religion is because comparing religious and secular organizations can help us get a better sense of how moral life works. Why are certain issues extremely important to communities while others are ignored? How do morals work at both an individual and community level? I’m also interested in the similarities between religious and secular communities, which are greater than you might expect.

As part of a longer definition of the “social imaginary” in his book A Secular Age, Taylor explains: “The social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and widely shared sense of legitimacy.”

“Understanding” in this sense doesn’t have to be conscious. If I say that someone is a “man” to you, you’ll probably imagine him in shoes, a shirt, and pants. At another time in history you’d have imagined a hat or a beard. These are “understandings” that are rarely articulated and usually aren’t even conscious, and they relate to “practices” (wearing a hat, wearing shoes) that are not actually necessary in any sort of biological or physical sense.

Yet these social imaginaries can relate to much more than just what we wear. In A Secular Age, Taylor relates how it became possible to imagine (or conceive of) a world without God, and for such an imagining to coexist alongside those who continue to imagine a God-filled world.

Taylor is a devout Catholic, so when he talks about religions imaginaries, he is certainly not claiming that God is “imaginary” in the sense of not real. He is shifting the focus of the question from “Does God exist?” to “How do people think about (that is, imagine) God? That shift allows him to show how certain ways of imagining allow for certain ways of acting and relating to each other. What makes Taylor’s work exciting is that he has shown how changing the way we imagine can change the way we live.

I use the idea of a social imaginary to challenge the commonly perceived chasm between religious and secular thought. In fact, they have a lot in common. Taylor has written about the historical relationships between things we now think of as utterly separate: science and religion, church and state, the religious and the secular. Believing in the scientific method is obviously not the same thing as believing in God, but insisting on the primacy of a social thing called “science” is as much a product of a social imaginary as insisting on the primacy of a social thing called “church.” Of course, a rock will still fall whether or not there is a human to describe it. However, in that world without humans, the force pulling a rock to earth will not be called gravity; neither will it interact with social imaginaries called physics, measurement, and the scientific method. All that stuff exists because humans imagined it. More importantly, humans imagined a moral impetus behind science and from that we got certainties: Truth is better than falsehood, scientific curiosity is good for everyone, and innovation trumps tradition.

And this is where Taylor’s argument helps me unpack modern secularism. Secularist scientists like Richard Dawkins present the new atheist as courageous, committed to truth, and eager to liberate others from error. Taylor shows that the secular social world is just as “imagined” as any religious person’s: There is a vision of a good person and a good life that is by no means self-evidently true, and both are maintained by their communities. A new atheist’s dogged pursuit of truth is just as much a “social imaginary” as a celibate monk’s quiet pursuit of holiness. Taylor describes the new atheist attack on religion as a “subtraction story”—the assumption that if you just take away all the religious superstition, you’ll somehow get down to the really real human existence. But, Taylor shows, all human existence is imagined. If you subtract imagination, all we are is bones.

But Taylor doesn’t just challenge secularists; he also challenges the faithful, who, he says, are almost certainly secular in the West. By secular, he doesn’t mean not-believing: He just means that they recognize how it’s possible another might not believe. That possibility comes from centuries of changes in how Europeans thought about themselves and their relation to the universe, gradually making it easier to believe it’s the individual in this world, rather than the God in another, who’s at the center of it all.

When I’m talking about my work with my secular friends, they sometimes ask me why many Evangelicals deny macro-evolution, or why certain Muslims separate genders and wear the hijab. Taylor’s analysis has helped to give me a philosophical language to articulate how Evangelical and Muslim moral imaginaries are not all that different from those of secular people.

Imagine an atheist with an impressive commitment to physical fitness who comes from a community of fitness freaks (perhaps in Southern California). This person feels that physical fitness matters in a profound way. But that’s not more obviously true than the idea that a woman has to cover her hair because it matters in showing her religious devotion. The same logic is in play when some Evangelicals deny evolution. Rather than thinking of scientific denial as a specifically religious problem, it’s a much more human story of what scholars call motivated reasoning, which can affect secular people as easily as religious ones. That realization makes bigger problems with scientific denial—things like climate change and vaccines—much easier to deal with. Despite new atheist claims, science is not an all-or-nothing deal. If it’s a human problem and not a religious one, then if you can show creationists why it doesn’t go against their religion to accept climate change, it’s entirely possible to convince them to accept one part of science without convincing them to accept all of it.

And that’s really what speaks to me in Taylor’s work: He helps me to show that my work on religious people is much more about people than it is about religion. And that’s something both the religious and the not-religious ought to hear.

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Last week in the same newspaper, food columnist and author Mark Bittman called the toddler obesity plunge a “tribute to the improved Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which encourages the consumption of fruits and vegetables; to improved nutrition guidelines; to a slight reduction in the marketing of junk to children; and probably to the encouragement of breast-feeding.”

But in fact, this spectacular drop is likely an artifact of the data sample, for which 2- to 5-year-olds are a small portion. Indeed, as Paul Campos has pointed out in The New Republic, rates of obesity among this group have gone up and down several times within the past decade. The real story is less spectacular but clearer: Rates of obesity for Americans of all ages—which increased during the 1980s and 1990s—have plateaued since 2000.

The question is why, and the answer is that we have no idea. We know no more about why rates of obesity stabilized in the 2000s than we do about why they increased in the 1980s and 1990s.

There is no shortage of hypotheses, as I discovered when doing research for my book on scientific and political debates over body weight. Some point to fluctuating levels of caloric intake, but this has been difficult to demonstrate. Indeed, one study found that that children and adolescents in 1988 to 1994 were consuming the same amount of calories as their counterparts had in the 1970s, despite increases in the numbers of overweight children and adolescents during this time. Others point to increased consumption of sugared drinks, meat, or carbohydrates, but hard evidence of any of this is hard to come by.

According to another line of research, reviewed in Julie Guthman’s 2011 book Weighing In, the weight gain of the 1980s and 1990s may be largely an adaptive response to toxins in our water, air, clothing, and elsewhere. According to this argument, the body creates fat deposits as part of an effort to store these toxins away from vital organs. In this scenario, weight gain may not be—in itself—a bad thing, although it may be indicative of other problems. Some research suggests that a small but significant part of the weight gain of the 1980s and 1990s can be attributed to smoking cessation, clearly a positive development that we do not wish to reverse.

The more interesting theories underscore the importance of broad societal trends. Some researchers argue that increases in obesity rates in the 1980s and 1990s were due to growing levels of inequality. They point to evidence that obesity rates rose highest in those nations with the greatest levels of inequality and with the stingiest welfare states, as well as among the poorest members of all societies. They reason that economic inequality and insecurity produce high levels of stress, raising levels of cortisol, which, in turn, leads to weight gain. Generous welfare states buffer people somewhat from the effects of economic insecurity and the related impact on their waistlines.

It’s clear that the poor and socially disadvantaged are more likely to be categorized as overweight or obese, though why that is isn’t so clear. The answer may lie in unequal access to information, fruits and vegetables, safe opportunities to exercise, greater exposure to toxins, or elevated stress and cortisol levels. There is also evidence that weight-based discrimination leads to downward mobility among those biologically predisposed to corpulence. According to this view, being fat makes you poor, rather than the other way around.

What’s frustrating about not being able to isolate precisely why our population’s weight skyrocketed at the end of the 20th century and has since stabilized is that it then becomes difficult to rely on the right public policy measures to further the trend.  Many of the policy interventions that are being credited for creating our current obesity plateau were developed a decade or more after the start of this trend. More to the point, even public health interventions designed to help people—children in particular—lose weight have been shown to produce no weight loss, even when they were successful in changing diet and exercise behaviors.

This is not to say that policy efforts—such as improving access to fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods, improving the nutritional value of school lunches, or building more bike paths and parks—are not laudable. Having access to delicious and healthy foods and safe opportunities for movement are likely to improve our overall quality of life and perhaps even health outcomes. Working to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity is also likely to have all sorts of social benefits, even if these efforts do not lead us to lose weight.

And maybe that is OK. There is growing evidence that people benefit from physical activity and improved diet even in the absence of weight loss. For instance, several studies have shown that physically fit “obese” individuals have a lower incidence of heart disease and mortality from all causes than do sedentary people of “normal” weight. Similarly, a clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that adopting a Mediterranean diet reduced cardiovascular risk without inducing weight loss. And economic security has consistently been shown to positively affect health and longevity, which is—after all—what all this is about.

Or isn’t it?

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University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers said that in his view, the scariest thing about this new L.A. is that we’re going to “depend on these kids who are native Californians” to become homebuyers and taxpayers and workers in our economy—“and they’re going to our schools right now.” If we don’t get their education right, we don’t get our future right.

Chapman University urban theorist Joel Kotkin called a more native-born city “a mixed blessing at best.” Great cities, he said, have always been “made and recreated by people who came from someplace else.” Right now, Los Angeles is at or near the bottom of almost all the growth indices we use to measure American cities. “How we deal with it is going to really determine how L.A. evolves,” he said.

Myers said that we still have a lot of immigrants in Los Angeles—we’re holding steady at 36 percent foreign-born, second only to Miami at 51 percent. “It’s good to have more people coming in and have more dynamism,” he said. But it’s not good for immigrants who can’t afford the cost of housing to come to Los Angeles—as happened in the 1980s.

How, Russell asked Kotkin, have economic policies—what Kotkin has called a “war on the middle class”—contributed to this drop in immigration?

Kotkin said that our post-industrial economic policy has moved opportunities for immigrants to other parts of the country. He pointed to an Intel plant in Utah—built there in part because of lower energy costs—as an example of the way California’s industrial base and the middle levels of its economy are eroding.

But Myers said that a better bet for building the economy is to invest in education; for every dollar put into public higher education, he said, you get four back—10 years down the line. We’re not willing to wait for that in California or America, and we’re going to be feeling it 10 years down the line, when older people are trying to sell their houses—and younger people can’t afford to buy them.

Immigration, said Russell, has also had a huge impact on the city’s culture, from the many languages spoken here to the infinite kinds of food that can be sampled at Southern California’s restaurants, food trucks, and roadside stands. Will a post-immigrant Los Angeles be a more assimilated and homogenous—and therefore less delicious—L.A.?

Occidental College sociologist Richard Mora said that Los Angeles has long been defined by its mix of ethnicities, and he doesn’t think that’s going away. And as long as there’s money to be made in tasty food, that’s not going away either. “Food trucks were here before the fad, and they’re going to be here after the fad,” he said. But Mora also wanted to home in in the notion of “assimilation,” which most of us associate with achieving “the American Dream.” But the numbers on assimilation versus economic achievement do not work quite the way people seem to think.

Myers concurred: Asian-Americans have the highest levels of academic and economic achievement of any immigrant group, he said, but Latinos are faster to take on the language and cultural habits of their fellow Americans—in short, they are faster to assimilate. Asian immigrants arrive in America with higher levels of wealth and education—but, again, low-skilled Mexican immigrants assimilate more thoroughly over time.

Should we, asked Russell, continue to assume that assimilation is a good thing and our desired end goal? And, if not, “how do we get all these ethnic groups to get to be good Americans?”

“Assimilation constantly changes,” said Kotkin. You need look no further than to Barack Obama—“the shift in who’s the hero, who are cultural icons”—to know that assimilation is no longer about Anglo-Saxon values.

Russell confessed that he’s not sure he’d like to live in a post-immigrant Los Angeles; wouldn’t it be boring?

Myers said that a post-immigrant California may be a little more boring—and will definitely be older than it is today. But a post-immigrant Los Angeles will still be a border city with a diverse set of influences; it’s not going to disappear, like a Little Italy. Mexicans, unlike Italians, are still going to continue to come—just in smaller numbers.

Los Angeles will maintain its immigrant feel, added Mora, because of our proximity to Mexico—and because the U.S.-Mexico border has one of the sharpest wage differences of any border in the world. And, if the economic situation in Los Angeles improves, immigrants from all over the world will seek it out once again.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked what the panelists would offer as suggestions for improving L.A. in the coming years.

Myers said that the city is already getting better, but the positive change can be accelerated—as long as we understand that the city is never going to be like it was before. “If we try to go back to before, we fail,” he said. We need to be able to articulate how the city has changed in order to get people to rally around it.

Kotkin said that the answer lies in focusing on economic growth—especially growing science, technology, engineering, and math jobs, where we’re currently below the national average.

Mora said that revising Proposition 13 has to be part of the equation at some level—at the very least ensuring that corporations and business interests don’t keep taking undue advantage of it.

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