Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who writes a column for The New York Times, wrote about the accelerating crisis of global warming. He pointed out that we shouldn't generalize from what this moment looks like to what the future will look like. He wrote:
... there’s a well-known proposition in my original academic home field of international economics known as Dornbusch’s Law, named after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist (and my mentor) Rudiger Dornbusch: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” |
At the University of Orange, a free people's urbanism school in Orange, NJ, we have been observing this process. We have been warning about the threat of gentrification for over a decade. Now, seemingly overnight, market-rate apartment buildings are springing up all around the city and it is obvious that the crisis of gentrification is upon us -- as Dornbusch put it, "much faster than you would have thought."
It is worth knowing that this is, in fact, a law -- meaning that it is a phenomenon which has been observed repeatedly and can be translated into a series of mathematical equations. In this case the mathematical equation would produce a graph with a line that rises slowly from the baseline for a long time but then turns sharply upward, rising very quickly in a short amount of time.
What we see today does not tell us what we will see tomorrow, especially in periods when many variables are moving quickly. We have to take threat seriously. We can't delay.
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