Over the next few decades, millions of hotel units disappeared. Why did the residents let the bigwigs get away with it?. Because they were invisible, by design. As explained by Paul Groth, in “Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States”:

“Because officials did not consider hotels to be permanent housing, during the official massive downtown clearances from 1950 to 1970, people living in hotels were not tallied as residents. Hence, when a city demolished an SRO [single room occupancy] building, ‘no one’ had been moved, and no dwelling units were lost in the official counts and newspaper reports. In reality, of course, hundreds of thousands of SRO people and homes were removed. Deliberate ignorance had become a cultural blind spot that made hotel residents invisible both to officials and to the public.”

This post was inspired by a current events group I attend weekly. The group is composed of what’s often called in political science papers as “high-information voters”. During one gathering, a question was put to the floor: “what shortcuts do you use to decide which candidates or propositions to vote for?” The overwhelming response: endorsements in the voter’s pamphlet. And that got me to thinking….

Which is why it makes total sense to me that small business owners are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. One, the vast majority of small business owners work long hours – so the Republican emphasis on hard work resonates with them. Two, the vast majority of small business owners make less than $100K a year; they don’t see themselves as part of an “elite establishment” but as hard-working common folk pursuing the American Dream – another Republican theme. Three, over two-thirds of small businesses fail within 10 years, so owners are sensitive to government policies that impact their bottom line.  Four, even when small businesses beat the odds, it typically takes decades for owners to strike it rich.  As far as these lucky few are concerned, their riches are deserved, not the result of unfair privilege.

While disagreements about the importance of luck versus work are often framed as matters of degree, there is a school of thought that subsumes hard work within the higher-order category of luck - basically reducing the role of hard work to zero. The argument goes something like this: yeah, some people work really hard to get where they are, but the reason they’re able to work so hard is because they were lucky enough to have been born into privileged circumstances (e.g., parents, neighborhood, schools, connections). In other words, it all boils down to luck.