 |
|
|
|||||
Five years ago, a retired police officer spotted a 7-year-old girl walking alone in her New Jersey neighborhood. The stranger stopped her, questioned her about where she lived and whether she was alone, then called the police. When officers arrived, the girl gave them her address which was just a few blocks away. They walked her home and met her parents. But instead of leaving, the officer demanded ID. When the parents refused, arguing they’d done nothing wrong by letting their daughter go for a walk in the neighborhood, the officer called for backup and threatened to take their daughter into protective custody. The father tried to comfort his crying daughter. Police wrestled him to the ground, arrested him for obstructing justice, and took him to jail in handcuffs. He was later found guilty and fined $133. We Americans talk big about freedom, but when a child is learning to be independent, the cultural reaction today is to think something is terribly wrong. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-desktop.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Urbanism Speakeasy\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/urbanismspeakeasy.com\/\u0022\u003Eurbanismspeakeasy.com.\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453933,"imageMobileId":91453932,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Way back in the olden days, if a stranger walked up to a child asking questions like “Where do you live?” and “Are you alone?” the stranger was considered suspicious. Countless PSAs were made about this stuff. But now, a stranger asks those questions, follows the child home, gets the child’s dad arrested, and is considered a hero. Freedom to move What does this have to do with urbanism? Well, it seems pointless to design streets for all ages if all ages arent allowed to freely move around. In the 80s, when my sister and I got home from school, we’d have a snack, change clothes, and go play. If it wasn’t pouring rain, a significant amount of playtime was outsidenot because we felt some bond to nature, but because that’s just what you did. Also, mom was teaching piano lessons in the living room, so being loud in the house wasn’t an option. We lived in a suburban neighborhood developed in the 1960s and 70s. Everything was within a 10-minute bike ride: playgrounds, soccer fields, the pool, the library, everybody else’s house, and the woods. (The woods is what we called any bigger-than-your-yard area of treesit had creeks, “secret” passageways to other streets, mysterious remains of tree forts, and places to hang out away from grown-ups.) By 3:30pm on any given weekday, we (and kids across America) were knocking on doors asking: “Can you come out and play?” or “You wanna ride bikes?” We’d shoot hoops until our arms got tired. We’d use saws, hammers, ropes, chains, and other found tools to make stuff. A few of us once made what in hindsight I’d call a cargo bike train. Multiple injuries followed. Walking everywhere My point about these neighborhood adventures isn’t that we became one with nature or longed for healthy exercise. The big difference between then and now is the getting from here to there. We were walking or biking everywhere. Parents were either at work or home doing parent things. No kid in their right mind was asking for a ride to the playground. You got yourself there. If you didn’t have a similar childhood, I’m sure someone close to you did. We Gen Xers love sharing the glory days of when we could be left to our own devices. I think one reason my generation is so nostalgic is that our ordinary youth seems otherworldly by today’s standards. Good urbanism isn’t any good if you’re not allowed to walk or bike. Besides the infrastructure itself, neighbors and cops now interfere with healthy childhood development. There’s a case to be made that a safe place to grow up allows for risky childhood behavior. I use “risk” loosely because expectations for child development have changed dramatically in our culture. Childhood independence Town councilman Keith Kaplan witnessed the New Jersey incident and was outraged. He drafted a Reasonable Childhood Independence bill stating that letting kids walk or play outside isn’t negligence unless they’re in obvious, serious, and likely danger. The bill passed and became law in 2025, making the New Jersey town a place where kids can be kids and parents can breathe a little easier. That bonkers story about the police investigating an independent child isnt an outlier. So many parents are threatened with legal action that groups like Let Grow have been established to help restore freedom of mobility for people of all ages. Town planners and urbanists talk about designing streets and public spaces to work for everyone, from children to elderly people, from wheelchair users to marathon runners. The idea is that if your infrastructure isn’t safe and comfortable for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old, it’s not good design. But thats a futile exercise if the cultural norm is to be suspicious of independent children. Personal stories are powerful tools to help convert policy jargon into infrastructure practice. It’s important to talk and write about your own experiences and what you’re hearing from others. Watch for stories that might have a headline about parenting or education but have deeper roots in land use or transportation policy. Walk-friendly, bike-friendly neighborhoods are incredibly important for human flourishing. But they’re also only as good as the local authorities allow them to be. Legalize good urbanism and legalize healthy childhood development. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-desktop.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Urbanism Speakeasy\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/rbanismspeakeasy.com\/\u0022\u003Eurbanismspeakeasy.com.\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453933,"imageMobileId":91453932,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Looking back on the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump boasts that he has resurrected the American economy by imposing big import taxes on foreign products. He made his case in a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, chiding the paper and critics, including mainstream economists, who predicted that tariffs would backfire, raising prices and threatening growth. “Instead,” he wrote, “they have created an American economic miracle.”But the proof he offers is often off-base or wrong altogether.Here’s a look at the facts around Trump’s assessment of tariffs.CLAIM: “Just over one year ago, we were a ‘DEAD’ country. Now, we are the ‘HOTTEST” country anywhere in the world!’ “THE FACTS: This is a standard statement from Trump. But the U.S. economy was hardly “dead” when Trump returned to office last year. And in Trump’s second term, it’s performed strongly after getting off to a bumpy start.In 2024, the last year of the Biden presidency, American gross domestic product grew 2.8%, adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023.The numbers for all of 2025 aren’t out yet. But during the first three quarters of the year, Trump’s tariffs or the threat of them delivered mixed results for the American economy.From January to March, U.S. GDP actually shrank for the first time in three years. The main culprit was easy to identify: a surge in imports, which are subtracted from GDP, as American companies rushed to buy foreign products before Trump could impose tariffs on them.But growth rebounded in the second half of the year. From April through June, the economy expanded at a healthy 3.8% pace. And from July through September, it grew even faster 4.4%. A big part of the surge was a drop in imports, likely reflecting Trump’s tariffs as well as the fact that importers had already stocked up at the start of the year. Strong consumer spending also drove economic growth.Trump also likes point to solid gains in the U.S. stock market. He noted that stocks hit new highs 52 times in 2025. It’s true that the American stock market did well last year. But it underperformed many foreign stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 17% a nice gain but short of a 71% surge in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the United Kingdom.CLAIM: “Annual core inflation for the past three months has dropped to just 1.4% far lower than almost anyone, other than me, had predicted.”THE FACTS: The president is using cherry-picked data to vastly exaggerate where inflation stands.His figure for annual inflation in the past three months which excludes the volatile food and energy prices is low, but reflects data distorted by the government shutdown in October and November, which disrupted the government’s data collection and forced the agency that compiles the figures to plug in rough estimates in some categories that artificially lowered overall inflation.Annual core inflation for the final six months of 2025 is higher at 2.6%. That is down from January 2025’s level but about where it was in October 2024. Overall, inflation has leveled off this year, and was 3% in September before the government shutdown, the same as it had been in January 2025.It’s true that inflation hasn’t been as high as many economists worried it would be when Trump started rolling out tariffs last spring, but that is partly because many of the “Liberation Day” tariffs were withdrawn, reduced or riddled with exemptions. When Democrats won some high-profile elections last year by highlighting “affordability” concerns, the administration rolled back existing or planned tariffs on coffee, beef and kitchen cabinets, for example, a backhanded acknowledgment that the duties were raising prices.The impact of tariffs can be more clearly seen in core goods prices, which also exclude food and energy. Before the pandemic, core goods costs typically barely rose or even fell each year, but last December they were 1.4% higher than a year earlier. That was the largest increase, outside the pandemic, since 2011.Alberto Cavallo, an economist at Harvard and the author of a study on the impact of tariffs cited by Trump in his op-ed, has found that Trump’s tariffs have boosted overall inflation by roughly three-quarters of a percentage point. _ CLAIM: “The data shows that the burden, or ‘incidence,’ of the tariffs has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business School, these groups are paying at least 80% of tariff costs.” THE FACTS: The study Trump cited appears to conclude the opposite of what Trump claimed. Authored by Cavallo and two colleagues, it finds that “U.S. consumers were bearing roughly 43% of the tariff-induced border cost after seven months, with the remainder absorbed mostly by U.S. firms.” Cavallo said by email that import prices hadn’t fallen much, “which suggests foreign exporters did not reduce their pre-tariff prices enough to shoulder a large share of the burden.” CLAIM: “We have slashed our monthly trade deficit by an astonishing 77%.”THE FACTS: This claim involves more cherry-picking, reflecting the percentage drop from a very high trade deficit in January 2025, when the president took office, to a super-low deficit in October.The story is more complicated than the president makes it. The trade deficit the gap between what the U.S. sells other countries and what it buys from them has actually risen since he returned to the White House.From January through November in 2025, the U.S. accumulated a trade deficit of nearly $840 billion, up 4% from the same period of 2024. In the first three months of 2025, importers rushed to buy foreign products before Trump could slap tariffs on them. After that, monthly trade deficits came in consistently lower than they were in 2024. But the January-March import surge was so big that the 2025 year-to-date trade deficit still exceeds 2024’s. CLAIM: “I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America, like no other country has ever seen before. In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.”THE FACTS: Trump did, in fact, use the tariff threat to pry investment commitments from America’s major trading partners. The European Union, for instance, pledged $600 billion over four years.But Trump hasn’t said how he came up with $18 trillion. The White House has published a figure of $9.6 trillion, which includes private and public investment commitments from other countries.Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics last month calculated the investment pledges at $5 trillion from the EU, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.And they raised oubts about whether the money will actually materialize, partly because the agreements are vague and sometimes because the countries would strain to afford the commitments.But all the numbers are huge nonetheless. Total private investment in the United States was most recently running at a $5.4 trillion annual pace. In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, total foreign direct investment in the United States amounted to $151 billion. Direct investment includes money sunk into such things as factories and offices but not financial investments like stocks and bonds. Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck. Paul Wiseman and Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writers
Category:
E-Commerce
Cellphones are everywhereincluding, until recently, in schools. Since 2023, 29 states, including New York, Vermont, Florida, and Texas, have passed laws that require K-12 public schools to enforce bans or strict limits on students using their cellphones on campus. Another 10 states have passed other measures that require local school districts to take some kind of action on cellphone usage. Approximately 77% of public schools now forbid students from having their phones out during classan increase from the 66% of schools that forbade students from using phones at school in 2015. Schools across the country are finding different ways to enforce no-phone policies. Some schools have students lock their phones in pouches that only open at the end of the day. Others use simple classroom bins or lockers. Some research shows that spending a lot of time looking at phones instead of peoples faces can make it harder for children and teenagers to get the basic human skills they need for developing and maintaining friendships and other relationships. As a scholar of educational leadership, I believe that school is about more than just classesits where young people learn how to get along with others. When phones are put away, students actually start looking at each other and talking again. School hallways and the lunchroom turn into spaces where students learn to resolve conflicts face-to-face and make human connections. Putting phones away in Ohio Ohio is an example of a state that has clamped down on students cellphone usage over the past 18 months. In May 2024, Ohio went from suggesting some cellphone guidelines for different schools to adopt to requiring that all public districts limit students phone use during class. School districts could choose to allow phones at lunch or between classes. Many schools began using lockable pouches, plastic bins, or lockers to keep phones out of sight. They still needed to allow some students to have phones for medical reasons, like monitoring blood sugar on an app. Ohio then adopted an even stricter cellphone use policy in 2025. This new law required all Ohio public school boards to adopt policies by Jan. 1, 2026, that prohibit phone use during the entire school day, including lunch and the time between classes. A needed break In the fall of 2025, I surveyed 13 Ohio public school principals from rural, urban, and suburban districts. Principals reported that the partial phone bans increased students social interactions and reduced peer conflicts: 62% of principals described more verbal, face-to-face socializing during recess, at lunch time, and between classes. 68% noted that students can stay on one task for more than 20 minutes without seeking a quick digital break. 72% observed a shift from heads-down scrolling to active conversation in common areas such as the cafeteria. 61% reported fewer online social conflicts spilling over into the classroom. A tension for students In late January 2026, I also surveyed and spoke with 18 Ohio high school students about the new phone bans in place at their schools as part of research that has not yet been published. Their responses revealed a complex tension between understanding the need for the phone ban and feeling a significant loss of personal safety and autonomy. A few students said they felt safe knowing a phone in the main office is available for emergencies. Some students said they felt anxious about not being reachable if there is an emergencylike if a relative were in an accident, or if the younger siblings they care for required their help. Finally, 13 out of 18 students argued that they should be learning the self-discipline required to balance technology with focus. Students said that phone bans made them feel as though they were children who could not make responsible decisionsrather than young adults preparing for professional environments. Some students also said that not having their phones made it impossible to fill out college and scholarship applications during the school day, since many application systems require multifactor authentication and require phones to log in. Lessons from Ohio Rules are more likely to be respected when students feel they have a voice in the boundaries that affect their daily lives. I think that school leaders could address students safety and security concerns in different ways, including by establishing a dedicated family emergency hotline that people can call. Principals could designate supervised areas where more senior high school students can briefly use their phones for multifactor authentication. School leaders could also offer a specific time window for students to check messages on their phones, or an easy way for the schools main office to deliver them messages from family. While these insights from Ohio students and principals offer a helpful starting point, they are just one part of a much larger conversation. More research is needed to see how these bans affect different types of schools and communities across multiple states. Because every district is different, what works in one town might cause unexpected challenges in another. By continuing to study these effects and listening to everyone involved, especially the students, researchers like myself can figure out how to keep classrooms focused and students interacting without making students feel less safe or less prepared for the adult world. Corinne Brion is an associate professor in educational administration at the University of Dayton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||