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Commentary: A city is more than business and politics — it must have heart

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A particular sentence jumped out at me from “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the bestselling book by the French economist Thomas Piketty.

The sentence crystallizes what’s missing from the run-the-city-like-a-business philosophy of the Costa Mesa mayor’s City Council majority.

Piketty weaves the story of capital as influenced by people’s economic and political relations. (His appropriately narrow definition of capital is “the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market.”)

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His magisterial, yet accessible, story — especially considering it’s an economics book translated from French — extends over three centuries and more than 20 countries, a much larger scope than any other such study.

In discussing the differences between the values of markets and democracy, Piketty notes that people have all too commonly assumed that democratic sensibilities would somehow flow down from a free marketplace “as if by magic.” They assume that somehow the efficiency and speed of the markets would trickle down to become the equality, fairness and deliberation of democracy.

Piketty objects, writing that “real democracy and social justice require specific institutions of their own, not just those of the market, and not just parliaments and other formal democratic institutions.”

What might these specific institutions be? In a city, they are the “soft” infrastructure of democracy. They are not the streets, traffic lights and sewers, but the families, neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations, shared history and connections among the residents and city workers, and, in Costa Mesa, the traditional Costa Mesa way of doing things.

Costa Mesa is not just the formal political structure of City Hall. It’s not just finding cheaper ways to get streets swept. It’s not picking fights with city employees. And it’s definitely not running the city like a business based on a heartless bottom line.

By attempting to run the city like a business, the mayor’s majority has thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater. However, residents have grown rather fond of that baby and resent that the mayor has tossed it into the Dumpster.

TOM EGAN lives in Costa Mesa.

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